Arthur Schopenhauer

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Arthur Schopenhauer met Johann Wolfgang von Goethe through his mother. Johanna Schopenhauer ran a literary salon at Weimar that drew Goethe as a regular guest, and it was there, in the winter of 1813 to 1814, that the two men spent months in direct conversation and joint experimentation on the nature of color and vision. Schopenhauer, still years from the philosophical system that would make him famous, approached the problem in sympathy with Goethe's own starting point: both rejected Newton's account of color as light mathematically decomposed by a prism, and both wanted an account grounded in what the eye actually does. Goethe encouraged prism experiments and the observation of afterimages and boundary colors, the same phenomena his own Theory of Colours had organized around the idea of a polarity between light and darkness. Schopenhauer took the collaboration in his own direction, publishing On Vision and Colours in 1816, written, in his own account, in sympathy with Goethe's anti-Newtonian project but developing a more physiological explanation, treating color as a specially modified activity of the retina rather than a property that arises, as Goethe held, at the boundary between light and dark as it is perceived. Goethe read the manuscript, rejected Schopenhauer's numerical scheme for the primary colors and his redefinition of Goethe's own concept of the Urphanomen, and declined to endorse the book. The collaboration cooled, but the winter at Weimar remained the seedbed of Schopenhauer's first published work, four years before The World as Will and Representation.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

On Vision and Colours, published by Arthur Schopenhauer in 1816, is often read as a footnote to Goethe's Theory of Colours, written in the older man's shadow at Weimar. The disagreement it records is real and specific. Goethe's Farbenlehre treated color as arising from the interplay of light and darkness as an embodied observer actually perceives it, an argument built from careful description of natural phenomena, rainbows, shadows, prismatic edges, rather than mathematics. Schopenhauer accepted Goethe's central move against Newton, that color belongs to the act of seeing rather than to light itself, but pushed the explanation somewhere Goethe never wanted to go: into physiology. For Schopenhauer color was a specially modified activity of the retina, a claim he tried to make rigorous with a numerical scheme relating the intensity of the retinal response to different hues. Goethe rejected this scheme outright when he read the manuscript, and rejected too Schopenhauer's attempt to redefine the Urphanomen, Goethe's own term for the primal phenomenon of light and dark polarity that grounded his entire method. Where Goethe wanted description that stayed faithful to appearance as experienced, Schopenhauer wanted a cause located in the body producing the experience, a move that anticipates his mature philosophy's insistence that the body is where the thing in itself becomes directly knowable. The two men's break over color theory previews, in miniature, the larger philosophical break to come.