Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour
Wittgenstein's last notebooks ask why there's no transparent white and no reddish green.
- Written
- 1950–51
- Published
- 1977, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe
- Starting point
- Goethe and Runge
Remarks on Colour collects notes Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in 1950 and early 1951, in the last year of his life, much of it in Oxford. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe, it was published in 1977 with the German text facing an English translation. It's a sequence of numbered remarks, not a finished argument.
It starts from Goethe's Theory of Colours and from a letter by the painter Philipp Otto Runge that Goethe printed in it. Runge noted things everyone seems forced to agree on: white is the lightest color, there can't be a transparent white, there can't be a reddish green. Wittgenstein asks what kind of truths these are: not discoveries of physics, yet not arbitrary definitions.
His answer is that they belong to the logic, or 'geometry', of our color concepts: the rules of the language game we play with color words. Goethe's theory, he says, isn't really a theory at all, since it predicts nothing; it's an attempt to clarify the concept of color. Newton explains light; Goethe and Runge describe how color words fit together.
The book matters to anyone learning color words. It shows how much we know about colors just by knowing their names: that grey sits between black and white, that brown is never a glowing light, that 'reddish green' makes no sense. Vision science later tied some of this to opponent channels in the eye (how eyes see color); other questions, like qualia, stay open.
Swatches
- White · the lightest color (Runge)
- Grey · between black and white
- Brown · never a glowing light
Colors
Sources
- Wittgenstein, L. (1977). Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. L. L. McAlister and M. Schättle. Blackwell.
- Westphal, J. (1991). Colour: A Philosophical Introduction, 2nd ed. Blackwell.
- Wikipedia, 'Remarks on Colour'.
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