“Trübe” as the Source of New Color Formation in Goethe’s Late Works Entoptische Farben (1817–20) and Chromatik (1822)

Ohne Durchscheinen giebts keine Farbe. Die durchscheinende Trübe ist und bleibt das Element aller Chroagenesie.

(Goethe, FA 1.20:528)

Much has been written about Goethe’s earlier didactic and polemical works on color.¹ However, little attention has been paid to his late essays titled Entoptische Farben (1817–20) and Chromatik (1822), on which I shall focus in this essay.² Goethe’s experiments with colors and his writings on the visual occupied him almost for his entire life. Whereas one group of scholars argues for continuity and consistency in Goethe’s works, a second group argues that his oeuvre displays gaps and discontinuities, yet that these various parts represent different voices dialogically responding to each other while in the process also forming a coherent whole. A third group has attempted to structure Goethe’s extensive work on color and has divided it into several distinct phases arguing for certain breaks in between. Convincing arguments can be made for all three of these various approaches to Goethe’s writings on color and seeing.

In this essay I wish to continue on the path taken by scholars from the third group, especially Rupprecht Matthaei and Frederick Burwick, but to confine myself specifically to the essays Entoptische Farben (1817–20) and Chromatik (1822). I will argue that Goethe in his late work introduces something relatively innovative to his analysis, especially in the material following 1817. While I shall consider these works together, it is debatable whether or not they can be subsumed together under a single heading as the final phase in Goethe’s work on color, although the arguments for and against cannot be taken up at this time. Entoptische Farben and Chromatik focus on the role of color perception in the subjective construction of what we call matter. These later essays appear to relativize some earlier ideas expressed in Goethe’s 1810 Farbenlehre, and one may argue that they even offer to some extent a counter-proposal to it. They shift attention from the assertion of the all-pervasive importance of light to an increasing emphasis on something he now claims to be of equal importance, namely “Trübe” or turbidity.³

I argue that this concept plays a key role in Goethe’s studies on color written after 1817 when he comes to realize that colors cannot ever exist without the presence of a “medium,” that is, “Trübe,” and that the production of new colors, which he calls “Chroagenesis,” is primarily the result in fact of the presence of “Trübe.” This “Trübe” is not identical with darkness or shadow, although it can be associated with such as well as with the dimming or virtual absence of light. It is something he describes as existing on the threshold (“Schwelle”) between the physical and the spiritual realms. While it is a term he had tossed around playfully earlier in his work, it now became the core concept for his new insights into color and something to which, in Chromatik (1822), he also attributed a new philosophical dimension.

Rupprecht Matthaei divides Goethe’s work on color into four phases: the first 1790–95, “Beiträge zur Optik bis zur Entdeckung der physiologischen Farben”; the second 1795–1807, “Vorbereitung des Hauptwerkes”; the third 1807–10, “Zur Farbenlehre,” and the fourth 1813–32, “Entoptische Farben und Nachträge.” Others, such as Frederick Burwick, have also suggested a four-phase schema:

[T]he first period [is], 1791–95, during which he produced the Beiträge zur Optik (1791–95); the second period, 1795–1810, during which he prepared his comprehensive Farbenlehre; the third period, 1810–20, during which he conducted his experiments on entoptic phenomena; and the fourth period, 1820–32, during which he elaborated the presentation of the physiological colors and reorganized his supplementary studies as “Chromatik” rather than “Optik.”⁴

I would argue, with Matthaei, that phase three ends in 1810, but follow Burwick in breaking up the period 1813–32 into separate phases. I would identify phase four as Goethe’s...