Mehr Licht: Goethe mit Newton im Streit um die Farben by Olaf L. Müller (review)

There can be little doubt that Goethe's scientific writings are experiencing a boom. Long the domain of erudite specialists and a subject of near discomfort to admirers of Goethe's vast corpus of poetic works, Goethe's morphological notebooks and study of color have recently been approached with more trenchant, less positivistic methodologies. Perhaps because of the productive overlaps between literary studies and the history of science, particularly within the German context, Goethe's scientific exertions have seemed to contemporary scholars more fruitful for close analysis than previously thought. Not only have Goethe's morphological writings become central to the analysis of his concept of artistic form, but the nuanced construction of his different scientific publications has also become the object of close scrutiny. The connection between Goethe's scientific and aesthetic practices, while long a subject for motif-oriented research, has now emerged as more intensive and consequential than previously thought. Bringing the tools of literary analysis to bear on the scientific texts and showing the impact of his scientific investigations on the design and purport of his aesthetic ones have made the boundaries between these two fields of Goethe research increasingly porous. Newfound disciplinary flexibility has allowed fresh views on the internal coherence of Goethe's wide-ranging interests.

Within this research landscape, Olaf L. Müller's Mehr Licht: Goethe mit Newton im Streit um die Farben is unique. While philosophers have occasionally engaged with Goethe's scientific work, particularly as a piece in the larger puzzle of German Idealist thought between Kant and Hegel, Müller's book stands out for its scope and ambition. Written with the argumentative transparency and methodical patience of contemporary analytic philosophy, Mehr Licht seeks to rescue Goethe's rejection of the Newtonian conclusion that light is made up of diversely refrangible color rays. Perhaps most unusually, Müller pursues this line of argument by doing exactly what Goethe had demanded, namely, performing dozens of experiments with color. Much like Goethe's own text, Müller includes protocols for experiments to be performed and a set of plates to be used. Müller has a local, as well as a global, ambition. His proximate ambition is to show that Goethe's experiments to demonstrate the bipolarity of light and darkness enjoy equal plausibility as the Newtonian experimentum crucis that established the decomposability and recomposability of colorless light. His secondary goal is to show that, in the course of his Zur Farbenlehre, Goethe introduces profound reflections on the impossibility of establishing incontrovertible facts by scientific experiment. In other words, Müller's text seeks to redeem Goethe's conclusions as both plausible on experimental scientific grounds and radically advanced on philosophical ones. And this leads ultimately to the speculative question that seems to drive the philosopher Müller in his meticulous presentation of experiment, evidence, and argument: what sort of physics would the modern world have if Goethe's ideas had taken hold within the scientific community? What if Goethe's argument for the bipolarity of light and darkness had effected a paradigm shift away from Newtonian optics? These questions may be ultimately unanswerable, but their power lies in encouraging us to question the historical rootedness of our most basic assumptions about the composition of the natural world.

Müller's book is at once adventuresome and meticulous. There is something undeniably daring about his apology for the long-infamous color book and something satisfying about his attentiveness to the subtleties of Goethe's epistemological reflections. Müller must be applauded for his willingness to recreate and expand on Goethe's experiments, sweeping aside the prejudices that have long made Zur Farbenlehre seem like Goethe's unhealthy obsession and the blemish on his otherwise peerless poetic career. To be sure, the presentation in Mehr Licht may feel plodding to a reader unaccustomed to the conventions of contemporary analytic philosophy and outlandish to a reader uninterested in...