Goethe contra Newton. Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 621 Dennis L. Sepper. Goethe contra Newton." Polemics and the Projectfor a New Science of Color. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pp. xvi + 222. $39.5o. The vast literature inspired by Goethe's attack on Newton's theory of color nearly two centuries ago has been excessively partisan and largely a continuation of the original polemics. Dennis Sepper's Goethe contra Newton is no exception, but rather than simply expounding and defending Goethe's alternative conception of the science of color, he adopts the bold strategy of attempting to show that Newton's theory was so flawed that Goethe was justified in attacking it. Hence his book could more accurately be entitled Goethe and Sepper contra Newton. Perhaps to show that it at least is not taking sides, the publisher has chosen to advertise my edition of The Optical Papers oflsaac Newton on the rear of the dust jacket, thereby making it obvious where my sympathies and expertise lie. Instead of attempting directly to defend or explicate Newton, my aim will be to indicate the historiographic problems of Sepper's approach. In 179o Goethe looked through a prism at the white walls of a room, and instead of seeing all the colors of the spectrum as he thought Newton's theory predicted, the walls remained white except for colored bands visible at borders of darkness and brightness, as at the windows. Newton's theory could and did explain such phenomena , but for the next twenty years Goethe devoted himself to research on color and refuting Newton's theory. The beginning of this period was marked by the publication of his Beitrtige zur Optick (1791--92), which only implicitly attacked Newton, and its ending by Zur Farbenlehre (i81o) with its onslaught in the polemical second part, "The Exposure of Newton's Theory." Here Goethe accused Newton--amid a vast array of other charges--of deceitfulness, sophistry, and purveying rubbish and fairy tales, and the Newtonians of incompetence, dishonesty, and propagating thoughtless idiocies. Newton and the Newtonians prevailed in the scientific arena. In the best historical analysis of the book, Sepper traces Goethe's initial misunderstanding of Newton's theory partly to widespread misinterpretations of that theory in late eighteenth-century Germany. He provides a perceptive account of Goethe's concept of a science and contrasts it with that of Newton and the physical sciences. Whereas Newton's goal was to discover experimentally the fundamental physical factors governing a set of phenomena and then to construct a theory to explain the phenomena, Goethe's aim was to capture the phenomena themselves in a comprehensive series of interrelated experiments. Accordingly, Goethe rejected Newton's and the physicists' very method of proving propositions by one or a few experiments, for it isolated the phenomena from one another. Sepper also nicely contrasts Goethe's concept of a "lively" science with contributors from diverse disciplines engaged in vigorous debate (polemics) with the relatively sterile state of contemporary optics. I am far from being an authority on Goethe and have made a number of unsuccessful attempts to understand him; Sepper's account made Goethe's conception of science intelligible to me for the first time. But precisely because of his great empathy for Goethe, Sepper does not subject the latter's science to the same scrutiny as he subjects Newton's and passes much too lightly over major weaknesses of Goethe's optical theories, such as his continued rejection of unequal refrangibility, his belief that color arises from light and darkness, and the peripheral image (Nebenbild). Goethe after all was engaged in 622 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:4 OCTOBER 199o science--even if an alternative one--and the cogency of his explanations must be fully examined in the context of his times. The central portion of the book is devoted to "dissecting" Newton's first public account of his theory of color in his 1679 letter to the Royal Society. Sepper's aim is to show its hidden assumptions, inconsistencies, incomplete descriptions of the phenomena , and especially its failure to prove the unequal refrangibility of rays of light as a "fact." To appreciate the boldness of this strategy one must recognize that...