The Viability of Aristotelian-Thomistic Color Realism

The Thomist 65 (2001): 179-222 THE VIABILITY OF ARISTOTELIAN-THOMISTIC COLOR REALISM CHRISTOPHER A. DECAEN Thomas Aquinas College Santa Paula, California M ost of us tend to think and to speak of colors as though they are real attributes of bodies. We say that grass is green, earth is brown, strawberries are red, and the sky is blue. This sort of intuitive or commonsense way of thinking and speaking lies at the basis of what I will call the "color realism" of St. Thomas and Aristotle. Those who look at the world from the contemporary scientific perspective, however, often say that our naive belief that bodies are colored has been shown to be mistaken. It is now clear, the story goes, that color is merely a sensation in me or my mind resulting from light of a certain wavelength striking the back of my retina, causing a chain of chemical reactions that generate certain nerve pulses terminating within my visual cortex. This rejection of color realism, which I will call "color anti-realism," has been the orthodox view among the educated since the Enlightenment. The following is a reconsideration of the cases for and against color realism. My aim will be to show not only that color realism in general remains tenable even now, but also that the Aristotelian-Thomisticaccount ofcolor realism is particularlywell suited to meet the objections posed by anti-realism. This will be accomplished in four sections, the first three of which will be largely expository, and the final one largely argumentative. First, I will explain the general account of how colors exist offered by Aristotle and further developed by St. Thomas. Second, I will offer an overview of modernity's reasons for rejecting this 179 180 CHRISTOPHER A. DECAEN account. Third, I will look at how color realism has been resuscitated in various forms by contemporary philosophers not of Aristotelian background, and will consider how these versions of color realism are like and unlike the Aristotelian-Thomistic account. Finally, I will suggest Aristotelian-Thomistic responses to the arguments in the second section, and further, I will make the case in favor of color realism in general. My minimal hope is that Thomists skeptical about the viability of an aspect of Aristotelian-Thomistic epistemology and philosophical psychology commonly thought to have been refuted by the advances of science might rethink their willingness to jettison Thomistic color realism, and will be encouraged by the recent interest in the subjectamong non-Thomistic philosophers more immersed in the philosophy of science.1 I. THE COMMON SENSE APPROACH OF ST. THOMAS AND ARISTOTLE A) Color as "in rebus" In ancient Greece and medieval Europe there was little controversy about whether color exists in rebus. A disciple of Aristotle in the Lyceum or ofSt. Thomas at the University of Paris could take it as a starting-point that colors are in bodies; as St. Thomas says, colors "are proper passions of surface" and "are indeed in the colored body as a complete quality in its natural existence."2 As Aristotle puts it simply, "a body is called white because it contains whiteness."3 Color is what it seems to be to the common man: a quality of the surface of an opaque body that is immediately apprehended by the sense of sight. 1At the very least, this paper will address a topic that often has been neglected by disciples of St. Thomas, in spite of the various reprimands made by many leading voices in Thomism; seeJacques Maritain, Science andWisdom (NewYork: Scribner's, 1940), 59-60; Yves Simon and J. L. Peghaire, "The Philosophical Study of Sensation," Modern Schoolman 13 (1946): 111-19. 2 Aquinas, VII Metaphys., lect. 3; De Sens., c. 4. All translations of St. Thomas and Aristotle will be my own. 3 Aristotle, Categories, 8.9a33. COLOR REALISM 181 But one might be a realist as regards color and wonder how self-contained or ontologically independent of external agencies a body's color is. For one might hold colors to be in bodies (more accurately, in surfaces) and then ask whether a body is still colored when the lights are out. Since, after all, colors need light to be...