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  • The Colors of Ideas
  • Claudio Magris (bio)
    Translated by Matt Langione (bio)

In Palermo, Goethe discovers—or thinks he discovers—the Urpflanze, the “archetypal plant”; its model and structure, that of the primary cell of plant diversity, is an expression, in his view, of the Nature-God, the divine and natural power that holds together the Whole in the infinite variety of its forms. He speaks with enthusiasm to Schiller, calling it “an experience,” to which Schiller replies: “it’s not an experience, it’s an idea.” Irritated, Goethe says that he would like to have some ideas and perhaps even behold them; later he will say that this rift, this gap between idea and experience, marked a clear boundary between him and Schiller, and also between him and the majority of other writers, scientists, and philosophers.

Forget ideology, of which he likely knew nothing; Goethe views the very word idea as suspect. Throughout his life, and with increasing vehemence, he will attack it again and again, in order to defend Anschaulichkeit, sensory evidence—facts, things, colors, smells—against abstraction, which seemed to him to weigh more and more on science, philosophy, and the very conception of the world they endeavored to affirm. The greatest example of this is his passionate, errant, but in its own way brilliant and creative polemic against Newton on the subject of light and color, which in turn led him to write, based on his own experiments, a theory of colors which he erroneously considered his masterpiece. [End Page 127]

In this bitter controversy Goethe is wrong, but also partly right. Newton does correctly describe how light reaches our cerebral cortex and how the colors we see correspond to different frequencies and wavelengths of light that our brain, the grand old philologist that it is, transforms into red, blue, and yellow, depending on the specific frequencies and wavelengths perceived by the eye. But it is true, concretely and incontrovertibly so, that we do not behold the numbers and mathematical fractions indicating those measurements, but instead red, green, and blue, and that we even perceive (with the eyes, the mind, the heart) the passion of that red, the nostalgia of that blue.

We may well argue, as Goethe insisted on doing, that science too ought to concern itself with that green or that yellow rather than their numbers; it is, however, indisputable that art and poetry, when they are enchanted before poppies or cornflowers, are enchanted by these colors, and it is for this very reason that they evoke or signify for the human spirit something more than the mathematical relationships that create these colors or than the class of plants to which the flowers, bushes, or colorful trees belong. Goethe saw in the road taken by Western culture in his time a dangerous loss of concrete and sensible experience, of evidence, of the physically tangible particular, of experience itself, a word that was dear to him like few others and that he felt inseparable from art, poetry, and every creative expression. A versatile scientist himself—he discovered the intermaxillary bone—and a tireless and rigorous, as well as lyrical, observer of nature, Goethe would likely have placed Galileo among the first despoilers of the sensible evidence of nature, due to the latter’s conviction that the great book of nature was written in triangles, circles, and other geometric figures.

But these triangles and circles do not prevent Galileo from being not only a great scientist but also a great sober, yet poetic, writer whose immortal pages touch the sky no less than the poetry of Goethe does. And even Goethe’s friend Schiller, together with whom he creates and presides over the final classical era of Western culture, was living proof that the “idea,” the moral and civil principles and sentiments, the political passions can nourish and even themselves become great and creative poetry. Schiller’s “Ode [End Page 128] to Joy” and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, works that put into music the very culmination of the universal message of human liberty, are also idea, fused, of course, with sentiment, and rendered poetic sentiment; they are also, at least in part and originally, ideology, an...

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