Trübe (Turbidity, Cloudiness, Gloominess)

1. Introduction
2. Trübe Between Subject and Object in Physical and Entoptic Colors
3. Perception and Nature: Trübe as Urphänomen
4. Trüber Blick: Goethe’s Poetics of the Self
5. Conclusion: The Metaphysics of Trübe and the Mediation of Geist and Materie
6. Notes
7. Works Cited and Further Reading

Introduction

The conceptual labor performed by the lexeme Trübe (adjective, trüb; verb trüben) in Goethean thought is only partially indicated by the range of definitions and examples provided in the Grimm’s Wörterbuch, where its literal and figurative uses as an adjective describe a range of phenomena united by their near opacity (in contrast with clarity), as well as their ability to both occlude and allude to surfaces and depth. Examples include the murkiness of standing and moving water, a person’s clouded gaze as a reflection of inner deadness or intoxication, some physical impurity, or a boundary condition of the perceivable.¹

Goethe’s later scientific writings draw on the physical attributes of Trübe, describing the atmosphere as trüb in Versuch einer Witterungslehre (1825; Essay on Meteorology) as a basis for understanding atmospheric colors. A more precise description in the essay Chromatik (1822; Chromatics) highlights the range of phenomena Trübe manifests as, for example, in the air: “Die Luft als ein vorzügliches Mittel zwischen Durchsichtigkeit und Undurchsichtigkeit, zwischen Vacuum und Solidum, bietet uns das Trübe in mannigfaltigen Graden, als Dunst, Nebel, Wolke [. . .]” (FA 1.25:784; The air, which is an ideal medium between transparency and opacity, between vacuum and solid, presents Trübe to us in varying degrees as mist, fog, cloud [. . .]).² This comment locates turbidity in a continuum between transparency and opacity, as well as between the complete absence of matter (vacuum) in air and its full occlusion as a solid. The lexeme’s diverse etymological origins from Greek and Latin-based languages discussed in Chromatik similarly point to a range of phenomena (air, darkness, faintness, scantiness) leading Goethe to conclude that Trübe is “eine Versammlung von Durchsichtigem und Undurchsichtigem, ein netzartiger Überzug von undurchsichtigen Atomen und deren durchsichtigen Vacuis” (FA 1.25:784; a collection of the transparent and the opaque, a reticulated coating of opaque atoms and their transparent voids).³ As a reticulated coating consisting of atoms and their empty spaces in varying densities, Trübe receives the most detailed attention in Chromatik after a section on the challenge of finding a conceptual vocabulary for elusive natural phenomena. Acknowledging a tendency toward anthropomorphizing and urging caution in the creation of such concepts, we might come up with terms that invoke our presence and perspective, yet force us to think in terms of absence, like the small voids in Trübe. In a reticulated coating, such voids do not signify an insurmountable gap, but rather are an integral part of the construction of Goethean turbidity, and by extension, the construction of our knowledge and experience of the world.⁴

The semantic field and applications of the term broaden in Goethe’s theoretical writings on color, due in part to the evolving role of Trübe in his later writings on color formation and perception, namely Chromatik and Entopotische Farben, as Beate Allert’s study shows.⁵ In Farbenlehre (1810; Theory of Colors), Trübe plays a key part of Goethe’s anti-Newtonian construction of the material form that mediates the polarity of light and darkness in the production of color. Accordingly, it is discussed most frequently in relation to physical colors, which are produced through certain media that “selbst keine Farbe haben, und teils durchsichtig, teils trüb und durchscheinend, teils völlig undurchsichtig sein können” (FA 1.23.1:70 and Miller 189; have no color themselves and [may be] either partially transparent, partially turbid and translucent or partially altogether opaque).⁶ Colors produced in such a way, we are instructed, “schliessen sich unmittelbar an die physiolgischen an, und scheinen nur um einen geringen Grad mehr Realität zu haben” (FA 1.23.1:70 and Miller 189; are immediately aligned with the physiological colors and only appear to have a little more reality. Characterized as “das Vorübergehende, Nichtfestzuhaltende” (something transient and fleeting), moreover, physical colors indicate an increasingly fluid understanding of the ways in which the observing subject reflects the structure of surrounding objects, thereby also applying pressure to the subject-object dichotomy. These colors, Goethe explains, “werden also in unserem Auge durch solche äussere bestimmte Anlässe erzeugt, oder wenn sie schon auf irgend eine Weise ausser uns erzeugt sind, in unser Auge zurückgeworfen” (FA 1.23.1:70, and Miller 190; are generated in the eye by such external particular events or, if they originate in some way beforehand in the outside world, they are reflected back into the eye). Entoptische Farben (1817–1822; Entoptic Colors) revisits physical colors and reconfigures the subject-object relationship by looking at how cases of the doubled refraction of light produces anomalous, fugitive color phenomena at the margins of the refractions and in the eye.⁷ Inspired by Thomas Seebeck’s (1770–1831) work, Goethe’s experiments with entoptic colors involved a deepening commitment to the role of Trübe as an essential medium in color formation and expanded his own earlier understanding of polarity.⁸ Entoptic phenomena became exemplars for how the physical and the contingent are bound together. Hence, they also extended his concept of the Urphänomen (original/primordial phenomenon) as developed in his morphological writings, where physical bodies—no matter how small or scarcely perceptible—more reliably produce discursive and scientific forms than abstract laws or language itself.

Poetic uses of Trübe psychologize its physical and philosophical qualities and further its conceptual significance without sacrificing its essential alignment with corporeal and natural phenomena. Scenes of poesis staged in haze or clouds serve as metaphors for the conceptual environment of the poet’s creative process, or creation more broadly, and add complexity to the ways we represent experience to ourselves. As Amanda Jo Goldstein argues, such moments, in fact, do not “valorize literariness as a critical escape from the confines of empirical representation or contextual determination” (7).⁹ Along similar lines, Goethe’s poetic stagings of Trübe demonstrate the full conceptual range of a net-like quality and ability to filter, shroud, and connect conflicting impulses. And this capacity, in turn, reflects an increasingly complicated and multi-dimensional way of experiencing and representing life that occurs during the period around 1800.¹⁰

Trübe Between Subject and Object in Physical and Entoptic Colors

As documented in Goethe’s Materialien zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre (1810; Materials on the History of the Theory of Colors) his own heterodox refutation of Newton, including the proposition that color production involves the reciprocal interaction of light and darkness within turbid media, has a long trajectory extending back to ancient and baroque ideas on color and optics from Aristotle to Anthansius Kircher (1602–1680). The scientific and poetic fascination with color at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century grew in part out of an increased interest in how the graspable and the ungraspable are constructed and the turn to a physiologically based understanding of visual phenomena.¹¹

Speaking through Foucault, Jonathan Crary connects this turn towards physiology on the “threshold of modernity” (71) to the realization that the “anatomo-physiological conditions of the body both impacts the nature of human knowledge” and is also “manifest in its own empirical contents.”¹² Such incorporation of the body in turn suggests a more complicated mode of experience than in centuries prior. Since, according to Crary, models of visuality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries insisted on transparency, they also “repressed and concealed” anything that threatened it (71), including the body or the new anatomo-physiological foundation of knowledge.

Goethe’s experimental designs and theories in Zur Farbenlehre make the act of seeing the object of investigation. The treatise thus further explores a tendency, first articulated in “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt” (1792; The Experiment as Mediator of Object and Subject), to imbricate the subject in the range of natural phenomena that the scientist stages and observes. To make seeing and how one sees a part of the study of visual phenomena fundamentally rethinks the optics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which had strictly separated subject and object. While Crary draws this modern turn mainly from the model of observation developed in Goethe’s treatment of physiological colors, which are subjectively produced without any external referent, another related tendency of modernity externalizes observation so that “the viewing body and its objects begin to constitute a single field on which inside and outside are cofounded” (73). The experimental configurations used in studying physical colors in the presence of a semi-opaque or turbid medium stages this tendency by giving another, albeit non-sensate and inanimate body, a critical role in repositioning the subject-object dyad within a field of reciprocal entanglements, thereby also introducing a new way of experiencing the world.¹³

Physical colors make it possible “einem subjektiven Phänomen ein objektives an die Seite zu setzen” (FA 1.23.1:70 and Miller 189; to place objective and subjective phenomena side by side). That is to say, they allow the observer to consider how subject and object co-exist in the visual field in reciprocal relationship. Goethe’s later works on color, however, will turn to the construction of this visual field to understand how the subject-object dichotomy is further complicated when material media are engaged in acts of color perception. The brief, part-etymologic, part-expository survey provided in Chromatik describes Trübe as the most delicate kind of matter, or the first lamella of corporeality, and then provides an account of how attention to corporeality produces a more complex understanding of perception and the subject-object relationship. The metaphysical descriptions of body and spirit in the following passage offer a subtle account of the emergence of visible phenomena while connecting corporeality to the boundaries of the perceivable. And all this starts with the most delicate form of materiality, which Goethe calls Trübe:

Wie sich die einzelnen Farben auf Licht und Finsternis als ihre erzeugenden Ursachen beziehen: so bezieht sich ihr Köperliches, ihr Medium, die Trübe, auf das Durchsichtige (Jene geben den Geist, diese den Leib der Farbe.) Die erste Minderung des Durchsichtigen d.h. die erste leiseste Raumerfüllung, gleichsam der erste Ansatz zu einem Körperlichen, Undurchsichtigen, ist die Trübe. Sie ist die zarteste Materie, die erste Lamelle der Körperlichkeit. (FA 1.25:782).

Just as individual colors relate to light and darkness as their generative origins: so too does their physicality, their medium, turbidity, relate to the transparent. (The former [light and darkness] gives spirit, the latter gives body to color). Turbidity is the first reduction of the transparent, that is, the first and most muted filling of space, at the same time, the first step to becoming a body, to opacity. It is the most delicate form of matter, the first lamella of corporeality.

Just as light and darkness are the foundation of colors, transparency (i.e., not a transparent medium), precedes corporeality. Or to speak through Crary’s reading of Goethean science, the transparent is no longer the productive field in which phenomena and perception occur (71). The entanglements of atoms, described in Entoptische Farben as matter that is not light, is necessary for color to appear: “Ist die Materie durchscheinend, so entwickelt sich in ihr, im Helldunklen, Trüben, in Bezug auf Auge, das was wir Farben nennen” (FA 1.25:687; if the material is translucent, what we call color is developed in it in the half-dark, or turbidity, in relation to the eye). Accordingly, Trübe may be what mediates the polarity of light and dark in the production of color, but it is also the beginning of disorder and confusion. The turbid images of atmospheric manifestations, which are composed of the unlike elements of visual apprehension, introduce the proximity of order and disorder that comes with perception and the emergence of visual phenomena:

Wenn nun die Trübe die verminderte Durchsichtigkeit und der Anfang der Körperlichkeit ist, so können wir sie als eine Versammlung von Ungleichartigem, d.h. von Undurchsichtigem und Durchsichtigem ansprechen, wodurch der Anblick eines ungleichartigen Gewebes entspringt, den wir durch einen Ausdruck bezeichnen, der von der gestörten Einheit, Ruhe, Zusammenhang solcher Teile, die nunmehr in Unordnung und Verwirrung greaten sind, hergenommen ist, nämlich trübe. (Dunst, Dampf, Rauch, Staubwirbel, Nebel, dicke Luft, Wolke, Regenguß, Schneegestöber sind sämtlich Aggregate, Versammlungen von Ungleichartigem, d.h. von Atomen und deren Vacuo, wovon jene keine Durchsicht, dieses aber eine Durchsicht gestattet). (FA 1.25:783)

If turbidity is reduced transparency and the beginning of corporeality, then we can address it as a collection of heterogeneous things, that is, of things that are both transparent and opaque and through which the visualization of a heterogeneous web originates. We characterize [this visualization]—derived from the disturbed unity, calm, [and] nexus of parts that are henceforth set into disorder and confusion—with the term turbid. (Haze, steam, smoke, whirlwind of dust, fog, thick air, rainstorm, snowstorm are all aggregates, collections of heterogeneous things, that is to say, [collections of] atoms and empty spaces through which the former allows no transmitted light to pass but the latter [allows it].

To speak of Trübe as a web or a kind of a woven fabric (Gewebe) brings uniformity to the micro-level chaos of atoms and vacui arranged in the aggregate we perceive as haze, steam, smoke etc. It thereby also structures the chaos of heterogeneous phenomena in the same way the subject-object dichotomy organizes how we view the world, while also providing the means for understanding the interrelatedness of heterogeneous elements. At both the macro- and micro-levels, then, Trübe upholds distinctions of unlike things within a unified and continuous visual field.

Along similar lines, in the “Lehre von den trüben Mitteln” (FA 1.23.1:80 and Miller 190; the Principles of Turbid Media) Goethe presents an aggregate of experiments with media of various degrees of opacity and describes a variety of atmospheric phenomena in order to understand the principles underlying the changing conditions of color production. And like Trübe itself, such principles bring uniformity to a diverse range of media, experiential conditions, and phenomena. Subsequently, in Entoptische Farben he developed this theoretical perspective by following Thomas Seebeck’s experiments with refracting light through different media such as glass, mica, and quartz of varying shapes and changing temperatures. In fact, like Seebeck before him, who had studied doubled chromatic forms that could be changed or reversed by manipulating the medium,¹⁴ Goethe focused his attention on the mediated nature of color phenomena and doubly refracted, compounded visual effects.¹⁵ If, as Andrew Piper posits, Seebeck’s project had proven that color phenomena depend on “their relational position within the reflective apparatus,” Goethe’s study of entoptic colors revised the subject-object relationship by introducing a “a relational objectivity between subjects and objects mediated by an apparatus” (Piper 19). This shared interest in a “technologically mediated” way of experiencing the world complicates the ways in which subjects and objects, including color phenomena, are tied to one another when a medium with a degree of turbidity or another body is introduced into their relationship. Finally, in addition to technologically mediated experiences, Entoptische Farben describes the contingent conditions of experimentation that can affect the production of color phenomena during changing atmospheric conditions at different times of the day, as well when different entoptic media are employed.

Goethe’s 1817 poem “Entoptische Farben” (Entoptic Colors) describes the fleeting and contingent nature of the formation of entoptic colors with a Spinozan gesture toward the interrelatedness of all phenomena that is facilitated through Trübe. Here the experimental configuration of mirrors surrounding crystal cubes used to generate entoptic colors finds an analogy in a terrestrial play of colors that dance across the visual field:

Spiegel hüben, Spiegel drüben
Doppelstellung, auserlesen;
Und dazwischen ruht im Trüben
Als Kristall das Erdewesen.

Dieses zeigt, wenn jene blicken,
Allerschönste Farbenspiele;
Dämmerlicht, das beide schicken,
Offenbart sich dem Gefühle. (ZA 2.1:570).¹⁶

Mirror facing facing mirror,
Doubles—exquisite effect;
Between them in a shadow [im Trüben] stands a
Crystal cube which will reflect,

Analog of earth, when mirrors
Glance their light across, the loveliest
Play of colors; and their twilight
Touches feeling, manifest. (Middleton 229)¹⁷

Creating an analog of the world in turbidity—however fugitive and scant it may be—shows the created and mediated nature of the cosmos as we perceive it. Since we only perceive it in fleeting appearances, our thinking must depend on the analogies that are produced by the arrangement of optical devices. The full range of such analogical thinking emerges when the macrocosm is perceived through the images formed in the turbid medium: “Laß den Makrokosmus gelten, / Seine spenstischen Gestalten! / Da die lieben, kleinen Welten/Wirklich Herrlichstes enthalten” (ZA 2.1:571 and Middleton 229; Let it be, the macrocosm, / With its phantom figurings! / Worlds we love and which are little/Harbour the most glorious things). A whole cosmic order is viewable only in fugitive, phantom-like images that appear through filtered light: entire worlds—from the microcosmic through the macrocosmic—are contained within each other in the same way that entoptic images are contained within the configurations of refractive and reflective surfaces. The figurative significance of perceiving these mediated, fugitive phenomena before the manifestation of the macrocosm recall Faust’s translation of the Gospel of John in Faust I.¹⁸ As the poem states in an allegorical reference to the image of Christ in the black crosses produced through the entoptic device: “Das Wort wird Symbol” (ZA 2.1:571 and Middleton 229) the word becomes symbol). However, light and color—as representations of Kraft (force)—drive the transformation from word to symbol, as well as from world to macrocosm, and not to turbidity. Goethean Trübe rather provides a necessary material backdrop that constrains this vision, just as the arrangement of mirrors and the placement of the cube make it possible to see the macrocosm in a fleeting appearance in the poem, “Entoptische Farben.”

As the scene of observation depicted in “Entoptische Farben” indicates, the philosophical—as well as the theological and cosmological—stakes of the subject-object relationship are raised in the presence of another medium and facilitate symbolic and analogic ways of looking at the world. The significance of the macrocosm-microcosm follows from revisions to the Spinozan in the eighteenth-century construction of man as creator or the measure of all things.¹⁹ According to this view we, as creators of natural phenomena, rely on aggregates of media and phenomena and an awareness of the conditions of their formation to appreciate the natural links and continuity between them. While the burgeoning interest in physiology by the second decade of the nineteenth century, especially in the wake of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Über das Sehen und die Farben (1817; On Vision and Colors) and Jan Evangelista Purkinje’s Das Sehen in Subjektiver Hinsicht (1819; Vision from the Subjective Point of View) made the act of seeing the object of inquiry and increasingly attributed a physiological foundation to the formation of colors, Goethe’s Spinozan inclinations relied on analogy rather than equivalence when outlining the physical and the physiological conditions of color formation. In Entoptische Farben, for example, the physiological and the physical aspects of entoptic colors are described through the observer’s participation in experiments. And this complicates the subject-object relationship by showing how the subject and its physiology function analogously (and not identically) to external color phenomena:

Nun müssen wir aber auch der physiologischen gedenken welche hier in vollkommener Kraft und Schönheit hervortreten. Hieran finden wir abermals ein herrliches Beispiel daß alles im Universen zusammenhängt, sich auf einander bezieht, einander antwortet.Was in der Atmosphäre vorgeht begibt sich gleichfalls in des Menschen Auge, und der entoptische Gegensatz ist auch der physiologische. (FA 1.25:710)

But now we must also recall the physiological [colors], which emerge here in perfect force and beauty. With this we find once again a splendid example that all things in the universe are connected, relate to one another, respond to one another. What happens in the atmosphere also occurs in the human eye, and the entoptic opposition is also physiological one.

Goethe goes on to describe the arrangement of mirrors and a tempered glass cube, followed by the retinal after-images perceived in the absence of the experimental apparatus once the observer’s eyes are closed. These secondary after-images further illustrate the unity of phenomena by inverting the primary image that had been projected through the prism when the eyes were open: “so wird die Erscheinung, die helle wie die dunkle, als gespenstiges Bild umgekehrt im Auge stehen und die Farben zugleich sich in ihre Gegensätze verwandeln” (FA 1.25:711; thus both the bright and the dark appearance will emerge as a ghostly inverted image in the eye, and the colors likewise will simultaneously metamorphose into their opposites). And while this physiological process does not explain the basis for the formation of entoptic phenomena, it does offer an analogy according to which the eye functions as an inversion of the tempered glass cube. Yet Goethe’s description does not feature the word Trübe. It does, however, list a sequence of experimental events to demonstrate how the scientist’s apparatus projects different optical phenomena under varying conditions that are then reproduced on the retina. By creating images that are inverted inside the eye as a retinal after-image, a turbid medium (i.e., the eye) offers another level of intricacy in the interrelatedness of natural phenomena, even if that interrelatedness—which appears as an inversion and not an identity—is at best an analogy.

In its mediating role of subject and object relations, Goethean Trübe appears, significantly, to be something more than inert matter. It is not only durable, but also vibrant, or alive with the capacity to reveal the analogous relationships that all corporeal things share across the natural order. As Jennifer Caisley suggests in her entry for this lexicon on matter, “for Goethe [. . .] Materie is a far cry from the inert, dead masses that the English term ‘matter’ suggests to a lay reader. Rather, it is something imbued with ‘Geist’ (spirit, mind): vibrant, ever-changing, and fundamental to all life on earth.” If, then, on the one hand, the interrelatedness of natural phenomena suggests matter with both conceptual and physical stability, our perceptions—which are contingent on the conditions that produce them—require, on the other hand, the kind of conceptual fluidity that is the hallmark of analogical thinking. Hence the exemplary role that Goethe’s multi-dimensional “turbidity” plays as an active and mediating form of “vibrant matter” in his thinking about perception and optical phenomena. In order to see (i.e., to understand) things “mit den Augen des Leibes und Geistes ungehindert methodisch vor und rückwärts” (FA 1.25:707; unimpeded and methodically with the eyes of the body and the mind both forward and backward), the scientist Goethe must acquire the same kind of conceptual fluidity that we find him pursuing in his journey as a heterodox philosopher.

Perception and Nature: Trübe as Urphänomen

The role of atmosphere and atmospheric conditions provides an additional level of mediation and contingency in the perception and experience of natural phenomena. Thus, the essay “Farben des Himmels” (1818; Colors of the Sky) describes the blue color of the sky as a “turbid” medium through which we perceive all other phenomena:

Die Luft als Feuchtigkeitsträger, auch die heiterste, ist immer trüb anzusehen, weswegen der Himmel der Sonne gegenüber und zur Seite blau erscheinen wird, denn das Finstere des Weltalls wirkt noch durch den Flor hindruch. Ebendeshalb erscheinen die Berge in einiger Entfernung dunkler blau als in größerer” (FA 1.25:206).

The air, even at its clearest, is a vehicle for moisture and must therefore be considered a turbid medium. This is why the sky opposite the sun and around it looks blue: the darkness of space creates this effect through the veiling. This is also why mountains at some distance seem darker blue than those at a great distance.²⁰

Trübe allows for variations in the perceived shades of a color based on both the spatial and temporal position of the observer in relation to the object of observation. The mediation it provides is constant in its change, thereby establishing the fluidity of the fugitive states that together comprise an observable phenomenon. In this vein, on February 20, 1831, Johann Peter Eckermann discussed with Goethe his own observation of colored shadows cast in the snow on Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa. Thanks to Goethe’s teachings on Trübe, Eckermann acknowledges, he could readily account for the changes in color of the shadows, even if the conceptual status of the turbid medium is itself more complex problem:

Im Grunde, sagte ich, ist die Lehre vom Trüben sehr einfach, so daß man gar zu leicht zu dem Glauben verführt wird, man könne sie einem Andern in wenig Tagen und Stunden überliefern. Das Schwierige aber ist, nun mit dem Gesetz zu operiren und ein Urphänomen in tausendfältig bedingten und verhüllten Erscheinungen immer wieder zu erkennen. (FA 2.39:441)

In fact, I said, the doctrine of the [turbid] medium is so simple that one is easily misled into the belief that it can be communicated to another in a few days [and hours]. The difficulty, [however], is to apply the law, and to recognize a [primal] phenomenon in [appearances] that are conditioned and concealed a thousand different ways.²¹

Eckermann’s comment is neither the first nor the only instance that conceptually links Trübe and Urphänomen,²² Goethe’s concept for a phenomenon “acquired through progressive experience” as a “mental image”²³ or an Urform (primal form) out of which other physical and biological forms develop. The conceptual proximity of Trübe and Urphänomen, however, suggests key differences between them that speak to Goethe’s paradigmatic rethinking of materialism in scientific discourses, which corresponds more broadly to his heterodox rethinking of philosophical concepts.

The Urphänomen, as both a perceptual experience and ideation, provides a conceptual mechanism for Goethe’s studies on color that subsumes a wide range of related and directly observable chromatic phenomena under a unifying law or idea. The sections of the Farbenlehre dedicated to physical and dioptrical colors begin with the doctrine of turbidity and lay out the highly varied circumstances under which semi-opaque or turbid media produce fleeting physical colors. These sections also include discussions about the role of Trübe in facilitating the progression of colors around the color wheel. Paragraph 175, for example, explains how the viscosity of varnish and the time of day or the presence of daylight affect the color perception of black velvet in a painting, which in turn leads Goethe to conclude that all these perceptions are effects of turbidity. The plurality of its forms, moreover, as well as their perception as both “die herrlichsten Fälle atmosphärischer Erscheinungen, so wie andre, geringere, aber doch immer genugsam bedeutende” (FA: 1.23.1:80 and Miller 194; the most sublime atmospheric phenomena as well as more obscure, but no less meaningful, effects) elevate this highly variable mode of perceiving color to a universal tendency in nature that falls within the conceptual field of the Urphänomen:

Das was wir in der Erfahrung gewahr werden, sind meistens nur Fälle, welches ich mit einiger Aufmerksamkeit unter allgemeine empirischen Rubriken bringen lassen. Diese subordinieren sich abermals unter wissenschaftliche Rubriken, welche weiter hinaufdeuten, wobei uns gewisse unerläßliche Bedingungen des Erscheinenden näher bekannt werden. Von nun an fängt sich alles nach und nach unter höhere Regeln und Gesetze, die sich aber nicht durch Worte und Hypothesen dem Verstande, sondern gleichfalls durch Phänomene dem Anschauen offenbaren. Wir nennen sie Urphänomenen, weil nichts in der Erscheinung über ihnen liegt, sie aber dagegen völlig geeignet sind, dass man stufenweise, wie wir vorhin hinaufgestiegen, von ihnen herab bis zu dem gemeinsten Fäll der täglichen Erfahrung niedersteigen kann. Urphänomen ist dasjenige, das wir bisher dargestellt haben. Wir sehen auf der einen Seite das Licht, das Helle, auf der andern die Finsternis, das Dunkle, wir bringen die Trübe zwischen beide, und aus diesen Gegensätzen, mit Hülfe gedachter Vermittlung, entwickeln sich, gleichfalls in einem Gegensatz, die Farben, deuten aber alsbald, durch einen Wechselbezug, unmittelbar auf ein Gemeinsames wieder zurück. (FA 1.23.1:81)

In general, events we become aware of through experience are simply those we can categorize empirically after some observation. These empirical categories may be further subsumed under scientific categories leading to even higher levels. In the process we become familiar with certain requisite conditions for what is manifesting itself. From this point everything gradually falls into place under higher principles and laws revealed not to our reason through words and hypotheses, but to our intuitive perception through phenomena. We call these phenomena archetypal phenomena because nothing higher manifests itself in the world; such phenomena, on the other hand, make it possible for us to descend, just as we ascended, by going step by step from the archetypal phenomena to the most mundane occurrence in our daily experience. What we have been describing is an archetypal phenomenon of this kind. On the one hand we see light or a bright object, on the other, darkness or a dark object. Between them we place turbidity and through this mediation colors arise from the opposites; these colors, too, are opposites, although in their reciprocal relationship they lead directly back to a common unity. (Miller 195)

As an Urphänomen, Trübe can lead observers to acknowledge “die Grenze des Schauens” (FA 1.23.1:81; the limit of perception). Both concepts, therefore, mediate between the observable and the intuited, experiences and ideas.²⁴ But as a physical—and in many instances, discreetly observed—phenomenon, Trübe is more than a mental image: By bridging the gap between observation and intuition as a figuration, it increases its own conceptual significance. The Urphänomen can be intuited through the mechanism of serialization, which reaches back from a primordial past to the present. It thereby provides a “pregnant point” or “immediate intuition of unity-in-diversity” that conceptually is “living, generative, multidimensional.”²⁵

Due to its spatial qualities and physical manifestations, the constant variations of Trübe are directly observable. As the first lamella, or membrane, of corporeality, it offers a graspable, concrete continuum of the fugitive and perceivable states of matter with attention to corporeal presence and aggregation. As both matter and a concept, moreover, the tendency of turbidity towards figuration and spatial and temporal stability lends it a capacity to be visualized and acted on by other ontological concepts and natural phenomena like polarity and metamorphosis.²⁶

The spatio-temporal coordinates through which the corporeality of Trübe are measured position Goethe within a paradigm shift in the science from the period around 1800. In response to the resurgent interest in Lucretian thought brought on in part by Karl Ludwig von Knebel’s (1744–1834) translation of De rerum natura, an alternative to Romantic or vitalist self-generation began to emerge. As Goldstein argues, the idea of “the metamorphizing life force between bodies” rather than “the life force within beings” (8) initiates a revaluation of empirical knowledge. Experimental methods that are “irreversibly historical” or contingent on a variety of factors linking observers to their environment, rather than on methods that are “infinitely replicable” (Goldstein 8) are more apt for a Lucretian conception of the ways in which bodies interact. But in Goethe’s experiments on color, where Trübe plays a dominant role, its “irreversibly historical” character is qualified by the conceptual framework of the Urphänomen. As a variation of the Urphänomen, Goethean turbidity and its conceptual framework unify diverse experiential conditions and results by abandoning the extreme atomistic particularity of a given set of circumstances while retaining some gestures toward universality. For Trübe to both proximate and diverge from the Urphänomen in a way that allows Goethean science to retain both its universality and particularity, we must consider both its spatial and temporal qualities, as well as account for the kind of mediation of sense experience and intuitive perception that it provides. As a continuum, turbidity facilitates analogical thinking with a strong empirical foundation.

Although Goethean Trübe can be represented with spatial and temporal fixity and describe stable phenomena and their perception, its status both as a conceptual device and as an aggregate of matter does not ensure that some unified symbolic system can adequately capture the complexities of scientific observation and experience.²⁷ In fact, the inadequacy of conventional language and forms of symbolic representation haunted Goethe’s attempts at describing and accounting for a contingent and multidimensional universe of things. His challenge, therefore, was to find a language that recognized the limits of his own perceptive capacities while still corresponding to both the condition of the observer and the phenomena they observe. As he writes in Entoptische Farben, “Wort und Zeichen sind nichts gegen sicheres lebendiges Anschauen” (FA 1.25:683; word and sign are nothing against lively intuitive seeing). The physical components of Trübe, however, offered a partial answer to this problem of representation.

The voids, or empty spaces that allow us to constitute turbidity, Goethe instructs, are essential to how we encounter and reimagine its spatial and temporal “continuity” as a material form: “Wir können demnach die Trübe als ein Dünnes ansprechen, als eine verminderte, teils aufgehobene Undurchsichtigkeit, als ein Liquiszieren des Soliden, als ein Zerreißen und Durchlöchern eines Continuum oder Dichten” (FA 1.25:784; we can thus approach turbidity as something sheer or whispy, as a diminished, partly suspended opacity, as a liquification of something solid, as a tearing and perforation of a continuum or something concrete). These voids (or perforations) carry as much conceptual weight as the aggregates of dislike atoms. Nor can they be eliminated by intuition. But they can provide a visual representation of the disruptions to the continuum of experience. On the one hand, their fleeting, heterogeneous, and disorganized qualities compose spaces as a net-like coating (“netzartiger Überzug”) that features the diastolic separation of cosmic bodies. On the other, however, the spaces between such bodies, which as voids also constitute them, are integrated into the metamorphosing aggregates of atoms, where they reveal the transience of temporal and spatial fixity. As a concept that can accommodate temporal and spatial variations, in fact, the voids of Goethean turbidity are not only essential to the constitution of the cloudiness of the atmosphere that surrounds us, but also to the knowledge we cultivate from and about the world.²⁸

According to Goethe’s “Studie nach Spinoza” (1785; A Study Based on Spinoza), nature maintains its totalizing form while accounting for a diverse range of fleeting and contingent phenomena.²⁹ But the voids in turbidity also push back against Spinoza’s monistic materialism, which allows the particular modes (natura naturata) of the universal and divine substance (deus sive natura) to exist harmoniously in a seamless relationship with one another.³⁰ In this context, Goethe’s concept of Trübe acknowledges conceptual gaps as necessary imperfections in the cosmic totality that must be integrated into our perception of the universe and the fragmented totality of natural phenomena. The resonances of this recognition across Goethe’s scientific thought are clear. His “zarte Empirie” (FA 1.25:113; delicate empiricism), which aimed to level distinctions between subject and object,³¹ as well as fill gaps in the kinds and modes of knowledge that present barriers to a unified system of knowledge, “gehört einer hochgebildeten Zeit an” (FA 1.25:113; belongs to highly evolved age). But its moment was not necessarily Goethe’s own.³²

Trüber Blick: Goethe’s Poetics of the Self

According to Pamela Currie, Goethe’s early lyric offers a model for the formation of mental images that corresponds to deeply self-conscious acts seeing. Following Goethe’s Italian journey in the late 1780s, this kind of subjective vision became more objective, or “more mature subjective” (Currie 5). In Currie’s formulation, it was characterized by a desire to see the “Sache an sich” (10; thing in itself). Furthermore, changes in Goethe’s ideas on the structure of the imagination (Einbildungskraft) and how mental images are formed, as well as their realism, coincided with his theories on color and perception. As Currie further argues, after-images in the eye were not a product of an untethered Phantasie (fantasy) but rather an activity of the imagination whose role is “to discover analogies” (10) and thereby to play an increasingly active role in the way natural phenomena are experienced and understood. Accordingly, scenes of poesis in Goethe’s late poetry where the lyrical ‘I’ is surrounded in haze or gloom introduced a poetics of turbidity into a more mature process of mental imaging that took as its object the subject’s own mental constitution. Thus poeticized as a figure of thought, Trübe retained many of the physical properties that were the focus of Goethe’s science. But the metaphorical deployment of turbid materiality as a mental state also allowed the poet to hone his understanding of murkiness and fluidity as corporeal conditions that allow the mediation of conflicting impulses within the mind and its experiences of the world.

In this context, the theatrical project announced by the Faust-poet in the opening stanza of the “Zueignung” (1808; Dedication) contains a well-known configuration of turbidity that precedes the act of poesis, i.e., the actual composition of the play. In this last of Goethe’s three preparatory scenes to the work proper, moreover, the poet’s “trüber Blick” (clouded vision or gaze) connects his inner state—which has prepared him to retrieve the “wavering forms” from his forgotten past—to the atmospheric mist and fog encircling him. As these “schwankende Gestalten” beckon the poet, then, we find ourselves, like him, within a physical continuum of turbid matter that marks the margins of perception and experience:

Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten,
Die früh sich einst dem trüben Blick gezeigt.
Versuch’ ich wohl euch dießmal fest zu halten?
Fühl’ ich mein Herz noch jenem Wahn geneigt?
Ihr drängt euch zu! nun gut, so mögt ihr walten,
Wie ihr aus Dunst und Nebel um mich steigt;
Mein Busen fühlt sich jugendlich erschüttert
Vom Zauberhauch, der euren Zug umwittert. (FA 1.7:10.1-8)

Again you show yourselves, you wavering Forms,
Revealed, as you once were, to clouded vision.
Shall I attempt to hold you fast once more?
Heart’s willing still to suffer that illusion?
You crowd so near! Well then, you shall endure,
And rouse me, from your mist and cloud’s confusion:
My spirit feels so young again: it’s shaken
By magic breezes that your breathings waken.³³

As the wavering forms, which have their own corporeality, press onto the poet’s gaze through the fog and haze the configuration reinforces the idea that poetry emerges from the interactions between bodies rather than within them (Goldstein 105). Initially, these forms (re)appear as an illususory internal vision (Wahn). In the next stanza, however, they are reconfigured as the “Bilder froher Tage” (images of happier days), which in turn motivates the poet’s retreat into a labyrinth of memories that reverse the spatial and temporal linearity of his experience. A similar disorientation, or displacement of memory, occurs at the beginning of the seventh of Goethe’s Römische Elegien (1795; Roman Elegies), which introduces the poet’s vision of the Capitoline Hill as Mount Olympus. The poem begins with a geographical displacement: the speaker’s recollection of the grayish gloom of Weimar.³⁴ Then, in contrast to now, the “Trübe der Himmel” (turbidity of the skies/heavens) that enshrouded the poet weighed on his brow forced him to sink into himself:

O wie fühl ich in Rom mich so froh, gedenk ich der Zeiten
Da mich ein graulicher Tag hinten im Norden umfing,
Trübe der Himmel und schwer auf meine Scheitel sich senkte,
Farb- und gestaltlos die Welt um den Ermatteten lag,
Und über mein Ich, des unbefriedigten Geistes
Düstre Wege zu spähn, still in Betrachtung versank.
Nun umleuchtet der Glanz des helleren Äthers die Stirne.
Phöbus rufet, der Gott, Formen und Farben hervor. (ZA 2.1:169)

Oh, how happy I am in Rome, remembering the times
When grey [sic] days clung to me, back there in the North,
The sky was dark [turbid], and weighed heavily on my head,
The world around me colourless [sic], formless, dull,
And I’d sink to brooding over myself, trying to see
Down the gloomy paths of my discontented spirit.
Now the glow of brighter air shines round my brow,
Phoebus, the god, calls up colour [sic], and form.³⁵

As the poet retreats into himself, his body serves as a medium through which his discontented mind attempts to orient itself without yet enjoying any beneficial contact with the forms and colors that the youthful god of the sun (Phoebus) will soon offer. Frederick Burwick attributes “metaphorical possibilities” to the entoptic figure and its similarly “intriguing dimensions of time and space,”³⁶ which are certainly viewable in the poet’s experiences. Like the poet’s Wahn in “Zueignung,” it seems, and his internal labyrinth in the seventh Roman Elegy, this scene stages the self prior to poesis. And while the convoluted memories in each configuration may lack the experimental apparatus of cubes and mirrors that projects entoptic figures, they all imaginatively deploy time and space to restructure the imaging capacities of the mind in ways that rethink and expand the fixed corporeality of the perceiving subject. That is to say, through the power of poetic configuration, they are able to re-imagine and visualize the subjective dimension of mental experience in terms of its spatial conditions. And by depicting its encounters with other visual forms, such poetry imitates the perception of natural phenomena.

Following his work on the Italienische Reise (1816–17; Italian Journey) and Entoptische Farben, Goethe’s writing shows evidence of what Andrew Piper calls “specular multiplicity” or “radial” rather than “stadial” orientation to life experiences.³⁷ Specular multiplicity introduces scenarios in which the subject does not see itself “as an other,” but rather “through others” (21). In this context, viewing the Goethean self as it emerges through acts of poesis that feature Trübe as a conceptual device allows us to identify early instances of “specular multiplicity” in works such as Faust and Römische Elegien. Thus, even when internalized, turbidity initiates a retreat to the depths of the self that incorporates different mediating bodies and upsets temporal and spatial linearity.

Rainer Nägele has discussed the use of mirrors and other reflective surfaces to facilitate a kind of lyrical writing where the subject “no longer sees another object, but [. . .] another [subject’s] seeing in which he reads himself.”³⁸ For Nägele, such a scene occurs in the 1784 poem “Zueignung” (Dedication), which Goethe would choose to introduce his final collection of poetry in 1827. Significantly, the lyrical I in this self-reflexive text about poetic vision recalls an early morning mountain ascent through mist and haze: “Die Gegend deckte mir ein trüber Flor” (FA 1.1:9; a misty veil obscured my view of the place) As he begins his mountain trek, however, and with his vision of the outside world veiled, the morning light suddenly breaks through turbid cover of clouds—“Auf einmal schien die Sonne durchzudringen”(FA 1.1:9; all at once the sun seemed to break through)—an epiphany transpires: “Im Nebel ließ sich eine Klarheit sehen” (in the fog a brightness could be discerned). Thus illuminated by the changing atmospheric condition, the poet takes an inward turn and feels his gaze returned through the murky ether (Trübe). Or to speak with Nägele, he imagines seeing his beloved seeing him. At the same time, moreover, the revelatory double gaze disrupts the regular temporal progression of events and the flow of images and sensations that the self-reflexive wanderer tried to experience, with increasing difficulty, through the first two strophes of the poem: “Bald sah’ ich mich von Wolken wie umgossen, / Und mit mir selbst in Dämmrung eingeschlossen (FA 1.1:9; I soon saw myself as if suffused by clouds, / and with myself enclosed in twilight).

This kind of temporal and spatial fluidity, which challenges and subverts all conventional expectations of stable relations between bodies, speaks to a more complicated form of experience in which subjective perspective and sensations are as generative of significant perceptions as external forms and surfaces are, especially when they have emerged from a turbid matrix. In his “Ansprache im Frankfurter Goethe-Haus” (Address Delivered in the Goethe House at Frankfurt) upon receipt of the Goethe Prize in 1930, Sigmund Freud cites the opening lines of the “Zueignung” to Faust as evidence for Goethe’s familiarity with “die unvergleichliche Stärke des ersten affektiven Bindungen des Menschenkindes” (GS 14:547; the incomparable strength of the first affective ties of human creatures).³⁹ Freud’s doctoral advisor, Ernst Wilhelm Ritter von Brücke (1819–1892), wrote “Über die Farben, welche trübe Medien im auffallenden und durchfallenden Lichte zeigen” (1852; On The Colors Shown By Turbid Media in Reflected and Transmitted Light), which as Eric Anderson suggests prefaces Brücke’s later writings—used by Freud in his own practice.⁴⁰ Freud’s mode of understanding and representing the self, which recalls the poet’s “turbid gaze” (trüber Blick) and depends on a similar kind of corporeal imaging of the self, is fully externalized to include the physical effects of aggregates of haze and atoms. By the turn of the twentieth century, it seems, the ways in which external phenomena shape subjective experiences was clearly established.

Conclusion: The Metaphysics of Trübe and the Mediation of Geist and Materie

In Chromatik Goethe offers an anthropological reflection that serve as a framework for the metaphysics of Trübe: “Der Geist, der erscheinen will, webt sich eine zarte Trübe, und die Einbildungskraft aller Völker läßt die Geister in einem nebelartigen Gewand erscheinen” (FA 1.25:782; The spirit (or mind) that wants to become manifest [appear] weaves a delicate turbidity for itself, and the imagination of all peoples has spirits appear in a fog-like garment). The “delicate turbidity” crafted into a textile by incorporeal spirits striving to manifest themselves as bodies configures the kind of metaphysical challenge that is required to mediate “Geist” (spirit/mind) and “Materie” (matter). In this context, the theologically inflected cosmological poem “Wiederfinden” (FA 1.3:96–7; Reunion) from the West-östlicher Divan (1819; West-Easterly Divan) imagines Trübe, paradoxically, as the material and immaterial substrate that made God’s pure light (i.e., divine truth) manifest in the body of Dawn (Morgenröthe) after its painful separation from primal darkness (die Finsternis): “Die erbarmte sich der Qual; / Sie entwickelte dem Trüben / Ein erklingendend Farbenspiel” (FA 1.3:97; she took pity on the torment [and] unraveled from turbidity a resounding play of colors).

Interestingly, a few years before his Divan appeared, Goethe had already explored the primal separation of heaven’s pure light from the eternal darkness of the cosmos (das All) in fifteen rhymed couplets that were published as the concluding section of a larger collection of aphoristic couplets entitled “Gott, Gemüt und Welt” (1815; God, Mind, and World). Only here the poetic figuration begins with an enigmatic question: “‘Und was sich zwischen beide stellt?’” (FA 1.2:382; and what places itself between the two). Since the two conflicting poles in need of mediation are the “starlight” and “cosmic darkness” of the previous stanza, Goethe’s soothsayer seems to be suggesting that a key to his enigma might be found in the Farbenlehre. Hence, his response to the question of mediation in the concluding line in the rhymed couplet: “Dein Auge, so wie die Körperwelt” (FA 1.2:382; your eye, as well as the corporeal word). Within the poem’s cosmological framework, the poet’s visual organ—as both the passive refracting medium of light and the active agent of (in)sight—occupies an intermediate position between “Gott” (god) and “Welt” (world) or “Geist” (spirit) and “Materie” (matter). And from this crucial and ambiguous point of separation and (re)union, the poet’s eye will effectively mediate the primal opposition of divine light and cosmic darkness in the same way that turbidity does its mediating work to manifest color.

Like Goethean Trübe, in fact, Goethe’s poeticized Auge has both physical and spiritual attributes. That is to say, both corporeal and incorporeal things, or bodies and ideas, traverse the region of its activities: “Die Totalität des Innern und Äußern wird durchs Auge vollendet.” (FA 1.23.2:269; the eye completes the totality of the inner and the outer) Accordingly, the final thirteen couplets in “Gott, Gemüt und Welt” (FA: 1.2:382–3) trace the cycle of chromatic transformations that the mediations of turbidity can produce in both the physically and spiritually configured human eye:⁴¹

Und so bleibt auch, in ewigem Frieden,
Die Finsternis vom Licht geschieden.

Daß sie mit einander streiten können,
Das ist eine bare Torheit zu nennen.

Sie streiten mit der Körperwelt,
Die sie ewig auseinander hält. (FA 1.2:383)

And so remains in eternal peace,
Darkness separated from light.

That they can quarrel with each other,
That should be called sheer folly.

They quarrel with the corporeal world
That holds them apart forever.

As presented in these verses and aided by the “actions” and “passions” of the “sun-like” eye,⁴² Goethean Trübe serves two conflicting purposes that are actually reciprocal. On the one hand, it mediates and facilitates perception and continuity between natural phenomena. On the other, however, it separates the perceiving subject from the divine light that generates the cosmological order. While upholding the Kantian distinction between noumenon and phenomenon, however, turbidity also offers an intuitive way to visualize a primal region beyond the fugitive world of apprehensible phenomena that allows the poet/observer to embrace the world of appearances in all its dimensions. In doing this, moreover, the conceptual labor of Trübe replicates its own ambiguous configuration: while marking the constitutive gaps in how we experience natural phenomena, it maintains the continuity of the physical world by providing an empirically sound basis for the poetic intuition of its generative forms. Fully cognizant of its own epistemological limitations, Goethean Trübe thus suggests a Spinozan influenced ontology to address the complex cosmological problem (enshrined in Kantian dualism) of bridging the gap between Kant’s God—or an incorporeal order of things beyond mere human understanding—and Spinoza’s deus sive natura—or the interacting bodies and minds in motion that are the object of the highest kind of cognitive activity.

I thank Clark Muenzer for his edits and feedback, as well and the anonymous reviewer for their comments.

1. Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, ed. Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, 33 vols. (Leipzig and Munich: S. Hirzel and Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1854–1972), 22: column 1186. ↩
2. All German quotations from Goethe come from the Frankfurter Ausgabe, abbreviated as FA unless noted: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, eds. Hendrik Birus, Dieter Borchmeyer, Karl Eibl, et. al., 40 vols. (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987–2013). Unless otherwise noted, the translations are the author’s own. ↩
3. Atomism and its adherents among Goethe’s contemporaries and predecessors are important counterparts for Goethe’s ideas on the construction of matter and perception. This is not to be confused with a corpuscle theory of light as Newton argues for, nor is it to suggest that Goethe’s view of the natural sciences is reducible to the movement of atoms as a form of extreme scientific materialism. For more information, Rudolf Steiner, “Goethe Against Atomism,” in which Steiner writes: “Someone whose need for causality is satisfied when he has succeeded in tracing the processes of nature back to the mechanics of atoms lacks the organ by which to understand Goethe.” ↩
4. Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 6. ↩
5. See Beate Allert, “‘Trübe’ as the Source of New Color Formation in Goethe’s Late Works Entropische Farben (1817–1820) and Chromatik (1822),” Goethe Yearbook 19 (2012): 29–47. Allert’s comprehensive study argues for the reach of Trübe as concept in Goethe’s later writings on color and offers further analysis of the term’s role in an aesthetic context. ↩
6. All translations of Farbenlehre are from Douglas Miller, ed. and trans., “Theory of Colors,” in Goethe: Scientific Studies (New York: Suhrkamp, 1988), 157–298. ↩
7. Allert, “Trübe as the Source of New Color Formation,” 31. ↩
8. This sentiment is described in a letter from Goethe to Hegel, the godfather of entoptics. See Frederick Burwick, “Goethe’s Entoptische Farben” in Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal, ed. Frederick Amrine and Francis J. Zucker (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1987), 29–44, at 30. ↩
9. The introduction to Goldstein’s monograph details the ways in which atomism in the early nineteenth century corresponds to a valuation of tropes and figures of poetic language as expressive of not only poetic creativity, but also scientific fact. ↩
10. Andrew Piper, “Egologies: Goethe, Entoptics, and the Writing of Life,” in Goethe’s Ghosts: Reading and the Persistence of Literature, ed. Simon Richter and Richard Block (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), 17–36, at 24. ↩
11. See Steffen Dietzsch, “Wie Farben, hinter dem Spektrum’ Gestalt annehmen: Von der Konstruktivität der romantischen Naturforschung,” in Die Farben der Romantik: Physik und Physiologie, Kunst und Literatur, ed. Walter Pape (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 1–13, at 5. ↩
12. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), 319, quoted in Jonathan Crary, The Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 72. ↩
13. For an excellent discussion on rereading Crary, see Michael Powers, “Atmospheric Color and the Phenomenological Gaze: Goethe and Merleau-Ponty,” in Pacific Coast Philology 54, no. 2 (2019): 298–321, at 302. ↩
14. Allert and Piper both provide explanations of the background of Goethe’s interest in entoptic colors and the ↩
15. Piper, “Egologies: Goethe, Entoptics, and the Writing of Life,” 24. ↩
16. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, edited by Ernst Beutler, 24 vols. (Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1953), hereafter abbreviated as ZA followed by volume number. ↩
17. Translation by Christopher Middleton in Goethe: Selected Poems, ed. Christopher Middleton (Boston: Suhrkamp, 1983), 229. All translations of the poem “Entoptische Farben” are by Middleton. ↩
18. Frederick Burwick, The Damnation of Newton: Goethe’s Color Theory and Romantic Perception (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1986), 60. ↩
19. Ralf Häfner, “Makrokosmos/Mikrokosmus,” in Personen, Sachen, Begriffen, L–Z, Goethe-Handbuch, vol. 4.2, ed. Hans-Dietrich Dahnke and Regine Otto (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag, 1998), 682–84. ↩
20. Douglas Miller, trans. and ed., “Colors in the Sky,” in Goethe: Scientific Studies (New York: Suhrkamp, 1988), 151. ↩
21. John Oxenford, trans., Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret (London: George Bell and Sons, 1883), 516. ↩
22. See Sebastian Meixner’s entry on “Urphänomen (Original/Primordial Phenomenon)” as well as John Erpenbeck, “Urphänomen” in Goethe-Handbuch 4.2:1080–82, here 1080. ↩
23. Pamela Currie, Goethe’s Visual World (London: MHRA, 2013), 11 ↩
24. I borrow this phrasing from Sebastian Meixner, “Urphänomen,” Goethe Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts. ↩
25. Frederick Amrine, “The Metamorphosis of the Scientist,” Goethe Yearbook 5 (1990): 187–212, here 197. ↩
26. Peter Huber, “Polarität/Steigerung,” in Goethe-Handbuch 4.2:863–65, here 864. ↩
27. For more information on analogy, see Christian Weber, “Gleichnis,” in Goethe Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts 2, no. 1 (2022): npg., also Amrine, “The Metamorphosis of the Scientist,” 198. ↩
28. See Bernard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors and Other Articulations of the Real, which traces veils and grid-like appearances as a part of an historical ordering of space, as well Clark Muenzer, “Ding/Unding (Thing/No-Thing),” for a discussion of the role played by the void (Leere) in Goethe’s ontological thinking. ↩
29. Clark Muenzer, “Figurative Images and Visual memory in Goethe’s Discourse on Color,” in The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture, ed. Patricia Simpson and Evelyn K. Moore (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 219–37, here 222. ↩
30. For a rereading of the integration of the universal and the particular in one another, see Goldstein, Sweet Science, 132. ↩
31. For a discussion on “zart” and its conceptual valences, see Goldstein, Sweet Science, 131. ↩
32. “Es gibt eine zarte Empirie, die sich mit dem Gegenstand innigst identisch macht, und dadurch zur eigentlichen Theorie wird. Diese Steigerung des geistigen Vermögens aber gehört einer hochgebildten Zeit an (FA 1.25:113; There is a delicate empiricism that makes itself utterly identical with the object, thereby becoming true theory. But this enhancement of our mental powers belongs to a highly evolved age). ↩
33. Translation by A.S. Kline, “Faust,” Poetry in Translation, 2003. ↩
34. For more on the greyness of the north compared with Italian skies, see Currie, Goethe’s Visual World, 13. ↩
35. Translation by A.S. Kline, “Römische Elegien,” Poetry in Translation, 2003. ↩
36. Burwick, The Damnation of Newton, 82. ↩
37. Piper, “Egologies: Goethe, Entoptics, and the Writing of Life,” 21. ↩
38. Rainer Nägele, Reading After Freud: Essays on Goethe, Hölderlin, Habermas, Nietzsche, Brecht, Celan, and Freud (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 42. ↩
39. Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud, vol. 14, Werke aus den Jahren 1925-1931 (London: Imago, 1948), 545–551, at 547. Translation from Sigmund Freud, “Goethe Prize.” In Writings on Literature, ed. and trans. James Strachey (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997), 256–63, at 257. ↩
40. Eric Anderson, “Dreams in Color: Sigmund Freud’s Decorative Encounters,” in Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture and Viennese Modernism, edited by Elana Shapira (Böhlau Verlag: Vienna, 2018), 161–78, at 172–73. ↩
41. See Eckart Förster, “Goethe and the ‘Auge des Geistes,’” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 75 (2001):187–101. ↩
42. Goethe used the following epigram in a supplementary essay to the Farbenlehre entitled “Physiologische Farberscheinungen” (1822): “Wäre nicht dein Auge sonnenhaft, / Wie könnt’ es je die Sonn’ erblicken? / We’ste nicht in uns die eigne Gotteskraft, / Wie könnt’ uns Göttliches entzücken?” (FA 1.25:798; If you eye were not sun-like, / How could it ever behold the sun? / If some godly power were not present in us, / How could the divine delight us?). ↩

Works Cited and Further Reading

• Allert, Beate. “‘Trübe’ as the Source of New Color Formation in Goethe’s Late Works Entropische Farben (1817–1820) and Chromatik (1822).” Goethe Yearbook 19 (2012): 29–47.
• Amrine, Frederick. “The Metamorphosis of the Scientist.” Goethe Yearbook 5 (1990): 187–212.
• Anderson, Eric. “Dreams in Color: Sigmund Freud’s Decorative Encounters.” In Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture and Viennese Modernism, edited by Elana Shapira, 161–178. Böhlau Verlag: Vienna, 2018.
• Burwick, Frederick. The Damnation of Newton: Goethe’s Color Theory and Romantic Perception. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1986.
• ———. “Goethe’s Entoptische Farben.” In Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal, edited by Frederick Amrine and Francis J. Zucker, 29–44. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1987.
• Caisley, Jennifer. “Materie.” Goethe Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts 3 (2022).
• Crary, Jonathan. The Techniques of the Observer. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
• Currie, Pamela. Goethe’s Visual World. London: MHRA, 2013.
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