Read Online On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry by William H. Gass - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: William H. Gass
Tags: General, Literary Criticism, Philosophy, Art, Color Theory, Aesthetics, blue, color, Semiotics & Theory, Sex in Literature
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blues and violets were startled sometimes by spots of cantharidian red, or else with the whole hand it spread a melancholy which gently purpled the spent body like a bruise.
For Democritus, shape was the principal cause of color, especially the shape of what might be considered the reflecting or emitting surface: white atoms were smooth, black jagged (shadow-casting, Theophrastus suggests); though his account is hardly consistent since the atoms of red are compared to those of flame and simply said to be larger, while the ones which produce green are made, like the statues of Henry Moore, of the solid and the void itself—thing and no thing—which, according to his own teaching, is the way the whole of reality is put together and not just the greenish part. Moreover, Democritus omitted blue from the list of his primary colors at the cost of our admiration.
On the other hand, Epicurus claimed that the positions and arrangements of the atoms were as important as their isolated shape, and that, in effect, color's cause was molecular, an opinion more correct than he could ever have imagined, since hue is not the simple effect of a stimulus, it is the actual perception of a whole series or set of relations.
In any case, as Galen observed, very early the philosophers kicked quality out of science. Aristotle insisted that qualities were accidents and could not be a part of essence. Lucretius faith-fully followed the lead of Epicurus. Galileo was equally concerned to reserve physics for mathematics, and, as we know, Descartes delivered, as a Frenchman should, the coup de grace.
The campaign against quality was a campaign against consciousness, because that's where quality was thrown like trash in a can. Although Descartes' public purpose was to certify faith, his successful secret purpose was to clean up thought for the sur-geries of science. For the most part, then, qualities were removed from the external world and given over to that same soul which was once said merely to perceive them, as though the telescope with its lenses had swallowed the stars. It is important to notice, however, that Plato's complaint about color was not that it was illusory whereas the physical world which it concealed was real.
No, for him the dancer was as deceitful as her veils. The inter-course of eye and object, which involves the voluptuous inter-twining of two rays (these were his own blue metaphors), en-genders twins: the eye is filled with seeing (an activity), while simultaneously the object seen becomes luminous with color (a condition). Eye and sky together are then blue and its apprehension. Goethe—great pagan that he was—sounds the same note: The eye owes its very existence to light. From inert animal ancillary organs light evokes an organ which shall become light; and so the eye learns to give light for light, emitting an internal ray to encounter that from without.
Plato's brilliant and beautiful suggestion avoids the insoluble projection problem. Of course, in philosophy, you settle one bill only by neglecting another, a strategy which must eventually be seen to fail since all of them fall due at the same time. Nevertheless, Plato was never guilty of such unempirical foolishness as the rag-taggle of doctrines which crowded along afterward required.
Once spread across the spaceless night and total nowhere of the soul, how shall the stars be got back through the skull and eye and scope into the sky again? No one has ever come close to saving and explaining the objective appearance of perception, not even Schopenhauer, whose suggestion was at least a try: namely that perception was a process in which a felt effect, in the moment of its existence, was nevertheless always experienced as if it were occurring in the space of its cause, and that understanding was simply the ability to experience any such effect farther and farther back along the chain of its conditions or its grounds.
Ordinary inferences are not altered by the time it
For Democritus, shape was the principal cause of color, especially the shape of what might be considered the reflecting or emitting surface: white atoms were smooth, black jagged (shadow-casting, Theophrastus suggests); though his account is hardly consistent since the atoms of red are compared to those of flame and simply said to be larger, while the ones which produce green are made, like the statues of Henry Moore, of the solid and the void itself—thing and no thing—which, according to his own teaching, is the way the whole of reality is put together and not just the greenish part. Moreover, Democritus omitted blue from the list of his primary colors at the cost of our admiration.
On the other hand, Epicurus claimed that the positions and arrangements of the atoms were as important as their isolated shape, and that, in effect, color's cause was molecular, an opinion more correct than he could ever have imagined, since hue is not the simple effect of a stimulus, it is the actual perception of a whole series or set of relations.
In any case, as Galen observed, very early the philosophers kicked quality out of science. Aristotle insisted that qualities were accidents and could not be a part of essence. Lucretius faith-fully followed the lead of Epicurus. Galileo was equally concerned to reserve physics for mathematics, and, as we know, Descartes delivered, as a Frenchman should, the coup de grace.
The campaign against quality was a campaign against consciousness, because that's where quality was thrown like trash in a can. Although Descartes' public purpose was to certify faith, his successful secret purpose was to clean up thought for the sur-geries of science. For the most part, then, qualities were removed from the external world and given over to that same soul which was once said merely to perceive them, as though the telescope with its lenses had swallowed the stars. It is important to notice, however, that Plato's complaint about color was not that it was illusory whereas the physical world which it concealed was real.
No, for him the dancer was as deceitful as her veils. The inter-course of eye and object, which involves the voluptuous inter-twining of two rays (these were his own blue metaphors), en-genders twins: the eye is filled with seeing (an activity), while simultaneously the object seen becomes luminous with color (a condition). Eye and sky together are then blue and its apprehension. Goethe—great pagan that he was—sounds the same note: The eye owes its very existence to light. From inert animal ancillary organs light evokes an organ which shall become light; and so the eye learns to give light for light, emitting an internal ray to encounter that from without.
Plato's brilliant and beautiful suggestion avoids the insoluble projection problem. Of course, in philosophy, you settle one bill only by neglecting another, a strategy which must eventually be seen to fail since all of them fall due at the same time. Nevertheless, Plato was never guilty of such unempirical foolishness as the rag-taggle of doctrines which crowded along afterward required.
Once spread across the spaceless night and total nowhere of the soul, how shall the stars be got back through the skull and eye and scope into the sky again? No one has ever come close to saving and explaining the objective appearance of perception, not even Schopenhauer, whose suggestion was at least a try: namely that perception was a process in which a felt effect, in the moment of its existence, was nevertheless always experienced as if it were occurring in the space of its cause, and that understanding was simply the ability to experience any such effect farther and farther back along the chain of its conditions or its grounds.
Ordinary inferences are not altered by the time it
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