Page 56 - The Power of Light, Colour and Sound for Health and Wellness draft

“COLOUR AND LIGHT DIMENSIONS”
FROM NEWTON TO GOETHE TO THEO GIMBEL´S COLOUR - LIGHT THERAPY {
Goethe and Newton: a fruitful discussion?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, best known for his literary work, was also a{ keen and outspoken natural scientist. In the second polemic part of his Theory of Colours “Zur Farbenlehre” he attacked Newton´s groundbreaking fndings, that light is heterogenous and not immutable, as previously thought.{
Goethe´s polemic was rejected by physicists of the day. Although Goethe repeated all of Newton´s experiments, he did not come to the same conclusions. It is now established that in fact Goethe did understand the momentum of Newton´s logic. Goethe´s resistance to Newton´s theory stemmed from something quite different: his pantheism - his belief in the spiritual nature of light. This prevented him from allowing himself to look at light in solely physical terms and accepting that it is anything other than simple and immutable. Goethe spent half of his life on writing his 1000- page oeuvre Theory of Colours.
He states that we humans and the world are united through the medium of the eye.
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Goethe´s concern and fascination was, unlike Newton, not so much the analytical view on colour, as with the qualities on how the phenomena are perceived. Philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer, Rudolf Steiner, Ludwig Wittgenstein etc. have come to understand the distinction between the optical spectrum as observed by Newton, and the phenomena of human colour perception, as presented by Goethe.
Goethe saw darkness as polar to and interacting with light - colours resulted from it’s interaction with light and shadow.
Boundary conditions - Goethe´s edge spectrum
When looking through a prism, the orientation of a light - dark boundary with respect to the prism angle and position is signifcant. With white above a dark boundary – the light shows a blue - violet edge into the dark area. When dark is situated above a light boundary a red-yellow edge can be seen extending in the light area.
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Goethe felt that this arising of colour at light-dark boundaries was fundamental to the creation of the spectrum, which he considered to be a compound{ phenomenon.
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