Remarks on Colour by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Author:Ludwig Wittgenstein [Wittgenstein, Ludwig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-01-23T18:30:00+00:00

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132. In a particular meaning of "white" white is the lightest colour of all.

In a picture in which a piece of white paper gets its lightness from the blue sky, the sky is lighter than the white paper. And yet in another sense blue is the darker and white the lighter colour (Goethe). With a white and a blue on the palette, the former would be lighter than the latter. On the palette, white is the lightest colour.

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133. I may have impressed a certain grey-green upon my memory so that I can always correctly identify it without a sample. Pure red (blue, etc.) however, I can, so to speak, always reconstruct. It is simply a red that tends neither to one side nor to the other, and I recognize it without a sample, as e.g. I do a right angle, by contrast with an arbitrary acute or obtuse angle.

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134. Now in this sense there are four (or, with white and black, six) pure colours.

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135. A natural history of colours would have to report on their occurrence in nature, not on their essence. Its propositions would have to be temporal ones.

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136. By analogy with the other colours, a black drawing on a white background seen through a transparent white glass would have to

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appear unchanged as a black drawing on a white background. For the black must remain black and the white, because it is also the colour of the transparent body, remains unchanged.

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137. We could imagine a glass through which black looked like black, white like white, and all the other colours appeared as shades of grey; so that seen through it everything appears as though in a photograph.

But why should I call that "white glass"?

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138. The question is: is constructing a 'transparent white body' like constructing a 'regular biangle'?

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139. I can look at a body and perhaps see a matt white surface, i.e. get the impression of such a surface, or the impression of transparency (whether it actually exists or not). This impression may be produced by the distribution of the colours, and white and the other colours are not involved in it in the same way.

(I took a green painted lead cupola to be translucent greenish glass without knowing at the time about the special distribution of colours that produced this appearance.)

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140. And white may indeed occur in the visual impression of a transparent body, for example as a reflection, as a high-light. I.e. if the impression is perceived as transparent, the white which we see will simply not be interpreted as the body's being white.

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141. I look through a transparent glass: does it follow that I don't see white? No, but I don't see the glass as white.

But how does this come about? It can happen in various ways. I may see the white with both eyes as lying behind the glass. But simply in virtue of its position I may also see the white as a high-light (even when it isn't).

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