Remarks on colour

Remarks on Colour (Bemerkungen über die Farben) is a short book of numbered remarks on questions that sound almost childish: why can there be no transparent white, why is there no brown light, why can nothing be reddish green? Wittgenstein wrote them in 1950 and 1951, in the same notebooks that hold the last parts of On Certainty. G.E.M. Anscombe edited them and published them in 1977, with an English translation by Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schättle facing the German.

How it came about

Colour had troubled Wittgenstein since the beginning. In the Tractatus (6.3751) he claimed that a point cannot be red and green at the same time, and treated this as a matter of logic. In 1929, in Some remarks on logical form, he admitted that this "colour exclusion" did not fit his system, and the problem helped push him towards his later philosophy.

The trigger in 1950 was Goethe. Wittgenstein was reading the Farbenlehre, Goethe's theory of colours, which attacked Newton. Wittgenstein did not take sides in the physics. What interested him was that Goethe, without knowing it, was often describing not light but the logic of our colour words.

The book has three parts. According to Anscombe's preface, Part III, the longest, was written in Oxford in the spring of 1950, and Part I, a selection and reworking of that material, in March 1951. Part II is a short stretch from a separate notebook. These datings have been questioned: a paper by João Carlos Salles for the 2001 Kirchberg Wittgenstein Symposium argues on the basis of the manuscripts that the order and places need revising. The safe statement is that the remarks belong to his last two years.

What it says

The central claim is that colour concepts have a grammar, and that many puzzles about colour are puzzles about that grammar, not about the eye or the physics of light. We can say "bluish green" and "yellowish red", but "reddish green" is not a colour we fail to see; it is a combination our language leaves no place for. White cannot be transparent, Wittgenstein suggests, because of how "white" and "transparent" work together in our descriptions of things, not because of a fact about light.

He also looks at what is odd in colour talk: gold and silver, which are colours and yet not quite; grey, which cannot glow; the difference between a colour as a surface and a colour as light. He asks what it would be like to meet people who are colour-blind, or whose colour concepts differ from ours, and whether we could even learn their game. Along the way he observes that there is no such thing as phenomenology as a science, but there are phenomenological problems: questions that look like questions about experience and turn out to be questions about concepts.

How to read it

Read it with real colours at hand: a paint chart, a window, a glass of water. The remarks become much clearer when you try them on what you see. Many of them are unfinished, and some contradict each other; this is a working notebook, not a treatise. A good way in is Part I, which is the most polished, followed by Part III for the full range.

The English edition has a 30th anniversary reprint from the University of California Press (2007). In French there is a bilingual translation by Gérard Granel (TER). For background on the wider debates, the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on colour helps; the manuscripts are in the Bergen Nachlass Edition.

Why it matters

This is a minor book in Wittgenstein's work, but it has had an unusual afterlife among painters, designers and colour scientists as well as philosophers. It shows his late method at small scale: take a concrete puzzle, describe how the words are used, and watch the puzzle change shape. It also closes a circle that opened with the Tractatus. Some readers find it the clearest demonstration of what he meant by a grammatical investigation; others find it frustratingly inconclusive.

Verdict

Read this if you like colour, painting or design, or if you want a compact, concrete example of how the later Wittgenstein works. Pair it with a few pages of Goethe. Do not start your Wittgenstein reading here, and do not expect a theory of colour: you will finish with sharper questions rather than answers, which is exactly what he intended.