Jim Cross wrote: ↑Tue Aug 17, 2021 10:11 pm Ashvin,
I'm not finding a lot in Goethe's theory of colors that really jumps out at me as being that different from other science from 200 years ago. It got some things right and some things wrong. I also am not seeing how it arisies in any direct way from an idealistic premise. Some of it seems actually physicalist. Goethe seems to think of colors as real things in themselves. Even your own quote seems to talk about nature as something we observe and interact with. For example, take this part of your quote:
Sure this is poetic but, aside from that, it seems to be about finding the regularity in the nature that is what science is all about.Nature speaks to other senses—to known, misunderstood, and unknown senses: so speaks she with herself and to us in a thousand modes. To the attentive observer she is nowhere dead nor silent; she has even a secret agent in inflexible matter, in a metal, the smallest portions of which tell us what is passing in the entire mass. However manifold, complicated, and unintelligible this language may often seem to us, yet its elements remain ever the same. With light poise and counterpoise, Nature oscillates within her prescribed limits, yet thus arise all the varieties and conditions of the phenomena which are presented to us in space and time.
But I'm certainly not an expert on Goethe. Do you have any better examples, something maybe in the last two hundred years?
Jim - this is not about whether Goethe's scientific conclusions were correct. From what you have read, you can tell that his approach and conclusions are radically different from standard scientific view, right? If you have only read my quote, then I will need to provide more. My quote was just to show how Goethe wanted to tear down the "castle" of Newton's color theory which is still today the standard view. Clearly no one, idealist or materialist, denies the importance of studying Nature in science.
If you want me to provide quotes showing Goethe was more inclined to idealism than physicalism, then I can do that, but actually that is not important. What is important is that he was a phenomenologist (note: I have not come across any phenomenologist who was not also an idealist), and that is how I believe science should be approached. It is a radically different approach than Bacon's inductive scientific method, which nearly all modern scientists, especially physicalists, hold to.