Collaboratively Exploring Goethe’s Theory of Colours – by Brendan Ferguson

01 Jun Collaboratively Exploring Goethe’s Theory of Colours – by Brendan Ferguson

I would like to introduce you to a project that has been underway for just over a year. Its aim is it to make available, and promote study of

Goethe’s Theory of Colour.

To this end, we have started a website which has provided some real accomplishments over the last year. We provide the only complete online version of Goethe’s book, Theory of Colours, and in collaboration with Dale Brunsvold, host the first and only audiobook version of this work. In accordance with our mandate — both are available for free on our site.

John Penner and I came together to form this website out of our own passions. My passion for this work is two-fold. Phenomenology being at the threshold of spiritual understanding; I believe the Theory of Colours lends itself as a stepping-stone into the spiritual worlds. We may not agree on the specifics of spiritual experience, but when it comes to colour, it is hard to deny the immanence of phenomena beheld by our eyes. As one who has undertaken to study Goethe’s Colour Theory, I hope to bring to fruition my own potential for spiritual understanding. I also have a passion to make such a wonderful resource more readily available to the public.

Many ingredients combine to enhance the study of this book. Goethe constantly references previous paragraphs. In the online version, we enhance the reading experience by adding relevant references and footnotes in a way that doesn’t detract from the flow of the text — you can hover over references and see the relevant paragraph. Public figures and authors referenced in the work now link to relevant Wikipedia articles, to provide a deeper context to these figures.

John’s primary focus for this project is the English translation of the book. After two-hundred years — there has yet to be a complete English translation of this work. In the 1840 translation by Charles Eastlake — he only undertook to translate the Didactic section. The Historical and Polemic never made it. The website has been designed to finally facilitate the translation of the remainder of the book. We would also like to supplement the text with Rudolf Steiner’s extensive footnotes. These are currently only available in German, and have to our knowledge, never appeared in digital form.

We also plan on expanding with modern methods — photographs and illustrations that were impractical given the publishing technology of the time, but the means of which are now widely available — to supplement the diagrams and experiments within the text.

If you would like to join us in exploring the world of colour — we welcome you. There is much work to do and we would love to have you on board. We are in need of: German to English translators, English to German translators, Latin to English translators, people willing to format text, and people who can undertake and photograph experiments outlined within the text. It is a hope of mine that Waldorf School Teachers might have class projects where a few of Goethe’s experiments are undertaken. These could then documented and photographed and included as contributions uploaded to the website.

Whatever your interest is; we welcome you to view the world of colour on the website www.TheoryOfColor.org — read the text, empirically try things out yourself, and listen to an audiobook. We hope you will be inspired, and be in touch.