On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (New York Review Books Classics) Read online

  Children collect nouns, bugs, bottlecaps, seashells, verbs: what’s that? what’s it doing now? who’s this? and with the greed which rushes through them like like rain down gulleys, they immediately grasp the prepositions of belonging and the pronouns of possession. But how often do they ask how cold it is, what color, how loud, rare, warm, responsive, kind, how soft, how wet, how noxious, loving, indiscreet, how sour?

  Measures, not immersions, concerned our sciences almost from the beginning, and we were scarcely out of the gate before Democritus was declaring fiercely that ‘color exists by convention, sweet by convention, bitter by convention; in truth nothing exists but the atoms and the void.’ Although Anaxagoras had already claimed that we see nothing but light reflected in the pupil of the eye, the real organ of perception, all along, was Mind. It was the soul that saw for Plato, too, yet color was a dissembling cosmetic, the tinted marble and the gilded thigh, perfume for the iris, spice for spoiled meat, and when the mind put a public face on, as Protagoras might, or Gorgias did, in pursuit of persuasion, it painted itself like an old whore for the light, and with one finger gooey from the color pot circled its sockets with the pale cream and gray-blue grit of the shaven pubis, smearing on each cheek a paste which matched the several pallors of debauchery, though these undertoning blues and violets were startled sometimes by spots of cantharidian red, or else with the whole hand it spread a melancholy which gently purpled the spent body like a bruise.

  For Democritus, shape was the principal cause of color, especially the shape of what might be considered the reflecting or emitting surface: white atoms were smooth, black jagged (shadow-casting, Theophrastus suggests); though his account is hardly consistent since the atoms of red are compared to those of flame and simply said to be larger, while the ones which produce green are made, like the statues of Henry Moore, of the solid and the void itself—thing and no thing—which, according to his own teaching, is the way the whole of reality is put together and not just the greenish part. Moreover, Democritus omitted blue from the list of his primary colors at the cost of our admiration.

  On the other hand, Epicurus claimed that the positions and arrangements of the atoms were as important as their isolated shape, and that, in effect, color’s cause was molecular, an opinion more correct than he could ever have imagined, since hue is not the simple effect of a stimulus, it is the actual perception of a whole series or set of relations.

  In any case, as Galen observed, very early the philosophers kicked quality out of science. Aristotle insisted that qualities were accidents and could not be a part of essence. Lucretius faithfully followed the lead of Epicurus. Galileo was equally concerned to reserve physics for mathematics, and, as we know, Descartes delivered, as a Frenchman should, the coup de grâce.

  The campaign against quality was a campaign against consciousness, because that’s where quality was thrown like trash in a can. Although Descartes’ public purpose was to certify faith, his successful secret purpose was to clean up thought for the surgeries of science. For the most part, then, qualities were removed from the external world and given over to that same soul which was once said merely to perceive them, as though the telescope with its lenses had swallowed the stars. It is important to notice, however, that Plato’s complaint about color was not that it was illusory whereas the physical world which it concealed was real. No, for him the dancer was as deceitful as her veils. The intercourse of eye and object, which involves the voluptuous intertwining of two rays (these were his own blue metaphors), engenders twins: the eye is filled with seeing (an activity), while simultaneously the object seen becomes luminous with color (a condition). Eye and sky together are then blue and its apprehension. Goethe—great pagan that he was—sounds the same note:

  The eye owes its very existence to light. From inert animal ancillary organs light evokes an organ which shall become light; and so the eye learns to give light for light, emitting an internal ray to encounter that from without.

  Plato’s brilliant and beautiful suggestion avoids the insoluble projection problem. Of course, in philosophy, you settle one bill only by neglecting another, a strategy which must eventually be seen to fail since all of them fall due at the same time. Nevertheless, Plato was never guilty of such unempirical foolishness as the rag-taggle of doctrines which crowded along afterward required. Once spread across the spaceless night and total nowhere of the soul, how shall the stars be got back through the skull and eye and scope into the sky again? No one has ever come close to saving and explaining the objective appearance of perception, not even Schopenhauer, whose suggestion was at least a try: namely that perception was a process in which a felt effect, in the moment of its existence, was nevertheless always experienced as if it were occurring in the space of its cause, and that understanding was simply the ability to experience any such effect farther and farther back along the chain of its conditions or its grounds.

  Ordinary inferences are not altered by the time it takes to make them. Here, however, immediacy is essential. In short, ‘seeing’ the blue of the gentian, the storm in the clouds, or deer in their tracks, involved the same principles and was basically the same process. Genius, then, was the ability to ‘see’ a long way—swiftly. Unfortunately, the implication is that if I were stupid enough—retarded might be the right word—I would see no farther than the inside of my eye. This seems unlikely, and, although the dunce sits in the corner he’s been sent to, the corner does not close that narrowly upon him, or his conical paper crown slide that darkly to his nose.

  Aristotle had no more doubt than Plato did that things were loud, sour, blue, or rough, but he had difficulty in understanding how we saw and felt and heard these qualities. Moreover, he wished to avoid Plato’s dismissal of the sensible world as a ground for knowledge. Consequently, he was driven to make a number of extraordinary suggestions. Perception, he said, is the power of receiving ‘the sensible forms of things without their matter.’ Here we tremble on the brink of something without actually toppling in, because Aristotle’s sensible forms, transmitted to us through an intervening medium called ‘the transparent,’ are tinted images, visible species, the verdigris of bronze without the bronze, the shape of the spear, first in the trembling air and then in the eye, given to us as the sharp flowing edge of a set of colors; but like a camera which peels off and spools the visible film of things, what these colors color must be supplied by the sensitive soul itself.

  We reach that brink in the moment when Aristotle says:

  . . . the sense is affected by what is coloured or flavored or sounding, but it is indifferent what in each case the substance is; what alone matters is what quality it has, i.e., in what ratio its constituents are combined. . . .

  When a colored surface sets the transparent in motion, it relays to the eye a record of the relation between light and dark which constitutes its hue, and the organ responds by establishing this relationship inside itself. Thus

  . . . the actualities of the sensible object and of the sensitive faculty are one actuality in spite of the differences between their modes of being . . .

  and the mind flies to another essay, this time a contemporary one by Edwin H. Land, in which the results of his experiments on color vision are summarized. It is not the eye’s response to a single wavelength, as the spectrum displays them, which causes us to perceive a color, rather

  . . . the colors in a natural image are determined by the relative balance of long and short wavelengths over the entire scene . . . (‘Experiments in Color Vision’)

  so that within the frequencies which make up spectral yellow, for instance, the whole range of colors can be experienced. Within spectral blue, already short or cool, the cool side will be seen as blue, the long or warm side as red. Clearly, color is the experience of a ratio.

  As I should like to spell the theory now, the musician, for example, counting on the auditory laws, creates a structure he knows the mind will materialize in sounds of a certain kind. The musical score represents
the music’s form in ink and paper. The disc represents it in wiggles and rounds. The performance troubles the air with the same structures. And our mind hears. But the qualities we taste in wine, touch and feel along the thigh while loving, hear as singing, sniff from the steaming pot, or observe articulate the surface of a painting, are, in fact, relations. Furthermore, the sense of passion or of power, of depth and vibrancy, feeling and vision, we take away from any work is the result of the intermingling, balance, play, and antagonism between these: it is the arrangement of blues, not any blue itself, which lets us see the mood it formulates, whether pensive melancholy or thoughtless delight, so that one to whom aesthetic experience comes easily will see, as Schopenhauer suggested, sadness in things as readily as smoky violet or moist verdigris.

  Nevertheless, what we saw, Aristotle had to say, was not quite the color as it was embedded in its bronze. It was instead a color generalized, the species bluegreenbrownishness, expressed, to be sure, in an individuating medium of its own, yet like the particular twangs of native speech, easily replaced with Oxford’s universal intonations by any listener fastidious enough to care. Furthermore, these qualities, although slightly general in their character, were neither essential nor universal enough to figure importantly in knowledge. The shapes of things, wrapped like cigars in their shades, were informative sometimes, but perception mainly permitted us to establish the behavior patterns of plants, animals, and things, and having sequences, discover causes, hence general laws and universal schemes. In short: without color we could not perceive, nor, I suspect, remember, but the production of these qualities is never part of the basic activity of Being, and therefore an account of them is never a significant part of natural science.

  Will the Bishop do better by blue? After all, he appeals to common sense and to the experience of ordinary men. Yet

  It is an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding.

  No one betrays perception more promptly than the empiricist. First he appeals to common sense, which he flouts; then to experience, which he misrepresents. How far must we search to find the reason for this strangely prevailing opinion? As it happens, the cover of my copy of Berkeley’s New Theory of Vision is blue, and when I shelve it so the sides slide between Bergson and Bradley, do they cease to be blue or bluish or even any color? Do I ever feel the likelihood of that, or wonder at the possibility?

  No doubt Berkeley was right to remind us that all our statements about the qualities of things are reducible to the general prediction that if we carry out certain operations properly, we will have certain perceptions; but it does not follow from this that to be is to be perceived; rather we must be content to argue only that to be known to be is to be perceived, for there is no other way to ‘know’ perceptible qualities except by perceiving them.

  Am I then wrong to believe that my copy of Berkeley remains blue though it rests in my briefcase throughout the night? Am I deceived if I think that the blue belongs to the book, not to me, though the book has my name on its flyleaf and lives on my shelves quite contentedly? Am I mistaken to maintain that this blue is a public property, as much as a park, for all to see, though my leather case and library are as private before the law as the penis behind my pants? Have I been fooled if! feel that this blue, though only a color, will suffer fading and staining, a circuit of changes like everything else on its way to oblivion? Suppose I shelve my book backward so that its raw ends stick out. How do I know that the binding has not fled with the blue I can’t see, like Peter Pan to the land of lost children, and the pages are held between Bradley and Bergson like a rosary between praying palms?

  Don’t prate to me of divinity, dear Bishop, but of blue, the godlike hue, because it’s contrary to experience to assume that anything alters itself without cause; consequently I can feel certain that my Berkeley will remain blue so long as I can be confident that there is no plot afoot to dye, bleach, or rebind it. The Law of Inertia will serve us all more reliably than the allegedly omniscient though in truth often watery gaze of God.

  Thomas Reid, a Scot who not only believed in common sense but used it, wrote with some exasperation once that

  Every man feels that perception gives him an invincible belief of the existence of that which he perceives; and that this belief is not the effect of reasoning, but the immediate consequence of perception. When philosophers have wearied themselves and their readers with their speculations upon this subject, they can neither strengthen this belief, nor weaken it; nor can they show how it is produced. It puts the philosopher and the peasant upon a level; and neither of them can give any other reason for believing his senses, than that he finds it impossible for him to do otherwise. (Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man)

  Still, every one of these diligent gentlemen may be right . . . and why should we mind if every one of them is right simultaneously? Let all notes sound together and cacophony be king.

  There are particular pieces of the world which essentially serve the abstract (dominos, for instance, standing armies, monetary prose), and there are fragments of the mind which nevertheless pretend to be (like men of good will and the data of sense) residents in the realm of things. It is around these coins, twin-headed and treacherous, that the quarrel which concerns us has centered, for there is clearly a similar conflict between the way we customarily experience color and the way we have historically tended to think about it. This unnecessary antagonism is traditional: shall we believe our senses or our reason? And reason is so swift to slander the senses that even Hume did not escape, replacing shadow, mood and music, iris and jay, with a scatter of sense impressions artificial as buttons: each distinct, inert, each intense, each in self-absorbed sufficiency and narrowly circumscribed disorder like a fistful of jelly beans tossed among orphans or an army of ants in frightened retreat.

  The blunt truth is that if the sky’s not blue, the sea, the serge suit, the chicory, the blue goose; if they’re not blue, then, like our ears and nose and tongue and fingers, our eyes have lied, and although on occasion the truth may be beaten from them, they cannot be a standard; they have soiled consciousness too continuously; they cannot be trusted. If, on the other hand, we begin with what we’re given, then what about all those advisers who have whispered persuasive nonsense in our ears from the beginning? don’t believe what you hear—the violin, the wind—believe me; others feel differently, in other ages, different climes; even yourself—on grayer days, at greater distances, in sickness, out of madness, during dream—distort—from pique, from spite, from wine; remember the shadows which threatened you like a thief? the friend you greeted like a stranger? the lap dog’s bite? the lips which claimed to be so sweet? so don’t believe the rainbow or the oil, but believe the lines the mind conceives connect the spill and bow to you; believe in the weights of spaces and the rush of quantity through the void. Well? what to do? For their treachery, for the buttered sound of their sophistries, shall we confine them to the tower?

  Choose.

  • • •

  We might suppose that connoisseurs and critics of painting, certainly the painters themselves, would be better disposed to blue than the physicists and philosophers—that’s a natural thought—and we might expect many of them to think of shape as a qualification of color, or colors as contents whose limits were created simply to contain them, like thick cream curdling in a bowl (because who looks at the basket when it’s heaped with berries?)—yes, that’s a thought natural enough—but you also might expect writers to love their words (does not Krapp cry out ‘spooooool’ to the unrecorded walls of his room?), although the truth is that what they usually want is whatever their words represent (the things, not the thoughts, the things, not the sounds, the things, not the snicker and giggle of ink or the rumple of sentences like slept-in pajamas—no, only things, dear things, sweet things . . . and then only those things things
designate, the way work means money and money downpays the car and cars confer status and status is power and power converts to cash), just as painters have for centuries carefully colored between the lines, lines which everyone read as the edges of objects, of things, though the color of those things, the mantle of the Virgin, for instance, sometimes gave them a special meaning.

  Yes, once blue signified, not sky, but Heaven, against which the figures of the gods burned like suns. Off and on it stood for the great outdoors, the container of all those usefully precious and precarious things; it was the space of spaces, the big Big Sky, and blue would flow into rooms through windows or surround soldiers, tall trees, towns, a flagellated Christ, with Greek, Venetian or Egyptian light as clean and final as a fluttering cape or goodbye shawl. Occasionally it darkened like a pit in which the world was thrown, or now and then it threatened us with the come-hither recessions of its vertiginous deeps, and we were small and incomplete before it as men had been in earlier times before their mountain-dwelling divinities.

  Seldom was blue for blue’s sake present till Pollock hurled pigment at his canvas like pies. Rarer still, since such sensitivity in the brush tip is a rarity (in the penis rarer, in the poet rarest of all), color became the breath of bodies, every hue the aching limit of a life, as if it rose up from within the substance it covered the way feeling changes the color of the chameleon, or like those remarkable cephalopods whose configurations alter with their moods, or as, inadequately, our own blood comes and goes like sunshine dreaming among moving clouds.