1 Hegel’s Logic in Relation to Goethe’s Theory of Colour Paul Redding It is well known that Hegel was a supporter, perhaps the most significant contemporary supporter, of Goethe’s colour theory, and that he shared Goethe’s critique of Newton’s treatment of colour in his Opticks of 1704 (Newton 1730). Goethe had commenced experiments on colour in the early 1790s and after a number of shorter pieces had in 1810 published Zur Farbenlehre, two volumes accompanied by a third containing illustrations. 1 Despite the almost universal rejection that Goethe received from practicing scientists, 2 Hegel publicly endorsed his approach to colour in the 1817 Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, “Philosophy of Nature”, and maintained this support in all the subsequent editions. Hegel claimed that it was Goethe, not Newton, who followed a properly empirical approach, and that Goethe’s treatment of these empirical findings, but not Newton’s, were “in accord with the notion” (Hegel 1991, §320 rem.)—that is, were in accord with logic as presented in his own Science of Logic. Here I want to focus on what we might learn of Hegel’s own understanding of the nature of logic and the type of metaphysics that he identifies with it, from his support for Goethe on these matters. 1. Hegel’s Support for Goethe’s Critique of Newton Newton had broken with the traditional “modificationist” accounts of colour that regarded the production of colour as resulting from the modification of homogeneous white light when passed through semi-opaque media (Zemplén 2004). For Newton, white light was a composite of an indefinite number of distinct rays, while black was their simple absence. The actual rays, he claimed, were invisible, and the colours experienced were the effects these rays produced in the sensorium of the observer, the particular colour experienced being correlated with the degree of the ray’s refrangibility through a prism. In contrast, Goethe’s theory, while closer to the traditional modificationalist account, nevertheless departed from it in a crucial way with the idea of colours as emerging from an interaction between light and darkness, an interaction he described as an “Urphänomen”—a primordial presentation of colour’s underlying form. 1 Volume One of Zur Farbenlehre, the so-called didactic part, was translated into English by Charles Lock Eastlake and first published in 1840 as Goethe’s Theory of Colours, this material being retranslated and published with others of Goethe’s scientific writings in Goethe 1994. Volume two, the “polemic part” has been translated as Goethe 2016. 2 Goethe had sent earlier material to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who responded negatively. Heather Sullivan comments that “For the most part, his optical experiments on light were received by his friends and the scientific community alike as amateur trifles published by a poet who inaccurately criticized the established Newtonian systems.” (Sullivan 2017, 116).