1 What Might Hegel and Wittgenstein Have Seen in Goethe’s Colour Theory? Paul Redding In a letter to Schelling in 1807, having read some of the publisher’s early sheets of a book on colour on which Goethe had been working for some years, Hegel suggests that in this Goethe “adheres completely to the empirical, instead of going beyond that thought to the other side of the empirical, to the concept which will perhaps only get to shimmer through” (Hegel 1984, 76). Nevertheless, Hegel would go on to be a supporter of Goethe’s book once it had become published in 1810. A century and a half later, Ludwig Wittgenstein would, in a letter to G. H. von Wright, report that he had been reading Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colour, Goethe 1988, 157–302, and 2016), about which he had similarly mixed feelings. It was, he said, “partly boring and repelling, but in some ways also very instructive and philosophically interesting” (Wittgenstein, 1993, 475). Both Hegel and Wittgenstein saw Goethe’s theory as bearing on certain aspects of their respective approaches to logic and certain common themes from Goethe’s book are picked up by the non-standard approach to logic of each. Wittgenstein’s concerns about his own earlier treatment of the logic of colour concepts in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is generally said to have been central to his reassessment of that work in the late 1920s, taking him eventually to the philosophy found in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations. 1 In the Tractatus he doesn’t say a lot about colour, but late in the book compares the impossibility of two different colours being “at one place in the visual field” to similar “contradictions” found in physics, such as the idea that “a particle cannot at the same time have two velocities, i.e. that at the same time it cannot be in two places, i.e. that particles in different places at the same time cannot be identical” (Wittgenstein 1922, 6.3751). For his part, Hegel would find in Goethe’s criticism of the modern scientific approach to colour developed by Newton in his Opticks of 1704, a criticism similar to that he had earlier expressed in relation to Newton’s celestial mechanics. Nevertheless, neither the post-Tractarian Wittgenstein nor Hegel seemed to find in Goethe the idea of a better scientific theory of colour to that offered by Newton. Thus, in his later work, Wittgenstein seemed to dismiss the idea that Goethe’s theory could be considered as a scientific alternative to a theory like Newton’s—the sort of theory that “experiments with the spectrum” could either confirm or refute (Wittgenstein 2003, §72). I will be suggesting that, similarly, Hegel, while considering Goethe’s theory more faithful to the empirical phenomena than Newton’s, did not consider it a better scientific theory. As his comments to Schelling above suggest, his own interest in Goethe’s colour “theory” was, as Wittgenstein puts it, “conceptual” (Wittgenstein 2003, §71). 2 In this essay this shared interest is explored in an effort to say something more general about the relation existing between the attitudes of Hegel and Wittgenstein to logic itself. 1 See, for example, the contributions to Silva (ed.) 2017. 2 “Someone who agrees with Goethe believes that Goethe correctly recognized the nature of colour. And nature here is not what results from experiments, but it lies in the concept of colour.”