Plato’s Mathematical Psychophysics of Color

Aristotle is often regarded as providing a potentially appropriate model for a naturalistic human psychology that is able to reconcile the commonly opposed normative or “manifest” and factual or “scientific” images of the world and restore to the world the qualities that constitute its value. Such Aristotelian features were taken up after Newton by Goethe in his Theory of Color in his attempt to restore the actual color to the world that had seemingly been drained of it by Newtonian science. Here, I argue that beneath the “modificationalist” elements that Goethe took from Aristotle lies a mathematical approach to color originating in Plato that exploits similarities between color and tonal consonances and dissonances. The logical structure of Goethe’s color theory has recently been investigated by proponents of “universal logic”, but only when this theory is viewed against the background of Plato’s appropriation of Pythagorean harmonic theory does its full explanatory potential become apparent.