Newton, page 14
Leibniz’s ideas also initially fared better than Newton’s in Russia, a country hosting many German scholars and where Leibniz himself had acted as personal adviser to Peter the Great. Naval and military men rapidly saw the advantages of adopting Newton’s optical instruments and mathematical techniques, but his philosophy found few supporters. Even one of Newton’s admirers, a professor at the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, declared that ‘I have always desired those excellent celestial instruments whose invention is the glory of Newton’ but dismissed gravity as ‘an occult quality from the old Aristotelian school which converts healthy people to madness’. Peter envisioned Russia as a centralized, coordinated bureaucracy to be governed in a hierarchical, ordered manner. Like the components of a smoothly running clock, his courtiers would work together to serve the interests of the Tsar and the state. Leibniz’s cosmology of preordained harmonic integration matched this model of society far more closely than Newton’s view of independent individuals interacting freely with one another.32
In Britain, an articulate, well-informed and politically effective public voice developed far earlier than in other European countries. As individual achievement became increasingly valued, newspapers, theatres and other intellectual institutions became potent mediators between the ruler and the people. Newton’s philosophical system matched the political one. Its strong endorsement of personal autonomy within a close-knit community underpinned his own promotion as a celebrity throughout British society.
But Leibniz’s fame in the German-speaking lands was restricted to narrow academic circles, especially after the Berlin Academy officially pledged allegiance to Newton. German scholars have noted with regret that it was a French Swiss editor who produced the first so-called complete works, fifty years after Leibniz’s death. Further collections were published sporadically, but it was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that his status was reappraised by several international scholars. Working independently, they hailed Leibniz as a neglected genius who had already formulated the most recent discoveries in mathematical logic. Leibniz’s philosophy, declared Bertrand Russell, has ‘been hitherto universally and completely misunderstood. This is to be accounted for partly by his sheer intellectual greatness, partly by the ignorance of editors, partly . . . [by] the vastness of the enterprise he undertook . . .’33
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, long after Leibniz had died, the town of Hanover did eventually erect a temple dedicated to their local genius, but by then it was two other German writers – Immanuel Kant and Johann Goethe – who were becoming acclaimed as national geniuses.
Kant’s philosophical texts have the reputation of being particularly abstruse, yet although he lived roughly a century later, it is Kant and not Leibniz who became Germany’s genius of rationality, the nation’s closest equivalent to Newton. Although adopting the life-style of a reclusive academic, Kant – unlike Leibniz – propelled himself into the public spotlight, intervening in contemporary political debates and campaigning for freedom of the press. With its ringing call ‘Sapere aude! Have courage to make use of your own understanding!’, his prize-winning essay ‘What is enlightenment?’ provided a manifesto for progressive rational thought.34 Kant held mixed feelings about Newton’s scientific ideas, but in many respects they became cultural counterparts. We remember Kant primarily as a philosopher, but during the nineteenth century he was also an iconic figurehead for German scientists.
Kant embodied the power of pure reason, the subject of his most famous book. Like all cult heroes, his reputation has been embroidered with colourful anecdotes, such as his identical daily walks timed with such precision that the townspeople used him to set their clocks by. Corroborating legendary tales of his abstemiousness and eccentricity, his portraits and death-mask depict a spare figure and a gaunt face. After his death in 1804, phrenologists declared that Kant’s status as a genius was confirmed by his skull, which revealed a brain possessing overdeveloped intellectual bumps but only minuscule ones of vanity, and absolutely none of the features associated with sexual desire. A century later, one school of German psychiatrists investigating insanity invented a new medical term, schizophrenia, to describe the mental tendencies of methodical, logical scholars with delicate bodies. Such geniuses were labelled the ‘Kant type’, a group that also included Newton.35
Romantic rainbows
Did Kant regard himself as a genius? Despite the phrenological evidence attesting to his lack of vanity, on a modern meaning of genius the answer is certainly yes. But his own comments are inconsistent. Near the end of his life, in a book based on some early lectures, Kant pronounced that ‘The genius is a man not only of wide range of mind but also of intensive intellectual greatness, who is epoch-making in everything he undertakes (like Newton and Leibniz).’ Conveniently bracketing his two great mentors, Kant’s fuzzy definition sounds like a self-description, but in his major writings he introduced a new and very different concept of genius that was to prove enormously influential.36
Driving a wedge between artistic creativity and rational thinking, Kant taught that genius is a talent for producing an original piece of work that operates completely independently of any rules. Bizarre though it might seem to us, he declared that Newton was definitely not a genius: whereas Newton could clearly demonstrate every step on the path he had taken to reach his theory of gravity, original writers of genius like Homer were incapable of describing their thought processes, because they did not themselves know how they had obtained their ideas. Following his own sharp cleavage of the mental world, Kant would certainly not have classified himself among the geniuses; he belonged to the ‘far superior’ group of ‘great men’ who relied on logical thought and argument to make great discoveries and to teach others.37
Kant’s intellectual sneer at geniuses was partly directed at some of his own contemporaries, the young writers of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement. Flourishing briefly during the 1770s and 1780s, this group articulated fresh concepts of creativity and national identity that stemmed partly from earlier British books on literary and aesthetic originality, notably by Edward Young. Reacting against the earlier optimistic faith in progress expressed particularly forcefully by Leibniz, they rejected the power of reason and launched a cult of original genius, whose adherents focused on the imaginative, mysterious aspects of human nature. Overturning traditional models of authorship, they viewed literary works as the products of neither a skilled craftsman nor a muse listening to divine dictation, but of a genius driven from within by an internal source of inspiration.38
Kant singled out for comment the best-selling author Christoph Wieland, whose prose translations helped to convert Shakespeare into an icon of creativity for aspiring German authors. But by far the most famous advocate of original genius was Goethe, now seen as the founding father of the Romantic movement. In 1744, embroidering his own experience of rejection by a woman, he published his hugely successful novel about Werther, a hyper-emotional young man who kills himself for unrequited love. In contrast with the measured orderliness of Kant’s solitary walks, Goethe’s own love-strewn life helped to originate a new stereotype of the original, Romantic genius who is governed only by his own creativity as he plunges from one extreme of feeling to another. Goethe’s poems and plays catered to the widespread wish for an indigenous middle-class literature, written in German, that would displace the Francophonic culture of the nobility and unite the separate German-speaking states into a single nation.
Throughout his life, Goethe constantly revised his ideas about genius and himself came to personify German genius. If Kant is the German Newton, Goethe came to represent the cultural equivalent of Shakespeare, an original genius who had created the nation’s greatest literature. But – in Germany at least – he is also remembered for his scientific activities, partly because chauvinistic nineteenth-century biologists claimed that he was a precursor of Charles Darwin. An enthusiastic collector who owned 18,000 rock samples, Goethe engaged in international discussions about human anatomy, botany and geology, as well as writing extensively on the physiology and physics of colour.
Unlike Kant, Goethe believed that science should not be conducted exclusively by logical, systematic thinkers such as Newton. Although he admired Newton enormously, he wanted to eliminate the split being forced between abstract scientific analyses and everyday experiences of life. For him, the emotional intensity and heightened awareness of a literary genius were also valuable attributes for creating a more humane type of scientific knowledge. So his optical experiments included studying the effects of gazing at a woman’s bright clothes or a snow-covered mountainside, while his novel Elective Affinities modelled marital exchanges on molecular transformations.39
Of all the scientific controversies in which Goethe became involved, the one that aroused most hostility – but also most enthusiasm – was his sustained attack on Newton’s optical theories.40 In his most famous scientific book, Colour Theory, Goethe attacked Newton in terms so abusive that even he later regretted them, ingenuously blaming his vehemence on the Napoleonic wars. For modern art historians, Goethe’s Colour Theory has become a classic study of colour whose status parallels that of Newton’s Opticks, a founding text for scientists. It influenced, for example, the Munich Blue Rider painters of the early twentieth century, who repeated Goethe’s experiments of gazing at scenery through a prism to see coloured fringes, and also revived his polar and spiritual theories. Scientists, on the other hand, now dismiss Goethe’s ideas with scorn, even though he had many enthusiastic followers during the nineteenth century.
Contradicting Newton’s claim that white light is a mixture of many colours, Goethe maintained that colour arises from mixing white light with darkness, its polar opposite, so that coloured fringes arise at a black edge against a pale background. He preached a subjective approach towards scientific experimentation, deliberately including rather than excluding the observer’s own reactions. Campaigning to found a new human-based science of chromatics, Goethe wrote extensively about the structure of the eye, the perception of different colour qualities, and the relevance of his theories to art.
Newton – so runs the idealized account – set a prism in the path of a ray of light pouring through a small hole in his window shutters, and examined the coloured spectrum cast on to the opposite wall (Figure 1.3). In a sense, he converted his own eye into a scientific instrument that could objectively analyse an image from which it was completely detached. In contrast, Goethe used not a wall but his own retina as a screen, looking through a prism held directly in front of his eye to experience different colours radiating out in opposite directions. For Goethe, the observer cannot be separated from the image under scrutiny.
Rainbows came to symbolize the differences between Goethe and Newton. Laden with religious symbolism, rainbows were a favourite topic for aspiring young artists who wished to demonstrate their philosophical allegiance as well as their technical expertise. In her allegorical self-portrait, Goethe’s friend Angelika Kauffmann showed herself in the act of painting a prominent rainbow across the sky. Goethe designed his own publicity material for a pack of instructional playing cards: like a Masonic emblem, his own eye glares out from the centre of the woodcut, projecting rays of light that stream beyond the arching rainbow.41
Newton, strongly influenced by Greek ideas of cosmic musical harmony, had asserted that there are seven colours in the rainbow, although rainbows had often previously been shown with only three bands. Seven has, of course, always been a significant number in magic and astrology as well as music, and one might say that Newton invented the colour indigo to make his rainbow conform with his theoretical beliefs. Newton’s rainbow was central to his optical thought, and it first reached artists and literary writers through poetry, especially James Thomson’s The Seasons; this was, for instance, one of the artist Joseph Mallord William Turner’s favourite books. Like other eighteenth-century poets, Thomson translated Newton’s terse experimental accounts into verbal pictures that lyrically glorified the rainbow, God’s natural equivalent in the sky of Newton’s man-made spectrum on his study wall:
. . . First, the flaming Red
Sprung vivid forth; the tawny Orange next;
And next delicious Yellow; by whose side
Fell the kind beams of all-refreshing Green.
Then the pure Blue, that swells autumnal Skies
Æthereal play’d; and then, of sadder Hue,
Emerg’d the deepened Indico, as when
The heavy-skirted Evening droops with Frost.
While the last Gleamings of refracted Light
Dy’d in the fainting Violet away.42
Goethe’s house in Weimar is still decorated with a defiantly anti-Newtonian rainbow, which has only three clear colours and is inverted so that blue lies at the top and red at the bottom. Even some English and French painters deliberately depicted rainbows displaying their disaffection with Newton’s theories.43 Ironically, like Newton’s, Goethe’s thought was profoundly influenced by his alchemical studies. At the heart of Goethe’s anti-Newtonian onslaught lay his concept of ‘augmentation’, which describes how a semi-opaque medium enables blue and yellow, the two extreme tones, to produce red, the highest, noble hue.
When Goethe’s Colour Theory came out in 1810, it prompted mixed reactions. English readers regarded the very notion of an anti-Newtonian science as a contradiction in terms, and were incensed by the audacity of this challenge to Newtonian ideology from a foreign poet. When the translation appeared in 1840, some particularly offensive sections were prudently omitted. Even so, Brewster, ever prejudiced, fumed that this ‘bold, though unbidden minstrel’ had ‘assailed the mild precepts of Newton with . . . all the sophistries of German metaphysics’. Even such a marvellous poet was, in his eyes, unworthy to covet ‘the diadem of Newton’.44
The German scientific response was not so dismissive. Goethe’s contemporaries shared his emphasis on polarities, which resonated with their own investigations into the role of opposites in magnetic, electrical and chemical activity. The enormously influential philosopher Georg Hegel, for instance, supported Goethe against Newton in his Encyclopædia, while physiologists immediately started to credit Goethe’s contributions to their studies of perception. Some of Europe’s leading young intellectuals, including Coleridge and Shelley, were trying to integrate living beings within their theories of the physical universe. They studied phenomena that affected people as well as inanimate matter, such as animal magnetism and galvanic electricity. Just as Goethe had used his own eye as a recording instrument, experimenters tried to cure themselves magnetically and made their own bodies part of electric circuits. Non-Newtonian science featured significantly in the lives of England’s Romantic poets.
Complementing these scientific investigations of an anti-Newtonian approach, two artists – Philipp Runge in Germany and Turner in England – used paint to explore Goethe’s insistence on colour’s psychological impact and moral symbolism. Runge epitomized the tragic artistic genius: this idealistic visionary even conformed to stereotype by dying young of tuberculosis, an illness then widely believed to be linked with genius.45 Runge’s early death meant that he left his ambitious schemes uncompleted, but his ideas about colour harmony strongly influenced later artists and are still cited today. Like Goethe, with whom he corresponded extensively, Runge imbued his eerily luminescent imagery with symbolism based on mystical philosophies as well as colour theories. Thus his three primary hues – blue, yellow and red – signify respectively the Father, the Holy Ghost and the Son, but also indicate different times of day and carry various gender associations.
Thirty years later, when the English translation brought Goethe to English artists, Turner was struck by the ways in which Goethe’s list of polar opposites meshed with his own interest in light and shade, and he painted a complementary pair of episodes from Noah’s flood. One is an evening scene of despair and punishment painted in dark brooding blues, while its companion, dominated by a bright yellow swirling centre, is called Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – the Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis. Although prompted by Goethe, these paintings demonstrate Turner’s own unshaken belief in sunlight as the source of colours. Similarly to Runge, Turner was intrigued by Goethe’s arguments, but by no means convinced that all of them were right. Perhaps turning to his volume of Thomson’s poetry, he painted rainbows whose diffused hues deviated from conventional representations but conformed to Newton’s order.
Rainbows provided a potent emblem for English Romantic writers to accuse Newton of destroying nature’s beauty. Like Kant, they wanted to drive a wedge between scientific knowledge of the world and artistic, intuitive representations. Keats’s warnings about eliminating a rainbow’s mysteriousness by dissecting its components have become a particularly famous example:
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine –
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings . . .
