Aesthetics and nature in Goethe's Farbenlehre

• Grant number: 25/00213-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: September 01, 2025
• End date: February 28, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Marco Aurélio Werle
• Grantee: João Augusto Araújo Ferreira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

We set out to investigate Goethe's doctrine of colors, in its natural and artistic sense, from the body of Zur Farbenlehre (1810). By tracing the main theoretical references of his thought, we intend to list the way in which Goethe interprets and, at the same time, enters the debate about the autonomy of painting, both in the context of an aesthetic of colors and in the territory of its physical nature. Furthermore, we believe that situating this tradition according to the dialogue opened up by Goethe's doctrine of colors allows not only an alternative assessment of the artistic tendencies of the modern era, but also an additional consideration of the treatment given to the question by aesthetics in classical German philosophy. Therefore, this plan puts Goethe before the understanding of optics in the 18th century and all its preceding scientific literature, with particular attention to the horizon of art history, whose central axes determined the direction of representational art in the West. In Materialien zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre, our author mobilizes the key moments in the understanding of the nature of colors and their relationships, from the analysis of historical individualities under the artist's gaze, as well as pictorial techniques for their emancipation. The research is also part of the formulation of the constitutive elements of the visual arts - among these, we highlight the theorization of perspective, dating from the 15th century, which forms one of the focal points of humanistic thought, of which art is an essential part. In this way, the opposition between color, as a sensitive phenomenon, and disegno, of an intellective nature, ensured by the theory of perspective based on Euclidean geometry and the mathematization of reflected space, is reconstructed.