3. Active perception
The above paragraphs are a very brief description of what is perceived in Goethe's experiments and it is possible to develop a detailed objective analysis along Newtonian lines as to how these perceptions come about. But to do so is to miss the point of what Goethe is doing. What Goethe is carefully demonstrating is that the subjective process of perception of colour has to be separated from the limited objective description of light beams provided by Newton, to be understood. He then proceeds to go further, exploring the process of perception in detail, to understand it better. Necessarily, the tools he develops are subjective tools and subjective skills, because the laboratory is within himself, and these are not the same as the objective tools of abstract science where the laboratory is 'out there'.
It is precisely because of this inward focus that Goethe's 'science' is of interest to designers, for they necessarily work on the borders of perception. Design is not a process of abstract observation and analysis, though it uses these abilities. It is in contrast a process of active engagement and synthesis. It is a process of creation, not description, and what is being created not only alters people's subjective perceptions but alters people's engagement with and experience of reality itself.
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Design is thus at root active, not passive, and this is present in Goethe's way of involvement with his experimental material. Newton's process tends to treat the process of 'observation' as a passive process in which something - a discrete phenomenon 'out there' - hits the eye, so that the observer 'sees'. Goethe insists that the observer 'looks, i.e. becomes actively engaged in the experience of observing. Newton set out to quantify the phenomenon being observed. Goethe set out to experience it and he did so by actively putting attention into the process of looking, trying to experience the quality of (the experienced nature of) the colours so that he could understand them in a creational sense. |