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Issue XIV Color
INTRODUCED BY EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MARIANNE JANACK
“It was Christmas time in New York City, and the streets and stores were all decorated in Christmas colors: grey and brown.” Nearly 40 years ago, when I worked as an assistant dean of admission at Colgate University, I read a personal essay that began like that. The essay itself wasn’t groundbreaking or particularly insightful. Its message–that one’s own experience does not always fit with that of others— was fairly trite. But that opening sentence showed a sense of humor that one does not always expect in discussions about philosophical topics.
It is spring break now, and of course there’s snow still sticking around here in Clinton, NY, frosting the pine trees and the yellowish-green grass. Snow is the accumulation of ice crystals, which are clear. Snow is frozen water. In reality, snow is colorless. Snow appears white and sparkly because it reflects all the colors that make up light—we perceive the snow as white as a result. That’s one story about how we encounter the world, one that emphasizes the ways that the world shows up for animals like us. And yet, some people (and other animals) can see things differently, or see different things.
Reflecting on the process of going blind, Borges objects to the idea that to go blind is to live in a world of blackness. “One of the colors that the blind—or at least this blind man—do not see is black; another is red. Le rouge et le noir are the colors denied us. I, who was accustomed to sleeping in total darkness, was bothered for a long time at having to sleep in this world of mist, in the greenish or bluish mist, vaguely luminous, which is the world of the blind. I wanted to lie down in darkness. The world of the blind is not the night that people imagine.” Though Borges could still see blue, green, and yellow, true darkness was denied him. His loss of sight did not mean a loss of color.
The question that plagued 17th and 18th century philosophy was whether there were any properties that things might have independently of perceivers, or whether all properties exist only because of the ways they strike human perceivers. Colors are classic paradigms of perceiver dependent properties; they don’t properly belong to the objects we perceive, but are artefacts of our perceptual faculties. Their naturalistic explanations bled into theories of knowledge, theories about reality, and theories about human nature.
In his classic work on perception Eye and Brain, R.L. Gregory observes: “It is almost certain that no mammals up to the primates possess colour vision—if some do, it is extremely rudimentary. What makes this so strange is that many lower animals do possess excellent colour vision: it is highly developed in birds, fish, reptiles and insects such as bees and dragon-flies. We attach such importance to our perceptions of colour—it is central to visual aesthetics and profoundly affects our emotional state—that it is difficult to imagine the grey world of other mammals, including our pet cats and dogs.” The notion of color, even if it is perceiver-dependent, feels like a primary aspect of human perception.
In his book about the genealogy of color, however, Zed Adams emphasizes the way that color concepts develop and change historically, and that these concepts may draw on intuitions about colors that don’t always fit neatly together. Naturalistic explanations and debates about whether colors are real properties of things we perceive assume that an ahistoric perspective is the best perspective; if so, then there must be a right answer to the questions about colors and properties. Unlike the 17th- and 18th-century scientific metaphysicians whose questions were driven by questions about the reality and objectivity of colors, people like Wittgenstein and William Gass focus on the ways that we use color words. Instead of remaining in the black and white realm of shades where a right and wrong exist in opposition, Wittegenstein and Gass show us the messy palette of writing, thinking, and aesthetic engagement that colors the human experience.
As Wittgenstein and Gass tried to do, we at Book XI seek to show where color words find homes. So, we dedicate Issue XIV to literary treatments of color: how we describe colors; how colors might be made up of words; how color and creation, artist and observer, work together in that production.