1.
The Rediscovery of Colour!
Supplemental Material for
Simon Robinson
24th January 2014

2.
I remembered well that everything appeared many-
coloured, but in what manner was no longer present
to my mind. At that very moment I was in a room that
had been painted completely white; I expected,
mindful of the Newtonian theory as I placed the prism
before my eyes, to see the light that comes from
there to my eye split up into so many coloured lights.
!
How astonished I was, then, when the white wall,
observed through the prism, remained white just as
before; that only there, where darkness adjoined on
it, did a more or less determinate colour appear;
finally, that the window bars appeared in the liveliest
colours of all, whereas no trace of colouring was to
be seen in the light grey sky outside. It did not take
much deliberation for me to recognise that a
boundary is necessary to produce colours, and I
immediately said to myself, as if by instinct, that the
Newtonian teaching is false.
!
!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

3.
Introduction
In our book Holonomics: Business Where People and
Planet Matter we write extensively about Goethe’s
Theory of Colours. The reason we do so is to help
people understand what is meant by a
phenomenological approach to understanding the
world we live in.
!
When we follow Goethe, we study colour as a
phenomenon, and we do not try and then go past the
phenomenon to explain colour in other terms, such as
rays of light, packets of photons etc. In doing so, we
are not trying to find alternative explanations to those
of science, rather we are attempting to develop our
sensory skills so that we can better appreciate the
sensory world we inhabit.
!
In teaching Goethe’s Theory of Colour to business and
other MBA students, Maria and I have found that
people are better able to explore the way in which
scientific thinking impacts on the way in which they
consider the natural world, and the manner in which
our intellectual minds dominate over the other ways of
knowing: sensing, feeling and intuition.
!
By breaking out of our of abstract and symbolic
thought, we are able to see and understand more of
what is around us, enabling to inhabit once again a
vibrant living organic world, being more open to new
ideas, ones which may not necessarily fit our pre-
conceptions of the world, thus developing a more
creative and constructive relationship with nature, our
technology, and of course other people we connect
with in our daily lives.

4.
The Rediscovery of Colour
In Holonomics we guide the reader through
some of the fundamental ‘experiments’ that
Goethe carried our using a glass prism. In
actually doing the experiments, the reader
begins to gain experiential knowledge of what
is meant by a phenomenon, and how for
example different colours by Goethe were
thought of as belonging together.
!
In 1951, Heinrich O. Proskauer first
published his wonderful book The Rediscover
of Color which was written to take readers
step-by-step through all of Goethe’s
experiments. The book came with its own
small prism, and sixteen colour cards (printed
on both sides) which allowed readers to
follow the steps that Goethe described in The
Theory of Colours.
!
Unfortunately Proskauer’s book is no longer in
print, and secondhand copies are extremely
expensive. These slides you are about to see
replicate the colour experiments from The
Rediscovery of Color, allowing you to explore
further Goethe’s theory which we describe in
Holonomics, along with instructions on how to
use the prism.
!

5.
Photos from a Holonomics
two day workshop

6.
The Dynamic Way of Seeing
Holonomics introduces the reader to a dynamic way of
seeing and thinking about systems. It is a way of seeing
which expands our mode of consciousness from the
analytical to the intuitive; one that not only is able to
understand the parts of a system, but at a deeper,
intuitive level of perception, is also able to understand
the relationships and processes within that system – not
from the perspective of a whole which is superior to the
parts, but from one which is able to encounter the whole
through the way in which it comes to presence in the
parts. (‘Intuition’ as we use the word should not be
confused with ‘feeling’ as it is used in everyday
language, but as a higher level of cognition to that of our
intellectual minds).
!
Part One of Holonomics is devoted to leading the reader
into the dynamics of seeing. These four chapters
introduce the reader to the work of Henri Bortoft who
passed away in 2012, just a few months after the
publication of Taking Appearance Seriously: The
Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European
Thought. This last book built on his previous two works
Goethe’s Scientific Consciousness (1986, now out of
print) and The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of
Science (1996).
!
For those readers who have already read Holonomics
and wish to explore Goethe’s phenomenological
approach to science, we recommend reading both The
Wholeness of Nature and Taking Appearance Seriously,
with are both published by Floris Books in the UK.

7.
Other References
Of course a number of other books have been written
about Goethe’s scientific studies, from a number of
perspectives. Some of the best include:
!
Goethe on Science: An Anthology of Goethe’s Scientific
Writings, edited by Jeremy Naydler
!
Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature,
edited by David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc
!
Colour, Rudolph Steiner
!
Goethe: Scientific Studies, edited by Douglas Miller
!
Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal, edited by
Frederick Amrine, Francis J. Zucker and Harvey Wheeler
!
Goethe Contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a
New Science of Color, Dennis L. Sepper

8.
The Experiments
In order to carry out these
experiments you will need a small
glass prism. You do not need to buy
a top grade prism used for
professional optical experiments,
Prisms which are used to teach
children about colour and light can
be purchased cheaply from many
shops on-line, for example
curiousminds.co.uk.
!
A Google search using the term
‘optical glass prism’ should help you
to find a few places to purchase
them. The ones that we use are 5 cm
long, each side being 2.5 cm.

9.
“The authors of this remarkable book have
distilled the essence of the ideas and values
taught at Schumacher College, a unique
transformative learning centre based on
systemic thinking and grounded in deep
ecology, and they show how these teachings
can be applied with many case studies of
enlightened businesses. Holonomics is a
powerful antidote to the fragmentation and
materialistic orientation of today's dominant
culture.”
Fritjof Capra
author of The Hidden Connections, coauthor of The Systems View of Life
Simon Robinson is the co-author of Holonomics:
Business Where People and Planet Matter and the
founder of Holonomics Education