(January 7, 2019 at 6:23 am)Fake Messiah Wrote:(January 7, 2019 at 6:00 am)Belaqua Wrote: He had no interest in mystifying things. He wanted to find the truth.
For some people mysticism is the truth. Goethe did try to mystify it, as that wiki article says, According to Goethe, "Newton's error.. was trusting math over the sensations of his eye."
Yeah, throwing out mathematics out of explanations is mystifying things.
He didn't like the math he wanted to pull it back to experience without explanation For Goethe, light is "the simplest most undivided most homogeneous being that we know. Confronting it is the darkness" I mean "being" - anthropomorphism is practically definition of mysticism.
So no wonder mystic like Rudolf Steiner felt connection to his un-explanation of light.
If your empirical observations are at odds with the math, it is reasonable to doubt and look again at the problem. Color is something we experience, and it makes sense to look closely at what this experience tells us.
In the 18th and early 19th century, the complete mathematization of reality was not yet complete. Our modern approach, which at times seems to suggest that the abstractions of math are more real than the empirical world we observe, is not something that clear thinkers could immediately accept. If people encounter the idea that mathematical abstraction is true and the evidence of our senses is false, it seems at first like mysticism -- that something unreal is truer than the world we see. In this sense, Goethe's preference for experience was anti-mystical.
"Being" here means existence. As in Heidegger's Being and Time. In German, Sein. (Goethe wrote in German.) Nothing to do with anthropomorphism.
As for Steiner, Goethe is not responsible for what later people make of his observations.
Newton was a religious man and had respect for alchemical theory. The fact that he took mysticism seriously is not reason to reject his work overall. In at least one case, his willingness to consider alchemy led him to a correct conclusion. Galileo had been prejudiced against the alchemical idea of "action at a distance." He held to the more mechanical view of the world, and thought that the idea of one object influencing the movement of another without direct contact was silly mysticism. For this reason, he rejected the huge amount of empirical evidence that the moon affects the tides. Newton was more open-minded concerning this non-mechanical action -- at the time considered occult -- and as a result made more progress in this area than Galileo. He made us all accept the alchemical idea of "action at a distance" by re-naming it gravity.
What we consider science or mysticism was not yet worked out in those days.
As in nearly all your posts, you over-simplify.
