by David Kastan
From every angle that we look at it, color appears as a glorious set of complexities and contradictions. What Colm Tóibín says about blue is true of every color: “It comes to us through silence and mystery and much argument.”18 Yet color viewed head on is easy to take for granted. It seems so very obvious. We see it wherever we look, and we normalize and naturalize our experiences of it. These ten chapters are intended to make that impossible. Their individual angles of vision are designed to unsettle our sense of color, while together they bring the subject of color sharply into view.
Of course we know that there are more than ten colors. It is impossible to know exactly how many there are, even though some scientists maintain that more than 17 million are distinguishable. Others claim that there are 2.2 million colors, while some, even more parsimoniously, insist that there are a mere 346,000. Other people interested in color insist that there are only the eleven basic colors: all the rest are merely tints and shades of one or another of those. And some believe with Newton that there are really just seven (though Newton acknowledged each of “their innumerable intermediate gradations”); and even others, like the people on Bellona, are sure that there are only three. Ten, however, seems a good number, at least for a book.
CHAPTER ONE
I hear the question on your lips: what is it to be a color?
ORHAN PAMUK, My Name Is Red
ROSES ARE
Red
FIGURE 6: Susannah Benjamin, Roses Are Red, 2016
Roses are red. Not all of them, of course. Near the beginning of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus sits in his Dublin schoolroom, staring at an addition problem he can’t quite solve. But rather than worrying about his inability to add, he distracts himself by focusing on something else: “White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of.” And then Stephen begins to imagine differently colored flowers, “lavender and cream and pink roses,” which seemed to him no less beautiful, although quickly he is disappointed when he realizes “you could not have a green rose.”1
Roses do come in a wide range of beautiful colors, and, in whatever color, they provide, if not lasting consolation, some temporary escape from the problems of the world, both arithmetical and otherwise. But most roses are red (and these are the ones that have allowed the word “rose” to become a recognizable color name, in a way that the similarly multicolored tulip has not). According to the Society of American Florists, red roses make up 69 percent of all roses bought for Valentine’s Day, and if we count pink as a shade of red, the figure rises almost to 80 percent.
Yet regardless of how many roses are red or of what other colors roses can be, it isn’t so obvious what it actually means for a rose, or anything else, to be red, or indeed to be any color at all. Maybe it isn’t important—the experience of color may be enough—but the question seems like the logical place for a book on color to begin. Although nothing about color turns out to be logical, or even to be in any obvious place.
SEEING RED
It seems, quite literally at first glance, simple enough. Color is part of the visual appearance of things that are colored, and to be red is to be red. A rose that is red is a rose that is not lavender or cream, or any other color except for one of those we are usually willing to consider some variety of red. It is hard to get past the tautology.
“Red” names the color of things that are red (except, oddly, in the case of naturally occurring red hair, which falls into a range of color that almost every native English speaker would in any other context recognize as orange). Still, saying that “red” names things that are red is unlikely to provide much clarity or satisfaction. Nonetheless, we have such a robust experience of red as a visual property of the world that the lack of a meaningful definition rarely causes us any problems or leads us to wonder about what “red” really is. Or even that there is something to wonder about. But there is; that’s the very nature of color.
We could start with: Is the rose red or does it merely appear to be red? This may seem a distinction without a difference. But the difference could be that if something is red, unsurprisingly, it usually appears to be red, but if something only appears to be red, it might very well not. A mountain at sunset might appear red, but we think of this as a trick of the light rather than an actual property of the mountain (Figure 7).
The redness of a rose, however, seems different, as if it is a property belonging to the rose. Unlike the mountains, where the late afternoon light distorts their actual color, the redness of a red rose seems to be a manifestation of what it essentially is. A red rose, we sensibly believe, is red, rather than merely appearing to be so.
So far, so good. But, although the distinction between being and appearing seems reasonable enough, some further thought about physical properties begins to unsettle it and make it more interesting for our purposes. A twelve-inch wooden ruler, for example, is twelve inches long regardless of how it appears. Length is an objective property of an entity. It is objective in the sense that it is not a function of the observer. It is what it is, and the observer can only get it wrong: viewed from the other side of a room or seen on an angle it may look shorter, as it will if it is viewed by someone affected with an odd neurological disorder known as micropsia, which results in objects being perceived as smaller than in fact they are (and if the viewer is affected with macropsia, the ruler will look larger). But the ruler is twelve inches long regardless of the conditions in which it is encountered or the visual capabilities of the observer. “How long is a twelve-inch ruler?” is one of those comically self-answering questions like “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?”
“What is the color of a red rose?” seems to be another one of these, but it turns out not to be. (Neither, in fact, does “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” since it is the burial place not only of the eighteenth American president but also of his wife, Julia Ward Grant.) Color and length each are properties of objects, but they are different kinds of properties. Length can be confirmed in various ways, color only by sight. Length we know is extension in space. Color is … well, what?
FIGURE 7: “Red” mountains, Los Glaciares National Park, Argentina
Color, we might say, is a particular aspect of an object’s appearance. What aspect? Unfortunately, its color is what we are tempted to answer. And that’s the problem. With color we always seem to get trapped in circularity, and it is hard to figure out how to escape it.
Still, we should try.
So we need to start again, this time by trying to figure out why red things look red, or, to be more precise, why, for normally sighted viewers in normal lighting conditions, red things look red. This admittedly graceless phrasing gets rid of the difficulty of the mountains at sunset, though it adds a new problem of what we should consider normal. But more of that later. For now let’s try to answer the question with its stipulations. The obvious answer, “Because they are red,” is simple and it is intuitive (and secretly what all of us think). But it avoids the question. And it isn’t, in any case, true.
As early as the fifth century B.C.E. Democritus suggested that it merely seems that an object has color. The only things that are real, the philosopher presciently thought, were “atoms and the void,” and since the atoms are colorless, colors couldn’t have an independent existence.2 For a long time, however, almost everyone else disagreed. (Plato was said to have wanted to burn all of Democritus’s writings.)3 People for the most part were convinced that our senses were designed to reveal the world as it is. And they were confident that color therefore had to be a real property in the world, one of the things that our vision was designed to recognize.
Slowly, however, they came to change their minds about the senses. By the eighteenth century, sense and science were increasingly at odds. Microscopes and telescopes had made it obvious that the world as it really is could not be apprehended by our unaided faculties. And as various phenomena became better understood, science slowly began to separate the
sensation of color from what was previously thought to be its external cause. Color, which once seemed so clearly to belong to the things we saw as colored, gradually was relocated: from the objects that ostensibly had them to the light by which we saw them and, finally, to the mind, which lets us see that light as color.
Many scientists have contributed to our modern scientific understanding of color, but no one more than Isaac Newton. Beginning sometime around 1665, when he first began to explore what he called “the celebrated Phenomena of Colours,” he had come to believe that color didn’t reside in objects but was a function of the light that illuminated them.4 It wasn’t that light merely allowed the colors of objects to be seen but that the light was the source of the colors that we see.
This was, however, not light as we usually see it, but light as it is “composed” of its various “colorific rays,” as Newton termed them. “If the Sun’s light consisted of but one sort of rays, there would be but one Colour in the whole world.”5 It was the misnamed “rays,” which Newton had shown with his prism experiments to be the constituent colors of light, that were the source of the colors we see.
But it wasn’t exactly clear how they accomplished this. Newton was certain that the rays themselves, “to speak properly, are not coloured,” but merely have the ability “to stir up a sensation of this or that Colour.”6 Whether we see “this” or “that” color seemed to depend upon some physical property of the illuminated objects acting upon the light that illuminates it, absorbing some and scattering others of its rays to produce the “sensation” of whatever color the objects seem to be.7
Though much of this has been clarified, refined, and augmented by modern science, Newton’s theory still provides the basis of much of our understanding of color today. The most important addition to what he proposed has come from thinking further about those sensations of color that are produced once the light has been reflected. His physics, that is, has been supplemented with our neurobiology. For a rose to be red, the scattered light has to be detected and processed by the visual system to produce the color experience that we (at least the English-speaking “we”) recognize as “red.” And, although we now know quite a lot about that processing, we still don’t really know why we see something red as something red.
The physical scattering of the light is the easy part; even the activity of the millions of photoreceptor cells in the retina (the rods and the three types of cones) is relatively well understood. Neuroscientists have also now begun accurately to map the flow of information from the optical nerve to various cortical regions in the brain. But exactly how the brain decodes and translates this into the experience of the colors that we see is still a mystery.
Neurons in the brain emit and receive electronic impulses—and somehow we see some of this activity as color. That “somehow,” however, is asked to do a lot of work. It isn’t clear how what they do allows us to change what we could call “color signals” into colors. It seemed easier when we thought that the colors we see are the colors of the world. But it turns out that what we see are the colors of the mind.8
We just don’t know how the color gets there. Cognitive scientists have offered various explanations for our perception of color, but most of these seem a lot like saying that it’s the magician who makes the coin appear from behind your ear, rather than explaining how the trick is done. We don’t know really how this trick is performed, but we do know that it is a trick and that the mind is the magician. Color is mind-dependent. Unlike length or shape, color doesn’t exist on its own. It is “relational,” as some philosophers say, maybe better thought of as an experience than as an attribute.9 And probably we should say that color happens rather than exists.
In most contexts, of course, it makes no difference how it happens (or what verb we use for it). Why we see a color normally doesn’t matter, any more than why the car we drive goes when it is turned on and we step on the gas or how our smartphone is able to access the internet. We just want these reliably to happen, and the same is true for the rose’s red.
If the science is right, however, a mind-dependent red turns out to be something surprisingly unreliable. If color doesn’t exist without the contribution of someone perceiving it, in the absence of a perceiver a red rose would no longer be red. It’s not exactly that its redness goes on and off with the comings and goings of a viewer or with the blinking of someone’s eyes. This doesn’t work like a switch. It’s that the color is constituted as color only as it is experienced. This is more or less what Galileo, for example, believed. Writing about colors, along with tastes and odors, he said that these are “mere names [puri nomi] for something that resides exclusively in our sensitive body, so that if the perceiving creature were removed, all of these qualities would be annihilated and abolished from existence.”10 That is, the rose would still be there, but its redness would not.
Common sense says that can’t be right. But science insists it is, although Galileo provocatively explained it backwards. It isn’t that the color is “annihilated” when the perceiver is removed; it is that it doesn’t exist without the perceiver present. Red roses aren’t red in a room without a viewer or in a dark one in which the roses cannot be seen. It is not just that we can’t see their redness but that without it being seen, the redness really isn’t there.
They are just roses, roses perhaps with the possibility of color, perhaps something like a stove turned off but always with the possibility of becoming hot. This seems weird only because we have misunderstood or mis-described (or didn’t much care) what colors are. Nothing in the scientific account of redness is red—except for the perception. In fact, without a perceiver not only is there nothing that is red but there is nothing that can properly be thought of as color.
Admittedly, this is all so very counterintuitive. If roses are red, it would be nice if they had the decency to stay that way. It would, therefore, be better if we could say that the perceiver’s role merely reveals the color of the roses rather than serves as a necessary part of what constitutes it. This seems preferable, because it conforms more closely to our intuitive sense of what color is—a stable visible property of objects that we are able to detect. But as hard as it may be to grasp or accept, a perceiver is necessary for there to be a color, not just to see one. Without a perceiver there are only the roses.
All of this doesn’t mean that colors aren’t real. It just means that their reality is different (and less well understood) than we usually imagine. But they are still colors, even if some of the things we have always thought about them turn out to be wrong. But the sun doesn’t really rise in the East, as Copernicus taught us, and we got over worrying about that.
The one thing that seems certain is that “color must be seen,” as the twentieth-century German cultural critic Walter Benjamin said.11 It probably seems strange to insist on something so self-evident, but Benjamin’s statement, which seems at first to be a pointless truism, turns out to be a crucial fact about color—certainly as important as the understanding of an object’s microphysical properties or the composition of light, or even the transmission and processing of neurons by the visual system. And arguably more so, since if color were not seen, we would have no reason to imagine that it exists.
But we do see it, so we know that it exists. We see it, and that is part of the process by which it comes into existence. We see it, and maybe there isn’t much more to say about it—or any more that we need to say.
KNOWING RED
There’s a group of philosophers that has made this the foundation of a rigorously argued theoretical proposition. In fact, they say that there is nothing else that we can say that will help us to know a color. We might know all the scientific information about how we come to see a color, but only the visual experience of it reveals the color’s essential nature (and thus the philosophical position is sometimes termed revelation theory).12 With color, they say, experience is not merely the best teacher; it is the only one.
Bertrand Russell fa
mously insisted about one hundred years ago, “The particular shade of color that I am seeing … may have many things to be said about it. … But such statements, though they make me know truths about the color do not make me know the color itself better than I did before: so far as concerns knowledge of the color itself, as opposed to knowledge of truths about it, I know the color perfectly and completely when I see it, and no further knowledge of it itself is even theoretically possible.”13
Russell makes a group of sometimes-hard-to-follow distinctions, but there is (or should be) something compelling in this theory about the appeal to the immediacy of color experience rather than to scientific explanations of what produces it. But if “knowledge of the color itself” can only come from the experience of it, then, by definition, this doesn’t tell us anything that we don’t already know.
Russell’s version of revelation theory collapses the difference between understanding and experience. It uses what he calls “the color itself” to mean a specific sensation of color (as he says, “The particular shade of color that I am seeing”). If “the color itself” is the shade that he sees, there can be no essential knowledge of it other than what perception provides.
FIGURE 8: “The Dress,” 2015
But what do we do with the fact that we regularly say that something is one color but looks another, as, for example, with those red mountains seen at sunset? Or any of the color illusions produced not by changed conditions of illumination but by dissimilar background contexts that make the same color appear different when seen against a different background? Which of these is “the color itself”?