[Image is A color sphere as illustrated in Albert Henry Munsell’s A Color Notation]
The following is playful speculation:
Color, against Hegel’s conception, belongs to subjective Spirit. To Nature belong the conditions of color, light (energy emission), matter (energy absorption, darkness), and the merely immediate and undifferentiated quality of light’s frequency.
The first dialectic of color arises with white/light and black/darkness in the primitive sight enabled by the equally primitive eye which is only receptive to the single gradient of frequency intensities. The immediately null state of sight is black, the immediately active state white. The actual mechanism of sight is almost inverted to the mechanism of light. Light’s full spectrum emission is white, full absorption is black; the eye’s full absorption is white, but this is also its full activity, and its full passivity is black. One may consider that the most primitive sight involves a simple on/off of light receptors of light and darkness, with the gray spectrum arising as the first determination of the sight in sensitivity to now differentiated and quantified light frequencies. For our eyes this concerns the developments of what are called rods. The determination of the middle colors as dimensions within white and black enter with the development of the biological organ mechanism which is receptive to specific frequencies of light that activate organs allowing for the sight of prime colors which are the basis of synthesis for other colors. These organs we know now as cones.
The color wheel is really best represented as a color sphere: white at top (emission) and black at bottom (absorption), each vertically splitting into the various colors in their frequencies and their light/darkness depending on the magnitude accumulation of said frequencies. Newton, Goethe, and Hegel are then all vindicated as having had true determinations which simply were incomplete. Newton develops the emission spectrum, Goethe discovers the dark spectrum and has the insight of light/dark preceding colors though they are colors themselves as well as discovering the more fully determined color wheel and phenomenology of color as one unified process with its own inner determination as color. Hegel has the genius insight of the dialectical opposition of light and matter as analogies of white/black (light/darkness), but then he mistakes color’s place in Nature rather than in subjective Spirit (mind).
My conception here (needing a lot more work) is going against Goethe and Hegel concerning the prime colors, which both consider blue and red due to Goethe’s split prism experiment where he found he could split newton’s spectrum into red and blue fringe colors which when progressively united yielded the middle colors. Goethe took this to be the fundamental dialectic of darkenned light (red) and lightened dark (blue) coming forth from the extremes. While ingenious on a conceptual level and in accord with phenomenal perception, this finds little sense in the physical account of color within the eye though it finds much evidence in the phenomenology of turbid media. It is perhaps not impossible to reconcile the origin of the colors with blue/red as the original.
Goethe is on to something with the red/blue dialectic when we unite it with the light/matter emission dialectic with regards to turbid media. But it is not in fact turbid media alone that speaks to this, but the light/energy spectrum itself. Red and blue are the boundary colors in that the lower level energy of our vision concerns reds and the higher level concerns the blue and the rest of the colors can be derived from mixing intensities of red/yellow and blue/violet. The existence of three types of eye cones, most sensitive to peaks of red/green/blue, seems to deny such a basic dichotomy, however, it is still unclear how the cones themselves truly work to determine the reception of color, it is only known that they certainly play a determining part. The determination of color must be in the eye and Spirit itself and not prior to it in the world as Goethe seemed to hold. Schopenhauer’s views on color and Goethe’s theory are actually quite impressive for his time, he recognized the proper need to shift the phenomenon to the eye of the subject.
The Empyrean Trail 