  In his interviews with Eckermann in the 1820s, Goethe referred to his Theory
of Colors as his greatest and ultimate achievement. Its reception following
publication in 1810 and subsequent reviews throughout the history of physical
science did not reflect this self-assessment. Even Hermann von Helmholtz, who
in part modeled his scientific work after Goethe's, initially thought that
Goethe's poetic genius prevented him from understanding physical science. Why
did Goethe champion his Farbenlehre so ardently even years after it was
dismissed by almost everyone else? In answering this question, this essay will
attempt to add to the existing scholarship by considering Goethe's Theory of
Colors in the context of his natural philosophy, and generalizing the variety
of objectifications of the concepts invoked by his color theory and their
relationships to Goethe's epistemology and Newton's mechanics. In this fashion,
I attempt to show that the reason for Goethe's self-assessment of his Theory of
Colors is less enigmatic than appears from its examination solely as a work of
physics. Rather, Zur Farbenlehre was the clearest expression of Goethe's most
universal archetype-- polarity of opposites-- which bridged Goethe's conflicts
with Kant's and Spinoza's epistemologies, and in an over-reaching way served as
a cosmology underlying Goethe's art and his science.
