One of the important take-aways from Goethe's approach to colours is that you shouldn't see the world as pigmented.

If you could zoom in on the pigments themselves, you would see in them a reason for their colour. This image of a ball-point pen helps to illustrate this. https://twitter.com/tom_username_/status/1380553990132396033

It is in our lazy, philistine nature to rest assured with a label.

Why is something green? "Because there's something green attached to it."
Well, why is that green thing green? "Because it's not any of the other colours."

This does not suffice. It is not an explanation at all.

In the case of the ink in that picture, there are two things to bear in mind.

One is that it's blue, and therefore it is conveying the idea of light that has a long path to extinction, i.e. light fading off into darkness. (Thus blue is melancholy)

The second is that, in this particular case, it's *reflecting* blue, and so it is not the original reason for that blue.

It's replicating that aspect of light which has a long journey to extinction. That is the idea it's conveying.

It does this either because that is the only light available to it (as in the case of a mirror), or because that is all it is capable of conveying.

In the latter case, the reason for colour is not clear to the human intellect. It's too small and detailed for us to grasp.

That a mirror can convey a colour without itself being the reason for that colour is an interesting side-effect of existence being essentially an Idea.

(I've set myself up for a difficult and messy thread by pursuing this digression.)

When you see a reflection, you're not seeing an object give you that reflection.

If the object was giving you that reflection, then you would be inhabiting a material world in which objects are the cause of ideas rather than the reduction thereof.

Rather, what you're seeing in a mirror is the forgetting of the object that stands before you (which is actually just a dull surface).

By forgetting/ignoring the object, there is something like a hole in your perspective, as odd as that might sound at first.

With that object ignored, there is necessarily something that fills the void. Consciousness cannot have a hole in it.

If there was nothing which could otherwise fill the ignorance/void, then you would see the object in the first place.

In other words, if the mirror couldn't reflect something intelligible, you would see just the dull surface. Consciousness would probe into a disorderly direction, seeing all the accidental folds and cohering it into a generic object: a slab of metal.

But because the mirror is so uniform, there is nowhere for consciousness to look further into.

Consciousness cannot see an object when looking at it, and so there is a void of intelligibility. There is a hole in consciousness.

If consciousness cannot make out an object, what is it to do?

The materialist thinks that the material world is exactly as it appears, and so he cannot say why consciousness refuses to see a slab of metal instead of a mirror.

If there's no grooves of differentiation, why should that hinder perception? It still exists, and so we should see that flat uniform plane with no issue

But we do have an issue, and that's because consciousness is prior to the material world, i.e. is the condition of its being.

The material world is consciousness making sense of it.

When it cannot be made sense of (in an objectified form), consciousness must persist nonetheless. And so, instead of nothing, it forms an idea of something.

It has to transcend the object by looking at the immediate basis for that object's revelation.

It sees not the object but the light which gives occasion for that object's revelation. (This is how all objects are perceived by consciousness)

(This is excruciatingly difficult to explain. It's like I'm trying to extract bits of egg shell from an egg mixture. Just when you think you've got a hold, it slips away.)

If this could be easily understood, it would possibly result in an out-of-body experience.

I have to repeat myself here.

When you see a reflected surface, this is pure idea. It is not an absolutely existing block of mass, but an almost ghost-like television image (of which consciousness really consists).

When you look at a mirror, you have ignored the material substrate. Consciousness could not make out an object. It couldn't see the usual folds of differentiation which give form to such an object.

It drew a blank, but it was also impossible for a void to appear.

Instead of a void, you saw the bare minimum which permitted its presence in consciousness at all, namely the light of consciousness itself.

In that space of your consciousness, there was a fundamental intellectual *opening up*.

Although a slightly different context, this is what I was referring to with this tweet: https://twitter.com/tom_username_/status/1366347518678818818

Look at a mirror and see for yourself. You *cannot* see the material substrate. It always evades you. There is nowhere on it for you to focus on.

This is also what it's like to look at white light, see e.g. the white in the attached lava image.

The materialist vision doesn't make sense.

If the world is exactly as it looks, then every object would be fully intelligible as something dark, not as reflected light. Reflected surfaces would be a nuisance. Light would forever be getting in the way of the thing-in-itself.

To get rid of the light, you would have to get rid of consciousness and hide the object in a place where it cannot be touched by any effects whatsoever. For this to be achieved, you would have to subtract it from the material world altogether.

The materialist cannot get in touch with the material world which he so flippantly regards as real and fundamental.

Everywhere he points, he's pointing at consciousness, not at matter.

An object is made visible by it reflecting other things.

But these other things are but reflections also, and so all these objects are reflections of reflections.

Which, if any, is immune from this paradox? It is the ostensible light source: the incandescent object.

This too, however, is like the mirror.

The difference is that, with the mirror, the differentiation was merely difficult to spot. With an incandescent object like the sun, it is just downright impossible. A real and genuine black hole is in the making.

Think of the alternative to illumination. How would the materialist set up the universe?

The sun would be a black object, tending towards increasingly perfect blackness. You would somehow see this black object, because matter is the thing-in-itself, not light.

A theoretically perfect black would be possible. This would be non-existence. Essentially, it would crumple up until the "building blocks" of the universe reach zero effectiveness.

These building blocks would be perfect black in the first place.

Now compare that to the existence we actually inhabit.

The sun is not a black object. We don't see the blackness of the object.

(Will write more on this tomorrow. Getting tired now.)

(Continued)

I've squeezed myself into a corner with this thread. I keep arriving at the cusp of a centrally important idea, but then my mind caves in.

This is because it's such a deep and profound subject which gets to the heart of ultimate reality.