Color

Use in the book

The hair example moves from colouring material put on something to the colour that old age produces in the hair itself. The noun χρόα, also printed in the example, denotes colour or complexion in the question about what the coated thing is like.

The distinction is between an applied appearance and a genuine change in the bearer. At 222b χρώματα returns in Hippothales’ changing colours from pleasure, a bodily reaction to the conclusion about a genuine lover. That dramatic use is not another statement of the technical distinction tested in the hair example.

Places to read

1. 217dτὸ γῆρας αὐταῖς ταὐτὸν τοῦτο χρῶμα ἐπαγάγῃ — Old age brings this same colour upon them.
2. 217c–e2
3. 222b

Use in the book

Empedocles’ report defines color through its fit with the passages of sight. Democritus’ report denies color to the primary constituents and explains the colors of compounds through arrangement, shape, and position. The Aristotelian notice makes a further distinction between potential and actual hue. These are different explanatory strategies, not successive parts of a single theory.

Places to read

1. I.16.1.3Color fits the passages of sight in the Empedoclean account.
2. I.16.1.7Colors of compounds arise from uncolored constituents.
3. I.16.1.9Color and visibility are distinguished through potentiality and actuality.

Translation in this edition

“Color” does not imply that a quality belongs intrinsically to every constituent of the colored body. The explanation must be read with the attribution.

Use in the book

The account of drawing and writing insists that even line-based arts exist to the eye through two or more colors. Color is thus not confined to a decorative addition after form. Yet the eyes’ color differs from their character: eyes of different colors can possess the same character. The Rousseau fragment imagines wiping colors from thoughts alongside stripping pomp and removing flesh and blood, but its conditional series has no supplied conclusion. The reader should not finish it as a demonstrated claim that nothing would remain.

Places to read

1. I, p. 247, entry 8, ¶3Colors make visible separation possible even in drawing and writing.
2. II, p. 578, entry 1, ¶1Eye color and expressive character are distinguished.
3. II, p. 767, entry 6, ¶1Colors join flesh and blood in an unfinished stripping-away experiment.

Translation in this edition

The English translation keeps colors literal inside the literary metaphor. The Rousseau passage’s if-clauses and detached Boileau quotation remain incomplete; an external quotation is not used to repair them. Coloris is not treated as attested by these couleur witnesses.

Use in the book

Beautiful bodies require a pleasing mixture of figures and colours. The same vocabulary supplies a compact account of the soul: affections are its colours. The metaphor makes feeling part of a knowable form rather than an invisible irrelevance. Colours can also falsify. The inherited assumptions stripped away in becoming childlike resemble a stain or jaundice that prevents seeing things truly. At the Cross, proper colours are disclosed through the blood of Christ: the value of the world is perceived through redemptive love. In the Fifth Century's cosmic painting, divine beauty and power are the colours, so visible variety becomes the expression of creative perfection.

Places to read

1. II.20Visible beauty is analysed as a pleasing variety of figures and colours.
2. II.83Affections are the colours of the soul’s developed form.
3. III.5False colours and the image of jaundice explain distorted apprehension.
4. V.5Beauty and power become the colours in the figure of divine painting.

In this edition

The supplied text uses both “colours” and “colors.” Preserve the local spelling in quotation, while grouping the forms under one headword.

Use in the book

The March snow scene uses a sharply opposed black and white, ebony and ivory, to produce severity. In Coëtquen the blackish stream first displeases; its harmony with dark trunks and ivy and its contrast with white birches alter that response. Beauty here requires learning the relations within a scene, not selecting an inherently attractive hue.

Other descriptions move through gradual differences. April light weakens across receding cloud ranks, and autumn twilight floods the eye with soft, velvety tones. May’s greenery seems to overflow the whole horizon into an emerald sea. Colour becomes both an expansive event and a delicate quality that might be damaged by touch.

The palette also refuses a fixed emotional code. Grey sky can bring welcome calm, while bright sun can leave the observer insensible. Blue and yellow petals matter as the actual contents of a friend’s letter; their worth cannot be detached from that communication. Guérin’s colours participate in perception, memory, and attachment, and must be read within their local combinations rather than translated into a dictionary of stable moods.

Places to read

1. 11 March 1833 · ¶1Ebony trunks and ivory snow establish a severe opposition
2. 19 March 1833 · ¶1The blackish stream becomes beautiful through harmony and contrast
3. 2 April 1833 · ¶1Diminishing cloud tones give a luminous scene depth
4. 3 May 1833 · ¶1Spreading greenery becomes an emerald sea within the horizon
5. 14 August 1833 · ¶1Grey supplies repose rather than simple dejection

Translation in this edition

Verdure is usually greenery, preserving the union of green colour with growing foliage. Bleuâtre becomes bluish, which matters in distant horizons where a qualified tone replaces a fully saturated blue. Nuances affaiblies et dégradées are diminished shades, not morally degraded colours.

Use in the book

Theophrastus's short notice at A69a assigns white to fire and black to water. His longer report explains their recognition by corresponding visual passages, with colour brought toward sight by effluence. Plato's Meno stages a definition in which colour is an effluence of bodies commensurate with sight and perceptible. The dramatic setting matters: Socrates offers an answer in Gorgias's manner for Meno, rather than quoting an Empedoclean poem.

Aëtius gives a related fitting definition, but adds four colours equal in number to the elements: white, black, red, and yellow. The notice does not explicitly distribute the last two over earth and air. Theophrastus's objection about grey and mixed colours reveals another limitation: the two reported types of passage leave intermediate appearances unexplained. These notices need not be forced into either total agreement or a demonstrable contradiction. A short list of elemental colours and a criticism of an optical mechanism answer different questions, but the surviving evidence does not establish how they were integrated.

The safest account preserves the plurality of witnesses and resists replacing it with a modern spectrum or a fully reconstructed pigment theory.

Places to read

1. A 69a (testimony)Theophrastus, On the Senses. Assigns white to fire and black to water.
2. A 86 §§ 7–8 (testimony)2Theophrastus, On the Senses 7. Makes effluence carry colours to sight.
3. A 86 §§ 16–17 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 17. Challenges the perception of grey and other mixed colours.
4. A 92 (reception)Plato, Meno. Defines colour within a staged Empedoclean-style account.
5. A 92 (testimony)Aëtius. Lists four colours, equal in number to the elements.

Translation in this edition

In Plato's definition σωμάτων, “of bodies,” is Diels's reading following Alexander; the manuscript alternatives include “of shapes.” This is consequential for the definition and should remain visible.