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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
“You’re not a painter if you haven’t painted gray”, declared Paul Cézanne. The same could be said of philosophers: you’re not a philosopher if you have never thought gray. This simple four-letter word signifies much more than a quasi-neutral color lying between black and white: we use the same word to describe moods, November skies, the hair of the elderly, the withered features of faces, dusty shelves, faceless bureaucracies, dreary politicians and hundreds of other things. This plain, unassuming word conceals a multitude of thoughts that we seldom pause to consider.
In this exceptionally original book, Peter Sloterdijk follows the grey thread through the history of philosophy, art, literature and politics, enabling us to see familiar things in new ways and highlighting features of our lives that would otherwise remain unseen. Beginning with Plato’s allegory of the cave which introduced the concept of gray into thought, Sloterdijk unfolds a chiaroscuro narrative which recognizes the power of grey as a metaphor for the indefinite, the indifferent, the ordinary, the intermediate and the neutralizing. We see the invention of photography and monochrome’s journey through modern art – from Malevich’s Black Square to Richter’s grey panel paintings – in a new light, and we see modern states and modern politics as full of grey zones, from the hidden spheres of the security services to the extraterritorial spaces that harbor illegal activities like money laundering and the drug trade.
A work of brilliance by one of the most creative philosophers writing today, If You Have Never Thought Gray will appeal to a wide readership interested in philosophy, art and politics, and to students and academics in philosophy, visual arts and the humanities generally.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Dedication
Prologue: Under Pale Sail, over Waters of Ordinariness
Notes
1.
Ge-gräu
– The Gathering of the Gray: Light in Plato’s Cave, Hegel’s Twilight, Heidegger’s Fog
Notes
First Digression: Kafka’s Corridor
2. Extension of the Political Theory of Color: The Gray Flags Flutter Before Us
Notes
Second Digression: Gray Zones
Notes
3. Spectral Gray: On the Ancient Suffering of Light in its Descent into Darkness and its More Recent Exploits on Salt and Silver
Notes
Third Digression: Of Gray and Woman
Notes
4. Gray That Touches You: In the Storm, in the North, by the Sea, in the Mountains
Notes
Fourth Digression: What Cézanne’s Gray Is All About
Notes
5. The Gray Ecstasies: Mystical Rap, Tepid Drift, Creative Indifference, and the Difficulty of Defending God against Suspicions of Indifference
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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If You Have Never Thought Gray
A Theory of Color
Peter Sloterdijk
Translated by Corey Dansereau and Robert Hughes
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in German as Wer noch kein Grau gedacht hat. Eine Farbenlehre © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2022. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.
This English translation © Polity Press Ltd., 2025
The translation of this book was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.
Excerpt from Wer sagt denn, daß die Welt schon entdeckt ist by Peter Handke © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2019. All rights with and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin AG. Reprinted with kind permission of Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.
Excerpt from A Moment of True Feeling: A Novel by Peter Handke, translated by Ralph Manheim. Translation copyright © 1977 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Originally published in German under the title Die Stunde der wahren Empfindug © 1975 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5748-6 – hardback
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Epigraph
Who said the world has already been discovered?
Peter Handke, A Moment of True Feeling (1975)
One wants to write just so much
that the words lend their life to each other,
and just so sparingly
that one still takes them seriously.
Elias Canetti, The Human Province (1943)
Dedication
For Bea
in the morning light
PrologueUnder Pale Sail, over Waters of Ordinariness
If, on a whim, one were to be seized by the notion that the phenomenon of “gray” – as a color of objects, a tint of ambient light, or an existential mood – deserves a deeper consideration than it has yet received in the spheres of aesthetic and philosophical theory, then Paul Cézanne’s declaration “You’re not a painter if you haven’t painted gray”1 might provoke a complementary claim: You’re not a philosopher if you have never thought gray.
What Cézanne meant when he stipulated gray as a discipline that would prove the painter will become clearer in later chapters.2 That the word “gray” signifies something more than just a quasi-neutral color value lying between black and white, or a reference to the achromatic and indefinite, will be indicated in various ways in the elaborations to come.
What remains to be thought in connection with the gray is to be found in a dimension halfway between the metaphorical and the conceptual. Everyday language, ensconced in its settled self-sufficiency, often passes by the critical point. Simply by observing a little more attentively its close encounters with the critical subject, we have a chance of catching sight of the unnoticed thing. We choose the same impassive term, usually tucked away in adjectival form (though occasionally in compound nouns such as graybeards, gray water, gray zones, grayhounds), to describe November skies, the skin of elephants and the fur of mice, the mottled floors of public restrooms, brooding cloud formations, the silver hair of the elderly, and the withered features of faces (as in the “gray-faced” complexion of Goethe,3 in the anxious days before his death on March 22, 1832) – to say nothing of paper bags and packing paper, the muted elegance of cashmere, lawless zones, grim outlooks, domestic routines, lifeless archives, dusty shelves, and a hundred other things. Language assigns a vast range to this plain, unassuming lexeme without making significant color-theoretical claims, let alone explicit statements about atmospheric conditions. The extensive and varied use of the word conceals a thought, indeed a multitude of thoughts, the volume of which we seldom pause to consider.
Under the plain name of a color, we find perceptions, evaluations, and impressions entering into a vague symbiosis. The indifferent, the dreary, the approximate, the uncertain, the undecided, the indefinite, the drawn-out, the monotonous, the one-dimensional, the directionless, the irrelevant, the amorphous, the inexpressive, the shrouded, the nebulous, the dubious, the ambiguous, the slightly repugnant, the long-forgotten, the cobwebbed, the ashen, the archival, the Novembral, the Februarial – so much is carried along under the same pale sail over the seas of everyday life. If one could say that human Dasein possesses its own implicit meteorology, the domain of existential weather science would be driven to make frequent recourse to the word gray. Indeed, anyone who proposes to take seriously the weather reports of the soul as an ongoing language game, or to consider it as its own genre of bulletin, can hardly avoid making the gray explicit.
Sighted existence is inherently immersed in worldly colors. Without a minimum of color theory, human life cannot explain itself to itself. With the inexorability of an elementary perception, the primal difference of light and dark precedes all experience of color or colored things – we will find occasion to comment on this now and again in the chapters to come, first in the context of remarks on Goethe’s theory of colors, which offers important insights into problems of darkness in relation to light, of colored shadows and the gray; then in connection with a discussion on color blindness, where congenital graysightedness emerges as a foundational quality of the human habitation of a light-dark space without color; and, finally, in the context of the revolution in seeing sparked by black and white photography in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Even without reference to physiological conditions of congenital red–green color blindness or achromatopsia and the epochal alienation of the visible in the first half of the photographic era, a light-sensitive existence has always known itself as being actually or potentially exposed to a pervasive colorlessness – and not just on foggy days. Wherever the heaviness of everyday life prevails, we feel the usual play of color values has been suspended. There are moments when the gray, both as visual datum and as mood, gains the upper hand due to its proximity with monotony. Someone sinking into the existential depths feels the tension draining from chromatic contrasts. The coloring of things runs together into a nondescript all-color, perceived as dark gray. An approximation of this state could be illustrated by comparing it to eyes exhausted to the point of rejecting any perception, to the melancholic apathy of a masochist in the wake of an indulgence, or to the miserable black-gray mood of a Central European following pandemic news on a late winter broadcast.
The gray that gives food for thought, whether regarded as a concept, metaphor, or metonymy, is associated with the undecided or the indeterminate. It stands for the intermediate, the neutral, the unexceptional, for an embedding in ordinariness on the far side of inclination and aversion. When it is not a color, it is called everydayness. As a milieu, as a middle zone, as the whole environment of custom, chatter, and flavours into which one is delivered by birth or by flight, it becomes “the world” as a whole. It forms the horizon or the “where” of being-in in general, along with its entourage of tendencies, uncertainties, and vague dangers.
The phenomenologist (whether Edmund Husserl or Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty or Hermann Schmitz) – the philosophical steward of gray worlds, so to speak – steps forth in willfully heightened receptivity, with as few presuppositions as possible, calmly attentive, brimming with observations that illuminate rather than persuade, and determined to bring clarity to blazing mediocrity. In the realm of the self-evident, everydayness adorns itself with a modest, self-assured term: Lebenswelt – “lifeworld” – a word that came to prominence through its development in Husserl’s later work.4 It promised, with vehement modesty, to address a life categorically different than that of the biologists; it sought to provide information about a world accessible yet hidden within everydayness, a world from which scientistic physicists and other scholars excluded themselves in consequence of their illusions of objectivity.
If asked to identify the main event of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the perspective of cultural dynamics, one possible answer – and not the least of them – is arguably the transcoloration of all color values. This unfolding process presented itself to everyday consciousness no more than was necessary to establish a basic change of mood. The change took hold at some point after the end of World War II, perhaps in the 1960s, when it seemed suddenly evident that all colors are equally valid and that it would be futile to continue to assert relationships of superiority and inferiority among them. The United Colors of the Present demonstrate mutual respect and refrain from trying to dominate their neighboring colors. Through this new way of feeling and judging, the average uncreative, trend-driven existence participated in an epochal process of a dehierarchization. It consummated the process as if it had willed it so. In the case of colors, the abolition of relationships between higher and lower was closely bound together with concurrent processes of desymbolization.
Color vision is usually unaware that it has a history. Modern design and its postmodern sequels are characterized by a mutual divorce of color and meaning. No one insists anymore that hope must be coded green, or that distance, expanse, and the envelopment of the infinite call for blue; anyone who still thinks that the color red signifies a declaration of love is beyond all improvement in taste. “Substances” now embrace for themselves the arbitraire du signe under the banner of which Saussure’s “structuralist” linguistics stormed the halls of the twentieth-century academy. The dissociation of chromatic signifiers from their once inevitable symbolic freight proceeds less along the lines of old European liturgical, allegorical, or school-specific color meanings than under the influence of mass color-psychological conditioning, following motifs variously ascetic or neo-baroque – to say nothing of the effects of fashion’s whimsical play of color.5
Where the tendencies toward dehierarchization and desymbolization met, a strategic alliance – or perhaps just a coincidental joint effort – formed against the special apex position of whiteness. The eminence assigned to the color white summed up a millennia-long tradition of solar mythological, light metaphysical, and color theological motifs from the Mediterranean and the West, together with their reflections in church liturgical colors and dynastic imagery; these range from the obligatory white of doves, attesting to the Holy Spirit’s flightworthiness, to the splendor of princely coronation mantles and the imperturbably white lilies of the House of Bourbon. If there was ever any advantage in welling up from the font of the past to flow into the present, it is white that managed to profit from it. It has always been considered older than its sibling colors; only with black would there be a question of precedence to resolve. In white, radiance and the sense of having come from afar seemed to coincide. By taking on the appearance value of a visual category, white became a stabilized epiphany. When Franz von Baader, a theosophist in wretched times, declared lightning to be the father of light,6 white became an element in a proof of God through color. As the All-Color, it assumed the rank of a supercolor. Through it, being-toward-the-eye passed into being from pure thought. When John Scotus Eriugena taught in the ninth century that omnia quae sunt, lumina sunt – everything that exists is light – he not only built upon the light-metaphysical speculations of late antiquity but also offered a portrait of God as the true suprematist. True to his supremely bright nature, he could not help but lay out all the distinctions that generate the world within a single color, the supreme color. God is the artist who expresses himself solely in white-on-white. He moves within a spectrum of light-white that expands into a storm of nuances, enveloped by the indistinct roar of the mononymous Being.
The oft-invoked revolutionary rupture of nineteenth-century thought inevitably bears a color-philosophical aspect. It is now not only the wheels of fate and fortune that are seen as capable of revolution or susceptible to deliberate turning; an activated avant-garde of humankind intervenes in the way they run – Enlightenment itself aims to be an operation of “sabotaging fate.”7 All at once, color wheels are spun, value pyramids inverted, hierarchies undermined. “Deface the currency” becomes a recurring motto in eras of free-floating disrespect.8 These revolutions, convolutions, and reversals, when they come along, do not stop at the instituted color of God and king. It would be pointless to speak of modern times if they did not also bring an end to the ancien régime of colors. The survey of instabilities that has emerged since the eighteenth century must include, in the realm of color, the regicide that stripped white of its eminence.
Before the Republic of Color Equality could be proclaimed, before the United Colors of Everything could dictate the aesthetic agenda, there had to be at least one open affront to the crown – just as the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793 represented the singularity in political history that crystallized the shift from monocephalic (monarchical) to polycephalic systems. Conventional narratives of art and cultural history do not report on the course of this affront; they touch on the subject obliquely at best – in this context, there appears an opportunity to revisit the pronouncement of Cézanne, with which we opened this prologue and to which we will return; for its part, it reveals little about the drama of theocide on the stage of color.
The locus classicus for the revaluation of the highest color value is to be found in the 42nd chapter of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick or, The Whale, in which the motif of the white leviathan makes its appearance. As conceived by the narrator, the figure of the albino sea monster – ancient, malicious, oft-hunted, cunningly adept in self-defense and counterattack – embodies a remnant of everything that has survived from medieval notions of the “prince of this world” into more recent times, together with an oceanically expanded experience of the world. It reveals nothing less than a neo-gnostic doctrine of the revaluation of values.
Melville’s narrator hasn’t forgotten how deeply, since ancient times, white has been associated with sublime ideas. Didn’t Zeus incarnate himself as a snow-white bull? Don’t Catholic priests wear, under their chasuble, the alb, the ancient white tunic, which as a baptismal robe symbolized that the officiant belonged to the corpus Christi? In the visions of John of Patmos, didn’t the redeemed enter eternity robed in white, on a collegial footing with the white-winged messengers? And was it not said of “one like the Son of Man,” with a sword protruding from his mouth, that his head and his hair were “white as white wool, white as snow” (Revelation 1:13–14)? Even so, as Melville’s narrator assures us, “there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue.” “This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds,” even if it has also long stood as “the most meaning symbol of spiritual things.”9
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows – a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?10
Then: “[P]ondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper.” Those who expose themselves without protection to the overwhelming presence of the unbearable all-color are like the “willful traveller in Lapland” who refuses to wear tinted glasses and “gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him.”11 In the scornful extraordinariness of the albino creature cruising the oceans, there glows, with the force of a valediction, the old hierarchical sense of European color-metaphysics, only now inverted and placed at the peak of malignity. White is no longer the summa of the beautiful; elevated to uncanniness, it becomes the beginning, middle, and end of the dreadful. Its first grand appearance was in Edgar Allan Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), when a giant shrouded figure, with skin of perfect whiteness, appeared before the narrator’s ship as it plummeted into the Antarctic abyss. Melville’s late metaphysical pathos anticipates Nietzsche’s concern for the proper use of the revaluation of all values: the American seaman, likewise, advocates for a reversal of poles without slackening the tension of heights. Willfully uncured of the transcendental neurosis of Old Europe, he answers to the time-honoured metaphysical pull from above – and, having submitted this to translation, shrinks back from an unbearable height.
Subsequently, it would become apparent how directly revaluations lead to devaluations and how easily, instead of alternate high tensions, there arise disinhibitions, discharges, and easements, dividing spaces among themselves. Circumstances in the post-metaphysical “world made precise”12 appear as if the advice from Walter Serner’s Handbook for the Con Artist had been broadly embraced: “Trivialize things and you will reap success and sow opportunities.”13
Desymbolization and dehierarchization have drained the old color order of its content and neutralized its power. The juxtaposition of hues proves to be one of the fields in which anything goes. The flattened hierarchies of taste make it easier to live and be accepted. Like constellations, seasonal colors incline rather than compel. They spread in the mode of mild infections, mingling easily and promoting change impelled by surfeit and weariness. The seemingly relaxed world prefers to see itself as the realm of free spectra, in which everything borders on everything else. A declaration such as that of De Stijl founder Theo van Doesburg, to the effect that white was “the spiritual color of our time,” sounded just as monomaniacal and anachronistic in 1929, even if it was not quite art-messianic in the mode of the proposal by Yves Klein (1928–62) to the International Atomic Energy Agency that, in the future, nuclear weapons should be built to produce mushroom clouds in his patented Yves-Klein blue.
The polychrome idyll is deceptive; modern liberalism invites mixing but cannot compel the rainbow society to which it aspires. At the same time, it is too late for demixing and monochromatic identities. As experiment will demonstrate, the combining of individual colors does not produce a radiant all-color but rather a dull brownish gray. One can no longer speak of Melville’s white. Crappy coloration is the inevitable result of postmodern mixophilia. By declaring this, current color theory places a firm pro nobis at its beginning. Gray is the dominant color value of the present. Declinable in a thousand shades, this color no longer dismays its viewers as the white demon once did, but neither does it possess the attracting and mobilizing power that red and black had in their prime.
Newton had already bluntly documented the results of mixing pigments, and here Goethe translates with grim pleasure the prose of his adversary (whom he does not forgive for the assertion that white light is “composed” of the spectral colors): the mixture yields something that is, to use Newton’s expressions, “mouse-colored, ash-colored, somewhat stone-colored, akin to mortar, dust, or street filth … and the like.”14 No politics of pigment will rouse gray from its lethargy, even if it dons fresh green or vintage red cockades. Gray allows our contemporaries to see, beyond likes and dislikes, the colorless omnicolor of alienated freedom.
Notes
1
Conversations with Cézanne
, ed. Michael Doran, trans. Julie Lawrence Cochran. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, p. 118.
2
See below, “Fourth Digression: What Cézanne’s Gray Is All About.”
3
Described by the Weimar court physician Carl Vogel,
Die letzte Krankheit Goethe’s
. Berlin, 1833, p. 16.
4
Edmund Husserl,
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy
, trans. David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970.
5
In Robert Gernhardt’s popular poem “Deutung eines allegorischen Gemäldes,” if the fifth man who silently brings the wine is the named “bringer of pure wine,” the non-allegorical point of this final verse colors the preceding four figures: “Bloody red” is then not necessarily death, the scourge is not restricted to pestilence, the wet poisonous drops are more than just hate. Even the third figure would lose clear definition: “The third sits gray-clad / That is suffering / That is suffering.”
6
“Über den Blitz als Vater des Lichts,” in Franz von Baader,
Gesammelte Schriften zur philosophischen Erkenntniswissenschaft oder Metaphysik
,
Sämtliche Werke II
. Aalen, 1963, pp. 31f.; repr. in Peter Sloterdijk and Thomas Macho, eds,
Weltrevolution der Seele: Ein Lese- und Arbeitsbuch der Gnosis
. Zurich: Artemis & Winkler, 1993, pp. 591–600.
7
The phrase is attributable in part to Ulrich Sonnemann. See
Negative Anthropologie: Vorstudien zur Sabotage des Schicksals
. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1969.
8
Paracharattein to nomisma
: a guiding slogan of ancient cynicism (reminting the coins, changing the mores); see Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting,
Der Kynismus des Diogenes und der Begriff des Zynismus
. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988. Nietzsche elevated the formula “revaluation of all values” to a schema that affords an interpretation of the general dynamics of civilization – for example, the Christianization of all values, or the Christianization of the West against the background of the older Greco-Roman warrior ethic. In his later writings, he combines the concept of revaluation with the demand for a post-Christian, neo-aristocratic
ars vivendi
.
9
Herman Melville,
Redburn: His First Voyage
;
White Jacket or The World in a Man-of-War
;
Moby-Dick or, The Whale
. New York: Library of America, 1983, pp. 994, 1001.
10
Ibid., p. 1001.
11
Ibid.
12
The expression is taken from Wolfgang Janke’s
Kritik der präzisierten Welt
, albeit without sharing all the alienation-critical motifs of that work. See Wolfgang Janke,
Kritik der präzisierten Welt
. Munich: Karl Alber, 1999.
13
Walter Serner,
Last Loosening: A Handbook for the Con Artist & Those Aspiring to Become One
, trans. Mark Kanak. Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, [1927] 2020.
14
Quoted in Albrecht Schöne,
Goethes Farbentheologie
. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1987, pp. 34f.
1Ge-gräu – the Gathering of the GrayLight in Plato’s Cave, Hegel’s Twilight, Heidegger’s Fog
“You’re not a philosopher if you have never thought gray.” It makes a difference, of course, whether one makes such a declaration at an urban art opening or in the opening lecture of a Cambridge philosophy conference. At the gallery, one can count on the smiles and approval of those not affected. Amused attendees would relish seeing others judged by standards that they themselves probably don’t meet. Tant pis pour eux: so much the worse for them! They suddenly understand, Prosecco in hand, why the teachings of most so-called philosophers, living or dead, have never meant much to them. No longer must the unbroken spines of their books inspire guilt feelings. Gray is the dust that gathers upon these books and testifies against their supposed worth and relevance – and rightly so, since, as it turns out, their authors have not adequately contemplated the gray.
Those in attendance concede that a few open-air thinkers stand out as exceptions among the philosophers. Nietzsche knew what he was talking about when he warned against trusting thoughts that hadn’t been conceived while walking in the open. When Merleau-Ponty evoked the “joyous realm of things and their god, the sun,”1 he too was likely on the right track. Similarly, Rilke in the Louvre, standing before the classical torso of Apollo and feeling himself called by a voice of ancient, gray stone: “You must change your life” – though Rilke, even if cited respectfully by a thinker of Heidegger’s stature, was less a philosopher than a bard of unspeakable vibrations.
After all, words spoken lightly can sometimes have far-reaching consequences. This time, from the condescending smile there emerges the outline of an insight: in order to fulfill what their profession demands of them, aspiring members of the philosophical faculty should – as Cézanne would have it – position themselves before Mont Sainte-Victoire and attend to the mountain’s discourse on the flickering of Provençal light, the nuances of the color gray, and the grave presence of the rocky in-itself in its luminous withdrawal.
Presented at a philosophy conference, the thesis declaring that philosophers are made by thinking the thought of gray would drop like an axe splitting the ice of consensus. Appearing as an unexplained declaratory event, before any justification that would lend it support, it is prima facie absurd – debilitating to the ear and seemingly detached from all logical associations. The agreement to disagree, essential at such synods, would collapse within seconds after the airing of such a thesis. Some would conclude that they’d heard a sophisticated provocation and chuckle to themselves, their self-possession unperturbed; others, more violently vexed, would fidget with their conference brochures so irritably that followers of Konrad Lorenz would have a chance to test his theory of displacement activities on an unusual group of subjects. Conference attendees of the neo-Pavlovian school would see their suspicion confirmed that conditioned reflexes are particularly strong in the reflective professions, where they are ingrained to the point of predictability.
In view of the extravagance of the claim that understanding gray is a fundamental task of thought for philosophers, the audience would spontaneously sort itself in a self-fulfilling application of Fichte’s theorem that the philosophy one chooses reflects the type of person one is. Fichte’s distinction, between the lovers of freedom and the determinists who argue that everything depends on external circumstances, would appear in this case as a contrast between those who are accustomed to responding more frontally and those who practice lateral thinking. The “frontalists” would be listeners committed to clear positions on all debatable questions, valuing the intentio recta as the hallmark of honest argumentation. In the current case, this would be expressed by the fact that, with the minimal politeness of British-trained debaters, they come to the judgment that what they’ve heard is nonsense – and not just any nonsense but the kind that cannot be described as elegant, even with the best will in the world. Their discursive ethos dictates that nonsense be given no foothold, the thesis advanced being so absurd as to warrant the predicate not even wrong.
The lateralist group consists of scholars with backgrounds in history and psychology, who typically prefer an indirect approach – the intentio obliqua – in both thought and action. They find it less important to determine whether a statement is correct than to consider how a speaker came to make it. Their experience affirms that false doctrines do not fall from the sky and that every propositional event, no matter how erratic, is interdiscursively and subsymbolically networked in some way or other. In an era when networking takes precedence over reasoning and connections overtake substantiation, it is advisable to see deviance as a different path rather than a wrong one. Thanks to lateral logic, even the most wayward sheep can be reconciled with the meaning-suffused flock. No error need remain unaddressed and isolated. For those committed to obliquity, it seems obvious to look up the speaker’s CV to see whether there are recent engagements with Dadaism or publications on synesthesia. If nonsense doesn’t deserve support, it nonetheless has a context and perhaps a kind of method.
How will the speaker navigate this predicament? “You’re not a philosopher if you have never thought gray.” To a gathering of people who cannot possibly be prepared for the accusation that they have neglected to think the gray, such a thesis would trigger the prompt ostracization of the speaker. One faces ignorance, incapacity, and unwillingness across various fronts of discomfort. While the one faction in the room offers their contempt, another has a therapeutic proposal up its sleeve, and a third thinks it’s time for the speaker to change disciplines. Perhaps the situation will be rescued by a timely recollection of that character in Christian Dietrich Grabbe’s play Duke Theodore of Gothland (1822) who, in dire circumstances, declares that “only despair can save us now.”
In view of such manifest embarrassment, the insistence that thinking the gray is what defines a philosopher can be sustained only by way of a bridging alternative: either one has been hoodwinked by philosophers who display no discernible trace of gray, and one has given them a full pass for only half a job; or else, insofar as they were or are philosophers, they must perforce have commented on the gray – even if their engagement with it may have been (perhaps initially) indirect and implicit. One must not abandon the claim that thinking “the gray” had some formative role in the play of their thought, even if the philosophers in question did not use the term themselves. A concession of this type implies that certain problems, certain topoi of contemporary thought, have a kind of virtual pre-existence, a prefiguration in the shadows of older terms, even if it is only later that they awaken to existence and clarity of concept.
To take a prime example: it cannot be the case that the concepts now central to the modern discourse on “subjectivity” were – notwithstanding Socrates’ legacy – entirely non-existent for well over two thousand years, even if expert intellectual historians demonstrate and confirm that these notions were first articulated with memorable clarity in Fichte’s attempts to elucidate his “original insight” after 1794; it is not without reason that Fichte was called a “fateful man” by Hermann Schmitz (1928–2021), founder of neo-phenomenology and (next to Heidegger) the greatest twentieth-century thinker on German soil, if today largely unknown. The acknowledgment that problems “pre-exist” in latency is compelled by a faint but subtly effective logical and material motif of continuity and compatibility, evident almost universally in the sequence of deliberate and incidental expressions of ideas. One might sum it up as the “principle of increasing explicitness.” One rarely finds it treated affirmatively – as, most prominently, in Hegel’s doctrine of the “labour of the concept” and in Ernst Bloch’s studies on the categories of “bringing forth” inspired by Schelling’s Naturphilosophie.2 Nonetheless, in the absence of assuming its validity, most chronologically consecutive formulation complexes relevant to intellectual history – most “theories,” as we call them – would languish in the semi-obscurity of archives, abandoned to the mercy of haphazard leaps from one “paradigm” to the next. The principle of explicitation encompasses, in sum, all the shifts in focus that form the rational core of so-called paradigm shifts.
To elucidate the analogy with another major theme of twentieth-century “continental” philosophy: human existence has presumably always been immersed in moods – anxiety, boredom, gloom, confidence – that color the modes of its being-in-the-world; yet one finds in the philosophical archives almost nothing useful on this topic until Heidegger’s intervention in 1927.3 No academic mind up to that moment was prepared for the claim, “Indeed, we must ontologically in principle leave the primary discovery of the world to ‘mere mood.’”4 Yet, when the ancients spoke in a typological tendency of the “laughing Democritus” and the “weeping Heraclitus,” they showed ante litteram a sense for the coloring of thought by “mood.”
Much the same can be said about a third major theme of recent thought: the question of the Other. The fact that no notable thinker before Fichte and Feuerbach had expressly inquired into the nature of Thou-subjectivity, and that post-egological discourses about I and Thou emerged only in the twentieth century,5 does not imply that earlier eras were oblivious to coexistence with beings of different soul, spirit, or will. It may seem astonishing – to indicate a fourth motif – that reflection on the moral relationship of people to their peers and to the objective tasks entrusted to them managed until the threshold of the twentieth century without the word “responsibility”; this, however, does not imply that in the two and a half thousand years when thought traveled from Ionia to Jena, that people thought and felt irresponsibly. On the contrary, we may be confident that what is meant by the modern term must have been articulated in earlier times under different conceptual light and with different angles of practical access, but addressing those conditions more or less adequately.
That the speech ran long does not mean that it was short on meaning. As surely as Plato, Hegel, and Heidegger were philosophers – to qualify them as “real philosophers” would be presumptuous, so inexorable is their claim upon the title – in accordance with the thesis above, they must as surely have thought the gray in advance, even if only in the mode of an approximation, in virtual projections whose factual content appeared with a different fold, cut at a different angle, or clustered with a different density – to state it more soberly: heterodiscursively, in signs suffused with anticipation, on the scent of what was yet to be said.
Anyone who regards Plato as a philosopher, or even more, is prepared to subscribe to the conventional view that he is the founder of philosophia (both the term and the matter itself), and who doesn’t object to summing up the substances and accidents of the European philosophical tradition as “a series of footnotes to Plato” (to recall Whitehead’s semi-humorous bon mot one last time before it has been definitively exhausted), must now point to the critical place where Plato introduces the concept of gray into thinking.
Does such a passage even exist? If it could be identified, how is it conceivable that it has been overlooked for more than two thousand years? Why is there no entry for the term “gray” in the lexicons of ancient philosophy or in the indices to Plato’s vocabulary? As with the most cunningly hidden things,6 what we are looking for hides on the surface, where no one would think to look. It lies openly exposed in the most prominent passage of the most widely read work of Hellenic classicism, yet no scholar ever thought it worth examining in the necessary detail.
One need only revisit the allegory of the cave from Book VII of the Republic to come across, within a few sentences, the earliest discourse on gray, or, more precisely, dark gray, which signifies the world to the common consumers of illusion. The elements of the allegory’s setup are still widely known in outline. First, there are the prisoners in the cave, fettered and constrained in such a way that they can only look forward; there is the great fire at the back of the cave, functioning like the lamp in a film projector; then there are the carriers, some talking, some silent, who bear objects and implements in front of the fire, but behind the audience, in such a way that the carriers themselves move unseen and only the objects carried aloft are visible; and, finally, there is the cave wall in front of them all, the steadfast focus of the fettered captives’ gaze – partly because they have been deliberately immobilized, and partly because they know nothing better than the shadowplay before their eyes. That the wall might have been stone-gray plays a subordinate but not insignificant role in what follows. The color gray comes into play not because of a wall moderately illuminated by a distant fire – we can imagine the wall might equally be bluish, reddish, brownish, or silvery in hue – but rather because of the apparitions that restlessly traverse it, thanks to the work of unseen carriers.
Shadows – skiai – is what Plato calls the apparitions on the wall, echoing Homer, who, centuries earlier, used the term to describe the disembodied spirits of the dead that would be encountered by the hero in his journey to the house of Hades. Here, in Plato, shadows move across the cave wall in the primal scene of the philosophical critique of knowledge. Shadows signify the world to the ignorant. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that Plato deliberately imported the Homeric underworld into the Athenian lifeworld. Disturbed by the doxa, the popular presumptions and mad delusions of city life after a war of almost thirty years, the philosopher nearly equates his shared world with the realm of the dead. As the last aristocrat and the first professional thinker, he would like to turn from this bourgeois Hades toward a true daylit world above the turmoil, a noetic world where archetypes and ideas hold a perpetual parliament of Being.
The nature of shadows was no mystery to the Greeks even apart from reference to the underworld. Shadows in daytime appear and become conspicuous when bodies block rays of light. Hence, as we say, bodies “cast” shadows – we figure the impermeability and non-transparency of bodies as their natural endowment. One might better say that bodies cast themselves and their solidity into the path of the light. Given the obstruction of light’s trajectory, the traces make their appearance as shadow.
Light seems the epitome of yieldingness; it allows itself to be waylaid on its straightline journey by the first body it meets. It grants to the front of the body whatever dose of brightness it can take in. Shadows mark the outline and contour of things that steal the light – Plato sidesteps the question of whether light is not intrinsically intent on being intercepted, so that it can demonstrate its illuminative power through the resistance offered to it.7
Be that as it may, the backsides of these thieving opacities transmit only the absence of light, supposing one could speak of transmission here. Areas in which no light is transmitted become visible as shadows. This, of course, presupposes a light source that diffuses over the surface, radiating past the obstacle, so that the dark areas contrast with illuminated surfaces. Without the firelight glow diffusing from the back of the cave and caught by the wall at the front, all the shadows would turn black – indeed, they would not exist at all: against a black wall, black shadows wouldn’t create the difference that makes a difference. Asking what shadows do when they have not been cast is like asking what winds do when they are not blowing. The Greeks had an answer for the latter: idle winds feast at the palace on the island of Aeolus; what uncast shadows do is not recorded.8 But if the cave wall catching excess light from the distant fire is tinted stone bright, silver-matte, yellow-gray or pink, the shadows stand out from it as dark gray or blackish-gray silhouettes.
Thus, when Plato speaks of shadows, skiai, he implicitly says shadow-colored, monochrome, achromatic, light-deficient – or, we might say more simply: dark gray. Shadows do not signify a gray without qualities, however. The apparitions of the shadow-colored world gain a degree of recognizability because of their shapes and figures, through which they participate in the noetic universe. If, hidden behind the audience, the carriers bear an amphora, its shape, its shadow, will allow viewers to recognize it as such, notwithstanding any distortion caused by imperfections of the shadow-displaying surface and despite the instability and softness of the silhouette caused by the flickering light source.9 Even if the opaque bodies are, by their very materiality, photophobic, even lightless, muddled, dark, obscure, and turned toward non-being, their concrete existence nevertheless approaches recognizability due to the photophilia of their shape, suggested by the shadow outline. Shadow silhouettes are borderlines between figure and darkness; they are gray heralds of the noetic world. As vague witnesses of the forms of objects, they remain connected to the sphere of the recognizable.
Plato’s poetic theory of shadow could easily be relegated to the field of pedagogy as an example of allegorical rhetoric in philosophy. It could even be misconstrued as a concession of philosophy to everyday understanding, were it not so destructively aimed at subverting trivial cognition as a whole. In equating everyday perception of the colorful world of appearances with a fixation on shadow plays, it wields a truly devastating irony.
The slaves of the perceptual cave face a world dominated entirely by matter. If a remnant of color lingers there, it is a dark gray residual luminescence that stops just short of the complete absence of light, on the very verge of pure blackness. Even in antiquity, painters did greater justice to shadows, in terms of deformations and color, than did the philosophers, who ultimately thought about the phenomenon of “holes in the light” only in terms of formal stability and the monochrome.10 Painters were the first to develop a preliminary practical concept of the importance of shadows for spatial perception.
The philosophical theory of color begins with a radically ironic prelude: where shadows are visible, people move through a dark gray zone that tends toward utter darkness, a night without contrast. Idealistic doctrine denies matter any participation in light, form, intelligibility and being; even Nicholas of Cusa deemed matter a confusum chaos, an almost-nothing located outside all structure and comprehensibility.
Let us imagine that someone achieved idealist enlightenment and left the cave, then turned back from the light to the realm of the material where most people dwell. This person would see a moderately graded monochrome – shadow gray against rock-wall gray – and would have to deal with a chained people who are obstinately convinced that they know enough about everything that is the case. Because there is a noblesse oblige that inheres even within the nobility of theory, the first real teachers – the a priori unpopular lecturers of counterintuitive insights – had to expose themselves to the fury of cave dwellers who had not asked for better knowledge.
Had Plato not conceived of matter, substance, the that-out-of-which that Aristotle later called hyle, as, precisely, that which is impermeable to light, as the inexistent resistance to the truly existent, as indeterminacy or at best as virtual determinability, and had he not thought of its projections on the wall as shadows, as the dark gray wastes of visibility, it is needless to say he would not have been a philosopher.
The witticism declaring that Plato’s teaching “casts its shadow” on two and a half thousand years of European thought sounds a little cheap, but it isn’t without its humor. What we call the modern is characterized by a sum of efforts to step out of Plato’s shadow. Conceived as an anti-Platonic experiment, modernity fundamentally rearranged the relationships among light sources, illuminated surfaces, and dark zones, inspired mostly by the neo-Aristotelian joy of empirical knowledge, the Cartesian illuminated autism of construction from logical evidence, and the French Enlightenment’s reaching out through the wide world of encyclopedia entries. Children of the world in more recent centuries no longer wanted to be persuaded that they were mere shadow-seers, especially after an incorrigibly idealistic, always quasi-esoteric philosophy undertook to explain to them what things are shadows of. They began to doubt their shadow vision, attested from Athens, no less than their original sinfulness, for which dubious evidence had been presented from Jerusalem, Rome, and Hippo.
A general abolitionism urged an end to cognitive cave life as well as political slavery. In bold declarations of human rights, the former slaves of appearance were granted the inalienable freedom of egress from the cave – indeed, it was even implied that they were duty-bound to forsake their cave.
After the demand for freedom had introduced impatience as a factor in great politics, the time became ripe for the emergence of a distinction between revolution and reform. The exuberant and impossible immediacy of the exit from immaturity prompted the insight that some things about freedom are better saved for later. Perhaps we can already speak here of the premature birth of the social democratic habitus out of the sense for establishing a reasonable timetable. Good emancipatory habits do not form overnight. In a more distant analogy, during the stormy years of the French Revolution, some deputies had spoken out in favor of postponing universal adoption of the informal “tu” address between citizens, as had been demanded by the Enragés, until conditions for familiarity were fulfilled not only in the clubs but in the civilizing world as a whole. This insistence on polite reserve masked a presentiment for how quickly regicidal headsmen can follow from radical egalitarians.
Subsequent developments made it clear that, and why, a privative theory of gray in the Platonic style was unsustainable. Just as it was impossible to durably understand evil solely as the absence of the good, in time it became evident that the gray couldn’t be understood solely in terms of a deprivation of brightness. It was one thing to assign an active meaning to evil, an entity imbued with agency, a selfhood driven to degrade and obliterate opponents and obstacles; it was another thing to think the gray as produced by competing tendencies to brighten and dim working against each other, as a concept of something attained, as a phenomenon of compromise.
As an expert witness in this matter, none other than Hegel should be called to the stand, specifically the influential professor of the Berlin years. With Hegel, the master of thought energized by the spirit’s drive toward self-explicitation, the gray finally comes expressly into its rights. If “rights” means explicitness, the critical articulation event occurs in 1821, a year of which cultural history otherwise has little to report, unless one is so devoted to the cult of great men that one would not overlook Napoleon’s death on August 15 on Saint Helena and the rapid modeling of Goethe’s bust by Christian Daniel Rauch between August 18 and 20 in Jena.
Though the title page of Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right bears the year 1821,11 the volume itself had already reached the bookstores of Berlin and the hands of students in October of the preceding year.12 Hegel read the first half of the work (up to §181) to his audience from October 25, 1820, until well into the following year; lectures on the second half to the end of the book continued, starting on October 24, 1821. What was presented from October to October and onward made for a richly autumnal program. It dealt with “bourgeois society,” its “system of needs,” its administration of justice, its police, and its corporations. The draft was concluded, if not really crowned, by a somewhat scandalous, all too respectably bourgeois over-affirmative coda, which must be accepted, for better or worse, as a sermon on the golden October of the state. To the final passages,13 which are unbearably slow and ponderous today, Hegel added a highly edifying, intellectually wan, and (by his standards) incomprehensibly concept-poor epilog on the theme of “World History” (§§341–60), which saw the author blatantly violate his own decree, issued in younger years, that philosophy must refrain from trying to edify.14
It proved serendipitous for subsequent generations of philosophical thought that the later Hegel often violated the not yet legally binding judgments from the period of his methodological and stylistic exhilaration, not least the ban on “imaginative” thinking and figural expression, which had long since lost their right of domicile in academic philosophy. In the edifying passages which became more frequent as he grew older, and in his forays into otherwise frowned-upon pictorial language, Hegel proved himself a master of non-discursive expression, with flights of fancy striving for Shakespearean heights.
At the peak of Hegel’s violations against his own rule of exhaustiveness and abstention from figurative conception, at the end of his Preface to the Philosophy of Right – in which the logical and polemical motifs of the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit resurface in a tougher, somewhat more power-seeking and perhaps more ambiguous form, owing to tightened censorship in the wake of August von Kotzebue’s murder of 1819 – we find those suddenly towering formulations which, despite being embedded in good reason, account for the author’s fame among contemporaries and later generations as an indispensable witness to the consciousness of existence in times of both historical agitation and post-historical stagnation:
When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.15
The peculiarity of these oft-cited words stems from the offensive association of color with the name “philosophy.” Here, gray is identified, rather straightforwardly, as a property of philosophizing. The gray painted by philosophy is “its gray,” and it sets the hue of its own free will, uncompelled and self-assured, aside from its competition from grisaille
