Johann Goethe"Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the
whole world will be clean."
Johann Goethe was a German Renaissance man who delivered many great works of poetry, theology, literature and painting in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Although he never wrote strict philosophy, his ideas have influenced many great philosophers and scientists, such as Georg Hegel and Charles Darwin. Goethe considered his most significant work to be his Theory of Colors which opposed the Newtonian interpretation of color perception. In it, he displays how the concern for the subjective quality of color perception is more important than the analytic approach that Newtonian physics presents. |
Goethe regarded the physiological and psychological effects on the eye as being interrelated. His ideas went on to influence Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck who both indicated the value of his scientific statements. Regardless of what Goethe himself regarded as his most significant work, Faust is still his most famous. An epic poem, featured in the Great Books of the Western World, it is considered by many to be the greatest work of German literature.
References Goethe, Johann, Theory of Colors |