TWOFOLD VISION: NEWTON’S DARK AND GOETHE’S LIGHT

Tuesday 20 May 2025 | Swedenborg House, London WC1A 2TH

11.00 am to 3.00 pm. Free, but please book.

As part of our daytime Influxus series, this month Swedenborg House will be hosting an event called ‘Twofold Vision: Goethe’s Dark and Newton’s Light’ from Manchester-based Bound & Infinity. Louis Stevenson-Miller and Philip Frances will be leading the session.

“May God us keep, From the Single vision and Newton’s sleep” – William Blake

“Goethe suggests in his scientific writings, as in his play Faust, that humanity should understand its darkness before it can learn to speak of light. Newton had attempted to explain light as constituted from colours described in terms of heaviness of particles, and where Newton contains the world in a minimal abstraction of materialism, Goethe’s view opens up the world to the challenge of seeing existence through the darkness. Goethe underpins this with experiments documented in Farbenlehre or Theory of Colours which was published in 1810.

In Goethe’s endeavour to familiarise abstract science with the process of participating in the phenomenon, he refined an observational method to create a practice of seeing. In this session, we compare Newton’s experiment with a prism bending white light into its constituent colours with Goethe’s experience of looking through a prism and finding colours at the boundary of darkness and light. Looking beyond Newton’s “Single vision” towards the discovery that darkness is equal in its capacity to light enables us to bring multiple ways of seeing together and into co-existence.

Swedenborg House lends character to the discussion. Swedenborg lived between Newton and Goethe and his identification of the light with a spiritual capacity in the culture at the time aimed to give purpose to a world becoming increasingly dulled by theoretical explanation. In these experiments with colour, we discover our own bridge between science and spirit, structure and unity, darkness and light as an enduring question engaging humanity down the ages.

If you have a thumb length prism please bring it with you, there will be some available to use on the day.”

Bound & Infinity with Philip Franses.

BOUND & INFINITY facilitate learning and hold space for enquiry, investigating the hidden alliance between the arts, science and philosophy.

PHILIP FRANSES taught Holistic Science at Schumacher College for over a decade, bringing together phenomenology, complexity and Goethean science. He is author of Time, Light and the Dice of Creation and co-author of The Language of Water.