ABSTRACT
This chapter examines that there are a number of very striking similarities between Goethe's conception of science and the Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy. It also examines that this shared understanding of aim and method results in a literary form which is common to Goethe's most important scientific treatise – the Theory of Colours – and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Goethe and Wittgenstein both think that theorizing, especially premature theorizing on the basis of artificial and unexamined examples, hidden mechanisms, distinctions between inner and outer, and appearance and reality. Goethe wished to discredit such theoretical distortions and artificialities, by placing the phenomenon back in the real world where it belonged, and establishing a much broader base for investigation. In a sense, the Farbenlehre and the Investigations are textbooks, workbooks, sets of exercises, because large numbers of experiments and questions are proposed but it is the reader who has to answer them.
