Carrion Luggage

Blue My Mind

I'm not overly familiar with the source of the article I'm featuring today. It's from Open Culture, which bills itself as having "the best free cultural & educational media," and already I distrust it because if you're really the best, you don't need to self-promote as such.

But we're going to look at this article anyway.

    Why Most Ancient Civilizations Had No Word for the Color Blue  

I'd heard this assertion before, but I don't think I've ever blogged about it.

The article, incidentally, contains a video with a similar title. I didn't watch it. I don't know if it covers the same material as the writing. I prefer writing over videos.

In an old Zen sto­ry, two monks argue over whether a flag is wav­ing or whether it’s the wind that waves. Their teacher strikes them both dumb, say­ing, “It is your mind that moves.”

That reminds me of how an optimist and a pessimist argue over whether a glass is half-full or half-empty, when, clearly, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Such obser­va­tions bring us to anoth­er koan-like ques­tion: if a lan­guage lacks a word for some­thing like the col­or blue, can the thing be said to exist in the speaker’s mind?

It's a fair question, I'll admit, but it seems to me that lots of things exist that we don't have words for.

We can dis­pense with the idea that there’s a col­or blue “out there” in the world. Col­or is a col­lab­o­ra­tion between light, the eye, the optic nerve, and the visu­al cor­tex. And yet, claims Maria Michela Sas­si, pro­fes­sor of ancient phi­los­o­phy at Pisa Uni­ver­si­ty, “every cul­ture has its own way of nam­ing and cat­e­go­riz­ing colours.”

Can we really dispense with that idea, though? Just as sound is a pressure wave in a medium such as air, water, or something solid, regardless of whether there is an ear around to hear it (so much for the "tree falls in the forest" Zen koan), color is a particular wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum. I'd argue that insofar as color exists at all, being not a "thing" but a property of a thing, that wavelength that we agree on as "blue" exists, too. How we perceive that color is, to me, a separate issue.

The most famous exam­ple comes from the ancient Greeks. Since the 18th cen­tu­ry, schol­ars have point­ed out that in the thou­sands of words in the Ili­ad and Odyssey, Homer nev­er once describes any­thing — sea, sky, you name it — as blue.

I'd heard that, of course, but I still have questions, like: How do we know they didn't use the word for blue if they didn't have a word for blue? And, more importantly: Why are we trusting the color descriptions of a blind poet?

It was once thought cul­tur­al col­or dif­fer­ences had to do with stages of evo­lu­tion­ary devel­op­ment — that more “prim­i­tive” peo­ples had a less devel­oped bio­log­i­cal visu­al sense.

Yeah, evolution doesn't really work like that. No matter how primitive the culture seems to our technological senses, people are generally the same, genetically speaking, all over.

“If you think about it,” writes Busi­ness Insider’s Kevin Loria, “blue doesn’t appear much in nature — there aren’t blue ani­mals, blue eyes are rare, and blue flow­ers are most­ly human cre­ations.”

Well, yeah, but unless you live in London or Seattle, there's this big thing-that-isn't-a-thing called the daytime sky, which we describe as blue. It's pretty hard to miss unless you live in a cave, which even cavepeople didn't do all the time.

The col­or blue took hold in mod­ern times with the devel­op­ment of sub­stances that could act as blue pig­ment, like Pruss­ian Blue, invent­ed in Berlin, man­u­fac­tured in Chi­na and export­ed to Japan in the 19th cen­tu­ry.

I did a blog entry a while back on that particular pigment; as I recall, it featured in Japanese ("The Wave") and European ("Starry Night") art. But I have my doubts about that being the origin of our shared perception of the color blue. Newton did a lot of study of the color spectrum, breaking up sunlight using a prism like the proto-Dark Side of the Moon cover art, and he included "blue" as a color. I should note, however, that Newton seems to have chosen a seven-color scheme (the actual spectrum covers a lot more than seven shades) because of the mystical association with the number seven: days of the week, visible heavenly bodies that move (sun, moon, and five planets).

One mod­ern researcher, Jules David­off, found this to be true in exper­i­ments with a Namib­ian peo­ple whose lan­guage makes no dis­tinc­tion between blue and green (but names many fin­er shades of green than Eng­lish does). “David­off says that with­out a word for a colour,” Loria writes, “with­out a way of iden­ti­fy­ing it as dif­fer­ent, it’s much hard­er for us to notice what’s unique about it.”

I kind of agree with that, though. There's the old story about how the Inuit have many different words for snow; it's probably false (not least because there are several languages and dialects involved), but it does speak to the larger truth that we name the things we find to be important in our lives.

It's an interesting line of inquiry, though. When I was a kid, I remember making an offhand comment to a friend like, "How do I know that the colors I see are the same as the colors you see? Like, we can both agree that this grass is green, but if I could see through your eyes, would I see the same color as I do now?" Those weren't my exact words, which I don't remember, but whatever I said, he understood what I was getting at. Much later, after the internet became a thing, someone echoed my childhood Zen koan and got a bunch of mind-blown reactions.

As far as I know, we can't know the answer to that, not yet. Perhaps someday.