I have written great poems. Others have written great poems before me and others still will write greater poems again. But this treatise [on light and colour] is a true feather in my cap.
Goethe (paraphrase mine).

[Now Goethe wrote Faust – one of the top six narratives of our world- A.C.]

Phenomenon: From the Greek phainomenon, appearance.

Whatever way Rupert Murdoch’s flying monkeys have of discerning the relative IQ’s of dead, white European males, the Sunday Times supplements articles on the matter often attribute the highest of these IQ’s to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

First off, it is important to discern why Goethe’s theory isn’t really a theory; strictly, a theory is strictly axiom based – the weakness therein fundamentally expose in the 1930’s by Kurt Gödel (standing on the shoulders of giants, etc… – this is further extrapolated on in the article “on theory building…”:http://choreograph.net/raw/theory-building).
In this article, I look to Goethe’s attitude (as opposed to his conclusions). Goethe hated mathematics, the bricks and mortar of pre-modernist theory building. As opposed to developing axioms and then imposing them to the natural world (a la Newton), Goethe looked to the phenomena first:

Search nothing beyond the phenomena; they themselves are the theory
Goethe.

Here is a subset (implicitly unordered list) of fans:

• J. M. W. Turner (hero of water, wind and light)
• Wassily Kandinsky (hero of colour)
• Kurt Gödel (hero of logic and the limits therein)
• Mitchell Feigenbaum (hero of Chaos Theory)
• Werner Heisenberg (hero of Quantum Theory)
• Arthur Schopenhauer (hero of 19th century philosophy)
• Ludwig Wittgenstein (hero of 20th century philosophy)

Now, for myself, I have been adopting as mantra “Methodology over Philosophy” in that it is all well and good to generate a philosophy, but without a repeatable methodology, it is some what lame. And the “all bets are off” characteristic of 20th century knowledge factories, as wonderful as they are, need some sort of corralling or else the land-rush that was may well degenerate into some sort of anarchistic Disney Land with a Mad Max lick…

This where new semiotics are to play an extremely important role (raised as I was, I never had much time for semantics). The frailties of logic and mathematical structure have being thus exposed by Gödel (et al), I have a sense that there are babies-and-bath-water scenarios developing, but through the development of appropriate notation and operators, I propose a marriage between phenomenology and mathematics. [In a sense, the modern computer science of reverse engineering is no that far removed – the answer to some puzzle (or other) is some sort of given and the engineer work backwards to render the methodology of the solution].

One thing I have learned is that it is nigh impossible to fully define a phenomenon based operator. Although Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems gets me off the hook, there is still a matter of a high enough percentile of happiness that has not been acquired. All the same, it keeps me busy….

In this regard, I propose a phenomenon basis – a basis set of phenomena that in combination describe all others. It is both ambitious and a work in progress.
This set is named for my brother Peadar (Petrus – the Rock) and is posted as the image that accompanies this article (along with Goethe’s colour wheel and Turner’s “Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) the Morning after the Deluge”). This set in will either expand or contract with respect to its number of elements, but never empty.

Like Goethe, I wish to construct something time proof.

For my brother.