Colors and Ideas

[constant escape]

I was thinking about how one's spirituality and personality could be influenced by the colors of one's environment, or more broadly by the aesthetics of one's environment. These spiritual/personal qualia could, in turn, come to inform/determine ideology.

What difference is there, across cultures, in the significance of colors? Is there something universal in how hues are registered and assigned significance?

Could the four temperaments, or temperamental theory more broadly, have an objective root in physics?

Our visual register is tuned to receive only a segment of the possible frequencies/wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum - could this segment be effectively dividing into grades, colors, and each color would act as a sort of element of significance? That is, the visible spectrum is roughly divisible into grades/discrete colors, and these colors are ascribed emotive (red as passion) or sensual/nervous (red as hot) significance based on the physical attributes of those objects in our environment that appear to be that color. Does abstract significance (emotive/psychical) emerge from concrete significance (nervous/physical)?

Did certain biological systems evolutionarily equip themselves to receive such a spectrum in order to navigate more precisely, only to find themselves with a set of abstract elements that can foster the creation of language? These archetypal meanings could be compounded with one another to form more complex meanings, no?

I'm looking for a way to connect ideology with physics, and this topic may house a few signposts.

 

[luka]

I've thought about this a fair bit although not in terms of ideology obviously.

 

[luka]

what you need to remember is that science is fake and ideology is fake. So forget about that stuff and then you can understand everything naturally and easily, like a genius.

 

[luka]

the colour wheel promises to offer something similar to the zodiac, a human typology. Hues of mood, modes of feelings, ways of being in the world. States and houses and stations we pass through.

 

[luka]

The precision of it is very alluring. How there is really no limit to the fine gradations it is possible to make.

 

[luka]

The different possibilities offered to mind and feeling nerves on a day of blunt, objective sunlight and a day of mist and pearlescent cloud. Of hard, definite outlines and dissolving, melting forms.

 

[luka]

Within the infinite shadings of tension and release, will and surrender. The inbreath is a sucking at the nipple. Warm, enveloping, humid, close, hot colours, oranges, reds, CARNATION PINK. This is the erotic world of everlasting delight. Squirming, sliding, very lovely and lubricious. BOTH MEANINGS INTENDED.

Yet! When I asked them, who is the puppeteer who pulls the strings? Who is behind the RED VELVET CURTAIN? I arrived instantaneously in a White, bright, Nordic bath house, mind was very clear with the white steady flame of Intellect. THERE ARE OTHER WORLDS.

 

[luka]

The Rose of Temperaments.

 

[yyaldrin]

i have days in winter where i consciously crave for the colour green. i remember a few years ago the winter being especially long and grey and dark and so i painted my flat yellow and brought in all sorts of tropical plants from the flower store. it actually helped a bit.

 

[yyaldrin]

why don't we colour our houses in europe? why do the scandinavinans romanticise all those boring variations of brown and grey? when i was in mexico once i was blown away by all the colours. the brightest and most warmest red and yellow and blue and green. and they were everywhere. i don't understand why we don't do that as well, why do we torture our self?

 

[luka]

It's about what's appropriate what works with the surroundings and the light

 

[luka]

London is a city of greys and browns fundamentally but this is being changed to present a more American, smiling customer service viciously optimistic capitalist face. Much more blocks of blank primary positive colour. It's actually an act of violence in my opinion.

 

[luka]

You can have those bright colours in Mexico, in Nice, in California and so on. The sun makes them hum and vibrate. It doesn't work like that in Northern Europe. You can't impose simple bright colour on us and expect it to have the same effect under different light and cloud conditions

 

[luka]

Our pleasures lie in more contemplative tones, light filtered through brown cloud and fogs

 

[luka]

Bright positive flat colour isn't emotionally congruent here. That's why our birds tend to shun it, with a few exceptions like goldfinches and yellowhammers and so on.

 

[luka]

The tropics are full of vulgar orchids and toucans and birds of paradise and lurid fruits hanging suggestively from the trees.

 

[luka]

Central heating and insulation and indoor work means we can adopt a Mediterranean diet but I don't think we should abandon our native colour pallete

 

[constant escape]

Ideologies could be considered fake while someone's values could be considered real, no? If an ideology is that which is averaged out and abstracted from a collection of value systems, it is almost certainly leaving something by the wayside. But perhaps ideologies are still useful ways of understanding how values operate and develop, provided one remains skeptical of them.

I think I see your point @luka about it being fake, but perhaps I am taking it too seriously.

An ideology, as a mold of potential values, is fake if and only if actual values are the only values that are held as real. I think I would argue that.

Could we argue that someone's values are fake if they force them into the preexisting mold of some ideology? That is, if they engineer their value system in accordance to what they think are the optimal tenets of a certain ideology?

I mean, trying taking a step back, I think I see your point about it all being overly systematized and wrung of immediate, affective potency - but much of our world speaks that language, no? Is it not worthwhile to learn this language?

 

[constant escape]

I love where you're taking this already. I might be more bent on mapping the affects through the poesy to the discourse (?), but that certainly doesn't mean I don't have loads to learn from your approaches.

 

[luka]

I dunno. I think you should follow your own obsessions wherever they lead you.