In a Old Zen storyTwo monks argue if a flag acts or if it is the wind that agitates. Their teacher strikes them both stupid, saying: “It is your mind that moves.” The Koan Old by centuries illustrates a zen point of points – and later philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists – have all underlined at one time or another: human experience occurs in the mind, but we share reality by language and culture, and these have established the terms on the way we perceive what we are experiencing.
Such observations bring us to another question similar to a koan: if a language does not have a word for something like blue color, the thing can we say to exist in the speaker's mind? We can do without the idea that there is a blue color “over there” in the world. Color is a collaboration between light, eye, optic nerve and visual cortex. And yet, says Maria Michela Sassi, professor of ancient philosophy at Pisa University“Each culture has its own way of named and categorize colors.”
The most famous example comes from the ancient Greeks. Since the 18th century, researchers stressed that in the thousands of words in Iliad And OdysseyHomer never describes once – sea, sky, you call it – as blue. It is not only the Greeks who have not seen blue or who have not seen it as we do, writes Sassi:
There is a specific Greek chromatic culture, just as there is an Egyptian, Indian, European culture, etc., each of them is reflected in a vocabulary which has its own particularity, and not to be measured only by the scientific meter of the Newtonian paradigm.
It was formerly thought that the differences in cultural colors had to do with the stages of evolutionary development – that the more “primitive” peoples had a less developed biological meaning. But the differences in color perception are “not due to variable anatomical structures of the human eye”, writes Sassi, “but to the fact that different eye areas are stimulated, which triggers different emotional responses, all according to different cultural contexts”.
As explained by aspapscience video above, evidence of literature and ancient Greek philosophy show that, since blue was not part of Homer and that the shared vocabulary of its readers (yellow and green do not appear either), it may not have been part of their perceptual experience either. The spread of blue ink around the world as a relatively recent phenomenon has to do with its availability. “If you think about it,” writes Kevin Loria of Business Insider“Blue does not appear much in nature – there are no blue animals, blue eyes are rare and blue flowers are mainly human creations.”
The blue color has taken hold of modern times with the development of substances that could act as a blue pigment, as Prussian blueInvented in Berlin, made in China and exported to Japan in the 19th century. “The only ancient culture to develop a word for blue was the Egyptians – and in this case, they were also the only culture that had a way to produce a blue dye.” The color is not only cultural, it is also technological. But first, perhaps it could be a linguistic phenomenon.
A modern researcher, Jules Davidoff, found that this was true in experiences with a Namibian people whose language makes no distinction between blue and green (but names many more thin shades than English). “Davidoff says that without a word for a color”, writes Loria, “without a way of identifying it as different, it is much more difficult for us to notice what is unique on this subject.” Unless we are blind, we “see” all the same things when we look at the world because of the basic biology of human eyes and brain. But that some colors appear, it seems, must do less with what we see that with what we are already ready to expect.
Note: an earlier version of this article appeared on our site in 2021.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him to @jdmagness
Finn founded Learnopoly to provide unbiased, in-depth online course reviews, helping learners make informed choices. With a decade in financial services, he developed strategic partnerships and business development expertise. After a frustrating experience with a biased course review, Finn was inspired to create a trusted learning resource.