Take a second and look up at the sky. Or if there’s a ceiling or it’s night time or maybe it’s grey think back to a clear day when you last saw a blue sky. Simple enough, right? But at the risk of sounding like Seth Rogan in the Pineapple Express, how do you know that the blue you're seeing is the same blue everyone else sees? For that matter, how do you know what you're calling "blue" today is the same colour you saw yesterday?
These aren't just super-baked-late-night musings or the kind of questions that emerge after consuming of your favourite recreational substances. Questions like this captured the attention of one of the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, leading him ideas that change how we think about colour, language, and the nature of reality itself.
Wittgenstein wasn't your typical philosopher. Born into one of Europe's wealthiest families in 1889, he initially studied engineering and became fascinated with aeronautics. But a growing obsession with logic and the foundations of mathematics led him down a philosophical rabbit hole essentially developing two distinct philosophical approaches during his lifetime. The early Wittgenstein thought they'd solved all of philosophy's major problems with pure logic. And funnily enough, the later Wittgenstein... well, he thought that approach was completely wrong.
Imagine trying to explain the colour blue to someone who has never seen it. Difficult, isn't it? You might say it's the colour of the sky or the ocean, but what if this person has never seen those either? You might try to describe it as a "cool" colour, but what does "cool" mean to someone who has never experienced blue?
This is what fascinated Wittgenstein. They realised that our understanding of colour isn't just about perception – it's deeply entangled with language and how we learn to use it. When we say "blue," we're not just naming a sensation in our heads. We're participating in what Wittgenstein called a "language game" – a set of rules and practices that give our words meaning.
Think about how we learn to name colours as children. We're not just learning labels for things we already see. We're learning a system of categories that helps us make sense of what we see. This system isn't just personal – it's part of our shared cultural inheritance, passed down through generations of people pointing at things and saying "blue."
Here's where things get even more interesting. Wittgenstein points out that our understanding of colour goes far beyond simple naming. Try to imagine a reddish-green colour. Not brown or olive – a colour that is simultaneously red and green in the way that purple is simultaneously red and blue. You can't do it. But why not? There's nothing logically impossible about such a colour. This reveals that our colour concepts follow rules we've never been explicitly taught, yet we all somehow know them.
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." In other words, the very structure of our language constrains not just how we speak, but how we can even conceive of the world around us.
This brings us to a deeper truth about how we exist in the world. Just as colour isn't purely objective—it's not just a property of objects that exists independently of us—neither is it purely subjective—not just a private experience that varies from person to person. Instead, Wittgenstein saw colour as something that emerges from the interplay between our perceptions, our language, and our shared practices.
This insight reaches far beyond colour. It challenges a fundamental myth of modern life: that we are isolated individuals, free to do whatever we like, whenever we like. Instead, it reveals how deeply interconnected we are through our shared practices and understanding. Just as we can't have a purely private concept of blue that exists outside our shared language and culture, we can't have a purely private existence that stands apart from our community and shared world.
Think about your own journey with the colour blue. Perhaps you first learned it from a crayon, or your favourite childhood toy, or indeed from looking up at the sky. Now think about someone else's journey – maybe they grew up in a culture with different colour categories, or they learned colours through different objects entirely. When both of you look up and say "the sky is blue," you're bridging a gap between two entirely different life experiences, two different paths to understanding.
This is where Wittgenstein's insights about language games become deeply personal. The miracle isn't just that we can agree on calling the sky blue – it's that through this agreement, we create a shared world of meaning. Every time we successfully communicate about colour, we're performing a small act of empathy, reaching across the void between our individual experiences to create something shared and meaningful.
Now let's think about what it would be like if we went beyond the colour blue and the sky. What if we thought about what we mean when we talk about living in a fair society? What does it mean to look after the people who need help? How should we think about the environment, money, culture, inclusion? Suddenly these things don't feel like concepts in isolation but something that we all have the ability to share. The same could be said for our understanding of justice, care, sustainability, and community.
The limits and gaps between us aren't barriers to understanding – they're the spaces where understanding happens. When we acknowledge that each person's "blue" might have its own unique history, its own emotional resonance, its own place in their world, we open ourselves to a richer kind of communication. We move beyond simple agreement about labels to a deeper appreciation of how each person's experience is shaped by their life story.
Maybe when we ask questions like “why is the sky blue?” we can see we're not isolated observers of a fixed reality, but active participants in creating meaning together.
But what do you think? Is this all just naval gazing bullshit cooked up in a university dorm-room with more smoke than Snoop Dogg's green room, or was Wittgenstein onto something with how we share language?