But is not just bats and aliens, fictional or hopefully imagined, wielding subjective experiences we can’t understand. Nagel cites his own inability to understand “the subjective character of the experience of a person deaf and blind from birth.” Across human abilities and cultures, there are myriad ways in which our sensory capabilities and even our cultures and languages render our subjective experiences of the world incomprehensible to others of our own species. Some languages have more words for basic colors than others; some name only dark, white, and red, while others, like Russian, divide blue into light and dark in the same way that English distinguishes red from pink. But still, research has shown that even people who don’t have different words for, say, blue and green, can differentiate between the two. Although when we each make our way through the world, who knows what different things we see.
A relatively well-known fact is that Homer writes of the “wine-dark sea” because the Greeks had no word for blue. He looked at the ocean and saw something different from what we see. But Maria Michela Sassi, a professor of ancient philosophy at the University of Pisa, sheds a deeper light on the subject.
In his essay, “The Sea Was Never Blue,” Sassi writes that, well, first of all, Homer had words at least for aspects of blue: “kuaneos, to denote a dark shade of blue that blends with black; and glaucous, to describe a kind of ‘blue-gray’”, as in Grey-eyed Athena. But, in fact, the sky was “big, starry, or iron or bronze (because of its solid fixity)”, and the sea was “whitish” and “greyish blue”, or “like a thought”, “like the wine” or “purple.” But neither the sea nor the sky were ever simply blue.
This didn’t just apply to our familiar blue extensions. Sassi collects examples of Greek descriptions that would seem patently incorrect to a modern reader. “The simple word xanthos it covers the most varied shades of yellow, from the bright blond hair of the gods, to amber, passing through the reddish glow of fire. chlorinessince it is related to Chloe (grass), suggests the color green but can also transmit a bright yellow, like honey.
We know that grass and honey are not the same color, didn’t the Greeks somehow?
Human eyes have not changed in the last 2,500 years, although in 1858 the classicist and eventual British Prime Minister William Gladstone proposed that, as Sassi puts it, “the visual organ of the ancients was still in its infancy.” But while Gladstone’s conclusion was incorrect, he was doing his best to account for the fact that ancient Greek writing reflects a particular sensitivity to light, not just tone.
Our contemporary understanding of color is primarily defined by hue, position on the rainbow spectrum, with variations in lightness or value. (Red and pink have the same hue, but pink has a lighter value.) There is also the saturation, the intensity of the color: deep blue versus less saturated blue-gray.
Sassi sees in the Greek descriptions of color a greater emphasis on prominence, which is how striking a color is. Red is more prominent than either blue or green, and of course Sassi finds the descriptions of green and blue in Greek to focus more on attention-grabbing qualities than on inconspicuous hues. She writes: “In some contexts, the Greek adjective chlorines should be translated as ‘fresh’ instead of ‘green’, or leucos as ‘bright’ instead of ‘white’”. It wasn’t that the Greeks couldn’t see blue, they just didn’t care as much about blue as they did about other qualities of what they were seeing.