--Remarks on Colour-- is the last fruit of one of the greatest intellectuals of the XXth century. It is a book that allows a most clear view of how intuitively brilliant Wittgenstein is; but in more than one sense, it is disappointing. Above all because he writes it largely on the shoulders of Goethe's --Farbenlehre-- and Runge's observations, without dedicating a single comment to him who has been increasingly disclosed as his mentor and master of youth: the unsurpassed creature of insight named Schopenhauer.

As a whole, Wittgenstein's book can be considered a bundle of topic additions and observations to the Farbenlehre. As everything he wrote, it is extremely sharp and illuminating, indeed of inestimable value. However, it lacks what Goethe's readers would be expecting to see: a personal position on those which were Goethe's main aims; firstly, the critique of Newton's famous spectrum of colors: two centuries ago, Goethe brilliantly challenged the Newtonian notion, still held in utmost esteem in our days, that white is composed by a melange of seven colors through a prism. Secondly, an appreciation of Goethe's attempt to postulate what he intuited as the original phenomenon, Urphaenomen, without being able to explain why: colors complement each other qualitatively in pairs - the most important examples would be orange and blue; yellow and violet; and, above all else, green and red.

Wittgenstein is also unfair to Goethe: criticizes him for not having presented a finished theory (III, 125) as if he had ambitioned that; whereas Goethe expressly states in his work that what he has to offer is but "Data zu einer Theorie der Farben". In fact, to translate --Farbenlehre-- in any language as "Theory" of Colors would be a similar mistake. The gap between Goethe's objective observations and subjective self-awareness is bridged precisely by Schopenhauer's treatise of 1816, --On Vision and Colors--, an attempt to account for the subjective forms of colours; Wittgenstein does not mention it once.

Maybe one could, very scholarly speaking, call this a case of bad bibliographical review by a genius thinker. For --Remarks on Colour-- does bring the impression that Wittgenstein did not really know Schopenhauer's treatise at all. But this can only bring astonishment to the reader: the same astonishment that arises when one sees how unnoticed the book has slipped through almost 200 years; for example by Rudolf Steiner, the brilliant thinker who prepared and commented the intents of Goethe in the present edition of the Farbenlehre (3 vols. Verlag Freies Geistesleben). In the case of Wittgenstein, this is especially striking when one considers how much he dwelled with the philosopher's works as he prepared his earlier projects, particularly as the Tractatus was written (a good account can be found at Bryan Magee's --Philosophy of Schopenhauer--, 2nd. ed.). Had Wittgenstein read --On Vision and Colors--, things would have been a lot different, and maybe this entire book would have followed a completely alternate path, since it would have to rise up to the task of judging the treatise of 1816. A sad instance of his neglect can be seen when, at page III-26, Wittgenstein makes comments which he does believe are quite decisive and original, and which would be indeed, had Schopenhauer not already explained why. Witty writes: "Blue and yellow, as well as red and green, seem to me to be opposites - but perhaps that is simply because I am used to seeing them at opposite points on the colour circle". It is something to be truly mourned that a man with such a marvelous intuitive grasp of this fact has missed the chance to meditate the theory that seeks to account for his perceptions. Because they bring no novelty to whomever has had the chance to read Schopenhauer's thoughts of why colors are qualitatively complementary.

At the end, the general impression that remains is that, theoretically, Wittgenstein's comments about colors stand one step below Schopenhauer's treatise, corroborating and indeed confirming it; exactly in the same way in which the --Tractatus-- stands one step below the --Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason--, corroborating and confirming it; and, likewise, not mentioning it.

Schopenhauer's treatise has been for many years out of print in English. Shouldering and even surpassing the Farbenlehre, it is perhaps the most important but, at once, the least read human study of the borderline where philosophy and physiology meet. Which is where Wittgenstein also stands with this little red book, so acclaimed by his own fans.

To read Hans Morgenthau is to meet his sharp and fearless mind seeking `to speak truth to power'. During most of his carrier, his main public cause was to call forth responsibility from North-American policy-makers. His days were the days in which mankind finally found itself face to face with the prospect of the end; here was the setting of a unique era, superior in danger and complexity to all other previous ones; and Morgenthau was one of the few-too-few authors who could see its political problems.

At the end of his life, he wrote the following words: "While I may be best known for my contributions to foreign policy and more particularly to American foreign policy, it is a paradox that my major intellectual interest from the very outset of my academic career has not been foreign policy or even politics in general but philosophy. After WWII, I made a conscious choice in concentrating my efforts on foreign policy because I realized that the existence of the United States and even of mankind depended on a sound foreign policy. What good was it to speculate on philosophic topics if in a couple of years or decades the world would be reduced to a radioactive rubble? So ever since, for more than twenty years, I have been caught in this self-imposed public service which by no means coincides with my real intellectual interests".

Morgenthau died in 1980, shortly before the Cold War itself was over. His political thought will outlast not only the competition of superpowers, but also what was then taken as states and nations; as well as Aristotle survived the disappearance of the Greek polis and Machiavelli, the unification of Italy. What unites great political thinkers is their capacity to make it through the surface of their objects and share a glimpse of the very essence of politics. In so doing, they expose truths about the human condition which remain, among the problems of the day, recognizable to eyes which may be very distant.

Of course, almost every man is a son of his era and expresses reality in terms hopefully understandable by his contemporaries. Thus, to point out the rediscovery of those recognizably human and tragically recurrent facts among one's present configurations is a most fortunate task in a biographical work. This is why Morgenthau's Intellectual Biography, written by Swiss professor Christoph Frei, is a special work for those who wish to understand the process of putting together the pieces of his line of reasoning which, in the early 1930's, started being dubbed 'political realism', but only effectively reached public in the late 1940's.

Before the Biography, those who went through Morgenthau's work in English had never had a contact with his early papers, which contain all the seeds of his later intellectual developments. Dr. Frei was the first to study these papers, along with other never seen documents, diaries and letters. Having conducted a trilingual research in English, German and French, he provides us with a reconstruction of the first decades of Morgenthau's life, points out to the first time when theory-relevant thoughts were put to paper and presents a lively account of the difficult context in which these thoughts began to flourish.

The book has two parts. The first part deals with Morgenthau's life story, his studies in different cities in Germany, his acquaintance and perceptions of its several ongoing schools of social sciences, and the beginning of his professional career. As the specter of totalitarianism approached the old continent with its somber colors, we watch his difficulties first in Europe as a Jew, as he tried to emigrate to America, and later on in America as a German and a Jew, struggling first for survival and next to retake his intellectual projects. This first part leads up to the success he achieved with the publication of Politics Among Nations in 1948 and deals, in smaller detail, with the second half of his life as a successful political scientist, trying to contribute to the North-American experience during the Cold War.

As the second part of the book unfolds, we go back to the early decades of the twentieth century and embark in a philosophical trip side by side with a young man's experience of disillusionment: his meditation of civilized life in a time of decay. Here we see the formation of Morgenthau's Weltanschauung and approach the central core of his view of man and society. Frei lets him speak out some of his frankest thoughts about the limits of science, the political sphere, the place and implications of power among human beings. Frei also strikes us with the clever insight of turning Immanuel Kant's four philosophical questions: "What is man?; What am I allowed to know? What should I expect?; and What should I do??" into the skeleton of his investigation. At its end, the book concludes that Morgenthau's realism is in fact a sober type of idealism; as it puts, "transcendent idealism". Not exactly a `con' or `neocon', as the labels and recent fads propelled among the internationalist Publikum , but, instead, perhaps what Henri Kissinger had once called a "white revolutionary", when referring to the life of Otto von Bismarck in a seminal article of his youth.

The two greatest contributions of this biography are the following: firstly, it unveils Morgenthau's central formative reference in a surprising and unprecedented way: the chapter about his existential dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche is, without a doubt, the most fascinating of all. Secondly, it swims against the epistemological and quantitative tides of contemporary political science so as to concentrate its work in Morgenthau's philosophical side - which is, when all is said and done, what truly matters for those who are attempting to think politics with their own heads.