"You really don't like the look of OS X?" my friend Eolake Stobblehouse of MacCreator.com asked last week, after I had said as much in a recent column. "I think you simply don't like too much color."

Well, as I explained to Eolake, its not that I don't like color. I like some colors a great deal, but it depends how and to what they're applied, and frankly, I'm not too partial to OS X's "Aqua" interface. It's spectacular, but I suspect that I'll get tired of it really fast, and I find its unsubtlety distracting.

My choice of iMacs would be the Graphite SE model, and I think the G4 PowerMac is much more attractive than the blue & white Yosemite. In color, my tastes generally run to subdued blues, grays, and black, although I can be quite partial to brighter hues in certain instances.

Color taste is a very subjective thing, and some suggest that our favorite colors reveal a lot about our personalities. Last year I wrote a column for MacTimes entitled "The Tao Of The iMac Colors," in which I explored this topic a bit, and I've been inspired to revisit it by several developments, including Eolake's comment, the imminent introduction of OS X with its colorful (too colorful IMHO) "Aqua" interface, the introduction of the aforementioned Graphite iMac DV SE, which makes the hypothesis I posited last year more compelling, and finally by an article recently published by Adobe entitled "Which iMac Are You?"

The article's author, Paul Myers, notes that Apple was not the first personal computer maker to offer colored machines (SGI has sold cobalt-colored computers for some time). However, Mr. Myers observes that Apple was the first to offer such an extensive palette of color options.

As I did in my "Tao" article, Mr. Myers cites an article published last year by Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute and author of "Colors for Your Every Mood," who contends that our color choices reveal only our moods, but indeed "a whole profile of personality and attitude traits." Ms. Eiseman notes that among the five original iMac "fruit" colors, Blueberry and Strawberry have the broadest general appeal, while Tangerine, Grape and Lime are more likely to be favored by self-styled nonconformists.

To paraphrase Ms. Eiseman:

• Blueberry signifies constancy and truth, and is the favorite color of 35% of the U.S. population (Blueberry being the best-selling iMac/iBook color as well). Blue, she says, is tender, soothing, cool, passive, secure and comfortable, inspiring calm, confidence and harmony, a sense of control and responsibility. and appeals to people who value credibility, authority, the basics, classicism, conservatism, strength, dependability, traditionalism, confidence, professionalism, sensitivity to others, trust and honor, responsibility, and who tend to have a perfectionist streak. As I noted above, blue is one of my favorite colors, and it appears that Ms. Eiseman has me cased personality-wise. Or not. Why then am I not that thrilled with the Blueberry iMacs and iBooks? There is a plausible explanation. Read on.

• Red (iMac "Strawberry") signifies power and strength -- being the second most powerful color, after black. Red is the color of excitement; dynamism; danger and sex. Those who prefer red value intensity, passion, drama, energy, aggressiveness, daring, achievement, impulsiveness, challenge, competition, excitement, optimism, assertiveness, new things and new experiences. "Red people" are born leaders crave attention and hate routine and humdrum.

• Tangerine signifies radiance and heat, orange being the hottest of all colors. People who like Tangerine/orange value sociability, fun, high-energy, adventure, originality, determination, and extroversion. "Tangerine people" are "people persons," charming, gregarious, and good-natured.

• Grape signifies passion and magic, and people who choose it are likely to value creativity, complexity, mystery, spirituality, wit, sensitivity, uniqueness, and intrigue. " Grape people" tend to be highly observant, creative, supersensitive, introspective, artistic or mystic types, maybe a bit vain and/or moody, and perhaps designers or performers, or those who have aspirations to be.

• Lime signifies nature and pleasure, refreshment, growth, coolness, regeneration and renewal of life. People who choose Lime iMacs are likely to be cool, calm, and collected, valuing stability and balance, good citizenship, neighborliness, organization, conformity. "'Green people' are intelligent and understand new concepts, and although they are more inclined to do what is popular and conventional rather than take risk with something new," says Ms. Eiseman, although aficionados of bright fluorescent greens (Aqua?) are more likely to be adventurous.

I find these analyses somewhat convincing, although as basically a "blue/gray/black person" it puzzles me why I like the Tangerine iBook better than it's Blueberry sibling, and as noted, I'm not blown away by the Blueberry iMac either. It is also unfortunate that Ms. Eiseman was not able to analyze the Graphite iMac in her article (which was published early last year), because I think it represents an important missing piece of the color/personality puzzle.

The Five Transformations And Some Philosophical Groundwork

To expand and build on Ms. Eiseman's analytical foundation, I turned to the "five transformations" theory of personality and character types proposed in Taoist philosophy. This seemed to potentially fit neatly with the original five-color iMac motif, although as I was to discover: not quite as neatly as I had hoped.

I hope that readers familiar with my "Tao" article from last year will forgive some recapitulation from here on. However, the Mac Web community's resident professional philosopher, David Schultz of AppleLust.com and MacSimple, kindly reviewed my philosophical musings that appear below and offered some suggestions, comments and insights that were not incorporated in the original article. And if philosophical discussion makes your eyes glaze over, you are hereby excused to just scroll quickly past the next twelve paragraphs to reach the concluding discussion of color/personality relationships toward the end of the article.

From its name, Taoism sounds like a religion, but it isn't in the sense that most Westerners understand religion -- that is: a relationship with a personal God. Rather, Taoism is more accurately understood as a philosophy, and it is coherently possible embrace certain Taoist ideas simultaneously with affirmation of other philosophical systems and/or religions, just as the early Christian Church adopted ideas of the classic Greek pagan philosophers, especially Plato, and St. Thomas Aquinas did later on with the philosophy of Aristotle in developing his Christian scholastic theology.

(David Schultz comments: "Some say that Taoism is a stance towards the world; Others call it a godless religion, or secular religion or however you want to put it, assuming that a god is not necessary for a religion. For an example of a philosopher who uses recognizably Taoist notions see Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time" -- yeah, I am sure that excites you!)

Part of the confusion arises from the fact that the East never adopted philosophical dualism as its dominant philosophical paradigm, as the West did in embracing Rene Decartes' construct of a hard boundary between body/matter; (that is: things that can be empirically measured and divided and that occupy space), and mind/spirit (things that cannot be scientifically studied because they are indivisible and do not occupy space).

David Schultz suggests that I am linking Descartes too closely to dualism here, and thinks that you can make the between measurable and not and still reject dualism. Dualism, in David's definition, is the belief "that there is both a subject and object, and its rejection is the view that there is only a subject, or the subject is the only thing worth considering in our theories. For example, Descartes believed in both mind and matter, which are the two distinct kinds of substances in the universe. The mind (subject) is 'me' and matter, such as my body (object), is 'mine' but not identical to me. The rejection of this view is that the 'me' is fundamental." However, Goerge Ohsawa, who was well-read in both Western and Taoist philosophy laid responsibility for dualistic philosophical assumptions in the modern West at Descartes' doorstep.

The problem with Cartesian dualism as I perceive it is that Descartes contrived it at least partly as a clever workaround designed to keep the Church's Inquisition off his back. Unfortunately, this "Cartesian compromise" was flawed from the beginning, in the sense that it denied transactions between mind/spirit and body/matter, which only the most ideologically hidebound materialist would gainsay the existence of. The fact that Western philosophy has embraced the dualistic Cartesian model, in my opinion hobbles its ability to conceive of whole systems and complex relationships, such as the relationship between color preference and personality.

David Schultz argues that Descartes was more worried about science, thinking that it might rob us of humanity, and thus proposed that there was something which is not capable of being measured, something about us not open to scientific methods - - the soul. "True," says David, "he had doubts at the end, but as for his mature philosophy, I think we can say with some certainty that he embraced dualism though saw it was not completely unproblematic. Because some philosophers have adopted Cartesian dualism it has kept them from solving many of their traditional problems, and has caused more puzzles than it solves, some say. See my Website for my class at http://members.home.net/platos-academy for more on Descartes."

In the East, (as in the West up until about 500 years ago), no hard boundary is proposed between the material and the immaterial, rest and motion, time and space, and so on -- rather such things are perceived as part of a continuum. The essence of Oriental philosophy, particularly the Taoist branch, is the idea that dialectical complementarity defines what is real: ergo, what has a front, has a back. What has a top, has a bottom. The universe is made up of two essential forces, Yin and Yang, and what we perceive as reality is a product of the creative tension between those two essential forces.

Bear with me. I'm working my way back to the topic of color and personality. The Eastern philosophers believe that in the beginning was a heaven, and on earth there was chaos and nothingness. Out of the nothingness yin-yang differentiations began to emerge -- left-right, bright-dark, up-down, male-female. These dialectics are interdependent, and can't exist without each other. The movement of these differentiations gave rise to "qi" or ch'i -- the life force or vital breath. Ch'i is expressed in matter as the five essential elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, which further correspond to the "five transformations" or "five energies," and indeed to five distinct personality types -- each of which is associated with a color preference.

Taoists maintain that ch'i is neither a vague metaphysical notion nor electromagnetic energy as we know it, although it may well be a sort of electromagnetic energy that Western science is as yet incapable of measuring. It has been proposed that ch'i is probably a complex organic combination of substance, energy, and message. Western science insists on studying substance, energy, and message separately, and thus is incapable of quantifying what conditions will occur when all three produce an effect simultaneously. (But see David Bohm's work on this, "Implicature and Wholeness" I think is the title, among others. DS)

The Taoists teach that ch'i is a life force, but it is not life itself, since all things -- animate and inanimate -- have ch'i. They might define life as a synthesis of ch'i and material substance -- the life force in combination with certain physical properties. Ch'i itself is an energy/substance with a metaphysical as well as a physical aspect -- a demi-physical force whose relative physical aspect is mass and whose basic property is energy that creates spatio-temporal organization. These notions are pretty much nonsensical and inexplicable in traditional Western scientific terms.

However, David Schultz notes: "with quantum mechanism winning the day, many scientists are turning to this kind of view, in the West. This has caught the philosopher's eye and so, not all are looking there too. In fact some say that matter is a myth."

Western, Cartesian philosophy emphasizes form and function. [Form and function are distinct from dualism though. Aristotle emphasized these yet was not a Cartesian. DS] Taoist philosophy studies spontaneous natural harmony of process. Westerners focus on atomism, precision, and fragmentation -- individual isolated bits of reality and reductive definitions. Taoists are more interested in relationships -- how things relate and interact as a synergistic whole. Western thinking is oriented toward ongoing and ever more minute analysis, while Taoism seeks to see how things work, not as isolated fragments, but as a harmonious interaction of complimentary opposites -- an ongoing synthesis which is mapped and explained in the five transformations construct.

(Philosophobes can resume reading again here. :-) )

The Tao Of The iMac Colors -- Or not?

If you're still with me, the foregoing explanation actually does have something to do with the choice of which of the five iMac colors a person prefers. The "five transformations" cited above correspond to colors as well as many other characteristics, which in turn correspond to five distinct character profiles.

Now, it would have been great fun if the five transformations had neatly dovetailed with Ms. Eiseman's thesis and with the original five "fruit" colors Apple chose for the iMac last year, and indeed they come close in some cases, but were not quite a perfect fit in 1999, although the introduction of the Graphite iMac brings them considerably closer. Here is what I learned.

WOOD - Blue-Green (Bondi Blue?, Aqua?)

The first of the five personality types is "Wood." Wood individuals tend to be dynamic, practical, impatient achievers, pioneers and innovators who are determined to make things happen. The wood personality's strengths are clarity of vision, foresight, judgment, and decisiveness. "Wood people" seek challenge and push to the limit, enjoying pressure and working well under it, admiring speed, novelty, and skill, loving action, movement, and adventure, and liking to be first, best, and only. The negative side of the wood character profile includes tendencies toward intolerance and impatience, impulsiveness and volatile emotions, a weakness for addictions, and extremism -- self-indulgence or self-punishment. Wood's season is spring, its desire is purpose and its time of day is dawn.

The inner creative tensions affecting "Wood people" are that they:
• like to be in charge -- but miss the companionship of equals
• love action and doing -- but sometimes suffer from their impulsiveness
• tend to be legalistic -- but like to break rules
• crave freedom -- but have a need to strive and struggle
• feel invincible -- but fear vulnerability and loss of control

The wood psyche's existential query is "What is the purpose?" its emotional addiction is to be aroused, and its spiritual fear is to be helpless. Wood's desires and values are: struggle, action, arousal, practicality, uniqueness, challenge, achievement , agility, interdependence, and contest. Wood's fears and difficulties are with: slowness, clumsiness, ambiguity, interference, authority, compromise, frustration, constancy, submitting, and confinement.

If this sounds like you, your color is blue, but more the "Bondi" aquamarine or teal of the original iMac and the Mac OS X "Aqua" interface, rather than the purer "Blueberry" blue of the fruit-colored iMacs, the iBook, and the b&w PowerMacs. Even attempting a synthesis of Ms. Eiseman's analysis of blue and green did not provide a strong correlation. Her descriptions of "Strawberry" and "Tangerine" people sound more like our "wood" personality archetype.

On the other hand, my son, Tristan Moore, fits the "Wood" personality profile described above so perfectly that it is almost comical, and his strong iMac/iBook color preference is Blueberry and bondi.

FIRE - Strawberry

"Fire people" tend to be talkative and extroverted. They love excitement and magic, and relish intimacy and sensuality. They are highly intuitive and passionately empathetic, great communicators as well as strong believers in the powers of charisma and desire. Fire loves sensation, drama, sentiment. heat, brightness, and vibrancy. The negative aspects of the fire personality are tendencies toward anxiety, agitation, and even frenzy, nervous exhaustion, drivenness, and insomnia. They have a potential weakness for abusing "mind-altering" substances. Fire's season is summer, its desire is fulfillment, and its time of day is high noon.

Fire's creative tensions are:
• a desire for contact and intimacy -- but a need for solitude
• a love of sensation and feeling -- but a fear of being overwhelmed by intensity
• a compulsion to say "yes" -- and an inability to say "no"
• a yearning for fusion -- but a dread of dissolution
• a desire to live in the present -- but a fear of the future.

The fire psyche's existential query is "How to express myself?" its emotional addiction is to be in love, and its spiritual fear is to be cut off. Fire's desires and values are: excitement, intimacy, sensuality, spontaneity, expression, yielding, merging, passion, self-exposure, and performing. Fire's fears and difficulties are: inactivity, separation, confusion, roughness, boundaries, deliberation, dullness, ordinariness, conservation, and suspicion.

If you're a "fire person," your color is red, and a "Strawberry" iMac is for you. Indeed, strawberries (and apricots) are the fruit that corresponds to the fire type in the five transformations theory. In this instance, there is a fairly strong correlation with Ms. Eiseman's hypothesis of the likely "Strawberry" iMac buyer.

EARTH - Tangerine

"Earth people" tend to be compassionate, nurturing, caring types, whose fondest wish is to be involved and needed. They busy themselves with arranging and harmonizing the world, and like to be in charge of organizing things in the background, but shun the Limelight that fire people compulsively seek. Earth energy is agreeable and accommodating, and desires to please, to be all things to all people. Earth seeks harmony and togetherness, and demands loyalty, serenity, security, and predictability. Earth's negative characteristics are a penchant for worry, obsession, and self-doubt. Earth people can be meddling and over-protective, may overextend themselves and then lapse into inertia, and are prone to harboring unrealistic expectations of both themselves and others and thus frequently disappointed. Earth's season is late summer (which is a "fifth season" added to the familiar four in the five transformations construct), its desire is connectedness, and its time of day is late afternoon.

Earth's creative tensions are:
• craving stillness -- but feeling stuck
• wanting to be filled -- but feeling weighed down, overstuffed, and overwhelmed
•desiring emptiness -- but fearing that there is nothing at the core
• desiring change -- but wanting things to stay the same
• wanting to be needed -- but fearful of being absorbed and losing self-identity.

The earth psyche's existential query is "What is my role?" its emotional addiction is to be needed, and its spiritual fear is to be lost. Earth's desires and values are: relationships, stability, family, sharing, harmony, loyalty, commitment, diplomacy, involvement, and interdependence. Earth's fears and difficulties are separateness, disloyalty, conflict, change, aloneness, impermanence, greediness, insincerity, emptiness, and displacement.

The color of "Earth people" is orange or a deep ocher yellow -- not a bad match for the "Tangerine" iMac. There are some correlations with Ms. Eiseman's analysis, but not as clearly as with Strawberry/red.

METAL - Pearl White - (Blue? "Ice?")

"Metal people" are fastidious perfectionists, discriminating masters of form and function who admire precise definition, structure, and discipline, as well as virtue, discretion, and authority. Their central desire is to live according to reason and principle, and they tend to be impatient with vagueness and intuition. The "metal person" holds both self and others to the highest of standards, and has a weakness for aesthetic beauty, pomp and ceremony, form and order, and refinement. Metal's negative characteristics include tendencies to indifference and inhibition, and the metal person can easily become autocratic, gratuitously strict, persnickety, unnecessarily formal, distant and unnatural, and must guard against self- righteousness and disillusionment. Metal's season is autumn, its desire is order, and its time of day is dusk.

Metal's creative tensions are found in:
• wanting relationship -- but needing distance
• knowing what is right -- but accepting what is safe
• aspiring toward beauty -- but settling for utility
• desiring joy -- but fearing spontaneity
• admiring creativity and ingenuity -- but being intolerant of disorder and dissonance.

The metal psyche's existential query is "What is right?" its emotional addiction is to be right, and its spiritual fear is to be corrupt. Metal's desires and values are order, purity, reason, aesthetics, definition, simplicity, quality, correctness, high standards, and precision. Its fears and difficulties are intimacy, complexity, chaos, nonsense, spontaneity, carelessness, impropriety, intemperance, vagueness, and shapelessness.

If Metal energy is you, then your color is pure white, for which there is no corresponding iMac flavor color, -- or is there? iMacs are all partly "Ice" or translucent white. Also, remember that snow, which appears white, is really blue. Looking to Ms. Eiseman's analyses, I see some strong resonances of the metal psyche in the "Blueberry" category. Or to look at it another way, Graphite is a "metal" color.

WATER - Blueberry?, Grape?, or Graphite (black)

"Water people" are philosophical, non-conformist intellectuals whose passion is the relentless pursuit of truth. They tend to be imaginative, articulate, self-contained and self-sufficient, introspective, reflective, clever, penetrating, critical, and scrutinizing. The water psyche seeks knowledge and understanding, and prefers to remain hidden, enigmatic, and anonymous. Water's negative aspects include a disposition toward being distant, emotionally inaccessible, and undemonstrative. This reserve can lead to isolation and loneliness, tactlessness, unwillingness to forgive, and a suspicious -- even paranoid -- state of mind. Water's season is winter, its desire is truth, and its time of day is midnight.

Water's creative tensions are:
• a yearning for truth -- but a fear of exposure
• a craving for connection -- but an intolerance of contact
• a desire to be squeezed -- but a fear of being squashed
• wants to penetrate inside -- but detests being absorbed
• enjoys being left alone -- but dreads being abandoned.

The water psyche's existential query is "Where do I come from?" its emotional addiction is to be protected, and its spiritual fear is of becoming extinct. Water's desires and values are solitude, mystery, continuity, originality, toughness, self- sufficiency, privacy, anonymity, caution, and conservation. It's fears and difficulties are sharing, rashness, vulnerability, ignorance, dishonesty, superficiality, trusting, faith, exposure, waste, and softness.

If you're a water person, your colors are blue, deep purple, and black, so either a "Blueberry," a "Grape" or most likely a Graphite iMac (or a PowerBook G3!) would seem to theoretically suit. In fact, blueberries, Grapes, and blackberries are the fruits corresponding to the water type in the five transformations theory. In Ms. Eiseman's analysis, I see correspondence here with both her Grape and Blueberry archetypes.

Being as quintessentially a "Water" type as Tristan is "Wood," I would have to say that the Graphite iMac and PowerMac G4, both of which I find aesthetically appealing, fill in missing pieces of our puzzle nicely. My guess is that the Blueberry and Grape shades chosen by Apple are just too bright and lacking in gravitas to really appeal to "Water" types or to "Metal" folks either for that matter. My predilection for Tangerine iBooks? Ask me again when a Graphite iBook becomes available!

In Summary

Of course, Apple did not choose the five iMac flavor colors with the five transformations in mind. There is no real place in the Taoist palette of characteristics for the Lime green model (Wood energy's "green-blue" comes closest color-wise, but fits Bondi-blue better). However, Ms. Eiseman's analysis of the "Lime" personality type suggests a set of traits most closely approximated by "Earth energy" in the five transformations, while the characteristics cited for "Fire energy" in the Taoist analysis seem to encompass both Eiseman's Strawberry and Tangerine archetypes. The super-popular Blueberry iMac fits to some degree with two or three of the five transformations categories (perhaps that's one reason why it is the best-selling color), while Ms. Eiseman's profile for "Grape" people also seems to correspond strongly to aspects of the already crowded "Fire" category, as well as with "Water."

However, my wife, who is a classic "Earth" type, also likes the Blueberry iMac best, followed by a tie between Strawberry and Bondi, and says that she prefers "blue everything." The paradigm appears to break down here.

Nevertheless, I find the five transformations personality profiling in general applies to most people I know too accurately to discount. The colors? They're to enjoy.

For more color commentary from David Schultz, see his "What Color of iMac Would an Anti-Quark Buy? at http://www.applelust.com/

Charles W. Moore

Bibliography

If you are interested in learning more about the five transformations or Taoist philosophy, here are the resources I consulted in researching this article:

I am especially indebted to Harriet Beinfield and Efrem Korngold, and their seminal volume, "Between Heaven and Earth: A GUI," (Ballantine, 1992), for their comprehensive outline and analysis of the five personality archetypes, which they further define as "The Pioneer" (Wood); The Wizard (Fire); The Peacemaker (Earth); The Alchemist (Metal); and The Philosopher (Water).

Other resources consulted were:

"Huang Ti Nei Ching Su Wen" ("The Yellow Emperor's Classic Of Internal Medicine" -- dates from waaaaay back), Tr. Ilza Veith, University of Chicago Press, 1966.

Bruce Holbrook, "The Stone Monkey"

William Tara, "Macrobiotics and Human Behavior," Japan Publications Inc., 1984

Bill Moyers, "Healing And The Mind," Doubleday, 1993

Deng Ming-Dao, "The Wandering Taoist," Harper and Row, 1983
Deng Ming-Dao, "The Seven Bamboo Tablets Of The Cloudy Satchel"

(The two volumes listed immediately above plus a third in a trilogy have I think been incorporated into Chronicles of Tao by Deng Ming-Dao, Harper San Francisco, October, 1993)

George Ohsawa, "The Order of The Universe," Tr. Jim Poggi, George Ohsawa Macrobiotic Foundation, 1986

C.G. Jung. "Psyche and Symbol," Doubleday, 1958

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March 12, 2010