Weighing in on the “More Colors” vs “Fewer Colors” Discussion
I want to engage the “few colors vs a lot of colors” discourse in a long-form post, as well as share some thoughts about how people here are assigning colors. Note that this is my opinion. I can’t prove any of this in a laboratory. As someone who strives to make his thinking as coherent and reasonable as possible, however, I wanted to share my viewpoint.
This subreddit is about color philosophy. I want to begin by describing *what kind of philosophy* color philosophy is.
The color philosophies are *philosophies of value*. Red’s color philosophy, for example, isn’t about metaphysics. It isn’t epistemology. (At least, not directly. We could make some extrapolations.) Rather, a color philosophy is a philosophy about what is valuable and important. More specifically, it is a philosophy about what is more valuable and important than other things—in other words, prioritization.
Someone might think, “Hey, Black is amoral and denies the importance of values. How is Black’s color philosophy about value?”
Black’s color philosophy holds that the self and the self’s own interests are more important than other considerations. Black says: my advancement, autonomy, power, survival, and self-interest matter more than other things.
White says the opposite. White says that the welfare and interests of everyone collectively matter more than other things.
Furthermore, philosophies of value like these come into play when values are in conflict. In Black’s case, for example, when self-interest and interests of others conflict—when Black and others cannot each have what they want—then Black’s philosophy says, “Me getting what I want is more important than other people’s interests.” In other words, color philosophies have maximum import when interests conflict and trade-offs have to happen.
What I see on this subreddit is, people often ignore that color philosophies are about value and priorities. They are not about traits.
That distinction matters enormously because a lot of color assignments on this subreddit operate almost entirely descriptively.
“This character has strong emotions, therefore they must have Red.”
“This character wants to learn something or is intelligent, therefore they must have Blue.”
“This character is self-interested, therefore they’re Black.”
But that is not actually how the philosophies work.
Everyone has emotions. Everyone uses reason. Everyone has self-interest. Everyone cares about other people sometimes. Everyone accepts some things and changes others.
The question is not whether these elements exist in a person. The question is which principles govern their decision-making when those principles conflict.
If caring about your own well-being was all it took to be Black, then everyone would be Black. That’s not sufficient. For a character to be Black, they must care about their own well-being enough that they’re prioritizing it over other things and regularly willing to act to the detriment and harm of others to further themselves. Because that is their philosophy of value.
In the same vein, a truly Red character is not simply emotional. A truly Red character prioritizes emotion over competing considerations. It is not enough to have emotions, even strong emotions: For a character to be Red, they must give their emotions precedence in situations where other considerations would lead them in a different direction. *They must care about their strong emotions enough that they’re prioritizing their emotions over other things when conflicts arise and values conflict*.
And this is why I think fewer-color interpretations are often more coherent than maximalist ones. Because philosophies of value are inherently about prioritizing one set of considerations at the expense of other considerations.
It is difficult to prioritize multiple things to the exclusion of other things simultaneously. Not impossible, but difficult.
Because if everything is prioritized, nothing is prioritized. The entire meaning of value systems emerges through trade-offs. A philosophy only becomes visible when it overrides competing considerations. Otherwise, the color pie collapses into a vague personality inventory where every psychologically normal person becomes five-color by default.
For a character to have many colors, they must be quite inconsistent as a personality. To be Red, they must prioritize emotions over other factors. To be Blue, they must prioritize intellectual deliberation over other factors. To be both, they must prioritize both, and these are often in direct conflict. As we all know, Blue and Red are enemy colors. Once we add one or more other colors, the prioritization process becomes very complex, if not unmanageable.
This is why WUBRG characters in MTG are often represented as impersonal forces and entities. WUBRG and colorless are similar in this regard. They seemingly prioritize everything and nothing.[[Jodah, Grand Unifier]] is a personification of legendary status, and [[The Ur-Dragon]], all of dragonkind. They represent an abstraction or category that spans all colors, prioritizing none yet representing something that is contained within all of them. What they aren’t is an average Joe who has ethics, intelligence, self-interest, emotions, and instincts, all five.
In a similar vein, if we look at color philosophies as philosophies of value that prioritize things over other things, to get to even three colors, we’re looking at quite a complex character, because at least two of the colors individually will oppose each other. To prioritize things that are in conflict simultaneously is difficult to do and usually requires cross-sectional thinking like Rosewater has elaborated for the Ravnica guilds. It might sound hard to prioritize others and the self at the same time, so Orzhov represents prioritization of a sub-group aligned with the self over others. We would have to see these cross-sections at work once we get to even two opposing colors, to say nothing of three or more colors.
Hopefully yall have gotten the idea I intended to share at this point. I hope you enjoyed reading this if you did. I know this is a controversial topic so if you want to argue with me in the comments feel free to do so.