How the World Shines Silver in the Moonlight

Abstract Literally, silver is what shines white. But it is also a precious metal. Here we ask: what is the relation between the metal and its shining? And what makes it white? Or more generally, what is the relation between light and material? Distinguishing the light that shines in our eyes from light as it is defined by physics, as beams versus rays, we argue that luminosity enters constitutively into our apperception of the material world. What, then, makes for the specific luminosity of silver? Focusing on colour as a property of beams rather than rays, we conclude that silver is to gold as white to black, arrayed respectively on the chrome spectrum and the spectrum of life and death. What is distinctive to silver moonlight, however, compared with golden sunlight, is that it shines with not with its own light but with light borrowed from the sun.