Nietzsche's Conceptual Chemistry

In response to the nihilism of logic, mathematics, physics and astronomy, then, Friedrich Nietzsche holds up chemistry as the great restorer of differences. The first evidence of this shift is revealed to the public from the very beginning of Human, All Too Human, where ‘Chemistry of Concepts and Sensations’ is positioned as the first paragraph and thus given programmatic significance. In the section of Ecce Homo devoted to a retrospective appraisal of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche uses the opening paragraphs for an account of the genesis of the book, which he calls, at the outset, ‘the memorial of a crisis’. In the light of Nietzsche’s abortive plan to abandon philology in favour of chemistry it is perhaps surprising that only three years later his first major publication should problematize Wissenschaft to such a degree. Nietzsche is using a notion of ‘sublimation’ which systematically reduces sociocultural, political and psychic events to steps in a chemical process.