Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
comes part of the mechanical philosophy of nature. In other words, rec-
onciliation of chemistry and religion depended heavily on mechanistic
reductions. However, for the majority of writers who, like Balzac, did
not believe in mechanistic reduction, chemistry was opposed to religion.
That is the nineteenth-century religious background of the reductionism
issue, which is again in vogue nowadays.
What about Balzac's second line of attack, chemistry as the fiendish
destruction of divine creation? It echoes the medieval complaint that
chemical manipulation changes nature at the basic level and thus de-
stroys the Creation (Schummer 2003). If applied to material (and per-
sonal) destruction, this line was frequently elaborated on together with
the hubris theme, to be dealt with in Section 6. However, once the notion
of destructive chemistry had been established, it also became part of an
interesting analogy between chemistry and critical thinking: just as
chemical analysis destroys material bodies, so does critical analysis de-
stroy ideas and beliefs. In his
Fathers and Sons
(1862),
34
Ivan Turgenev
(1818-83) mentions “young chemistry students [at the University of
Heidelberg], who cannot distinguish oxygen from nitrogen, but are
brimming over with destructive criticism and conceit”. Thus, the main
character of the novel, the arch-nihilist Bazarov, is characterized by his
fascination with and practice of experimental chemistry. And when Pavel
Petrovich complains that Germans have from romantic poets “turned into
chemists and materialists”, the nihilist cries: “A decent chemist is twenty
times more useful than any poet” (chap. 6).
Turgenev was not the inventor of nihilism, and nor did he invent its
association with chemistry. The earliest association is probably in the
novel
Die Ritter vom Geiste
(1850/51; bk. VII, chap. 12)
35
by the Ger-
man writer Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow (1811-78):
Oleander was reading a topic of the new philosophical school, the critical
or chemical school as he called it. “Chemical” because these philoso-
phers of the absolute Nothing are the Liebigs of the invisible world, as he
told Siegbert. Such as the chemical retort invents element after element,
34
Firstpublishedin
The Russian Herald
magazine in March 1862; on the nihilist char-
acter, see also Seeley 1991, chap. 10.
35
First published Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1850-51, 9 vols. (repr. Frankfurt: Zweitausend-
eins, 2000).
