“A Completely New Chemistry”: Lichtenberg’s Generative Paradigmata

In an article for the Goettinger Taschen Calender of 1798, the Göttingen physics professor Georg Christoph Lichtenberg proposed that discovery was prompted by the perception of inconsistencies in a dominant system of thought. As though to encourage such perception, he proposed that a table of duties (Haustafel) be nailed to the wall of every physical and chemical laboratory. Instead of being prescribed by scripture, these duties would be prescribed by the “history of the discovery of the true world system” in astronomy (Lichtenberg, “Geologisch-Meteorologische Phantasien” 93).¹ The lesson of this history might be paraphrased as follows: to perceive inconsistencies, it had in the past been necessary to draw on competing systems of thought. That is to say, Tycho Brahe had improved upon Ptolemy. Copernicus had overthrown the Ptolemaic system, and as a result, Tycho had been held in contempt by “boys” unworthy of “untying his shoe straps” (Lichtenberg, “Geologisch-Meteorologische Phantasien” 94). Yet by building on Tycho’s observations, Kepler was able to perceive “absurdities” in the Copernican system he so greatly admired, to recognize that planets moved in “simple, constant ellipses” (and not in circular orbits with epicycles). Through a mediation of new and old, rather than a one-sided favoring of novelty, he had discovered the “true world system.”

In proposing that this history lesson be nailed to the walls of laboratories, Lichtenberg generalized the “procedure of the astronomers in expanding their science” to a “paradigma” according to which physics and chemistry could and should be patterned (“Geologisch-Meteorologische Phantasien” 93). As Lichtenberg defined the term for himself elsewhere, a paradigma was a “rule of invention,” according to which a model from one field of study was used to model problems in another (Schriften II: 455).² By applying Kepler’s procedure to physics and chemistry, Lichtenberg was therefore not simply making claims about the history of those disciplines. Rather, he was applying this paradigma in at least two ways: as a guideline for invention, but also as a regulative principle for scientific conduct. Discovery entailed not only the perception and resolution of inconsistency between a system and the world, but that resolution also depended upon the ability to draw from systems themselves deemed incompatible. Moreover, Lichtenberg stressed that physics and chemistry would not be “in a good way” until Kepler’s procedure had become obligatory. For history had already begun to repeat itself. In chemistry, the new “anti-phlogistonist” system of the French chemist Lavoisier appeared to have overthrown an older system based on a principle called phlogiston. In the wake of this equivalent to the Copernican revolution, however, Lavoisier’s followers had acted like the detractors of Tycho. To be sure, “no absurdity has yet to be imputed to the Copernicus of chemistry” (Lichtenberg, “Geologisch-Meteorologische Phantasien” 95).³ But it would be imprudent to scorn those who did not blindly follow Lavoisier in everything, Lichtenberg warned, as though fearing such scorn might delay or even preclude the emergence of the Kepler of chemistry.

In Lichtenberg’s account of discovery and progress, inconsistencies play a generative role. As he put it in a private notebook, to better understand the “whole,” physicists studied its individual parts in great detail. The resulting “mingle-mangle” of specialist observations contained the seeds for theories that, like Newton’s theory of gravity, would explain an “endless amount of anomalies”(Schriften II: 484).⁴ By looking to nature rather than to a system as a guide, by considering as wide a range of observations as possible, inconsistencies would be perceived and resolved, bringing each successive system closer to a “true” representation of the world. As his commentary on chemistry suggests, however, Lichtenberg’s paradigma was not a rule applied unanimously by contemporaries. To scholars with the benefit of hindsight, moreover, Lichtenberg’s defense of phlogiston theory has appeared like a textbook example of conservative “resistance” to a necessary “paradigm shift” in the terms set by Thomas Kuhn.⁵ This paper draws on the comparison between Kuhn and Lichtenberg in a different sense. Lichtenberg has been called the first to use paradigma to...