Sprache der Chemie und “Experimentalpolitik”. Lavoisier, Lichtenberg und die Revolution(en)

The polymath and physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg intensively studied the new French chemistry founded by Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, who was eventually guillotined by the Revolutionary Tribunal in May 1794. Lavoisier’s oxygen theory of combustion, which gradually replaced the old phlogistic doctrine of the German chemist G.E. Stahl, was initially met with skepticism, especially in Germany. In a number of entries in his Sudelbücher and in other texts intended for publication, Lichtenberg criticized not so much the antiphlogistic chemistry as the new chemical nomenclature associated with this theory, which was just as revolutionary as the chemistry of combustion itself. Lichtenberg’s thoughts on nomenclature are strongly influenced by his ideas on the philosophy of language. The last section of the essay deals with the connection between the chemical and the political revolution, which Lichtenberg again justifies with linguistic arguments – the problem of justifying new names.