In the midst of a period of convalescence following upon a riding accident during his military service in Naumburg, the 23-year-old Nietzsche embarks on the project for an academic dissertation to be entitled "The Concept of the Organic since Kant".¹ By May of the same year, the project is abandoned, giving way to a period of sustained inquiry into the field of philology, centring around the original sources of Diogenes Laertius and the relationship between philology and Homer.² We could comfortably assume that nothing really happened, that the young Nietzsche, armed with a vague intuition regarding a hotly contested region of post-Kantian philosophy and scientific speculation, merely threw together a collage of quotes and speculative clichés, unable to attain anything like the groundwork of a thesis, or even to sketch out a genuine problem.³ Needless to say, the very possibility of such an initial impression means that any reading claiming a higher status for the admittedly fragmentary insights collected in these early notebooks must somehow persuade us of its legitimacy.