On materialism

by Sebastiano Timpanaro

English, Italian (translation)

Genres: Philosophy, Politics

260 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Sebastiano Timpanaro was an Italian classical philologist, essayist, and literary critic. He was also a long-time Marxist who made important contributions to left-wing political causes. He was an atheist.

Reviews

[Tiarnán · Rating 4 out of 5]

A provocative and convincing defence of certain unfashionable "orthodox" Marxist themes, from materialism, Engels' writings on science and Marxist fidelity to a "scientific method" in general, Lenin's "Empirio-criticism", the Marxism of the Second International (in its pre-degenerated era), an orientation towards organised mass revolution rather than the twin perils of accommodation to the bourgeois state or voluntarist adventures, and so on. All of these ideas were controversial at the time - in the 50s/60s at the height of Western leftist infatuation with the Frankfurt School, Structuralism, Maoism, and other "supersessions" of classical Marxism - and are hardly less so today. Worth it alone for the absolutely savage and deserved roasting he gives extra-linguistic structuralism, particularly the clinical and humorous deconstruction of Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault and similar charlatans. Much of the latter in a more toned down form is reformulated in Perry Anderson's critique of post-structuralism e.g. in "In the Tracks of Historical Materialism".

[Callum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.

[Kristofer Dubbels]

Primarily an intervention within Western Marxism, Timpanaro’s book has a datedness to it that makes it quite interesting from the standpoint of intellectual history, and a bit less interesting from any other. Timpanaro is a marginal figure in the canon of Western Marxism; like Galvano Della Volpe and Lucio Colletti, he is effectively unknown in the United States. But Timpanaro is also a singular figure within the canon of Western Marxism - employed as a proofreader rather than an academic, Timpanaro was plausibly a rank-and-file worker, albeit a white collar one with an expansive network of academic friends and acquaintances. Timpanaro also witnessed the emergence of Althusserianism as a positivist, anti-dialectical (but according to Timpanaro, still idealist) alternative within Western Marxism as it then existed.

While much of the history of Western Marxism was preoccupied with litigating the nature of the dialectic (Lukács, the Frankfurt School, Althusser), Timpanaro instead centered materialism. As Timpanaro rightly saw it, the history of Western Marxism just was the history of an idealism, or, at least, an insufficiently thorough materialism. As he explains:

Diverse social orders give, of course, a very different direction to the ‘struggle against nature’; they may favour resignation or, contrariwise, action to overcome biological conditioning. But such action cannot go beyond certain limits. Communism does not imply, in and of itself, a decisive triumph over the biological frailty of man, and it appears to be excluded that such a triumph could ever be attained (unless one wishes to indulge in science-fiction speculation). (63)

I first read the words above - contained in the essay “Praxis and Materialism” - in 2016. I had been introduced to Timpanaro by Perry Anderson’s effusive praise for the great maestro. As I recall, I enjoyed the book but did not find it of any particular interest. A few years later, near the beginning of the COVID pandemic, I reread the first two essays and they struck me like a bolt of lightning. As the pandemic gripped the imagination of the left, people previously calling for the abolition of police and borders suddenly were calling for closed borders and harsh penalties for the violation of measures ostensibly to contain the pandemic. It became apparent over time that the left-wing mind had been seized by a rather odd idea - that the State is so powerful that it can simply exercise its powers to halt death and human finitude altogether. (If only the insensitive masses would comply!) Here we can see the outcome of the neglect of the physical and biological dimension of existence emphasized by Timpanaro.

The account of materialism established in the first two chapters is incredibly rich - from a rather simple premise, Timpanaro is able to articulate a forceful defense of Engels and a powerful critique of nearly all of subsequent Marxism, both Western Marxism and official Marxism-Leninism by emphasizing materialism itself. Timpanaro is, however, careful to differentiate himself from a mechanistic materialism. Rather, his materialism emphasizes the priority of nature over mind, physical over biological, and biological over the historical (that is, the socio-economic-cultural dimensions of human existence). Nature not only has a chronological priority over humanity, it also conditions humanity’s on-going existence (weather, germs, and so on). Of course, later ecological writing has emphasized the role of humanity itself in conditioning nature - our farming and manufacturing practices that lead to desertification and extreme weather events, for example. (Although he does not directly address the subject in the essays that comprise On Materialism, Timpanaro’s subsequent writing did deal extensively with ecology.)

Crucially, Timpanaro also emphasizes - following Labriola - that the dependence of superstructure on base is complex and indirect. On its own, this is a trivial observation and the starting point of sustained investigations both within the Western Marxist tradition (Althusser, notably) as well as Marxisms outside of it (Mao, notably). But neither Althusser nor Mao emphasized the extent to which the “natural terrain” conditions both base and superstructure alike. After all, how much art is dedicated to reflections of the natural world? (“One must have a mind of winter…”)

As Timpanaro tells it, Marx himself indulged the very idealism he sees as characteristic of Western Marxism, to a degree. It was Engels who offered a partial correction to it. In this way, Timpanaro does speak to contemporary debates within Marxism. One can see this trope in certain representatives of value-form theory: dismissal of Engels as a way to uphold a specific (and frankly idiosyncratic) reading of Marx. One can see this in the work of, for example, Christopher Arthur and other interpretations of Marxism that emphasize reading the critique of political economy through Hegelian logic, thereby emphasizing abstract philosophical categories over “blood and dirt.”

The rejection of Engels, then, is cut from the same cloth as the embrace of idealism within contemporary Marxism. Man is no longer embedded in the cosmos, and at the mercy of nature. For the contemporary left, the war on nature is complete; the idea that man, having destroyed nature, cannot also readily conquer disease itself is due to capitalism itself, not lack of ability. This is, of course, delusional - it is “science-fiction speculation”. None of this, of course, is particularly earth-shattering, and none of it struck me as particularly interesting until the COVID era made it clear that the far left is itself mired in a deluded idealism of its own.

Timpanaro’s materialism, however, runs into its limits when confronted with thinkers outside of then-current Continental Marxism. In “On Structuralism and its Successors”, which is by far the longest essay in the book, Timpanaro discusses at length structuralism (typified by Saussure and Lévi-Strauss), a handful of thinkers in the French structuralist milieu (Lacan, Foucault, Althusser), as well as Noam Chomsky (his inclusion in this company is a historical curiosity that surely might puzzle a contemporary reader - Francois Dosse’s history of structuralism provides some insight on the matter to anyone interested). Timpanaro’s materialism dictates his dismissal of structuralism as, at heart, an idealism. Indeed, the “scientific” pretensions of structuralism are immediately undermined by its bizarre anti-empiricism combined with a fixation on synchrony that ultimately forecloses any attempt to show just how it is that the synchronous structures interact with the diachronic ones. While Timpanaro’s treatment is interesting, it also follows a line of critique that is by now well-established by, amongst others, Chomsky himself. The discussion is sharp, and shows how Timpanaro relates his own thought to then-current trends in structuralism and Western Marxism, but his critical extended discussion of Chomsky is more revealing of the nature of Timpanaro’s thought than is his discussion of Continental structuralism, of either the Marxist or non-Marxist variety.

One might, however, ponder at the charitability of Timpanaro’s accounting of developments within French structuralism - the critique of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss’ “mechanistic” structuralism had already been advanced by the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, Derrida, and Deleuze. Timpanaro’s critiques of Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and Althusser are forceful and compelling but will surely appear less novel in the 21st century than they would have in the seventh decade of the 20th. But he does not reckon at all with the emergent critiques of structuralism from within; as J.G. Merquior and Peter Dews have both noted, post-structuralism emerged almost simultaneously with structuralism. One can already find in Lacan and Althusser the attempt to move beyond the mechanistic outlook of earlier structuralisms.

Unfortunately, Timpanaro’s powers fail him spectacularly in his discussion of Chomsky. Timpanaro is far from being the first European thinker to dismiss Chomsky with glib incomprehension - unlike Foucault, Timpanaro is at least able to admit his lack of understanding of mathematical logic may be of relevance (199). Curiously, although Timpanaro forcefully dismisses Foucault earlier in the piece, he takes roughly the same line of attack against Chomsky as Foucault himself. Rather than meaningfully engaging with Chomsky’s strictly linguistic work, he instead focuses on the brief essay Cartesian Linguistics, one of the few places where Chomsky engages in sustained intellectual history.

I have often wondered just why it is Chomsky himself felt the need to call his linguistics “Cartesian” at all. Certainly, Chomsky was not under any particular influence from Descartes when developing his own theory of syntactic structures (roughly, the era of Chomsky’s thought that Timpanaro is concerned with), as a cursory glance of Syntactic Structures itself will show. Rather, the meat of Chomsky’s argument is Cartesian in the broadest sense, as positing something like an “innate idea” (the human faculty for language) as well as a dualistic conception of substance - it simply cannot be that physicalism is correct, as Chomsky has it, hence a dualism about the world that might as well be called “Cartesian.”

However, why Cartesian and not, for example, Kantian? That Chomsky’s thought could just as easily be classified as Kantian occurred also to Bryan Magee; when Magee asked Chomsky about this on Magee’s television interview show, Chomsky showed little interest in the matter. For Chomsky, of course, the Cartesianism is just shorthand; the fixation on “Cartesianism” by his (Continental) critics is glib and, moreover, an exceptional display of laziness. The critique of Descartes having been completed, after all, why bother understanding the intimidating logical symbolism of Syntactic Structures when one can simply regurgitate centuries of anti-Cartesianism instead? Notably, none of the most significant critique of Chomsky from within American intellectual life concerned itself with a critique of his supposed “Cartesianism”. One can imagine quite readily a possible world in which Chomsky had instead taken up Magee’s idea and called his essay Kantian Linguistics while leaving all else as it is. Would Timpanaro (or Foucault) have bothered in that possible world to learn the mathematical logic required for understanding Chomsky’s arguments in detail? Would they content themselves with a critique of Kant as a sufficient stand-in for a critique of Chomsky himself?

As Timpanaro asks rhetorically:

With an obsessive persistence he repeats that ‘it means absolutely nothing’ to talk about a gradual evolution from elementary forms of communication to human language, about linguistic habits learned through repetition, about associations and extensions by analogy. He assumes that there exists an absolute hiatus separating animality from humanity, which no kind of mediation can bridge. … But can one regard as an explanation Chomsky’s assumption of ‘innate linguistic competence’ as an unconditioned primum? (201-202)

But to call this an “assumption” is a bizarre misunderstanding of Chomsky’s position - rather, the innate faculty for language is brought in to explain how it is that humans acquire language so rapidly. As Chomsky explains in his classic takedown of behaviorism, it simply cannot be the case that children learn to speak so quickly without such a mechanism innate in the human brain. Moreover, as Chomsky forcefully demonstrates over and over and over, it is the human mind’s capacity for recursion that allows for linguistic novelty. The speed with which children make not just novel utterances, but many novel utterances attests to the existence of this innate capacity for recursion.

Of course, nothing like this can be found in Descartes (or for that matter Kant, although I wager that Chomsky is still a great deal closer to the latter than to Descartes). While Chomsky is - this really is the argument of Cartesian Linguistics, after all - attempting to revive certain apparently dead ideas in the history of the West, his variant is, after all, a repetition with a difference. Timpanaro seems to content himself with a materialism that here reveals itself to be naive - whether one agrees with Chomsky’s own attacks on materialism (or, more appropriately in the Anglo-American context, physicalism), they are a serious challenge all the same. Rather than simply asserting the continuity of humans with non-human animals, Timpanaro might here ask if his own cosmic pessimism is not itself a comforting illusion. If man is at the whims and mercy of an indifferent cosmos, that does not, for all that, make him any less unique.

His more or less worthless assessment of Chomsky aside, however, Timpanaro is rightly dismissive of the illustrious French, and closes strong:

It appears, therefore, that post-structuralism - with only a few partial exceptions - is destined for the time being to remain in that closed circle of various alternating forms of idealism which, for a number of decades now, western culture has been revolving and from which only a new socio-political situation can release it. (219)

The concluding essay, “Karl Korsch and Lenin’s Philosophy”, an exegesis of Karl Korsch, and specifically of Korsch’s interpretation of Lenin’s philosophical work (primarily, but not exclusively, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and the Philosophical Notebooks). A reading of a reading of a reading might sound particularly irrelevant to a general audience, but Timpanaro’s underlying motivation is a “discussion of the relationship between ‘Western Marxism’ and Leninism” (226). Now this might be irrelevant to a general audience.

In some respects this is the most surprising essay in the book. Timpanaro has already shown his command of Marx and Engels and the canon of French structuralism, common enough in Paris and London alike at the time, but he goes further by displaying an atypical command of the Dutch-German ultraleft. As far as I can tell, the “mainstream” of Western Marxism (either in its German or French, and later, American, variants) never paid much attention to the work of the descendents of the German-Dutch ultraleft. Korsch himself is something like a bridge figure between the German-Dutch ultraleft (as represented here by Pannekoek, Gorter, and Paul Mattick) and Western Marxism (recall, Korsch was condemned alongside Lukacs by Zinoviev at the Fifth Congress of the Comintern).

In this respect, Timpanaro’s choice of using Korsch as a proxy for “Western Marxism” altogether is odd. If we use Perry Anderson’s understanding of “Western Marxism”, then surely Korsch is quite an outlier in the canon. Anderson observed that the foundational figures of Western Marxism were themselves deeply engaged with political and strategic questions, holding roles in Communist Parties or even positions in government (this applies to Gramsci, Korsch, and Lukacs). As the Third Period wore on, however, the concerns of Western Marxism shifted over to scholarly matters, becoming concerned after the war almost exclusively with matters of culture and aesthetics (Adorno and the first generation of the Frankfurt School broadly, Lukacs himself) or epistemology (Althusser).

Korsch, however, came to a forceful rejection of Leninism altogether before the war, whereas even Adorno and Horkheimer still aspired “to rectify that and develop a theory that remain[ed] faithful to Marx, Engels and Lenin, while keeping up with culture at its most advanced” as late as at least 1956 (in “Towards a New Manifesto?”). It is also interesting that aside from the tradition descended from the German-Dutch ultraleft - broadly, “left communism” - there was a concomitant lack of dialogue between Western Marxism and Trotskyism (the latter of which would itself sometimes overlap with, or at least engage with, German-Dutch left communism).

Timpanaro rejects what he perceives to be Korsch’s idealism. He is sympathetic to the political positions taken by Korsch, but his condemnation remains all the same. To simplify the argument: Korsch’s rejection of Stalinism entails his rejection of Leninism. In this way, the Korschian critique of Stalin is far more radical than its Trotskyist variant. For Korsch, there is a clear continuity from Lenin to Stalin.

Thus far in the argument, there is nothing much for any bourgeois anti-Bolshevik to object to. But Korsch’s critique is decidedly from the left, not the right. Korsch radicalizes the critique of this continuity by arguing that Stalinism is not merely a continuation of Leninism, but that Lenin himself was, first and foremost, a left-wing Kautskyite. But it is here, Timpanaro claims, that Korsch misunderstands the nature of the break between Kautsky and Lenin, building up a straw man only to burn him down. There is one important point of continuity between the two, Timpanaro concedes, which is distorted beyond all plausibility by Korsch: Lenin shared Kautsky’s thorough-going materialism. And it is this materialism that is ultimately rejected by “Western Marxism.” Crucially, for Korsch, Marxism is then not a revolutionary theory because it is a materialism, but because it is a dialectics.

A fascinating essay for anyone interested in the history of Marxism, but, of course, perhaps not so interesting to anyone else. Here, as in the rest of the book, Timpanaro has a rather simple idea - materialism itself! - that is used as a battering ram against all of his opponents. Timpanaro is able to marshal an impressive array of resources to uphold materialism against its perceived enemies; his readings are nuanced even at their polemical heights. This essay is a terrific example of Timpanaro’s powerful thought - an analysis of Karl Korsch gives way to a critique of Western Marxism altogether, and a powerful restatement of the principles of Leninism against left communism and Western Marxism alike.

So - what is the “actuality” of Timpanaro in the 21st century? Verso recently published a monograph dedicated to Timpanaro, and the New Left Review recently ran an article about his Anglo reception. But does he speak to the concerns of the moment, or is he merely an isolated artifact in the history of Western Marxism? Timpanaro’s major theme - materialism itself! - remains as significant as ever.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Timpanaro was an Italian philologist and essayist, active in mid-to-late-century Marxist intellectual circles. He was Marxist in a similar vein to István Mészáros; both focused on historical materialism as a point of view, and both frowned upon the Western tradition of Marxism which has tended to blend it with non-Marxist (and often anti-materialist) traditions. His point of view is different from Mészáros's, which makes for an interesting contrast (not to mention he is much easier to read, though of course we forgive Mészáros for his excessive wordiness).

Timpanaro's point of view seems to be critical of other Marxists who are focused too heavily on various particular tendencies within Marxism. Marxists who are too humanistic, for example, or else too invested in historicism, or economics; they all seem to have long been targets of his criticism. His position was an attempt to balance all of the tendencies—as far as they supported the historical materialist point of view—by accepting the criticism of each one in a dialectical fashion, so that none of them could become dominant.

One of my favorite things related to reading about historical materialism is the uses its perspective is put to; it is itself an excellent example of its focus on praxis. Contrast Timpanaro's historical materialism of 1970's Italy, for instance, with John Bellamy Foster's eco-oriented historical materialism of today from the mid-latitude North American West Coast; many different focuses and changes in interest become apparent from these two quite different poles in historical time and place, yet still share the same scaffolding.

[_db · Rating 3 out of 5]

its okay. thoroughly trotskyist, highly critical of any actually-existing socialism. for a book meant to emphasize materialism, it comes across rather idealistic at times ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

pretty funny how much he hates althusser

had to skip the chapter on structuralism, went totally over my head. no idea how anyone but the academic trained in the relevant fields could understand that stuff

i can get behind his criticism of western marxism for its idealism and detachment from science but not his trotskyist condemnation of the ussr or china, nor his affirmation of the new left (that didnt age well lol)

his beginning chapter on "marxism-leopardism", a sort of "materialist pessimism" (critical of both the naive utopianism and the romantic, idealist bourgeois pessimism of schopenhauer etc) was extremely interesting, i wish he had explored that further. what the limits of a socialist revolution can do for the human condition and the inevitable destruction of the solar system is not something i see discussed often

[Tony Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

First published in 1970, On Materialism defends the materialism of Marx and Engels from a host of rival and/or hostile approaches, particularly those popular during the 1960s. These include the structuralism of Saussure and how it was taken up by Claude Lévi-Strauss and later Foucault; the Frankfurt School; and the Stalinism of Althusser and his fellow thinkers. Timpanaro is thorough-going, clear, sober-minded but also biting and witty.

He writes, for example, that while Foucault's books The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge "represent an (entirely successful) attempt to outstrip Lévi-Strauss in snobism and pretension, the same Foucault has written things about the history of madness and the origins of modern medicine which, even if open to debate, are certainly worthy of attention"; but the "fame enjoyed by these authors during the last fifteen years is not a consequence of the scientific side of their work" but rather of its "charlatanesque features".