‘MATERIALISME’ EN ‘FILOSOFIE VAN DE PRAXIS’

Abstract

SUMMARY The aim of the article is to offer a closer examination and elucidation of the views of materialism set forth by S. Timpanaro in his book Considerazioni sul materialismo (1970; English translation: On Materialism, NLB, 1975). To this end I first consider the notions developed by one of the authors criticized by Timpanaro, namely A. Schmidt, referring to his study Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx. By means of a comparison between these two authors I try to show in more detail the significance of discussing the various conceptions of materialism, and to elucidate Timpanaro's views on the matter. In discussing materialism Schmidt emphasizes the role played by the subject, and the subject's labour. To this end he relies on the theoretical principles of Marx (referred to by Schmidt as “historical materialism”), contrasting them with Engels' principles, which he considers to be the source of the view embodied in soviet Marxism. Engels' principles, called ‘dialectical materialism’ by Schmidt, involve autonomous dialectics of nature that transcend the subjects, and to which human action is entirely subjugated. Timpanaro denies that there is a basis for the contradiction which Schmidt and others assume to exist between Marx's principles on the one hand, and those of Engels on the other. He considers Schmidt's interpretation as characteristic of the tendency in Western Marxism, in which history and human labour are severed from the ‘external reality’ that is being acted upon, a reality that we do not create but which imposes itself on us. This point is manifested in two respects. Cognitively, for one thing, human experience is reduced either to a production of reality by a subject, or to a reciprocal implication of subject and object. On this level Timpanaro stresses the element of passivity in experience, and the permanent weight of nature within history. Secondly, as regards the subject: a spiritualization of the subject takes place, and the attention shifts to the individual as a freely constituting producer of history. Timpanaro here points to the value of the concept of ‘subject’ as an ‘empirical ego’. Timpanaro's observations about materialism appear to be of importance since they offer startingpoints for an inquiry that may lead to a materialist foundation of human action, in which the concept of the subject as a “relatively independent psycho-physical entity” is retained as well. In this inquiry existing elaborations of “dialectics of nature” will have to be examined critically.