Retour sur le marxisme et le darwinisme

Abstract

As a thinker whose work proposes the recovery in Darwin of an innovative anthropology, which no specialist scholar has consistently refuted or has exposed as amounting to a forced or willful interpretation, Patrick Tort can enable us to arrive at a valid assessment of Darwin’s discourse on man and on civilization. In this regard, he underlines the unquestionably dialectical character of the passage from “nature” to “culture” in the project. As a consequence of their ignorance of this innovation, Marx, and those who came after him, equated Darwinism with a Malthusian ideology and a doctrine of social selection, a position which Darwin precisely did not adopt, in his explanation of the origin and transformation of civilization, without however having to break with his selective biology. In the history of Marxism, the consequence of this epistemological faux-pas has been the interminable reiteration of “monist” problems in pursuit of a dialectical conceptualization of the links and the distinctions to be teased out between nature and civilization, materialism and morality. With a view to reestablishing a fruitful theoretical dialogue between the heritage of Marx and that of Darwin, a detour by way of Kant and his categorical moral imperative is certainly not desirable. The path leading to an overcoming of the contradictions is rather to be located by way of Marxism’s acknowledgement of the notion of “reversive continuity”, thus enabling us to conceptualize, in a unitary mode and from the perspective of materialism, the paradox of the extinction of struggle, within the horizon of the struggle of which nature constitutes the field of experimentation.