ABSTRACT
Timpanaro’s most general definition of the fundamentals of materialism can be accepted, at first sight, as it stands: ‘By materialism we understand above all acknowledgment of the priority of nature over “mind”, or if you like, of the physical level over the biological level, and of the biological level over the socio-economic and cultural level; both in the sense of chronological priority (the very long time which supervened before life appeared on earth, and between the origin of life and the origin of man), and in the sense of the conditioning which nature still exercises on man and will continue to exercise at least for the foreseeable future’ (Timpanaro 1975:34). It is difficult to see how anyone could deny the intention of the first proposition, though it is better expressed in its specifying than in its general terms. The cautionary notation of ‘mind’ needs to be extended also to ‘nature’, but there can be no serious argument against the existence of a physical world before life and of other life-forms before man. And it is important that while these facts are never denied, within any relevant area of argument, they are quite often dismissed as banalities which have little practical bearing on the more interesting questions that lie ahead. One of the excuses for this impatience is that the general terms used to summarize the enormous and complex body of facts, on which the propositions necessarily rest, are shot through with inherently subsequent interpretations of a philosophical and cultural character. Thus it is not unproblematic to say that ‘nature’ has ‘priority over’ ‘mind’, but we can only approach these problems in good faith if we have, with full seriousness, taken the weight of the astronomical, geological and biological evidence before entering the more congenial ground of the humanist categories. And it is in this area, at first sight, that the effect of the declining contribution of the natural sciences to the general culture of Marxism has been most apparent. While the sense of proportion imposed by this fundamental materialism is either forgotten or
dismissed as a preliminary banality, the way is indeed open for every kind of obscurantism and evasion.
