Mich^le Barrett

Review Article
Timpanaro: materialism and the question
of biology
The relationship between sociology and natural science has frequently
created tensions and difficulties. In sociology of medicine, for instance,
different views are apparent - some sociologists treating medical science
with respect and deference, others subjecting it to a stringent cdtique.
Sociologists of medicine disagree on the status of medical knowledge
and the claims of the medical profession. Some sociologists of medicine
see their work as differing only in emphasis from the research undertaken
from the perspective of social medicine, others see medical practice as
an object for a distinctively sociological analysis. It is rarely that we have
an opportunity to review these questions in their most general form and
in this context the ideas of the materialist philosopher Timpanaro can
be both provocative and productive.
The polemical and controversial writings of Sebastiano Timpanaro
seek nothing less than to challenge the entire direction of Marxist thought
in the twentieth century. In so far as he identifies ideahsm as the main
problem, represented by the influence of phenomenology and structur-
alism in Marxist philosophy, his arguments are also clearly apphcable to
parallel developments in recent sociological thought. He argues that an
emphasis on reality as socially constructed leads to a wilful and arrogant
evasion of the extent to which human hfe is fragile and transient ~
bounded by the continuing determination of natural forces over which
we can have no complete control. The unpalatable facts of disease, dis-
ability and death are here brought in centre-stage to dispel our grand
illusions.
Timpanaro is an Italian Marxist, born in 1923 and by training a phil-
ologist. The most significant of his works to be published in this country
is the collection of essays entitled On Materialism, but we also have in
English his essay on the poet Giacomo Leopardi and his cdtical analysis
of Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life.^ As we shall see, the
nineteenth-century poet Leopardi plays a considerable role in Timpan-
aro's thought, and the contentious essay on Freud deserves some

Sociology of Health and Illness Vol. 3 No. 3 1981

©R.K.P. 1981 0141-9889/81/0301-0337 $1.50/1
338 Michele Barrett
comment, but I want to concentrate here on the salient features of
Timpanaro's view of matedalism.
On Materialism consists of five essays, the first of which ('Consid-
erations on Matedalism') sets out Timpanaro's basic theses. This is
followed by 'Praxis and Matedalism' — essentially an elaboration and
defence of his position in reply to vadous Italian cdtics. The book also
contains a substantial essay on Engels, whose importance to histodcal
matedalism Timpanaro sees as commonly underestimated; an extended
cdtique of 'Structuralism and its Successors'; and a piece on Karl Korsch.
An exposition of Timpanaro's argument can well begin with his own
definition of matedalism, for it is here that we first encounter his force-
ful insistence on the importance of natural and biological constraint. It
mns
By materialism we understand above all acknowledgement of the pdodty 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 ofthe conditioning which nature still exercises on man
and will continue to exercise at least for the foreseeable future, (p. 34)
Timpanaro argues that the determining role of biology has been ig-
nored because in any given histodcal epoch it appears as a constant. At
one level he counters this through a spidted defence of Darwinism,
suggesting that histodcal matedalism cannot adopt a stance dismissive
of evolutionary biology. More significantly, perhaps, he points to the
fallacy of assuming that because something remains constant over a
long pedod of time then it is not still determining. No one would argue
that since socio-economic relations remain relatively constant for the
duration of a given mode of production then they must have no signifi-
cance for cultural and superstructural phenomena.
It will be clear that Timpanaro is putting forward a double challenge
to contemporary Marxism. Not only does he polemicise against those
who have sought to free ideological and cultural processes from socio-
economic determination, he further insists that this socio-economic level
is itself determined by natural conditions. It is this invocation of the
determining physical environment that renders Timpanaro's work quite
different, and far more sedous, from that of those who seek simply to
re-assert the orthodox positions of a cultural superstructure determined
by a socio-economic base. In as much as Timpanaro does endorse a
highly determinist stance on the relation of 'base' to 'superstructure' his
views have proved unacceptable to many contemporary theorists. But it
is incorrect to read his work simply as weighing in on one side of this all
too familiar debate. For Timpanaro there are not two levels, whose
 Review article 339
relative determinacy or autonomy must be settled, but three, and it is
the inclusion of the physical level that constitutes a radical relocation
of the debate. In a characteristic passage Timpanaro addresses the argu-
ment that human biology is socially moulded, conceding that cultural
mediation does play a part but not to the exclusion of an element that
is irreducibly natural:
It is certainly true that the development of society changes men's ways of feeling
pain, pleasure and other elementary psycho-physical reactions, and that there is
hardly anything that is 'purely natural' left in contemporary man, that has not
been enriched and remoulded by the social and cultural environment. But the
general aspects of the 'human condition' still remain, and the specific character-
istics introduced into it by the vadous forms of associated Ufe have not been
such as to overthrow them completely. To maintain that, since the 'biological' is
always presented to us as mediated by the 'social', the 'biological' is nothing and
the 'social' is everything, would once again be idealist sophistry, (p. 45)
Timpanaro argues that 'social man' can never entirely shed 'biological
man' — that human beings did not merely have an animal origin but
that we still are animals, and likely to have a finite existence on earth.
This view, virtually axiomatic to the biological sciences, he sees as uni-
formly denied in a contemporary Marxist philosophy which appropdates
the world through anthropocentdc conceptual categodes. And in so far
as Marxism ignores biological conditioning, and the continuing deter-
mination of human society by the natural world, then Marxism is ceasing
to be matedalist.
In this respect Timpanaro sees a trajectory away from the mature
thought of Marx and Engels. ('Whenever you scratch a twentieth century
Marxist, he tums out to be a left idealist', p. 101.) He sees Marx, and
particularly Engels, as laying the basis for a matedalism that did recognise
the importance of physical and biological conditions and that could
therefore specify that which is distinctive about humanity as well as that
which humanity shares with other animals. The key to this is human
labour - that purposeful and refiective ability to plan and to work that
Marx saw as uniquely human. Timpanaro argues that the human ability
to work, in this sense, underwrites the existence of what we regard as the
socio-economic 'base' of society. This new social level, which Timpanaro
descdbes as 'relatively autonomous from the animal base' (p. 216), has
a decisive effect on all cultural and ideological processes.
It is at this point that Timpanaro differentiates his own position from
that of biologism.The substantial effectivity of socio-economic relations
must render it impossible to reduce social appearances directly to
supposed biological determinants:
The term 'biologism' (in its pejorative meaning) should be used to designate any
340 Michele Barrett
theory which, denying or underestimating this function of the socio-economic
structure, claims to explain in biological terms the division of society into classes,
the class struggle, war, institutions, and culture as a whole, (p. 216)
Timpanaro is concemed, however, not merely to expose the 'correct'
Marxist truth on the role of the physical world in matedalist analysis. A
central point of his argument is (leaving aside the idealism of much post-
Marx Marxism) that Marx and Engels themselves took too optimistic a
view of humanity's abiUty to transcend nature. He calls for a major
modification of this Utopian triumphalism of'man over nature', appealing
to the sober pessimism of Leopardi as a necessary antidote to the claims
of Marx and Engels. Recognising the biological obstacles to human
happiness (hunger, disease, death) suggests a matedalist ethics based on
the hedonistic balance of pain and pleasure, and recognising the frailty
of humanity in the face of natural cmelty suggests a degree of pessimism
in a matedalist outlook. Even in communist society the oppression of
mankind by nature will not cease. These latter themes are distinctively
absent from the Marxism of Marx and Engels, and in this fundamental
sense the matedalism of Timpanaro is by no means an exclusively Marxist
philosophy.

Timpanaro's thesis has a sweeping originality that forces a vadety of

comments and refiections to surface at different levels. The position he
is arguing could not be less fashionable, and the blatant contempt he
displays for several modern intellectual Gums has already aroused con-
siderable animosity and disregard. (Pads, particularly, seems the home
of idealists and charlatans.) Yet whatever the problems with Timpanaro's
arguments, some of which I shall discuss below, his polemic is a timely
one and salutary in its effect. For Timpanaro's wdting canies an un-
mistakable stamp of sedousness, and it recalls us to fundamental ques-
tions on the purpose of intellectual work. His writings intimate, in a
profoundly authentic way, the insignificance of mankind to the cosmos,
the stark reahties of death and disease, the tragedies of wasted life and
cruel suffedngs. And how can we defend, in the face of these monumental
issues, the limited and tdvial work with which we are engaged? To pose
a pertinent question here: can the sociology of medicine, presumably
well placed to document and analyse these cogent questions, really justify
those studies of inter-subjective encounters in the waiting room or those
accounts of 'doing being ill'? Phenomenology and subjectivism have
their influence in medical sociology, just as stmcturalism and semiolog>'
have theirs in sociological aesthetics, and Timpanaro's sweeping challenge
to these forms of 'idealism' calls for some sedous response.
It is, however, the high level of philosophical abstraction of Timpan-
aro's arguments that constitutes one ofthe first problems we can identify.
 Review article 341
It is paradoxical, although not uncommon, that Timpanaro calls for
rigorous, empidcal, scientific examination of these issues whilst his own
wdting is couched very largely in philosophical terms. Perry Anderson
has pointed out that although Timpanaro's work contains 'the most
coherent and eloquent rejection' of western Marxism it stdkingly re-
produces the very emphasis on philosophical, rather than political or
economic, thought that it seeks to counter.^ To read On Materialism is
in fact to plunge into the entire history of modern European thought.
The argument proceeds through polemical engagement with a staggedng
range of Italian, French and German intellectual adversaries, necessarily
loading down the text with an extensive scholarly apparatus. One con-
sequence of this is that the argument that I have extracted from the
book, and which has proved the focus of comment so far in Bdtain, is
stated at several points in the book but never fully elaborated. The ulti-
mate determining of the social by the natural tends to be asserted as a
fact rather than argued through in terms of illustrative cases. Kate Soper
argues that Timpanaro in practice thus blurs the distinction between an
ontological category (the expedence of a biological realm) and an epis-
temological one. She writes:
Timpanaro asks us to conceive of the 'biological' as an ontological category, and
tends to identify materialism with the recognition of this ontological realm. This
means that ontological facts (biological structures and properties) are in them-
selves accorded an epistemological status and that their explanatory value is con-
trasted with, and somehow in competition with histodcal materialist explanation.
Timpanaro stresses, quite rightly, that mankind is naturally and biologically
determined, but he appears to think that a materialist explanation of human
history is contained in this simple recognition of these general determinations
abstracted from their particular effects.'
Although Timpanaro engages in more detailed and less abstract argu-
ments when cdticising what he considers to be mistaken positions (the
case of Chomsky being a good example here), he fails to do so in support
of his own most striking and contentious thesis.
Related to this silence on the exact operations of the physical and
biological parameters of human action are some sedous definitional
problems. The categodes of 'natural', 'physical', even 'biological', are
undefined and unclear in these wdtings. Timpanaro concedes them to
be socially mediated, but does not specify precisely what remains as
'natural' and in practice takes this to be self-evident. The conceptual
categodes of what he takes to be idealism — mind, thought, theory,
reflection - are all problematised in a highly dgorous way. Yet those
that belong to empiricism — nature, reahty, observation, fact - are used
far less cdtically. It is stated as unquestionably tme that '. . . facts do
not allow themselves to be vanquished by labels' (p. 41).
342 Michele Barrett
This point can be illustrated with an example. Timpanaro contrasts
physics, as a science that has contdbuted to idealism, with the biological
sciences, which have shown themselves as much more 'tenaciously
materialist'. He refers to geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology
as not only contdbuting to a matedalist epistemology but as producing
findings that are in some sense reliable scientific knowledge. Timpanaro
is prone to statements that begin 'The results of scientific research teach
us that . . .' (p. 36). Yet paleontology and evolutionary biology are
scarcely beyond cdticism as objective knowledge, having been accused
in recent years (just to take one example) of drawing inferences about
animal behaviour on the basis of anthropocentdc — and highly sexist -
assumptions.'* Difficulties such as these are somewhat glossed over in
the attempt to establish the materialism of scientific research and the
objectivity of its knowledge.
Timpanaro argues that two separate strands of thought share a com-
mon refusal to develop a philosophy informed by scientific knowledge.
These are the Hegelian ideaUsm that identifies the world exclusively
with human history, and what he calls 'methodologism' - a tendency
to emphasise the formal methodology of the scientist and to emphasise
results as the product of thought. This latter tendency is perhaps better
captured as 'conventionalism', described by Terry Lovell as follows: 'The
limit position which all conventionalisms more or less approach is one
in which the world is in effect constructed in and by theory.'^
There can be no doubt that of the two the latter position is currently
more dominant than Hegelian idealism. In sociology, as well as in Marx-
ism , we have seen a massive dse of interest in several conventionalisms,
from the 'paradigms' of sociology of science to the 'labelling theodes' of
radical cdminology. It is precisely this kind of subjectivist phenomen-
ology that Timpanaro is at pains to cdticise. Yet in his relatively uncdti-
cal use ofthe traditional categodes of empidcism — implying the neutral
scientific observation of a natural world - he remains undefended against
conventionalist arguments.

In addition to these theoretical difficulties with On Materialism there is

a second major area of contention. This is the question of biologism.
Timpanaro argues some convincing points here, but a number of prob-
lems remain. As mentioned earher, he distinguishes between a matedalism
in which the biological level is recognised, and biologism, which ex-
trapolates directly from biology to social or cultural phenomena. He
stresses that there are no grounds for accepting biologistic arguments such
as have been proposed in connection with race or in theodes such as
Lombroso's attempt to link cdminality to biological differences. Timpan-
aro sees, in some ways quite accurately, the fear of biologism as the
underlying reasons for Marxism's evasion of biology. The reactionary
 Review article 343
connotations of biologistic arguments are well known and require little
comment. Attempts to link social divisions and social inequality to
their supposed biological odgins inevitably assume the immutabiUty of
biological givens and frequently lend themselves to manipulation as
pseudo-scientific justification for oppressive social relations.
It is unclear, however, exactly how Timpanaro's own analysis will
eventually escape any biologistic gloss when appHed to a particular in-
stance. Raymond Williams, in his review of On Materialism, stresses the
distance between the 'triumphalism' of orthodox Marxism (its confidence
that man can transcend nature) and Timpanaro's pdncipled pessimism
in this regard.* If we take an instance where biologistic arguments have
considerable currency - the question of gender division - we see the
problems that adse from Timpanaro's unwillingness to specify exactly
what is meant by the biological realm and, therefore, to what we should
resign ourselves. His formulations are insufficiently precise to resolve
the major disputed issues. There is, in fact, beyond glancing references
to Engels's The Origin ofthe Family, Private Property and the State vir-
tually no consideration of sexual division at all. It is to be deprecated
that the text operates throughout with the sexist vocabulary of 'man'
'he' and so on, rendedng precision on these questions somewhat unhkely.
If we tum to Timpanaro's work on Freud, assuming that here at least
the centrahty of sexual difference to psychoanalysis must be given some
comment, we are sadly disappointed. The Freudian Slip argues that
Freud's explanations of parapraxes could equally well be replaced by
explanations of another kind and concentrates on the failure of psycho-
analysis to meet dgorous scientific cdteria. Timpanaro's lengthy critical
engagement with Lucien S6ve, the only serious contender in the project
of developing a Marxist theory of the personality,^ fails to comment on
Sfeve's silence in this cdtical question of gender.
In the absence of any comment from Timpanaro, the inference is not
clear. Are we, for instance, to see the mortality and suffedng associated
with childbirth as a biological given to which we must resign ourselves
with a correctly matedaUst pessimism? Or do we see it as a manifestation
of socio-economic, or cultural, relations that might be altered by human
agency? The insistent pessimism of Timpanaro's arguments, combined
with the failure or refusal to fiesh out with some content the bones of
his theses, leaves - to say the least - an area of disturbing ambiguity.
Soper's conclusions are difficult to refute:
Even death, that notorious leveller, will not Ue down in the flatness of its essence,
for though it comes to all, it comes in a thousand different w a y s . . . . The human
race is biologically determined in the sense that it has the kind of lungs which
will be destroyed by over-exposure to a certain form of asbestos; and it is
naturally determined in that asbestos has the physical and chemical properties
344 Michele Barrett
that it does; but the incidence of asbestosis is a socially determined fact that it is
within human capacities to alter. These determinations should be kept distinct.*

The third issue that I want to take up from Timpanaro's work is that
of the status of science. He argues that the cdtique of scientific enquiry
has gone too far. In seeing science as merely mystification — a tool
of oppression - Marxism has abandoned the scientific socialism of
Marx and Engels and handed over science as a gift to the bourgeoisie.
Timpanaro believes in the possibility of a genuinely objective scientific
knowledge: a knowledge grounded in more than praxis, based on more
than pdncipled relativism. He alludes with some force to the 'cdminal
use of science by capitalism and the constantly dsing tendency of
scientists to debase themselves to faithful servants of the mlers of
society' (p. 258). But this tendency, he argues, does not warrant the
purist and escapist attitude of noli me tangere that Marxists have
assumed in relation to natural science. Timpanaro sees the reduction of
science to ideology, so common in contemporary Marxist thought, as a
quite mistaken reaction to the degradation of science under capitalism.
He insists that science must be politicised rather than abandoned. It
must be politicised in that at present science is not in practice neutral,
but this politicisation will involve a rigorous scientific examination of
the issues hitherto suppressed rather than a disrespect for scientific
knowledge itself.
In this respect Timpanaro is surely dght. As things stand we are
ill-equipped to defend ourselves against reactionary, but popular
and persuasive, pseudo-scientific arguments. Timpanaro does, I think,
correctly identify a key weakness in our failure to provide substantial
materialist responses to these positions. On Materialism indicates some
telling failures in contemporary Marxism, and raises questions that
cannot easily be dismissed. I have discussed some problems which
recur in a sedous consideration of his argument, notably his vulner-
ability to charges of a naive and empidcist conception of the natural
world and a failure to specify the relations between biological and
socio-economic or cultural processes in particular cases. It might
also be noted that Timpanaro's intransigent rejection of structuralism in
theodes of culture can be seen as unduly dogmatic — but this ques-
tion is more appropdately left to debates in aesthetics and cultural
studies.
It is undoubtedly the case that Timpanaro's arguments will provoke
dissent, if not outrage. He represents what is currently regarded as a
reprehensibly determinist position and, even worse, has introduced a
biological bogey-man into our all too cerebral disputes. But his work
provides a healthy corrective to the wilder excesses of idealism and
 Review article 345
subjectivism in common currency in both Marxism and sociology, and
a cdtical engagement with his arguments can only prove productive.

Department of Social Science and Humanities

The City University, London

Notes

1 All un-noted page references in the present text are to S. Timpanaro, On Mater-
ialism, London, Verso, 1980 (first published in Italy in 1970); S. Timpanaro,
'The Pessimistic Matedalism of Giacomo Leopardi', A^ew Left Review, 116 (July-
August, 1979);S. Timpanaro, The Freudian Slip, London, New Left Books, 1976.
2 P. Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, London, New Left Books,
1976: 91.
3 K. Soper, 'Marxism, Materialism and Biology' in Mepham and Ruben (eds).
Issues in Marxist Philosophy, Volume Two: Materialism, Bdghton, Harvester,
1979: 93.
4 E. Morgan, The Descent of Woman, London, Souvenir Press, 1972; E. Fisher,
Woman's Creation, London, Wildwood House, 1980.
5 T. Lovell, Pictures of Reality, London, British Film Institute, 1980: 15.
6 R. Williams,'Problems of Matedalism', AfewZ.e//i?evjeiv, 109 (May-June. 1978).
7 L. S^\e, Marxism and the Theory of Human Personality, London, Lawrence &
Wishart, 1975.
8 K. Soper, op.cit.: 95-6.