a materialist and objective element, derived from scientific practice; and an
idealist element, the reflection in science of philosophical theses elaborated
outside it.
The typical example Althusser gives of a SPS is the case of Jacques Monod,
Nobel Prize winner in biology and author of a book of scientific and philosophical
popularisation that has been forgotten today, but which enjoyed some influence
in the mid-1960s.^22 A scientist of great stature, Monod was also a man of the
Left: he had been a member of the French Communist Party and it was
whispered when he received the Nobel Prize that the party leadership, which
was in a phase of popular union and cultural progress, suggested to him that
he should rejoin, which he declined to do. What Althusser criticises is thus
the thinking of a committed scientist with progressive leanings. He detects
in Monod two contradictory impulses: a materialist tendency, which leads
him to affirm the materiality of the object of biology against vitalists and to
criticise finalism, counter-posing to it the concept of emergence; and a spiritualist
tendency, centred on the notion of ‘noosphere’ taken from Teilhard de Chardin,
and based on a thesis that is not irrelevant to us: ‘language created man’.
Althusser analyses this thesis as a philosophical thesis which, instead of
separating mechanism and spiritualism, combines them:
When he believes himself to be materialist, by giving as the biophysiological
basis of what he calls the ‘noosphere’ – that is to say, the social and historical
existence of the human species – the emergence of the neurobiological support
of language, he is not a materialist, but...a ‘mechanistic materialist’ and in
terms of a theory of human history, that now means that he is an idealist.^23Readers will have noted some superficial similarities between Monod and
Chomsky: both are progressive in politics (a leaning much more strongly
marked in Chomsky, who is a veritable anti-imperialist activist) and materialist
in philosophy – but adherents of a mechanistic materialism which does
not take account of the social and historical existence of humanity. Things
are altogether clear in Chomsky, of whom one has the impression that, in
philosophical terms, he left Europe before the end of the eighteenth century.
But we can go further – for example, by posing the preliminary question:
is linguistics a science or merely one of the human sciences, that is, one of
Critique of Linguistics • 41(^22) See Monod 1972.
(^23) Althusser 1990, p. 151.