Structuralism

Philosophical current that arose in the decade of the 1960s, especially in France. It is a “way of thinking” that unites very different authors, who express themselves in the most diverse fields of the human sciences including anthropology (C. Levi-Strauss), literary criticism (R. Barthes), Freudian psychoanalysis (J. Lacan), historiographic investigation (M. Foucault), as well as specific philosophic movements such as Marxism (L. Althusser). These scholars reject the ideas of subjectivism, historicism and humanism, which are the core of the interpretations of phenomenology and existentialism. Using a method in sharp contrast with that of the phenomenological, “structuralists” tend to study the human being from outside, as though it were any other natural phenomenon, “the way one would study ants” (as Levi-Strauss has said), and not from within, as the contents of consciousness would be studied. With this focus, which imitates the procedures of the physical sciences, they attempt to elaborate research strategies capable of elucidating the systematic and constant relations they believe exist in human behavior, both individual and collective, and to which they give the name “structures.” These are not obvious relations, but deep relations that, in large part, are not consciously perceived, and both limit and constrain human action. The research of structuralists tends to highlight the “unconscious” and conditioning factors rather than consciousness or human freedom. The concept of structure (*) and the method inherent to it do not come to s. directly from the logic-mathematical sciences or from psychology (the Gestalt school), which had already been using this concept for some time. Rather, s. borrows its analytical instruments from linguistics. In fact, one point of reference common to the various distinct developments of s. has always been the work of F. de Saussure in his Course of General Linguistics (1915) which, in addition to constituting a decisive contribution for the foundation of modern linguistics, introduced the use of the “structural method” into the field of linguistic phenomena. The vision of s. would have made more progress had it gone more deeply into the study of the fields of “presence” and “co presence,” in which Husserl locates the characteristic of the consciousness that allows it to infer more than it perceives or understands. Ratio-vitalism probes deeply into this co presence in order to comprehend the structure of ideation, which it calls belief (*), and on which ideas and reason are based. We note that the system of beliefs is in no way related to a supposed “unconscious.” It has its own laws, its own dynamic, and it develops historically, transformed by the generations (*) as their landscape (*) changes. Beliefs appear, then, as the “soil” in which these other structures of ideation called “ideas” are rooted and nourished.