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The Philosophical Foundations of Structuralism

By: Dr. Fouad H. Zakaria (Summary)

The paper starts by stating that structuralism, as a method, was known from ancient times, while, as a total system of thought, it is a recent phenomenon.

Its philosophical roots may be traced to various sources, of which one of the most important is Kant’s philosophy. The latter, too, was seeking an a-priori schema within which the variety of experience may be organized, consists of mental forms. Structuralism constitutes one episode in the long series of attempts to elevate the study of man to the level of rigorous science, hence the important role played by the linguistic model in it.

feature of structuralism is its opposition to empiricism on the one hand and historicism on the other. According to it, man’s mind and its cultural products grow organically, with a hard core of forms which remain unchanged, although they are incessantly elaborated and made more complex in the process of growth. It is the discovery of these stable elements which, for structuralism, justifies its claim to be a rigorous scientific study of man and society.

The paper gives an exposition of the philosophical foundations of structuralism as examplified in a few of its main representatives: (1) Lévy-Strauss:

The philosophical formation of Strauss is evident in the stress he lays on the role of the human mind in moulding all of its cultural products. Man’s mind tends to subsume various groups of experiences under one basic structure, which forms the basis of all the apparent aspects of social institutions. It was this philosophical character of his research that provoked other anthropologists to criticize him severely, on the ground that he dogmatically kept his “structures” aloof from the stream of time. This was also the origin of the famous controversy between Strauss on the one hand, and Sartre and Existentialism on the other. (2) Michel Foucault:

In his “Las Mots et Jes Choses”, Foucault attempts to discover, in a non-historical manner, the distinctive structure of each period in modern European intellectual history since the Renaissance. He arbitrarily fixes that structure to the point of neglecting many basic elements without which each period would be incomprehensible. (3) The Structurlist Marxists:

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