Structuralism was a school of philosophy that was at the forefront of the Continental
philosophical tradition for a few short years in the 1960s. This time at the cutting edge
although brief was critical; it marked a turning point, a bridge from the Existentialism
that had dominated the Continental tradition since the Second World War into a new
intellectual landscape that has often been captured under the labels Post-
Structuralism and Postmodernism. In this episode we are going to be looking
at what Structuralism is, why it was so revolutionary and why it was so quickly outgrown.
Saussure Structuralism can't be understood without
reference to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. In a previous episode on the channel
we looked at Saussure's revolutionary reorientation of linguistics with Semiology
or as it's now known Semiotics. This work of Saussure made him the retroactive father
of the Structuralist tradition. In the language of Thomas Kuhn, Saussure birthed
the paradigm within which Structuralism worked and it was an exemplar of what a Structuralist
analysis should look like. In his posthumously published work Course
on General Linguistics, Saussure made a number of important distinctions that laid
the groundwork for this tradition. The most important idea for the purposes of
our general overview of Structuralism is Saussure's distinction between parole and
langue. These are two different words for language that have slightly different meanings
for the Swiss linguist. Parole is the trillion and one uses of language
as it is used everywhere every day. It is language in motion. But underneath this constantly
changing surface of language there is the langue, the structure of the language
which dictates the workings of parole. The relationship between langue and parole is
much like that between the rules of chess and a particular game of chess. The rules
provide a structure that give meaning and order to the individual moves in a particular
game of chess. In the same way the langue provides the structure
of language within which our day to day interactions occur and derive their meaning.
This distinction between the empirical surface of language and the hidden underlying
structure of it was to prove a major inspiration for the French philosophers of the
1960s and 70s. What is Structuralism?
With that groundwork in place then let's talk about what structuralism is.
In the broadest sense, Structuralism is a way of perceiving the human world in terms
of structures. This is already familiar to us when looking at the physical world. The
natural world whether it's a supernova, a quark or a gene are individual instances that
operate by underlying rules. Each supernova, quark and gene are different - they are
the parole of the natural world. But underpinning them is the hidden structure of
physical laws that scientists have unriddled in the past few centuries. From Newton's
laws to the work of Watson and Crick, humanity has been decoding the langue of the
natural world - the hidden set of structures that makes the physical world predictable
and enables the progression of science. Structuralism is the transposition of this
physical scientific worldview onto the human world. At its core Structuralism is the belief
that this human world is subject to such a langue and that we can discern these structures.
Saussure was the pinup philosopher of the Structuralists. His analysis of language gave
Structuralists the confidence and the example - in Kuhnian language the
paradigmatic exemplar - of how this work might be done.
But Saussure wasn't the only inspiration for the Structuralists. Much as the
Existentialists of the 40s and 50s cast their net back to 19th century thinkers like
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, the Structuralists cast their net back not just
to Saussure but also to Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx.
Marx's Structuralist reputation comes from his dialectical materialism in which he
argues that the underlying structures of society - the labour, class and socioeconomic
conditions - determine all the higher activities. Thus religion is opium for the masses
and philosophy, art and politics are all surface reflections of the deeper underlying
structure of material concerns. Freud was another legendary proto-Structuralist
because he undermined the myth of the free conscious agent that was at the backbone
of the Western Judeo-Christian tradition since the story of Adam and Eve.
Freud showed that who we are as individuals is determined much less by the
surface of the mind - by the words and thoughts we consciously think about ourselves
- than it is by the deep hidden structures of the unconscious mind.
But moving beyond Saussure and the proto-Structuralists, in the 1960s and 70s, the
Structuralists-proper applied this type of analysis to fields as varied as psychology,
anthropology, history and sociology. The Structuralists
The ideas of Structuralism are far too varied and disparate to fit into one episode. Like
Existentialism, Post-Structuralism or Analytic Philosophy, it is a catch-all term that
serves more as a useful container than as a tightly defined set of shared principles.
That being said, it is worth giving an overview of who the major players were and how
they applied the ideas of Structuralism. The pioneer and most famous of the Structuralists
was Claude L vi-Strauss who, in many ways, was to Structuralism what Sartre
was to Existentialism. Levi-Strauss's stomping ground was cultural
anthropology. He left France to teach in Brazil and spent a lot of time in the Amazon
observing indigenous tribes. He examined social phenomena such as kinship
structures, myths, cooking practices, religion and ideology and searched out the
underlying structure. The most famous Structuralist approach to mythology is without
a doubt Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Campbell though not
a Structuralist was strongly influenced by L vi-Strauss and his work is the perfect
example of the Structuralist project of unearthing underlying structures in this case
exposing the monomythic structure of the hero's journey that hides beneath the
surface parole of a million and one individual myths.
As well as L vi-Strauss there was the legendary psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who
explored philosophical implications of Freud's work and applied mathematical logic
and topology to the psychology of humanity. There was Roland Barthes who applied Structural
analysis to cultural relations most famously in his highly entertaining book Mythologies
in which the French philosopher applies Structural analysis to everything
from wrestling and soap to margarine and the appearance of Ancient Romans in Hollywood
movies. There was also Michel Foucault whose early
work - despite his later acrid comments to the contrary - are classics of Structuralist
thinking in which he applied structural analysis to the history of punishment, mental
illness and to knowledge itself. Outside of the French main-line of Structuralism,
the most famous of thinker in the school was a scientist - the developmental
psychologist Jean Piaget. In a previous episode on the channel, we looked at Piaget's
model of childhood development and at the four stages of development that each child
goes through on the way to adulthood. Piaget is unusual among the Structuralists
in that he is a hard scientist rather than a
social scientist and is a part of the scientific grand tradition rather than the
philosophical one. But in 1970 Piaget wrote a book called Structuralism
in which he explored the connections between his form of Structuralism
and fields such as mathematics, physics and biology. In the last couple of
chapters of the book he turns his attention to
Structuralism of his colleagues in the social sciences. While has a lot of praise for L
vi- Strauss and a lot of criticism for Foucault,
ultimately he finds more bathwater than baby in the applications of Structuralism
in the social sciences. Piaget and the Failures of Structuralism as
a Science The work of Piaget serves to highlight a lot
of what went wrong with Structuralism. Structuralism is the belief that there is
an underlying structure that human activities adhere to. This abstract nature means that
these structures are not directly observable. All of which begs the question: how do we
uncover these structures? While the work of L vi-Strauss caused great
excitement and, like most of structuralism, was an electrifying intellectual
journey, it is ultimately froth. L vi- Strauss's work in anthropology is praiseworthy
more for the inspiration it provided to potential anthropologists rather than any
rigorous conclusions that have stood the test of time.
As early as 1970, the Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach famously
wrote of L vi-Strauss: "Even now, despite his immense prestige, the
critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber the disciples."
L vi-Strauss brings to mind Aristotle's pioneering work in science. He was attempting
to discern the structure to the natural world but working from the armchair his results
were far from rigorous. As Kuhn would put it: though he was a scientist, the net output
of his work fell far shy of the label science. By comparison the work of Piaget is a Structuralism
that is supported by a solid skeleton of science. And while Piaget's work
is far from criticism-free, it has behind it
the rigour of decades of experiments and a whole field of scientists working in the
same direction. Piaget's work instantiated a paradigm in the field of developmental
psychology that the work of L vi-Strauss never attained in academic anthropology.
This was the failing of Structuralism in the social sciences. With the works of L vi-
Strauss, it never attained a rigour that deserved the label science and yet it was the all-
important stepping-stone from which Post-Structuralism jumped off.
Derrida's Criticism In 1967 work Writing and Difference, Jacques
Derrida dealt a death blow to Structuralism that marked the beginning of
Post-Structuralism. His criticism of the school comes at it from a different angle
to Piaget's and yet there is a surprising overlap between their evaluations.
Derrida sees Structuralism as going way back beyond Saussure to Plato. It is the
history of Western metaphysics seeking the eternal unchanging structures. He is
referring to Plato's Ideas- the eternal unchanging Forms out of which all particular
instances emerge. Thus in Plato we have the langue as the archetypal
realm of the Ideas and we have the material world as the parole of these Ideas.
All chairs are individual instantiations of the archetypal Idea Chair just as all good
deeds are individual instantiations of the archetypal Idea of the Good. And so you have
the langue of the Ideas and the parole of the immediate individual experience.
Derrida criticises this Structuralist idea as being myopic and missing out on change
and individual cases in its focus on the structure. This dovetails nicely with Piaget's criticism
of Structuralism in the social sciences. In his 1970 book Structuralism Piaget criticises
Levi-Strauss's conception of structure as static, atemporal, anti-functionalist, and
leaving no place for "the activity of the subject." He sees his own Structuralism as
being completely at odds with this. Coming from a more traditional scientific
background it is hard to think of human developmental stages as being atemporal and
static rather than evolutionary and changing over time.
But this is what is what Piaget and Derrida find fault with in the main-line of
Structuralism - it is an unchanging atemporal straitjacket that human life must abide
by ad infinitum. Piaget comes at it from a scientific angle
while Derrida comes at it from a linguistic one but both criticisms point to the same
fundamental tension, a tension that has been in Western philosophy even before Plato: the
interplay between Being and Becoming between change and order. It's the same puzzle
that Parmenides, Heraclitus and the other Presocratics that followed them were
all wrestling with and it seems the same crisis reared its head once again in the 20th
century Continental tradition. In the episode on Phenomenology we saw this same
disjoint between Heidegger and Husserl and it's something we'll be exploring in more
depth as look deeper into Heidegger and into Post-Structuralism.
Summary and Conclusion To summarise then Structuralism was a branch
of French or Continental Philosophy that had its heyday in the 1960s with the
works of Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault and Barthes.
Structuralism argued that there is a structure beneath the surface reality that explains
reality more accurately than the empirical study of this surface. The Structuralists
took as inspiration and exemplars the works of Marx, Freud and above all Ferdinand
de Saussure. Inspired by this approach, L vi-Strauss sought
to uncover the underlying structures in his field of anthropology - whether that was
in mythology, kin relationships or cooking practices. Lacan sought to push the
envelope on Freud's analysis of the unconscious while Foucault with his Epistemes
attempted to use structural analysis to understand the history of punishment, madness
and knowledge. Ultimately Structuralism with its rigid atemporal
conception of human life was outgrown but it provided a bridge between
the Existentialist tradition that had ruled in
the 1940s and 50s to the so-called Post-Structuralist and Postmodern trends that
emerged in the 1970s and 80s. We will be exploring these Post-Structuralist trends in
greater depth in future episodes of the channel. But for now that's everything for this episode
of the living philosophy. If you've enjoyed it you might like to give the video
a thumbs up down below and if you really liked it and the other content on this channel
then you might like to subscribe to the channel on Patreon where you can get early
access to scripts and episodes as well as many other goodies. And as ever if you have
any thoughts insights or feedback I'd love to hear from you down in the comments otherwise
I shall see you next time thanks for watching.