أهم المراجع

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L. Althusser:
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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.

Philosophically speaking, the main 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:

Lucien Sebag made an attempt to combine Structuralism and Marxism on the ground that Marx was seekig “total” forms or schemata which go beyond those economic factors exclusively stressed by traditional Marxism. The result was that Sebag denied the absolute causality of the economic factor which, for him, formed only a part of a much wider schema.

Louis Althusser’s attempt was more important. He tried to restore the scientifically rigorous character of Marxism, to stress its independance of Hegel and of the whole previous philosophical tradition, and to found it on a socio-economic structure of which man himself is only a part.

He replaced traditional causality between the infrastructure and the superstructure by a more complicated, multiform causality. This attempt was criticized because of its unilateral, arbitrary interpretation of Marxism as an exact science, and its tendency to discard Man.

The paper concludes by criticizing stucturalism as a whole for the same reason, i. e. ignoring Man, together with history and evolution. It is true that Piaget and Sebag tried to reconcile structuralism with some sort of historicism, through a more accurate definition of Man as envisaged by structuralism. However, this defence was not utterly convincing. Structuralism did not sufficiently take into account the factors of movement, change and activity. It stressed Man in his “static” condition, when he is acted upon, instead of being active.