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A gentle introduction to Structuralism - Magical Realist - Jul 30, 2026
https://philosophynow.org/issues/10/A_Gentle_Introduction_to_Structuralism_Postmodernism_And_All_That
I find myself, both intentionally and at other times unintentionally, echoing the ideas of this whole philosophical movement along with its spawned bastards post-structuralism and post-modernism. A major shift from the absolutism and foundationalism of my earlier studies of Heidegger, Whitehead, and Jung. I no longer buy into this assumption that there is something real and preexistent to our experience of the world--a Kantian "in itself" to which all appearances refer. That in fact language itself generates within itself, thru its infinitely fertile system of relations/differences, what we call Reality and Truth.
"A simple explanation of structuralism is that it understands phenomena using the metaphor of language. That is, we can understand language as a system, or structure, which defines itself in terms of itself. There is no language ‘behind’ language with which we understand it, no metalanguage to explain what language means. Instead it is a self-referential system. Words explain words explain words (as in a dictionary), and meaning is present as a set of structures."
"We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things - metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities."--(Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, 1873)
"The articulation of language…can never be the articulation of things…. [i]t helps to summarize, classify, and analyze man’s contact with the world, reducing things to human perspectives on a human scale. Nor can language preserve the scope or movement even of thought, since it marks only certain terms or termini—boundary stones like statues at the end of vistas—on which attention is sharply arrested; the approach, the atmosphere, and the setting remain unnamed. A word cannot be adequate if it has a meaning at all: only whistling is adequate. Significant speech is a lasso thrown into the air, lucky if it catches some living thing by a leg or by a horn. It would be idle as well as ungrateful to quarrel with words when one must use them; but in venturing upon a long discourse it may be prudent to notice the degree to which some important term abbreviates the facts it stands for, or puts them under an alien category…. "---George Santayana
“We have to drop the notion of correspondence for sentences as well as for thoughts,” Rorty says “and see sentences as connected with other sentences rather than the world.”---Rorty
“Is," "is," "is"—the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Nature's God
“That which I call a text is practically everything… Speech is a text, gesture is a text, reality is a text in this new sense. This is not about re-establishing graphocentrism alongside logocentrism or phonocentrism or text-centrism. The text is not a centre. The text is an openness without borders, of ever-differentiating references.”― Jacques Derrida