2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

S TRUCTURALISM, PHILOSOPHY, AND AI
whose status Lévi-Strauss has shown to be deeply interlinked within a elaborate set of
structures, belongs, by definition, to a level of “presumptive objectivity.” The taxonomic
classifications embedded and made possible by the structures are thus to be considered as
part of a different “philosophical sketch” where the ontological status of the structures has
radically changed.
The crucial point that Ricoeur wants to bring home, is that the “structuralist science”
does not allow to choose between the two rival interpretations because these conflicting and
mutually incompatible “philosophical sketches” are all necessary to make it coherent as a
form of philosophy. Structuralism, then, is bound to oscillate between these incomplete
forms of philosophies because it misses the essential link with the facticity of a subject
who—always located within a historical frame and therefore constrained by a horizon con-
stituted by the history of previous interpretations—strives to recover the sense of the words
that come to him always mediated by the unconscious linguistic structure. Thus, Structur-
alism is forced to privilege, alternatively, one of the two terms of the relationship: some-
times it emphasizes the formal aspect and sometimes it stresses the praxis, but it can never
bring the two together. In either case it is doomed to fail, if left to itself, because in the
former case it postulates an unconscious linguistic grid without being able to account for
the subject (be it empirical or transcendental) who will be able to use it in its daily practices.
In the latter, and symmetrical, case, it reifies the structure by turning it into the structure of
things and a thing itself, e.g. it transforms the unconscious linguistic grid that has to medi-
ate between the subject and reality into an objectively real structure of reality that consti-
tutes praxis itself, that is, into a superstructure of praxis. The structuralist’s pendulum, in
Ricoeur’s words, swings from one of these extremes to the other according to the necessi-
ties of the moment, but is unable to go beyond these “rough outlines of philosophies” and
provide a satisfactory solution to the philosophical problem of integrating men within their
historical world. Such a solution can only come from a marriage with hermeneutics, since
philosophy is the necessary supplement that Structuralism lacks. Ricoeur, in facts, con-
cludes his critique by saying that there cannot be any:
structural analysis without a hermeneutic comprehension of the transfer
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