82
PETER
CAWS
... we prefer to operate with detached pieces, if not indeed with
"small change," while the native is a logical hoarder: he is for–
ever tying the threads, unceasingly turning over all the aspects of
reality, whether physical, social or mental. We traffic in our ideas;
he hoards them up.
And in this way he avoids the fragmentation we frequently lament
in our own lives. But it would be a mistake to suppose that he has
access to a kind of conceptual stability denied to us, by virtue of
some now lost insight into things as they are. He looks for no such
insight and therefore does not miss it; it is enough to be engaged in
the structuring activity, whatever form it may take, to be relieved of
any uneasiness about lack of foundations or of meaning or of the
other things for which modem man, anguished and alienated as he is,
often yearns so eloquently.
If
mind in its natural state finds this psychic equilibrium so
easily, how does it come about that modem man has such difficulty
in adjusting himself to the conditions of his existence? We may have
moments of equilibrium, significantly enough when we are wholly
engaged in some activity (as might by now be expected, it doesn't
matter much
what
activity, whether athletic, intellectual or artistic),
but left to our own reflective devices we tend to be a bewildered and
discontented lot. This bewilderment and discontent manifest them–
selves in all sorts of projects for self-improvement, self-realization, even
self-discovery, all of which the primitive would find completely mys–
tifying. He is in the fortunate condition of not knowing that he has
a self, and therefore of not being worried about it. And the structural–
ists have come to the conclusion that he is nearer the truth than we
are, and that a good deal of our trouble arises out of the invention
of the self
a's an object of study,
from the belief that man has a
special kind of being, in short from the emergence of humanism.
Structuralism is not a humanism, because it refuses to grant man any
special status in the world. Obviously it cannot deny that there are
individual men who observe, think, write and so on (although it does
not encourage them in the narcissistic effort of "finding themselves,"
to use the popular jargon). Nor does it deny that there are more
or less cohesive social groups with their own histories and cultures.
Nothing concrete recognized or valued by the humanist is excluded,
only the theoretical basis of humanism. In order to clarify this point
it is necessary to consider the central question of structuralism, which
