Structure

STRUCTURE

Structure relates to an arrangement in accordance with set parameters. It puts into order what appears at random. The sanctity for a structure comes from its utility and ease of understanding or transaction. It is a response to a need of a development that is natural. For example, grammar is a structure abstracted from usage. Grammar codifies usage and has no relevance isolated from usage. Usage dictates grammar and not the other way around. A person who emphasises a structure on its own merit is dubbed a stickler or a pedant.

Structure has been useful for progress and organization of society and propagation and advancement of knowledge. Structure by itself does not promote the content. For example, a school is a structure, with classes as sub-structures. But, a school attains sanctity from teachers and students. There have been some who disliked the idea of school. In India, still a large number do not go to school, but it is from a cultural lag and economic unaffordability. The few like Tagore have been wizards and creative geniuses, but that is a rarity. Schools have not been shut because a great artist could grow without it. This truism is not evident in some walks.

Almost everything in our life follows a structure. We have an internal structure that is organically formed. We have unravelled a good deal of it, but mysteries remain, the disconcerting example being cancer. The order we have evolved is an extension of the order we have observed.

Just like physical structures, we have mental structures. We behave, think and operate from those structures. The structures of all individuals are not congruous, except to the extent of shared evolutionary traits, and sometimes shared social beliefs buttressed by examples that are specific to certain cultures. Now, in this light an objective view is a Utopian objective. We can delayer, but I suspect some unknown layer forms in the space created as ‘nature abhors vacuum’. For all practical purposes, we do not have the capacity to dismantle the structures in our minds; the mind (compared to a monkey) hops from one position (branch) to another. That is why rationalism is also a belief in a structure based on reason (many rationalists are very inconsistent even in terms of reason, rare indeed is a rationalist like Russell) and reason is by no means all settled and a sure guide to understanding. Scientists do make guesses transcending reason and are vindicated; a new theory is born; and it goes on like that.

The point I am labouring at is that structure facilitates organized life (thinking), but is a limitation in understanding as the structure shuts vistas outside it. While we should strive for knowledge keeping aside interferences, we must constantly question the conclusions raking up the basics from which they were arrived at.

It is not that clarity would be elusive, but that certainty would be illusive.