FROM ANTHROPIC ZONES TO ANTHROPIC LEVELS

Resumo

We will first present our interpretation of François Rastier’s theory of anthropic zones and discuss how to use it. Next, extending François Rastier’s theory on the three levels of social practices – phenophysical, semiotic, and representational – we will integrate
the concepts of anthropic zones and levels of social practices into a larger whole that we describe as a system of “anthropic levels”, that is to say, ontological levels in which human beings exist and move. Extending Rastier’s distinction between the phenophysical (the world as we perceive it) and, implicitly, the noumenophysical (the world as it is in itself), we will apply the pheno-/noumeno- distinction to all the major levels and their subdivisions. We will, of course, discuss whether the noumeno- dimension exists. Different reductions (whether justified or unjustified) are possible between levels of a higher or lower order, and
between levels of the same order. For example, to take the example of the semiotic level: the semiotic can be reduced to the physical (signifiers would then be physical stimuli) or to the representational (signifieds would then be mental images); the physical can be reduced to the semiotic (e.g., in Greimas’s semiotics of the natural world), and the cognitive to the semiotic (according to the cognitive semiotics of Groupe μ). To give another example, in some theories (e.g., Berkeley’s solipsism and the Buddhist principle of cittamātra), the physical is reduced to the cognitive: the mind creates the world — thought solidified — whether it does so at every moment or once and for all.