FROM ANTHROPIC ZONES TO ANTHROPIC LAYERS

Abstract

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 layers of social practices – phenophysical, semiotic and representational – we will integrate the anthropic zones and the layers of social practices into a larger whole that we describe as a system of “anthropic layers”, that is to say, the ontological layers 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- and noumeno- distinction to all the major layers and to the anthropic layers. We will obviously discuss whether the noumeno- dimension exists. Different reductions (whether justified or unjustified) are possible between layers of a higher or lower order, and between layers of the same order. For example, to take the example of the semiotic layer: 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 (for example, in Greimas’s semiotics of the natural world), and the cognitive to the semiotic (according to the cognitive semiotics of the µ Group). 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.