Ptolemaic Man and Copernican Man: In Favour of “Depth Anthropology”

This essay highlights how in the anthropology of Portmann, nature and culture, history and biology, coexist in man in a form of close collaboration, which has as its premise “world-openness” and the “extra-uterine year”. This dual belonging, which Portmann reworks in his basal anthropology, sees man inhabit two worlds at the same time: a primary world, which he shares with all other living things, which he accepts as immediately endowed with meaning and which makes him part of a connected system of integrated signs and communications; and a rational, cultural secondary world. The latter has the obligation to give meaning to life, whilst safeguarding human health. The risk of a hypertrophy of the secondary world – a warning, in our opinion, to be found also in the thought of Morin and Lorenz – requires an integration of the two worlds, through what we have called “depth anthropology”. In the last part of the essay, in fact, we have introduced this expression as a different declination of basal anthropology, in which attention is placed on the positive and indispensable role of the primary world.