Umwelt
Description
Tim Elmo Feiten:
"Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944) believed that every living creature inhabits a world of its own. The structure of this world is largely determined by the species to which a creature belongs, by its physiology, its behaviour, and its environment, but this world discloses itself only through individual subjective experience. As such, these worlds are both private and unique to each living subject. Uexküll coined the technical term Umwelt to refer to these worlds of subjective experience. Uexküll’s thought, and the concept of Umwelt at its centre, were received with excitement by his contemporaries and have exerted a small but steady influence on both science and philosophy ever since. However, his notion of Umwelt also has deeply unsettling consequences for the way we understand the world and our place in it.
Uexküll’s thought is a three-fold provocation:
1) He posits a world of experience for each living creature that is strictly beyond the reach of scientific knowledge, offending the boundless optimism in science engendered by centuries of technological successes and cultural dominance;
2) None of these Umwelten has a different metaphysical status than the others. Since we humans, including human scientists, are also living creatures, the world we each experience and study gives us no privileged access to an objective truth about a mind-independent world;
3) The claim that each human individual experiences a private phenomenal world of its own, and can never access the Umwelt of anyone else, has deeply disturbed many thinkers."
(https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/jakob-von-uexkull-umwelt)
Discussion
A holistic view of nature as a meaningful totality
Tim Elmo Feiten:
"Uexküll also developed a holistic view of nature as a meaningful totality that was strongly influenced by Goethe.
Besides the account of individual living subjects inspired by Kant, Uexküll also developed a holistic view of nature as a meaningful totality that was strongly influenced by Goethe. Since he rejected Darwin’s account of species change and adaptation, Uexküll needed an alternative account of why the parts of nature seem to fit together so perfectly. Based on a musical metaphor, he developed a vision of nature as a grand meaningful whole consisting of melodies, harmonies, and counterpoints between the morphologies and behaviours of, say, predator and prey. This view has clear overtones of Romanticism, organicism, and even pantheism. Uexküll himself extended his holistic commitments and the rejection of change implied in his anti-evolutionary stance into a deeply totalitarian organicist political theory. This creates a jarring contrast: on the one hand, the concept of Umwelt seems to unsettle our view of the world we inhabit and give us a non-anthropocentric multiplicity of worlds instead of a single, objective, scientific account of the world; on the other hand, Uexküll’s account of the state as an organism, which he saw confirmed and realized in the rise to power of the Nazi party, expresses a deeply reactionary and oppressive vision in which each individual is completely subordinate to the whole of the totalitarian state. It is important to keep in mind that states are not literally organisms, so Uexküll’s use of his biological views to develop an account of the state is not only politically but also intellectually problematic. Comparing societies and states to organisms is a common reactionary trope that goes back at least to the Roman consul Agrippa Menenius Lanatus. If we reject the comparison, Uexküll’s account of nature has no direct relevance for political thought."
(https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/jakob-von-uexkull-umwelt)