Abstract
The chapter deals with two of the best known works of Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans and A Theory of Meaning, and focuses on the behavior of higher animals (that includes issues such as territoriality, individual recognition, imprinting, etcetera). According to the Estonian biologist, these phenomena are due to the emergence of superior environmental traits, such as the function and the meaning of particular images, individuals or places. This approach is linked to the idea of the semiotic variability of the Umwelt, in particular in higher animals and human beings. The chapter ends with a synthetic exposition of some of the philosophic dialogues Uexküll dedicated to problems such as the overall teleology of nature, the question of immortality, the role of the individual in a biological species.
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- 1.
See above, 30, n. 67.
- 2.
In the first half of the 30s during a series of popular conferences promoted by the Austrian cultural association Urania, Lorenz also realized that there was a growing interest in a larger public (Föger and Taschwer 2001: 57–58).
- 3.
Companions as Factor in the Bird’s Environment (original title Der Kumpan in der Umwelt der Vögel) was published in the “Journal für Ornithologie” in 1935; but the previous year Uexküll had been given the work as a gift on occasion of the Festschrift for his 70th birthday, and he had already received some material from Lorenz in 1933 about his results on social corvids.
- 4.
The material sent to Uexküll comes mostly from Lorenz’s research from the end of the 20s and the beginning of the 30s, that can be found in K. Lorenz, Contributions to the Study of the Ethology of social Corvidae (Lorenz 1931) and A Consideration of Methods of Identification of Species-specific Instinctive Behaviour Patterns in Birds (Lorenz 1932).
- 5.
Also in terms of the concrete structuring of these coordinates, there are interspecific differences which are motivated by the necessity to manage different amounts of stimuli. It is important to note how the most elementary level of spatial and temporal organization is (so to speak) an empty network: “Space and time” – writes Uexküll – “are of no immediate use to the subject. They only become meaningful when numerous perceptive marks (features) must be distinguished that would otherwise coincide without the spatial and temporal framework of the environment. However, such a framework is not needed in simple environments” (von Uexküll 2010b: 73).
- 6.
This highly important idea shall be explored in greater detail in the analysis of A Theory of Meaning (cf. below, 195).
- 7.
Uexküll’s gradualist formulation was again well-received by Merleau-Ponty: with the increase in the closeness to man “the Umwelt is less and less oriented towards a [unique] goal and more and more interpretation of symbols. But there is not a break between the planned animal, the animal that plans, and the animal without plan” (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 178). On Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Uexküll cf. Brentari 2010.
- 8.
“For decades now, many American researchers have carried out thousands of series of experiments in which the most different kinds of animals had to find their way through a maze, in an attempt to establish how quickly each animal can learn a certain path. They never saw the problem of the familiar path that is concerned here. They never studied visual, tactile, or olfactory perceptive marks, nor did they consider the animal’s application of the coordinate system; that right and left are a problem in and of themselves never occurred to them” (von Uexküll 2010b: 99).
- 9.
An even more direct reference to imprinting can be found in A Theory of Meaning: “The puzzling behavior of young grey geese, reported by Lorenz, also consists in imprinting meaning. […] Even the human being can acquire the meaning “mother” for the grey goose in this case. “How does the human being imprinted as mother companion look to the grey goose?” is the question which particularly occupies Lorenz” (von Uexküll 2010b: 176).
- 10.
- 11.
To describe the presence “in the mind” of such stimuli, Uexküll again turns to a musical metaphor: they “sound one after the other like an inborn melody” (von Uexküll 2010b: 124).
- 12.
Ibi, pp. 125–126. With the term “surroundings” (Italian: “dintorni”) Mazzeo translates the German Umgebung, which in the Uexküllian lexicon indicates the physical context that, on a case-to-case basis, supports the establishment of subjective Umwelten (environments). Not even the Umgebung, however, is an objective reality in the strictest sense: it is the specific environment which man has access to when he adopts the point of view of science. The same translation of the German term can be also found in von Uexküll 1985.
- 13.
This point was well-understood by Medard Boss, who – in discussing the extreme variety of the subjective experiences of human beings from a psychoanalytic-existential perspective – in regards to Uexküll states: “Although, because of some biologic misunderstanding, this author cannot yet fully differentiate between the rigidly prescribed animal world and the more or less free world of man, he has demonstrated that there are vast differences in perceiving one and the same object of the world by various kind of animals. But he also has pointed out how differently an oak tree in the woods is observed and experienced by a hunter, a romantic young girl or a practical lumber dealer” (Boss 1949: 31). Boss adopts the example of the oak as presented in Theoretische Biologie (von Uexküll 1928a: 232), which has some slight differences with the one used here, which comes instead from A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans.
- 14.
Here we have a curious similarity with the stance of Protagoras, who believed that man’s gnoseological relativism (starting from a sensory level) would be justified by the simultaneous presence in reality of all the different properties and nuances felt by subjects: “matter, so far as depends on itself, is capable of being all those things which appear to all” (Sextus Empiricus 1976: 131).
- 15.
This leads to instances of baroque complexity, such as when magnetic attraction toward metal is defined as “ferrotropically positive behavior” (von Uexküll 2010b: 162).
- 16.
Loeb’s model of living things shares a strong similarity to Descartes; here, too, the impact between physical objects becomes the paradigm of the relationship between the organism (as perceiving object) and the environment, and reflex behavior (triggered automatically by the stimulus) becomes emblematic of all animal behavior. This issue will be dealt with in detail in the paragraph dedicated to the critique that Merleau-Ponty – using Uexküllian categories – addresses to behaviorists and Pavlovians (see below, 212).
- 17.
For simplicity’s sake here Uexküll neglects the fact that, in his conception, the operative world is also based on an interpretative process (see above, 108–110).
- 18.
As Buchanan rightly states, the attribution of meaning (or rather the inclusion of an animal species in the semiotic environmental system) concerns at least three categories of entities: other living beings, lifeless things and “inorganic forces – such as affects, temperatures, shadows, or noises” (Buchanan 2008: 36).
- 19.
In Theoretische Biologie we find the concept of rule in the analysis of the controlled action (“first we have to know the animal’s rule of action, and only afterwards can we approach the issue of the constitution of objects [in their environments]”) and in the question of the formation of the embryo (“to the question: “How does a rule affect the protoplasm of the fertilized egg?” […] our answer said it orders the series of impulses from the protoplasm” (von Uexküll 1928a: 134, 148; cf. also above, 115).
- 20.
Cf. also von Uexküll 2010b: 160, where the terms “primal image” (Urbild), “primal melody” (Urmelodie) and “primal score” (Urpartitur) are used as synonyms.
- 21.
As Giorgio Agamben observes in conclusion to his brief but accurate description of this Uexküllian passage, “though the spider can in no way see the Umwelt of the fly […] the web expresses the paradoxical coincidence of this reciprocal blindness” (Agamben 2004: 42).
- 22.
In the following pages the zoologist’s vision of the world is defined “mono-world [unimondal]”, and that of the biologist a “multi-world [multimundal]” one (von Uexküll 1938: 60).
- 23.
Rudolf Bilz (1898–1976). German psychiatrist and psychotherapist. After World War II he dedicated himself extensively to the study of human ethology, specifically instinctive behavioral reactions (shame, pain and fear) and their influence on the daily actions of man. For the work which Uexküll cites cf. Bilz 1940.
- 24.
In reference to the interchangeability of the actors who, in the human world, can play the same part in a given piece, Uexküll writes: “I have to admit the same is true for the dramas of life, whose author we don’t know” (von Uexküll 1950: 67).
- 25.
As Uexküll points out in the introduction to Die ewige Frage, for the Greeks the gods are a sort of narrative fiction with which to portray different aspects of nature (von Uexküll and von Uexküll 1944: 17).
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Brentari, C. (2015). Environment and Meaning. In: Jakob von Uexküll. Biosemiotics, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9688-0_6
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