Jakob von Uexküll: An introduction

The book is a comprehensive introduction to the work of the Estonian-German biologist Jakob von Uexküll. After a first introductory chapter by Morten Tønnessen and a second chapter on Uexküll's life and philosophical background, it contains four chapters devoted to the analysis of his main works. They are followed by a vast eighth chapter which deals with the influence Uexküll had on other philosophers and scientists. Finally, the author discloses his conclusions, focused on the possibility of updating Uexküll’s work. As far as the key issue is concerned, the Uexküllian Umwelt is the perceptive and operative world which surrounds animal species; it is a subjective species-specific construction which provides living organisms with great security and behaviour stability. The relationship that the animal carries out with its environment is a complex system of semiotic interactions: its behaviour is not a set of mechanical reactions, but a spontaneous attribution of meaning to the outside world.

Sign Systems Studies, 2004

Abstract. Like other sciences, biosemiotics also has its time-honoured archive, consisting, among other things, of writings by those who have been invented and revered as ancestors of the discipline. One such example is Jakob von Uexküll who has been hailed as a precursor ...

Biosemiotics, 2009

Jakob von Uexküll was a well-know author in the German biological and philosophical circles in the first decades of the 20th century. His work influenced Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Konrad Lorenz, among many others. However, tempora mutantur, after the Modern Synthesis in biology, his texts became non-understandable in the framework of the mainstream discourse for several decades. But what is fascinating is that in 1987 he is mentioned as one out of 8 major classics of semiotics (see T. von Uexküll 1987; in Krampen et al. 1987), and in 2001, as one out of 50 major classics of biology of all times (see Hassenstein 2001, in Jahn and Schmitt 2001). Meanwhile, many minds got infected by Uexküll's Theoretische Biologie-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, René Thom (not to mention those who in many different fields have used some of his concepts-Ortega y Gasset, Giorgio Agamben, Noam Chomsky, Arne Naess),... and above all, Thomas A. Sebeok. In 2007, Florian Mildenberger has published a monograph on the life and work of Jakob von Uexküll, entitled Umwelt als Vision: Leben und Werk Jakob von Uexkülls (1864-1944). It is the first full scientific biography written about Uexküll, predated just by Mildenberger's own professorial dissertation (2005). 1 The monograph differs from previous dissertations written on Uexküll (among these, Chien 2005; Helbach 1989; Schmidt 1980) in its comprehensive interweaving of the chronologically ordered biographical data and the development of Uexküll's and his contemporary scientific ideas and ideologies.

Sign Systems Studies, 2009

Thomas Sebeok attributed it to what he called the ‘wretched’ translation of Uexküll’s Theoretische Biologie (1920) that the notion of Umwelt did not reach the Anglo-American intellectual community much earlier. There is no doubt that making more of Uexküll’s Umweltlehre available in English will not only further the biosemiotic movement, but also fill a gap in the foundational theoretical canon of semiotics in general. The purpose of this paper is to address issues of terminology and theory translation between Uexküll’s Umweltlehre and current biosemiotics.

Sign Systems Studies , 2003

In biosemiotics, life and living phenomena are described by means of originally anthropomorphicsemiotic concepts. This can be justified if we can show that living systems as self-maintaining far fromequilibrium systems create and update some kind of representation about the conditions of their self-maintenance. The point of view is the one of semiotic realism where signs and representations are consideredas real and objective natural phenomena without any reference to the specifically human interpreter. It isargued that the most basic concept of representation must be forward looking and that both Charles Peirce’sand Jacob von Uexküll’s concepts of sign assume an unnecessarily complex semiotic agent. The simplest representative systems do not have phenomenal objects or Umwelts at all. Instead, the minimal concept of representation and the source of normativity that is needed in its interpretation can be based on Mark Bickhard’s interactivism. The initial normativity or natural self-interest is based on the ‘utility-concept’ of function: anything that contributes to the maintenance of a far from equilibrium system is functional to that system — every self-maintaining far from equilibrium system has a minimal natural self-interest to serve that function, it is its existential precondition. Minimal interactive representation emerges when such systems become able to switch appropriately between two or more means of maintaining themselves. At the level of such representations, a potentiality to detect an error may develop although no objects of representation for the system are provided. Phenomenal objects emerge in systems that are more complex. If a system creates aset of ongoingly updated ’situation image’ and can detect temporal invariances in the updating process, these invariances constitute objects for the system itself. Within them, a representative system gets an Umwelt and becomes capable of experiencing triadic signs. The relation between representation and its object is either iconic or indexical at this level. Correspondingly as in Peirce’s semeiotic, symbolic signs appear as more developed — for the symbolic signs, a more complex system is needed.

History and Philosophie of the Lifes Sciences, 2024

This paper investigates the reception and discussion of Jakob von Uexküll's biological theory by two German thinkers of his time, Helmuth Plessner and Kurt Goldstein. It demonstrates how their bio-philosophical perspectives are on the one hand indebted to Uexküll's theory and, on the other, critical of its tendency to excessively harmonize the relationship between living beings and their environment. This original critical reading of the Umweltlehre is rooted in ambiguities within Uexküll's own thought-between a dynamic conception of the organism-environment relationship and the idea of "conformity to a plan", which is here examined in the second section. In the third and fourth sections we will then focus on Plessner and Goldstein respectively, demonstrating how for these two authors the harmony between organism and environment is not an original state, but only reveals itself against the background of a tension; as such, it can only be partial, unstable and always changing. The two thinkers avoid the rigid alternative between Darwin's concept of adaptation (Anpassung) and Uexküll's "fitting into" (Einpassung) by theorizing the ideal state of the relationship between organism and environment in terms of "adequacy" (Adäquatheit) and "adaptability" (Adaptiertheit). Between organism and environment there is neither absolute separation nor perfect harmony, but rather a gap which can never be definitively fixed.

the rest of the living, reflection on animal representations is, in the context of human understanding, ultimately self-reflection.

Ecological Psychology, 2019

Jakob von Uexküll is mostly known for his concept of Umwelt-the meaningful surrounding of animals. von Uexküll insisted vehemently on the fact that Umwelt vindicated Kant's subjectivist epistemology in the biological domain. However, we argue that a crucial yet widely overlooked development in von Uexküll's theory of meaning implies a more radical vision strikingly germane to J. J. Gibson's own direct realist epistemology-ontology and in tension with his own subjectivist concept of Umwelt. Gibson argued that organism and environment are complementary and meaning is not constructed via a subjective act but is directly available in the world as opportunities for action, namely, affordances. We show that von Uexküll's notion of "functional tone" is similar to Gibson's concept of affordance in that it includes action in perception. More important, von Uexküll introduces the musical metaphor of harmony to characterize the relationship between animal and environment. Like Gibson's reciprocity , harmony implies an unmediated isomorphism between the dispositions of the animal and those of the environment that allows for direct perceptual contact with the world and action upon it.

Jakob von Uexküll's evolutionary views are described and analysed in the context of changes in semiotic and biological thinking at the end of Modern age. As different from the late Modernist biology, a general feature of Post-Modern interpretation of living systems is that an evolutionary explanation has rather secondary importance, it is not obligatory for an understanding of adaptation. Adaptation as correspondence to environment is a communicative , hence a semiotic phenomenon.