Jakob von Uexküll

Dzieła

• 1920Biologia teoretyczna

  Stosuje kantowską teorię poznania do istot żywych: każdy organizm kształtuje swój świat według własnego planu, przez znaki percepcyjne i efektorowe.

• 1934Wędrówki po światach zwierząt i ludzi

  Ilustrowana „książka obrazkowa niewidzialnych światów”: kleszcz, mucha i pies żyją każde we własnym Umwelt znaczących znaków.

Stanowisko

Uexküll took Kant’s idea that the forms of perception belong to the subject and applied it to animals: each organism lives not in one objective environment but in its own Umwelt, built from the few features its receptors register (perceptual world) and its effectors can act on (effector world), joined in a “functional circle”. The tick, waiting for butyric acid, warmth and the touch of hair, became his best-known example. Against Darwinian selection theory and mechanistic biology he set the idea of a “plan” in nature, a vitalist strand most biologists rejected. His concept travelled widely in philosophy: Heidegger discussed it in his lectures of 1929/30 on the animal as “poor in world”, Cassirer adapted the functional circle for his definition of the human being as a symbolic animal, Merleau-Ponty treated it in his lectures on nature, Deleuze and Guattari took up the tick, and Agamben read it in “The Open” (2002). Ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz and, since Thomas Sebeok, biosemiotics regard him as a forerunner. His political views – he rejected democracy, and in November 1933 he signed the professors’ declaration of allegiance to Hitler – are set out under “Context & critique”.

Życie i kontekst

Jakob von Uexküll was born on 8 September 1864 on the Keblaste estate in the Governorate of Estonia, then part of the Russian Empire, into a Baltic German noble family. He studied zoology at the University of Dorpat (Tartu) from 1884 to 1889 and then worked at Wilhelm Kühne’s physiological institute in Heidelberg and at the zoological station in Naples, publishing studies on the muscle and nerve physiology of marine animals. Living on private means, he worked for decades without a permanent academic post. In 1909 he published “Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere”, which introduced his concept of the Umwelt. The war and the Estonian land reform cost him his estates; in 1920 he published “Theoretical Biology” and the political essay “Staatsbiologie”. In 1926 the University of Hamburg gave him an Institute for Umwelt Research (Institut für Umweltforschung), which he directed until his retirement and where, with collaborators such as Georg Kriszat, he produced “A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans” (1934). His late “Theory of Meaning” (Bedeutungslehre, 1940) described nature as a composition of meanings. He spent his last years on Capri, where he died on 25 July 1944. His son Thure von Uexküll became one of the founders of psychosomatic medicine in Germany.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Umwelt and Inner World of Animals (Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, 1909)
• Building Blocks for a Biological World View (Bausteine zu einer biologischen Weltanschauung, 1913)
• Theoretical Biology (Theoretische Biologie, 1920)
• State Biology (Staatsbiologie, 1920)
• A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen, with G. Kriszat, 1934)
• A Theory of Meaning (Bedeutungslehre, 1940)