Uexküll's Animals: The Experimental Origins of the Umwelt

Abstract

Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt has been influential in many different disciplines spanning both the sciences and the humanities. Given the resurgence of interest in the Umwelt concept in recent decades, it is timely to revisit the origins of the concept. In the literature, the emphasis has predominantly focused on the Kantian roots of the Umwelt concept. Here I present a different perspective, by focusing on how the scientific practices that Uexküll developed in conjunction with his experimental animals contributed to his development of a new approach to biology, and ultimately to his Umwelt concept. When Uexküll turned his attention from the frog to marine invertebrates, he remarked that ‘new objects ask new questions’, and that proved to be the case in his own practice. His experimental animals duly raised new and unanticipated questions that shaped the course of his inquiry. I focus on the period from 1890, when Uexküll began working as a physiologist, to 1909, when he introduced his concept of the Umwelt in his book ‘Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere’. Over this period, Uexküll’s animals underwent a transformation from being the objects of mechanistic physiology to being the subjects of his new Umwelt research. The organising concept of his new biology was the Bauplan, the structure and form of which Uexküll depicted by drawing on the metaphor of machines, but in revealing the Bauplan he revealed also the ‘machine operator’--the animal subject. In Uexküll's metaphor of animals as machines, the machines were animated by life.