umwelt

In everyday German, umwelt means simply “surroundings” or “environment,” but through the work of the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) the term, at least in scientific literature has acquired more specific semiotic meanings as the ecological niche as an animal perceives it; the experienced world, phenomenal world, or subjective universe; and the cognitive map or mind‐set. Work with simple marine animals, especially sea urchins, convinced Uexküll of the subjective nature of signs received by a living organism. He found that environmental cues could only have an effect on the animal if the combination of stimuli was specific to the respective living being. “Beyond that,” he observed in 1905, “the objects of the environment” do not exist for the sea urchin. Organisms from different species experience the world differently—that is, they have different umwelts. Uexküll uses a meadow flower to illustrate this: for the child who picks the flower, it is an ornamental object; for the ant walking along the stem, it is a path; when the cicada larva pierces the stem, the flower is transformed into a source of building materials; finally, the grazing cow transforms the flower stem into wholesome fodder. “Every action, therefore, that consists of perception and operation imprints its meaning on the meaningless object and thereby makes it into a subject‐related meaning‐carrier in the respective umwelt” (1982, p. 31).

Uexküll did not believe in Darwinian evolution, which he found absurd. But from the point of view of modern biology, the real scope of the umwelt theory becomes apparent only when the theory is interpreted in an evolutionary context. The umwelt theory tells us that it is not only genes, individuals, and species that survive but also—and perhaps rather—patterns of interpretation (Hoffmeyer, 1997). A creature's umwelt can be seen as the conquest of vital aspects of events and phenomena in the world around it, inasmuch as these aspects are continually turned by way of the senses into an integral part of the creature. The umwelt is the representation of the surrounding world within the creature.

The umwelt is also the creature's way of opening up to the world around it in that it allows selected aspects of that world to slip through in the form of signs. Even a moth's umwelt, otherwise so silent, has kept one chink open to admit the few fatal soundings of bats. The specific character of its umwelt allows a creature to become a part of the semiotic web found in that particular ecosystem. It becomes part of a worldwide horizontal semiosis.

The umwelt theory necessarily leads us to the epistemological problem of how scientists can study the umwelts of other animals when they themselves are bound to a human umwelt. “Everyone carries around with him his universe like a gigantic impenetrable bubble,” wrote Uexküll in 1935. His son Thure von Uexküll has explained the epistemological position of umweltsforschung (“umwelt research”) thus:

[See also Biosemiotics; Mindscape; and Receptors.]

Bibliography and More Information about umwelt

• Hoffmeyer, J. Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
• Uexküll, J. von. “The Theory of Meaning.” Semiotica 42 (1982): 25–87.
• Uexküll, T. von. “Introduction: Meaning and Science in Jakob von Uexküll's Concept of Biology.” Semiotica 42 (1982): 1–24.

—Jesper Hoffmeyer