Abstract
As is well evidenced in the history of biosemiotics that opens this volume, the work of Estonian naturalist and experimental biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll occupies a singularly prominent position in the contemporary attempt to develop a biological science of signs. “When we talk about [Uexküll’s bio-analytical concept of] Umwelt,” writes historian of ideas John Deely, “we are talking about the central category of zoösemiosis and anthroposemiosis alike” (1990: 120). Accordingly, Thomas A. Sebeok, whose revival of Uexküll’s all but forgotten work was integral to the launching of the project of biosemiotics proper, never failed to acknowledge his debt to the man whom he considered “single-handedly brought biosemiotics about – avant, so to speak, la lettre – [with his] wholly unprecedented, innovative theory of signs, the scope of which was nothing less than [the scientific investigation of the manifold of] semiosis in life processes in their entirety” (1998 [2001]:168–169).
Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944)
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Notes
- 1.
For insightful accounts of Uexküll’s scientific and civilian activities during the time of Nazi rule (which consisted almost entirely of continued attempts to keep his research programs from being de-funded by the government) as well of his intellectual friendship and Kantian/Romanticist kinship with the English naturalist turned German nationalist philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), see G. von Uexküll (1964), Schmidt (1975), Harrington (1996) and Rüting (2004).
- 2.
One of Sebeok’s many disquisitions on the role of Jakob von Uexküll in the development of biosemiotics appears within the selection included in this volume (Chapter Six). For the most in-depth discussion of Uexküll’s sign theory in this regard, however, the reader is emphatically directed to consult both Sebeok’s fullest account of Uexküll’s Umweltlehre, “Neglected Figures in the History of Semiotic Inquiry” (1977), as well as semiotician John Deely’s seminal 2001 article, “Umwelt.” Estonian Professor of Biosemiotics Kalevi Kull’s entry in this volume (Chapter Thirteen) provides an illuminating account of the intellectual milieu in which Uexküll worked to help found the discipline of Theoretical Biology. Critically, the Semiotica (2001) “Special Issue on Jakob von Uexküll” that Kull edited contains over two dozen scholarly articles on Uexküll’s work, as considered from almost a dozen different disciplines, as well as the most complete Uexküll bibliography extant.
- 3.
Exegeses by Thure von Uexküll (1987) and Thomas A. Sebeok (1977) clarify Uexküll’s methodology, lest there be any misapprehension about “attempts to read an animal’s mind”. Writes von Uexküll: “This method of observation means first of all ascertaining which of those signs registered by the scientific observer are also registered [analogously, not necessarily identically] by the living being under observation”(1987: 149). Writes Sebeok: “The Umweltlehre of von Uexküll requires no more than that the categories of experience and knowledge [be pragmatically aligned with the extra-mental regularities of] the real universe – not that the two halves of the cycle fully correspond with one another, let alone that the Innenwelt completely ‘represents’ the world. A rather circumscribed repertoire of guiding signs sufficiently serves the purpose of the organism, which is the sustenance of its survival” (1977: 203). Colloquially: The goal is not to try to find out what (or if) an animal “is thinking” – but, rather, what its behavior, when confronted with a certain stimuli, reveals that such stimuli, at that moment and in that situation, “means.” The first project has nothing at all to do with biosemiotics – the second is at the heart of it.
- 4.
Harrington notes that the recently released Heidegger lecture notes of 1929–1930 reveal that the philosopher had “studied Uexküll’s works at remarkable length, particularly Theoretical Biology (1920) and The Inner and Outer Worlds of Animals (1909) [and that] it may well be that Uexküll’s Umwelt concept contributed, in a way not yet properly recognized, to Heidegger’s intriguingly similar central concept of ‘Being-in-the-world’ which Heidegger had first comprehensively articulated in Being and Time” in 1927 (1996: 53–54).
- 5.
Uexküll’s renown within the biosemiotic community is now such that the Jakob von Uexküll Centre for biosemiotic research was opened at the University of Tartu in 1993, and the Jakob von Uexküll Archiv für Umweltforschung und Biosemiotik inaugurated at the site of Uexküll’s original Umwelt-study laboratory at the University of Hamburg in 2004. Still, not all biosemioticians are convinced that proceeding from even an evolutionarily modified Uexküllian framework is the most fruitful possible framework for biosemiotics. See Barbieri (2001 and Chapter Twenty Four of this volume) for an explicit discussion of principled objections to such an approach.
- 6.
Henri Fabre (1829–1915), French insect researcher.
- 7.
Jacques Loeb (1859–1924), German-American biologist.
- 8.
Tropism is regular movement in a specific direction in the case of plants and lower forms of animal life, as a reaction to specific stimuli.
- 9.
Otto August Mangold (born 1891), zoologist, student of Spemann, since 1946 head of the department in Heiligenberg (Max Planck-Institut). He has been occupied, among other things, with embryonal cells.
- 10.
Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876), zoologist, originator of a modern theory of evolution that differs from Darwin’s.
- 11.
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), philosopher, adherent of the biological theory of evolution.
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Karl von Frisch (born 1886), German zoologist honored with the Nobel Prize for his research work with fish and bees.
- 13.
Jean Baptiste Antoine Pierre De’ Monet de Lamarck (1744–1829), French zoologist who introduced a new system into the animal kingdom. He developed the first theory of evolution and expounded the principles of acquired characteristics.
- 14.
Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), German zoologist, follower of Darwin.
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Favareau, D. (2009). The Theory of Meaning. In: Essential Readings in Biosemiotics. Biosemiotics, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9650-1_2
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