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Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944)

Uexküll reconceived the organism’s relation to its world. Against a biology that set every creature in one shared, objective environment, he held that each inhabits its own Umwelt — a world composed only of what carries meaning for it, marked out by its own senses and needs. Perception and action close into a single loop, and meaning becomes a biological category rather than a human one.

Jakob Johann von Uexküll (1864–1944), Baltic German biologist, born a baron (Freiherr) at Keblas Manor in the Governorate of Estonia and died in Capri. He studied zoology at the Imperial University of Dorpat (Tartu) and did early experimental work on the physiology of marine invertebrates — muscle and nerve responses in sea urchins and related animals — before turning to theoretical biology. From 1924 he was at the University of Hamburg, where he founded the Institut für Umweltforschung (Institute for Environmental Research). He worked largely outside the mainstream of a biology then consolidating around Darwinian and mechanist explanation; his rejection of natural selection made him a marginal, even eccentric figure to his contemporaries, and his rehabilitation came later and from outside biology — in semiotics and philosophy.

Key concepts

Umwelt. The organism’s surrounding-world — not the objective environment (Umgebung) but the world as it appears to that creature, made up only of the things that matter to it. Each species, and in a sense each individual, lives in its own Umwelt; the worlds of the tick, the sea urchin, and the human do not coincide. Meaning, for Uexküll, is not added to a neutral world afterward — it is what an object is for the organism within its Umwelt.

The functional circle (Funktionskreis). Perception and action form a closed loop. The receptor organs (Merkorgane) pick out perceptual cues, marking a Merkwelt (perceptual world); the effector organs (Werkorgane) act back on the carrier of those cues, a Wirkwelt (effector world). Object and organism lock together into a single unit of meaning — an account of feedback that anticipated cybernetic ideas by decades.

The tick. His best-known illustration. The tick, waiting on a stem, lives in a world of three signs: the butyric acid in mammalian sweat, which makes it drop; warmth at around 37°C, telling it it has landed on a host; and bare skin, which it searches out to bore in. A whole, sufficient world built from three cues — the Umwelt at its starkest.

A theory of meaning (Bedeutungslehre). In the essay appended to the 1934 Foray, Uexküll generalised the Umwelt into a doctrine of meaning: organism and world are tuned to each other like the two halves of a duet, and nature is composed as a meaningful whole — a “Plan.” On this basis he rejected Darwinism, holding that natural selection could not account for the planful fit between creature and world.

Where von Uexküll stops

The Umwelt is built one organism at a time. Each creature is sealed in its own world, and the account stays there: how the Umwelten of different organisms mesh, or how a world might be held in common across them, is not part of his programme — the duet is always between a single animal and its surroundings, never among animals. And the fit he describes rests on a designed “Plan”; how such fit could arise without one he answered by rejecting the question rather than replacing it. Later workers kept the Umwelt and the functional circle while setting the Plan aside, carrying sign-relations across the whole of the living world in the biosemiotics his work seeded.

The political writings

Uexküll also turned his organicism on society. Staatsbiologie (1920) treated the state as a living body whose health required each part to keep its place — a conservative, anti-parliamentary organicism that later readers have found troubling. In the Nazi period he signed the 1933 Confession of the German Professors to Adolf Hitler and helped found the Committee for the Philosophy of Law within the Academy for German Law (1934), alongside Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. The record is mixed: he dedicated the 1934 Foray to his Jewish colleague Otto Cohnheim and later voiced disapproval of Nazi antisemitism, yet earlier writing used the antisemitic trope of the “parasite.” Recent scholarship (Schnödl and Sprenger, 2021) has documented the involvement more fully than mid-century accounts allowed.

Key works

See also: Semiotics · Biosemiotics · Sebeok · Hoffmeyer · Cassirer · Heidegger · Merleau-Ponty