Jakob Johann von Uexküll (September 8, 1864 - July 25, 1944) was a Baltic German biologist who made important contributions to the fields of muscular physiology, animal behaviour studies, and the cybernetics of life. However, his most notable achievement is the notion of umwelt, used by semiotician Thomas Sebeok. His works established Biosemiotics.
According to Giorgio Agamben, Uexküll was a baron before his family lost most of their fortune in World War I, although Uexküll managed to retain a villa on Capri where the critic, historian and philosopher Walter Benjamin stayed for some time. Needing to support himself, Uexküll took a job as professor at the University of Hamburg where he founded the Institut für Umweltforschung.
Uexküll was interested in how living beings subjectively perceive their environment(s). Picture, for example, a meadow as seen through the compound eyes of a fly, continually flying through the air, and then as seen in black and white by a dog (with its highly efficient sense of smell), and then again from the point of view of a human or a blind tick. Furthermore, think of what time means to each of these different beings with their relative lifespans. Uexküll called these subjective spatio-temporal worlds umwelt. These umwelten are distinctive from what Uexküll termed the "umgebung" which would be objective reality were such a reality to exist. Each being perceives its own umwelt to be the objective umgebung, but this is merely perceptual bias.
Uexküll's writings show a specific interest in the various worlds that exist ('conceptually') from the point of view of the Umwelt of different creatures such as ticks, sea urchins, amoebae, jellyfish and sea worms. This often gives his writings a poetic quality.
The biosemiotic turn in Jakob von Uexküll's analysis occurs in his discussion of the animal's relationship with its environment. The umwelt is for him an environment-world which is (according to Agamben), "constituted by a more or less broad series of elements [called] "carriers of significance" or "marks" which are the only things that interest the animal". Agamben goes on to paraphrase one example from Uexküll's discussion of a tick, saying,
"...this eyeless animal finds the way to her watchpoint [at the top of a tall blade of grass] with the help of only its skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her post (on top of the blade of grass/bush) and fall blindly downward toward her prey. If she is fortunate enough to fall on something warm (which she perceives by means of an organ sensible to a precise temperature) then she has attained her prey, the warm-blooded animal, and thereafter needs only the help of her sense of touch to find the least hairy spot possible and embed herself up to her head in the cutaneous tissue of her prey. She can now slowly suck up a stream of warm blood."
Thus, for the tick, the umwelt is reduced to only three (biosemiotic) carriers of significance: (1) The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, (2) The temperature of 37 degrees celsius (corresponding to the blood of all mammals), (3) The hairy typology of mammals.
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Works by scholars such as Kalevi Kull connect Uexküll's studies with some areas of philosophy such as phenomenology and hermeneutics. Jakob von Uexküll is also considered a pioneer of semiotic biology, or biosemiotics. However despite his influence (on the work of philosophers Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (in their A Thousand Plateaus), for example) he is still not widely known, and his books are mostly out of print in German and in English, although a paperback French translation of Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen [A stroll through the Umwelten of animals and humans] is currently in print.
Uexküll's application of the notion of "umwelt" to the human person has been contested. In "Welt and Umwelt" and "Die Wahrheit der Dinge" the philosopher and sociologist Josef Pieper argued that reason allows the human person to live in "welt" (world) while plants and animals do indeed live in an Umwelt--a notion which he traces back far beyond Uexküll to Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas.
His son is Thure von Uexküll. His grandson is Jakob von Uexkull.
| Jakob von Uexkull | |
| Born | 19 August 1944 Uppsala, Sweden |
|---|---|
| Occupation | writer, lecturer, professional philatelist |
Jakob von Uexkull (born 19 August 1944) is a writer, lecturer, professional philatelist and past member of the European Parliament who, in 1980, founded the Right Livelihood Awards (a.k.a. the Alternative Nobel Prize). He holds both Swedish and German citizenship.
Uexkull stems from a Baltic German family that was forced to leave Estonia after World War I. He was born in Uppsala, Sweden. After studying in Sweden and Germany, he won a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
Uexkull provided an initial endowment for the awards by selling his collection of postage stamps for US$ 1 million; the awards have subsequently attracted additional funding from private individuals enabling it to donate annual prizes worth 2 million Swedish Kronor.
Uexkull created the awards out of a recognition that Nobel prizes were relatively narrow in scope and usually recognised the work of those in industrialised countries.
Von Uexkull first approached the Nobel Foundation with the suggestion that it establish two new awards, one for ecology and one relevant to the lives of the poor majority of the world's population. He offered to contribute financially but his proposal was turned down.
Uexkull then decided to set up the Right Livelihood Awards, presented in the Swedish parliament on the day before the nobel prizes and often referred to as the alternative nobel prize. In recognition of his initiative in founding the Right Livelihood Award, the German Green Party has several times nominated Jakob von Uexkull in elections to the European Parliament. As an MEP, he served on the Political Affairs Committee and the Science and Technology Committee. He was also a member of the Delegation for Relations with the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the Baltic Intergroup (1987-89).
Uexkull is a co-founder of The Other Economic Summit. He is a patron of Friends of the Earth International. He has been a Trustee of the New Economics Foundation, London, and a member of the Global Commission to Fund the United Nations. He has served on the Board of Greenpeace, Germany, and on the Council of Governance of Transparency International. He lectures widely on environment, justice and peace issues. He is also a recognised philatelic expert with publications including 'The Early Postal History of Saudi Arabia' (2001).
Uexkull created the Estonian Renaissance Award after the independence of the Estonian country in 1991.
Uexkull is currently working towards the creation of a World Future Council of planetary elders, pioneers and youth leaders, acting as a global conscience, speaking up for our ethical values as global citizens and in the interests of future generations.
Uexkull's grandfather Jakob von Uexküll is the founder of the study of biosemiotics.
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