Jakob Johann Freiherr von Uexküll (German:
[ˈʏkskʏl]; 8 September [O.S. 27 August]
1864 – 25 July 1944) was a Baltic German
biologist who worked in the fields of muscular
physiology, animal behaviour studies, and
the cybernetics of life.
However, his most notable contribution is
the notion of Umwelt, used by semiotician
Thomas Sebeok and philosopher Martin Heidegger.
His works established biosemiotics as a field
of research.
== Early life ==
The son of Baron Alexander von Uexküll and
Sophie von Hahn, Jakob von Uexküll was born
in the Keblas estate, Sankt Michaelis, Governorate
of Estonia.
His aristocratic family lost most of their
fortune by expropriation during the Russian
Revolution.
Needing to support himself, Uexküll took
a job as professor at the University of Hamburg
where he founded the Institut für Umweltforschung.
== Umwelt ==
Uexküll was particularly interested in how
living beings perceive their environment(s).
He argued that organisms experience life in
terms of species-specific, spatio-temporal,
'self-in-world' subjective reference frames
that he called Umwelt (translated as surrounding-world,
phenomenal world, self-world, environment
- lit.
German environment).
These Umwelten (plural of Umwelt) are distinctive
from what Uexküll termed the "Umgebung" which
would be the living being's surroundings as
seen from the likewise peculiar perspective
or Umwelt of the human observer.
Umwelt may thus be defined as the perceptual
world in which an organism exists and acts
as a subject.
By studying how the senses of various organisms
like ticks, sea urchins, amoebae, jellyfish
and sea worms work, he was able to build theories
of how they experience the world.
Because all organisms perceive and react to
sensory data as signs, Uexküll argued that
they were to be considered as living subjects.
This argument was the basis for his biological
theory in which the characteristics of biological
existence ("life") could not simply be described
as a sum of its non-organic parts, but had
to be described as subject and a part of a
sign system.
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 Giorgio 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 hairiness of mammals.
== Theoretical biology ==
von Uexküll anticipated many computer science
ideas, particularly in the field of robotics,
roughly 25 years before these things were
invented.Uexküll views organisms in terms
of information processing.
He argues every organism has an outer boundary
which defines an Umwelt (German word generally
meaning 'environment', 'surrounding world').
Rather than the general meaning, Uexküll's
concept draws on the literal meaning of the
German word, which is 'surround-world', to
define the Umwelt as the subjectively perceived
surroundings about which information is available
to an organism through its senses.
This is a subjective weltanschauung, or "world
view", and is therefore fundamentally different
from the black box concept, which is derived
from the objective Newtonian viewpoint.
The organism has sensors that report the state
of the Umwelt and effectors that can change
parts of the Umwelt.
He distinguished the effector as the logical
opposite of the sensor, or sense organ.
Sensors and effectors are linked in a feedback
loop.
Sensor input is processed by a Merkorgan and
effectors are controlled by a Werkorgan.
The modern term 'sensorimotor' used in enactive
theories of cognition encompasses these concepts.
He further distinguishes the Umgebung (that
part of the Umwelt that represents distal
features of the external world, in German
'that which is being given as surroundings')
from the Innenwelt which is reported directly
by sensors and is therefore the only unmediated
reality immediately knowable to the organism.
The relationship between the distal (mediated,
transformed) features of the Umbegung and
the proximal (untransformed, unmediated, primal)
features of the Innenwelt must be learned
by the organism in infancy.
The nature of the Umbegung::Innenwelt relationship
is relevant to the later theories of embodied
cognition.
This is also similar to Kant's phenomenon
and noumenon but derived logically from the
properties of the sensors.
What we now call a "feedback loop" he calls
a "function-circle" and "circle" seems to
be something like "system".
He uses the term "melody" to mean something
close to "algorithm".
He coins around 75 technical terms, and a
proper understanding of his book would require
clearly defining them in modern terms and
understanding their relations.
He notices qualia, comes close to object-oriented
programming (page 98) uses the image of a
helmsman which later showed up as "cybernetics"
(page 291) and makes a good guess about DNA
(page 127).
He has a large number of ideas, although not
expressed clearly in modern terms.
His metaphysics is hyper-Kantian ("All reality
is subjective appearance", page xv.) Space
is a set of direction symbols.
He rejects Darwin and says nothing of God.
Organisms are based on something called "Plan",
the origin of which we cannot know.
Uexküll was an advocate of non-Darwinian
evolution and critic of Darwinism.
Kalevi Kull noted that "despite his opposition
to Darwinism, Uexküll was not anti-evolutionist".
== 
Influence ==
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 Max Scheler, Ernst Cassirer,
Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humberto
Maturana, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault,
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.
A paperback French translation of Streifzüge
durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen
[A stroll through the Umwelten of animals
and humans] of 1934 is currently in print.
This book has been translated in English as
A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans,
with A Theory of Meaning by Jakob von Uexküll,
translated by Joseph D. O'Neil, introduction
by Dorion Sagan, University of Minnesota Press,
2011.
The other available book is "Theoretical Biology",
a reprint of the 1926 translation of "Theoretische
Biologie" (1920).
"Foray" is a popular introduction while "Theoretical
Biology" is intended for an academic audience.
== Family ==
His sons were the physician Thure von Uexküll
and journalist Gösta von Uexküll.
His daughter was Sophie Luise Damajanti von
Uexküll ('Dana').
His grandson is the writer Carl Wolmar Jakob
von Uexküll.
== In popular culture ==
Uexküll's ideas about how organisms create
their own concept of time are described in
Peter Høeg's novel Borderliners, and contrasted
with Isaac Newton's view of time as something
that exists independent of life.Main character
Cocona's pet rabbit in the anime Flip Flappers
is named after him.
== See also ==
List of Baltic German scientists
Jakob von Uexküll Centre
Copenhagen–Tartu school
== Notes
