Jakob von Uexküll
Von Uexküll worked in the generation after Haeckel and in a tradition that was simultaneously ecological and phenomenological. His 1934 A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans introduced the tick example that has become standard in philosophy of biology: the organism that perceives three things (scent of butyric acid, temperature of mammalian blood, texture of skin) and for which the rest of the world does not exist. The Umwelt concept made precise Haeckel's insight that organism and environment are locked in a single relational system by specifying the relationship phenomenologically: the environment is not an objective given but a construction of the organism's perceptual architecture. The concept has been rediscovered by phenomenologists, biosemioticians, and—most recently—by philosophers trying to articulate what machine perception is and is not.
In the AI Story
Von Uexküll studied zoology at Dorpat and Heidelberg, worked extensively at the Naples marine biology station, and founded the Institute for Umwelt Research in Hamburg in 1926. His work was simultaneously biological and philosophical—Heidegger cited him in the 1929 Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and Merleau-Ponty drew on him in his phenomenology of perception. Von Uexküll occupied a unique position in twentieth-century thought: a rigorous biologist whose framework was taken seriously by Continental philosophers who otherwise had little use for biology.
The Umwelt concept's AI relevance emerged slowly. Early AI research largely ignored phenomenological questions about machine perception. The rise of embodied cognition in the 1990s and of enactivism in the 2000s brought von Uexküll's framework back into discussion. With the emergence of large language models, the question of what the model perceives—what features of reality its architecture makes salient and what it renders invisible—became unavoidable, and von Uexküll's framework became unexpectedly useful.
Von Uexküll's relationship to Haeckel was complex. The two were members of the same broader German biological tradition, but von Uexküll was more philosophically sophisticated and more skeptical of the universalizing ambitions of Haeckel's monism. Where Haeckel proposed that one substance underlies all expressions of mind, von Uexküll emphasized the radical specificity of each organism's perceptual world—the tick's world, the bat's world, the human's world, each categorically different from the others.
The tension between the two frameworks is productive. Haeckelian monism insists on continuity across substrates; von Uexküllian phenomenology insists on specificity within perceptual worlds. Both insights are necessary for understanding AI. The monist framework prevents the categorical dismissal of machine intelligence as merely simulated. The phenomenological framework prevents the reduction of human intelligence to an instance of the same process that produces AI output. The framework is continuous; the specific expressions are not interchangeable.
Key Ideas
Umwelt as phenomenological ecology. Made precise what Haeckel's framework had implied: the relationship between organism and environment is a perceptual relationship.
The tick example. Canonical illustration of the radical specificity of perceptual worlds.
Influence on Continental philosophy. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and the phenomenological tradition took his biological framework seriously.
AI relevance. The question of what a machine perceives—what features of reality its architecture makes salient—has brought the Umwelt concept back into active use.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, trans. Joseph D. O'Neil (University of Minnesota Press, 2010)
- Brett Buchanan, Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze (SUNY Press, 2008)
- Kalevi Kull, "Jakob von Uexküll: An Introduction" (Semiotica, 2001)