Beyond Kant: Created Worlds of Other Animals
47
Beyond Kant: Created Worlds of Other Animals
Baron Jakob von Euxkull was a Baltic German biologist of the early Twentieth
Century whose foremost interest was to know how living beings perceive their
environments. For him, every living creature has an umwelt, or subjective
world, through which it experiences its surroundings in Gestalts. Through
the window of its umwelt every animal knows the world in its species-specific
way, and feels itself as a living participant in the niche which is its world. Von
Uexkull did not write much, but left a beautiful book describing his researches,
with the title “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book
of Invisible Worlds”. We’ll see shortly why the worlds are invisible.
For von Uexkull, the essential nature of an animal is not so much that
it is a biological structure, but that it is a living subject interacting with its
environment and deeply integrated in it. The life of every creature is an active
engagement with the objects and beings which surround it. Every animal, even
the smallest and simplest, is in possession of a world-model which includes all
the objects which are significant for it, as well as the ways of engaging with
them. For the small marine animals which von Uexkull studied, these objects
include stones, shells as well as other creatures which might be predators, prey
or neighbors.
In von Uexkull’s terms, for every object it engages with, an animal has a
Gestalt perception image, and with every object it acts on it has an effect image.
“These images are acts of animals that are projected onto environments, which
confer meaning upon perception images only via the effect image.” That is, the
way an animal represents an object is shaped pragmatically by the way it uses the
object. Every object which is significant in an animal’s life is mentally projected
outward onto its habitat: There, it becomes real for the animal, and acquires
exactly the shape and features which it has in the mental representation.
All creatures are sensitive to covariances and constellations of events, as
well as recurring patterns. These only become salient if a creature has Gestalt
perception. No matter how simple the animal, the configurations which are
meaningful to it, and to which it responds, are Gestalts. To perceive useful
structure and regularity in nature, recognition of Gestalt wholes is indispensable.
Every creature—as one aspect of its world-model—has its own concept
of space, determined by the style of its bodily movements and the kind of
environment it moves in. An animal perceives space as a Gestalt which frames
its daily round of activities. Moreover, von Uexkull says his research has shown
that every species has its own notion of time, which is felt differently by
different creatures. All animals live according to a Circadian rhythm, which
47
Beyond Kant: Created Worlds of Other Animals
Baron Jakob von Euxkull was a Baltic German biologist of the early Twentieth
Century whose foremost interest was to know how living beings perceive their
environments. For him, every living creature has an umwelt, or subjective
world, through which it experiences its surroundings in Gestalts. Through
the window of its umwelt every animal knows the world in its species-specific
way, and feels itself as a living participant in the niche which is its world. Von
Uexkull did not write much, but left a beautiful book describing his researches,
with the title “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book
of Invisible Worlds”. We’ll see shortly why the worlds are invisible.
For von Uexkull, the essential nature of an animal is not so much that
it is a biological structure, but that it is a living subject interacting with its
environment and deeply integrated in it. The life of every creature is an active
engagement with the objects and beings which surround it. Every animal, even
the smallest and simplest, is in possession of a world-model which includes all
the objects which are significant for it, as well as the ways of engaging with
them. For the small marine animals which von Uexkull studied, these objects
include stones, shells as well as other creatures which might be predators, prey
or neighbors.
In von Uexkull’s terms, for every object it engages with, an animal has a
Gestalt perception image, and with every object it acts on it has an effect image.
“These images are acts of animals that are projected onto environments, which
confer meaning upon perception images only via the effect image.” That is, the
way an animal represents an object is shaped pragmatically by the way it uses the
object. Every object which is significant in an animal’s life is mentally projected
outward onto its habitat: There, it becomes real for the animal, and acquires
exactly the shape and features which it has in the mental representation.
All creatures are sensitive to covariances and constellations of events, as
well as recurring patterns. These only become salient if a creature has Gestalt
perception. No matter how simple the animal, the configurations which are
meaningful to it, and to which it responds, are Gestalts. To perceive useful
structure and regularity in nature, recognition of Gestalt wholes is indispensable.
Every creature—as one aspect of its world-model—has its own concept
of space, determined by the style of its bodily movements and the kind of
environment it moves in. An animal perceives space as a Gestalt which frames
its daily round of activities. Moreover, von Uexkull says his research has shown
that every species has its own notion of time, which is felt differently by
different creatures. All animals live according to a Circadian rhythm, which