the idealistic elements in modern semiotic studies: with

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies March 2021: 107-128 DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.202103_47(1).0006

The Idealistic Elements in Modern Semiotic Studies:

With Particular Recourse to the Umwelt Theory†

Lei Han

Department of Chinese Language and Literature, School of Humanities

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

Abstract This paper explores the idealistic elements in modern semiotic studies, with

particular recourse to Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt. It firstly

addresses Uexküll’s affinities with and indebtedness to Kant’s philosophy,

pointing out that Uexküll took Kant’s transcendental idealism as a meta-

philosophical method to bring forth his own non-mechanistic, constructivist

description of an organism’s relationship with its environment and other

organisms. Secondly, the paper refines the Uexküllian concept of Umwelt to

differentiate the functionally constructed Umwelten of non-human animals

from the linguistically and symbolically constructed Umwelten of humans, with

the focus on the peculiarity of human language. This is followed by a discussion

of the semiotic properties of the human body and its semiotic and symbolic

interactions with natural and cultural environments. In the final section, the

paper touches on the speculative question of whether an artificial intelligence

has an Umwelt. Arguing that the interpreting, meaning-generating capability of

a subject plays a significant role in constituting its Umwelt, this paper

emphasizes again the idealistic elements that the concept of Umwelt contains

within itself. Echoing previous discussions across biosemiotics and

anthroposemiotics, the paper aims to contribute to shaping a new understanding

of the time-honoured philosophical concept of idealism through the lens of

modern semiotic studies.

Keywords

Umwelt, idealism, Jakob von Uexküll, modern semiotic studies, human language

The author gratefully acknowledges the comments and suggestions of the two anonymous

reviewers. She has followed one reviewer’s suggestion to change the title to the present one. She would like to thank the second reviewer’s suggested readings on Uexküll and idealism, which now appear in Works Cited.

† The research for this paper is funded by the National Social Science Fund of China project titled “符號學視域下的法國當代文論與治理話語研究(1960-1980)” (Fund No. 20CWW002).

108 Concentric 47.1 March 2020

“All reality is subjective appearance. This must constitute the great, fundamental admission even of biology.”

—Jakob von Uexküll Theoretical Biology

Introduction

It seems that the three branches of modern semiotic studies all have certain

idealistic elements. Saussurian semiology is established on the basis of linguistique

de la langue, which is a purely formal science and designates no material referents.

The core concept of this semiology is the linguistic sign, which is comprised of a

signifiant (image acoustique) and a signifié (concept). The relationship between them

involves a psychological association,1 and thus it is believed by scholars like Floyd

Merrell that Saussurian semiology is a “nominalistic mentalism or idealism” (Merrell

242). Peircean semiotics maintains within its structure an “objective idealism,” which

is a view of cosmology regarding all matter as nothing but mind (Dupuis 202-69;

Merrell 238). The third branch, biosemiotics, was pioneered by Professor Thomas A.

Sebeok. Sebeok regarded the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll as the founding

father of biosemiotics, although Uexküll himself was not consciously engaged in

semiotics, instead being deeply influenced by Immanuel Kant’s transcendental

idealism.

This paper will not attempt a general discussion of all of these branches; instead,

it will focus on, but not confine itself to, the third branch, with Uexküll’s affinities

with and indebtedness to Kantian epistemological philosophy as the starting point.

Taking a cue from one of Uexküll’s most widely known concepts, the Umwelt, this

paper analyzes some critical issues that relate this concept to idealism. In doing so, it

envisions pars pro toto the idealistic elements in modern semiotic studies, including

both biosemiotics and anthroposemiotics (for example, semiology, semiotics of

discourse, and semiotics of culture).

1 Saussure’s psychologie is more a part of the philosophy of mind than of psychology in the

sense of the modern discipline. Saussure did not develop the psychological aspects of his linguistics. However, when Saussure developed the definition of semiologie, he believed that this new science of the system of human ideas, once properly established, should form part of social psychology and therefore also part of general psychology.

Lei Han 109

Uexküll, Umwelt and Kantian Transcendental Idealism

Jakob von Uexküll has had various labels attached to him: a forerunner of

animal cybernetics and ethology and the founding father of biosemiotics have been

among the most widely accepted (Chang, Sign 611; Barbieri 286). The latter was

promoted by Sebeok (1979) and soon adopted by John Deely, Kalevi Kull, Claus

Emmeche, and many other semioticians. Scholars have re-evaluated Uexküll’s

contributions in fields other than biology, and Uexküll’s reputation has risen along

with the maturation of biosemiotics and semiotics in general. Uexküll’s Umwelt

theory, in particular, was rediscovered by Sebeok and his followers as being of

foundational importance for biosemiotics studies dealing with organisms’

relationship with their environment.

The concept of Umwelt, as originally coined by the Danish-German poet Jens

Immanuel Baggesen in 1800, applied to the human/nature relationship. Only much

later, in 1909, was it applied to animal/environment relationships by Jakob von

Uexküll (1864-1944) in his Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. According to Urmas

Sutrop’s survey, this 1909 work does not contain a definition of Umwelt. However,

from the properties of the concept implied in this work, we can infer that it is “a part

of a complicated system for describing the relations between a living being and its

world” (Sutrop 448). The concept of Umwelt was further elaborated in Uexküll’s

later works, notably Theoretische Biologie, emphasizing that Umwelt is a

subjectively constructed “island” (“An Introduction” 107) of the senses on which

humans and animals deal with the perceptible world. This definition is accepted by

Estonian semiotician and botanist Kalevi Kull and by Jakob von Uexküll’s son, Thure

von Uexküll, both of whom insist on the subjective and constructive properties of the

concept. Kull regards it as the “self-centred world of an organism” (43) established

by the organism to understand its environment and its relations with other organisms.

Thure von Uexküll describes an organism’s perception of its world as restricted by

its biological needs and associations and thus dependent on its species-specific

sensory organs (“Glossary” 87).

It can be said that, among other things, the concept of Umwelt falls into the

category of socio-biology, in that it deals with the interaction of a species with other

species as well as the interaction of a species with its environment. In short, it is the

sociology of animals, including humans, which deals with a subject’s relations with

objects and other subjects. In this sense, semiotics, as an epistemological system that

deals with relations, was bound to embrace the concept of Umwelt. And idealism, in

its broad sense as “the philosophy of the immaterial,” encompassing mental mapping


of the world, is by no means irrelevant to Umwelt theory and semiotics in general.

Scholars, mainly semioticians, have widely noticed Uexküll’s affinities with

and indebtedness to Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism, yet only a few have

done detailed and systematic studies on this issue (Esposito; Fultot & Turvey 293-94;

Chien; Barbieri 278-88; Bains; etc.). Barbieri outlines three of Uexküll’s

amendments to Kant’s idealism and Jui-pi Chien, in her doctoral thesis, separately

deals with Uexküll’s appropriations of Kantian categories in constituting the concept

of Umwelt. Esposito’s work is particularly illuminating, especially concerning the

significant use of the Kantian ideas of transcendental subject and teleology in

Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt.

Such work shows us that it is not lack of academic value that has distracted

scholars’ attention from the relationship between Uexküll and Kant, as they have long

been aware that Uexküll’s ethology was based on Kant’s epistemological philosophy.

There is no way, therefore, that any in-depth study of Uexküll’s thought could

mistakenly overlook his intimacy with Kant. Here are two possible explanations for

the lacuna: firstly, it might be considered too risky to try to cross epistemological

philosophy and biology; secondly, it is very difficult to find a suitable tertium

comparationis, a meta-language and a methodology that we can apply to study the

relationship between Uexküll’s Umwelt theory and Kantian transcendentalism. Such

an approach, despite the necessity of a staunch emphasis on relations de fait, must

try to go beyond the descriptive nature of studies of “influence” and “analogy.”

Esposito analyzes the intimacy between Uexküll’s thought and Kant’s

philosophy by asking not only which elements of Kant did Uexküll choose to

incorporate into his thought, but also why he did so; the answers to these questions

help Esposito to situate Uexküll within the tradition of “romantic biology” (Esposito

36). Inspired by Esposito, this section, therefore, will not attempt an exhaustive study

of each and every Kantian concept that was (mis-)read and used by Uexküll. Instead,

acknowledging Geoffrey Winthrop-Young’s description of Uexküll as “less a

proponent of Kant than of a Kantian vulgate” (Winthrop-Young 231), Barbieri’s

comment about Uexküll being “unfaithful to his master” (287), as well as Esposito’s

question of how Uexküll “transform[ed] and betray[ed] Kant’s philosophy” (36-37),

this section will examine how the general framework of Kant’s epistemology was

adopted by Uexküll as a philosophical basis for developing his biological studies.

Kant argues that all knowledge comes firstly from sensations and experiences

as the material, but only through the mediation of an a priori cognitive form does it

become true and universal; the philosophy that studies a subject’s a priori cognitive

form is called “transcendental idealism.” Within the scaffolding of this transcendental

Lei Han 111

idealism, one of the most important of Uexküll’s appropriations is from Kant’s

differentiation between appearance (object) and thing-in-itself (thing).

While Uexküll conceived the thing-in-itself as “a purely marginal concept, with

which certain things would be dismissed and it does not help us understand anything”

(qtd. in Chien 59), he was much more interested in how empirical materials can be

formed as objects via schemata. He stated clearly in the introduction to his

Theoretische Biologie that his biology takes all reality as subjective appearance: it is

the relationship between subject and object, not involving a set of noumenal things-

in-themselves (Theoretical Biology xv). This premise also governs Uexküll’s

research in space and time. Uexküll’s selective absorption between subjective

appearance and the thing-in-itself seems to leave him with the risk of falling into

environmental solipsism (Heredia 30-31; Brentari 165-169, 185, 187). Critics might

question his treatment of the relationship between organisms’ Umwelten and

noumenal reality, and at the same time regard him as having a penchant for

metaphysics.

Uexküll himself refused to label his biological studies as metaphysical. Seen

through the lens of Henry E. Alisson’s restoration and interpretation of Kant’s

original text of Kritik der reinen Vernunft, mainly in the book Kant’s Transcendental

Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (2004), Uexküll’s claim seems acceptable.

In the view of Alisson, Kant engages in no noumenal settings in discussing the thing-

in-itself but employs a meta-philosophical method. Uexküll’s use of Kantian

subjectivity as a premise to describe an organism’s relationship with its environment

and other organisms, in the present author’s opinion, can similarly be viewed as

taking Kantian transcendental idealism as a meta-philosophical method, and in this

sense Uexküll remained faithful to his philosophical mentor. Thure von Uexküll’s

statement that Umwelt theory “postulates that the laws of the natural sciences are not

laws of nature, but rules which we derive for our own objectives from our

confrontation with natural phenomena,” and “draws the line not between nature and

man, but between animate and inanimate nature” (“The Sign Theory” 151) can be

seen as further supporting evidence.2

The concept of Uexküllian Umwelt has a close relationship with Kantian

transcendental idealism in differentiating appearance and thing-in-itself when

concerned with the issue of meaning. The Uexküllian Umwelt is a world enriched

2 Based on Thure von Uexküll’s interpretation of his father’s thought, F. Merrell concludes that

Uexküll’s Umwelt is “akin to Peirce’s ‘objective idealism’” (238). This might remind us of Peirce’s own link to Kant, but that issue is beyond the scope of this paper.


with objects, not with things; to be an object is to be intelligible for certain knowledge.

Only that which is intelligible can be objectified and transformed into a “meaning-

carrier.” The subject is not only the constructer of its Umwelt but also the meaning-

giver. In Umwelt theory, the establishment of meaning relations between an organism

and its Umwelt is mediated by subjective, constructive mental actions; the number of

subjects determines the number of Umwelten, and all of these Umwelten are worlds

of appearances. Uexküll used the metaphor of a bubble to describe each perceptible

self-world known to each organism only (i.e., each organism’s Umwelt). However,

the bubble is invisible because it consists of relations as “subjective perception signs,”

rather than other things, and one bubble can be overlapping with other bubbles (A

Foray 70).

The objectivation of things in an organism’s environment, based on the

interactions between its senser and effector, establishes its Umwelt, but, as a closed

unit, this Umwelt “is governed, in all its parts, by the meaning it has for the subject”

(J. von Uexküll, “The Theory” 30). Deely points out that the differences of sense

modalities in different species living in the same physical environment determine the

species-specific cognition and objectivation of this environment, while he stresses

that an organism’s sensation of environment does not directly constitute its Umwelt,

but how it organizes these sensations into a network of relations makes its Umwelt a

meaningful world (Deely 126-28). It is in this sense that how the organism maps its

world is how it perceives this world as meaningful; and how the meaning that comes

into the network of relations perceptibly structured by the interactions between its

senser and effector determines a species-specific Umwelt of an organism (Deely 129).

Thus, the description of an organism’s Umwelt “will mean the demonstration of how

the organism (via its Innenwelt) maps the world, and what, for that organism, the

meanings of the objects are within it” (Kull 43).

It is argued by Fultot and Turvey that the concept of Umwelt falls into the

organism/environment dualism due to its kinship with Kantian epistemology.

Kantian epistemology insists on the existence of a mediating mental process as a

priori; thus, the schemata is of critical importance in juxtaposing sensory intuitions

with mental forms (Fultot & Turvey 294). Chien has done some thorough research

into Uexküll’s appropriation of Kantian schemata and describes it as Uexküll, in his

early thought, treating schemata as a philosophical term which unites metaphysics

and empirical science. But Uexküll later configures the schemata, in anatomical

terms, as a faithful reflection of the features of objects in the environment of an

organism: schemata do not work independently, but rather with a reflex arch and

functional cycle. Chien thus argues that Uexküll’s Umwelt theory is much more

Lei Han 113

inclusive than the Kantian schemata (60-67). Chien’s judgement is fair in considering

the matter that Uexküll must make a reconstruction of Kantian schemata so as to

extend Kant’s human mind-centered subjectivity theory to encompass all organisms

(Esposito 38). Chien sees further that Uexküll’s appropriation of Kantian schemata,

together with his use of Platonic eidos and Aristotelian teleology, constitutes a quite

comprehensive and complex structure that connects his Umwelt theory with the time-

honoured issue of idealism (68-70).

It is safe to say that Uexküll’s affinities with Kant’s critical views on

mechanism, natural causality, and ultimately scientific reason itself supplied him

with a meta-philosophical method to bear the teleology of anti-mechanism and anti-

Darwinism. Kant argues that metaphysics makes judgements on things as doctrines

without analysis of reason’s cognitive capacities, and thus cannot elucidate how

knowledge based on experiences can be universally effective. And his

“transcendental idealism” sets as its task the study of the subject’s cognitive forms,

which are prior to experience and serve as conditions of our experience. Thus, on the

one hand, it aims to make a compromise between empiricism and rationalism, and

on the other hand, to find a way out for metaphysics that was at stake at that time. In

the very beginning paragraphs of the preface to his Theoretische Biologie, Uexküll

takes aim at dogmatic or metaphysical assertions of Nature. He argues that Nature

discloses no knowledge about herself but rather reveals phenomena that an

investigator has to analyze; thus, the authority of knowledge concerning Nature is

not held in the hands of Nature herself but in the hands of investigators (Theoretical

Biology xiii). This can be viewed as a solemn rebuttal of traditional metaphysics,

which claims knowledge should be knowledge of the object for it to count as true

knowledge. Without doubt this is a legacy of Kant’s reversing of the traditional

metaphysical concept of knowledge. Inspired by Copernicus’ “heliocentric theory”

hypothesis, Kant claimed that, rather than knowledge conforming to objects, objects

conform to knowledge and thus conform to the subject’s cognitive form.

In a 2001 special issue of the journal Semiotica devoted to Uexküll, Marcello

Barbieri comments that, among semioticians, a consensus appears to exist of

accepting of Uexküll’s opposition to mechanism. It seems to him that the whole

special issue “unwittingly” comes to the conclusion that “biosemiotics must be

incompatible with mechanism” (288). He further argues that “[s]o far biosemiotics

has been the discipline which has discovered that animals are interpreters, or semiotic

agents; now we are told that mechanism is not competent to study this new world . . . .

Mechanism cannot explain meaning” (290). Barbieri, among others, could see that

the rediscovery of Uexküll has been closely related to his critical stance of anti-


mechanism and anti-Darwinism. This can be traced back to Uexküll’s theory of

meaning, and thus implies a unity of the two issues in the concept of Umwelt, which

denotes a species-specific, subjectively constructed, meaningful world. With this

concept, Uexküll proposes that instead of speaking of animals’ adaptation to different

environments, it is better to speak of the world becoming comprehensible to an

animal through its connections to the perceiving and acting subjective animal. In this

sense, the flourishing of the Umwelt concept across biology and philosophy can be

regarded as a century-long resistance to mechanism both in the natural sciences and

the humanities.

The Function of Language in the Construction of

Humans’ Umwelten

Uexküllian Umwelt theory is mainly concerned with the animal world, but

Uexküll himself also pays attention to human Umwelten. He argues that the

peculiarities of human Umwelten compared with those of animals lie in (1) the

expansion of space, and (2) the confirmation of the center of the universe. For

animals, each of them is at the center of its universe/world, and the world moves

following the animal’s movement. The animal cannot live outside of its Umwelt.

However, the human is not the center of this space s/he lives in; s/he enters into a

world that has its own center. This is exactly the obstacle presented by the concept of

the material universe to our cognition, and thus s/he has to develop a capability of

symbolizing so as to replace the perceived information with symbolic signs and be

compatible with other human subjects’ perceptions of this space. It is this capability

of symbolizing that makes the human able to get rid of the limitations of his/her

sensory organs and structure the symbolic signs intelligibly. In short, the Umwelten

of animals are selectively and functionally constructed, while the Umwelten of

human beings are symbolically constructed (“An Introduction” 109). In that sense,

the Umwelten of human beings are concerned with how humans model and map their

world symbolically, and it is at this point that we must return to the issue of human

language. This issue also concerns the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s

critique of Uexküll’s schemata for being narrowed down to the spatial schema, and

thus it is necessary to expand it from pictorial representations to representations in

general. Cassirer emphasizes that human beings in their language usage form a “view”

of the world independent of visual connections (The Philosophy 214-15; Chien 76),

and according to him, language is among those parts of a “symbolic universe” that

interpenetrate with the “world-as-sensed” and the “world of action” of humans, and

Lei Han 115

the human is better defined as an “animal symbolicum” rather than an “animal

rationale” (An Essay 43, 44; see also Koutroufinis 51, 52).

Human language was among Uexküll’s interests, although he was primarily

interested in the issue of whether some linguistic elements could work as meaningful

signs for the animal (Thure von Uexküll, “The Sign Theory” 150). In a letter to

Heinrich Junker in 1937, March 29, Uexküll writes that the languages of animals are

merely means of communication in terms of sounds or sound sequences rooted in

their biological heritage; even linguistic sounds are treated as external stimuli by

animals without consciousness of the relationship between sounds as signs and their

possible referents in the world (J. von Uexküll, “Letter to Heinrich Junker” 445-46).

Following Uexküll, Deely further distinguishes human and animal Umwelten with

particular reference to the linguistic operations of humans, pointing out that animals

use their “languages” as means of communication while humans treat language as a

modelling system through which humans are capable of constructing their world

independent of perception and experience. For Deely, the uniqueness of human-

animal beings compared with other animals lies in the former’s awareness of signs

and semiosis.

To put this issue in a broader perspective, more evidence of differentiation

between the human-animal and other animals in terms of their language ability can

be found in psychology. For example, stress cut-off therapy, used to treat traumatized

soldiers, shows how humans, like other animals, can receive and respond to external

stimuli to construct their relationship with the outside world. At the same time,

however, humans are capable of using discursive communication as a means of self-

identification and self-therapy, and may thus reconstruct their Umwelt, as revealed

by the psychoanalytic therapy pioneered by Sigmund Freud (Han, 《老子》 51). It

seems that the consciousness of using language to symbolically construct a subjective

world delineates the border between the human-animal and other animals.

When they established a new branch of biosemiotics called zoosemiotics,

Sebeok and Emmeche tried to exclude humans’ natural language and sign systems

that derived from natural language (Nöth 147-48; Chang, Sign 205). Even Sebeok

himself, however, has to admit that humans, in terms of their language functions,

especially the operation of “naming,” penetrate into the field of zoosemiotics. Chang

has put it as follows:

[N]aming constitutes the first stage of zoosemiotics. This first stage is

a logical and semiotic necessity that mediates culture and nature

because whatever life species and form one sets to describe, he needs


naming to encode it in the first place. Here “encoding” runs the

pragmatic gamut of designating, referring to, and describing, as well

as covering the semantic area of sense (Sinn) and meaning

(Bedeutung). While zoosemiotics serves to mediate ethology and

semiotics . . . naming, one could argue, links zoosemiotics and

biosemiotics in terms of language function, and more precisely,

linguistic pragmatics. (Sign 205)

Through Chang’s argumentation, we see natural language as a human, species-

specific primary modeling system (Sebeok 46-47). Yet not only does it not create an

indelible gap between anthroposemiotics and zoosemiotics, it is the only channel that

connects them. Consciousness of language marks the species-specific existence of

human beings and manifests itself as an interface between human nature and culture,

hence the terms sociosemiotics and biosemiotics. These differentiations mean that

the human-animal uniquely applies the mental mapping of his world and obtains first

priority in constructing a network of relations between human subjects and animal

subjects in their overlapping Umwelten.

Inspired by Sebeok and Chang’s arguments on “naming” animals, and with

recourse to Peircean triadic semiotics, Han reads the Taoist canon of Lao-tzu as an

architext of semiotics and argues that the problematics of naming (名 ming), lodged

mainly in the first chapter, reveals that, in the eyes of Lao-tzu, linguistic pragmatics

manifest the species-specificity of human Umwelten, although the philosopher

himself had strong reservations about linguistic pragmatics. In Han’s view, naming

represents the human’s ethical undertaking of sign activities. By retrospectively and

self-reflexively contemplating the effect of his/her sign activities upon other living

things, the human makes and maps his/her world by naming other creatures, which

highlights the significance of the conscious use of language as a main force in

constructing a human-centered world (Han, 《老子》).

As discussed above, Umwelt is a subjectively-constructed world which holds

true for both humans and other animals. However, the capability of symbolizing is

the species-specific capability that humans hold, while animals are subject to

restrictions so they can only depend on sensory organs to perceive and experience

realities in their worlds. Regarding the same issue, Émile Benveniste, a linguist and

semiotician, defines “la faculté de symbolizer” as humans’ capacity to use signs to

refer to realities and to conceive signs as representamens of the referred realities; he

insists that humans’ “faculté de symbolizer” is best accommodated in human

languages (in the narrow sense of le langage). For Benveniste, language is a double

Lei Han 117

structure, a combination of the material and the immaterial, in which thoughts dwell

and inner experiences manifest themselves. Meanwhile, since the materialization of

language always occurs through the existence of natural language and certain

linguistic structures, language cannot exist without social realities, thus leading to the

conclusion that “le langage re-produit la réalité” (Benveniste 25; emphasis in

original).

Benveniste sets as his task the study of the influence of the human’s language

behavior on himself and his environment, stating that it is the living discourse that

ensures the existence and presence of subject(s) (or subjectivity). He explores the

area that Saussure leaves aside—discourse—and thus invites reality back into his

linguistic studies. This fundamentally differs from Saussurian linguistics as a pure

formal science whose main object is relations (linguistic structures) rather than

existential objects.3 However, Jacques Derrida is quite critical of both Benveniste

and Saussure and labels their linguistics as logocentric and metaphysical. Being

influenced by Edmund Husserl, Derrida conceives that a sentence could make sense

by following grammatical rules only and ignoring the absence of the material object

it refers to: for example, a living man saying, “I’m dead” (Derrida 155-56).

Benveniste is thus incorrect in insisting that living discourse maintains the existential

and present subject. For Derrida, everything in language is constructed and thus can

be disassembled.

Despite the radical conflicts between philosophy of language and linguistics,

as shown in Derrida’s attack on Benveniste and Saussure, modern linguistics in its

role as a universal mediation in twentieth-century academia (seen in the “linguistic

turn”) once again invites us to reconsider the meaning-generating activity of human

beings in their interactions with material and immaterial worlds. Saussure was not

the first to view meaning as a function of language and see language as determining

what the speaking subject thinks, but he was the most influential revolutionary who

finally established an alternative tradition to that of Descartes, which views language

as the carrier of meaning. Saussure and his followers also invite us to rethink the

idealistic property instilled in the human language even in its social use, and to

rethink what kind of meaning-animal we humans are.

As Thure von Uexküll states, his father was not familiar with Saussure (“The

3 We may bear in mind the “equivalence” between the plan of concepts and the plan of image-

acoustiques, which anchors an idea within a sound in terms of articulation instead of expressing thoughts that already exist; both idea and sound have no substance but form and are therefore purely immaterial. Thoughts are a mass of obscure nebulae, which can only be reorganized in the process of articulation.


Sign Theory” 150), but the present author finds an interesting homology between

Uexküll’s figuration of different processes interlocking in human perception (see fig.

1) and Saussure’s illustration of speech circulation between two persons (see figs. 2

and 3). Fig. 1. Uexküll’ s figuration of human perception (“A Stroll” 63). Copyright © Jakob von

Uexküll.

Fig. 2. Saussurian speech circulation between two persons (Saussure 27). Copyright © Ferdinand

de Saussure.

Lei Han 119

Fig. 3. The reversing process of human speech circulation (Saussure 28). Copyright © Ferdinand

de Saussure.

According to Uexküll, there are three processes involved in a single act of

human perception: a physical process, which is the process by which the signal of an

external stimulation reaches the human’s sensory organ(s) through physical space; a

physiological process, which is a processing of this signal from one organ to the

central receptor; and a psychic process, which shows how the central receptor deals

with the received sign and projects a meaning to the Umwelt. Uexküll also terms the

last process a psychological one (“A Stroll” 63). In Cours de linguistique générale,

the speech circulation described by Saussure also includes a psychological

phenomenon, a physiological process, and a physical model. A concept evokes a

response of image acoustique in the brains of the sender and receiver, which is a

completely psychological phenomenon. The brain transmits a nerve impulse to the

vocal organ according to this image acoustique, which is a physiological process.

The sound comes out from the sender’s vocal organ and passes through the air to the

receiver’s auditory organ, which is a physical process. A complete speech circulation

is thus a unity of these three processes.

From the above comparison, three observations are essential to make. First, all

linguistic communicative behavior involves the union of body, sign, and space, and

this holds true for Umwelt theory, too. Second, the body is an interface of physical,

psychological, and semiotic worlds, and this is true both for human and non-human

animals; thus soma (the body) and sema (the sign, meaning) are the two basic codes


that human and non-human animals alike use to construct their Umwelten.4 Third,

both an organism’s Umwelt and human language are not characterized as having

subjectivist closure. Saussurian speech circulation manifests the fact that the

construction of human Umwelten through language communication is always a dual-

or multi-oriented and inter-constructing process; in Uexküll’s later years, his focus

in the Umwelt theory lay in the “counterpoint interaction among environments and

different subjects,” and he discovered “a reciprocal functionality that exceeds the

perceptual and behavioral confines of single organisms” (Brentari 167). This view

serves as Uexküll’s refutation of the accusation of environmental solipsism and the

isolation and closure of the Umwelt of a certain organism. An Umwelt needs

interactions with other Umwelten so as to complete itself.5

Habitat and Habitable Space in Human Umwelten

When the concept of Umwelt is reconsidered in the relationship between soma

and sema, the body itself becomes a meaningful space and an Umwelt of the soul; its

property is closely related to the concept of “habitable space,” which can be

expressed in semiotic terms as a semiotic niche or the organism’s nīdus activities.

From the Latin nīdus derives the French verb se nicher, which designates the

organism and non-organism’s mutual and reciprocal relationship with the

environment they dwell in: the environment is built to serve the subject’s need of

settling down, while it is the subject who supplies meaning to the existence of the

environment. As discussed above, the habitable space for an animal is biologically

4 This can also be traced back to Plato’s Cratylus, in which Plato describes the unity and

separation of the body and the soul (400c): the body as a visible biological construction (material, corporeal) is (1) the tomb (σῆμά [sema]) of the soul as an invisible spiritual construction (incorporeal), but, because the soul gives indications (semainei) to the body, the body is also called (2) a sign (σῆμά); and it is also (3) the safe (σῶμα [soma], sozetai) of the soul. Thus, in Cratylus, the body (soma) is equal to the tomb (sema) and the sign (sema). For a more developed interpretation of this relationship and its rapport with Saussure, see Chang,《符号与修辞》207-15. Another example can be taken from 《老子》. In this highly condensed and metaphorical text, the human body is conceived as the coupling place of macro-universe and micro-universe. The former consists of perceiving and understanding material, typological natural settings, while the latter is formed only through inner spiritual contemplation. It is the body where the two universes meet in the physical world, but only by transforming the material into the ideal and bridging humanity and its environment, nature and culture. The body as a converging of signs is both the starting place and the ultimate nest of humans’ mapping and recognition of the world where they live. In other words, in the space where soma and sema are unified, meaning is generated and invested in a corporeal as well as semiotic subject.

5 See also Jacob von Uexküll, Das allmächtige Leben 13.

Lei Han 121

required and functionally constructed with recourse to the involvement of sense-

organs, while for a human, it is once and for all in his Umwelt, as a habitable place

immersed in his conscious sign activities, that the sensorially perceived messages of

his Umwelt are transformed into symbolic systems. This is best represented in a

human’s relationship with his cultural environment.

As a systematic concept, Umwelt implies that the organism that constructs this

Umwelt (that is, the subject) occupies a special position within a system, and this

system takes the subject as its center and itself as a radiation from the subject. Roland

Barthes supplies us with an example of this in his Fragments d’un discours amoureux

(1977), which is based on a reading of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther.

Barthes points out that with Werther’s praying to God to take the position already

occupied by Charlotte’s fiancé Albert, a dwelling in a social system maintained by

marriage, Werther conceives himself as at the same structural position as Heinrich, a

madman who falls in love with Charlotte too, and another young man who falls in

love with a widow and kills his competitor. Barthes articulates this situation as

Werther having a “structural identification” with the other two men, and the present

author will argue that the concept of “structural identification” is another name for

Uexküll’s human Umwelt bubble, in that both of them are concerned with relations

among different subjects within the same material or immaterial world. But Barthes

exposes the conflicts of uniqueness between individuals and their occupying of a

repeatable position with others; as a human species-specific character, humans

oscillate between these two piles like a child enjoys and suffers its “fort/da” game.

Barthes uses the Italian phrase “Tutti Sistemati” (literally, all settled) to reveal that

the object of desire in Werther’s Umwelt is not Charlotte, but a position, a place

habitable. The subject is “entretenu” in this habitable place; all is within a system and

everything settles down in this system by taking its own position. The English

translation of this text locates a biological counterpart for “Tutti Sistemati” as

“pigeonhole.” A pigeonhole is a functional habitat for a pigeon, but it has been

enriched with its wide mimesis in human cultures, thus also being symbolic: “toute

structure est habitable” (Barthes 56) (Han, Lun ba’erte 217-22). As on many other

occasions, Barthes reveals to us his obsession with the concept of system and the

subject’s structural identification, but he emphasizes the function of language as a

zoom effect through which the network of relations of the subject is mediated and

thus constructed.

The difference between a habitat and a habitable space for human beings once

again echoes with Uexküll’s critical attitude toward Darwinist environmental

determinism. He also influenced Martin Heidegger in the latter’s development of the


idea that “man is world-forming” (Heidegger 177).

Artificial Life and Its Umwelt

The previously mentioned scholar Claus Emmeche contributed a paper to the

special issue on Uexküll in Semiotica in 2001, in which he deals with the question,

“does a robot have an Umwelt?” His question can also be paraphrased as “in what

sense can we say that a robot has an Umwelt?” Emmeche identifies Uexküll’s Umwelt

theory as “a branch of qualitative organicism in theoretical biology” and believes that

it

sheds light on recent discussions in cognitive science, artificial life, and

robotics about the nature of representation and cognition—indeed genuine

semiotic questions as they deal with the role of information and signs for any

system that has the property of being ‘animal-like,’ that is, systems that move

by themselves and seem to be guided by a kind of entelechy or, in modern but

shallow terms, a behavioral program. (653-54)

By taking the concept of Umwelt into our consideration, we have implied the

existence of a living being, or at least a perceptible and effectible being; it might be

on this basis that Emmeche argues that a robot can take more or less intelligible

actions by using its sensor and effector tools like an animal. To become an

intrinsically autonomous system, however, it needs to be able to “[create] genuine

life de novo,” which means first of all a disentangling from its programming to

imitate the life process, and then an involvement in metaphysics and presuppositions

(Emmeche 661; emphasis in original).

Leaving the technical analysis aside and focusing on Emmeche’s examination

of the Uexküllian Umwelt concept, we might also be drawn closer to the answer of

his question. Emmeche finds that the concept of Umwelt brings in two important

issues: the non-identical correspondences between mind and Umwelt, and the

relationship between different Umwelten. He argues, on the one hand, that mind is

certainly much more embracing than the systematic concept of Umwelt, and on the

other hand, a human’s Umwelt can be an interpreting system that can (incompletely)

penetrate into other animals’ Umwelten as interpreted systems, but not vice versa.

Concerning the first point, it has been proved by the above-mentioned function of

human language in the perspective of humans’ psychological potentials, and to

exceed what has been said, sub-consciousness and unconsciousness may be regarded

Lei Han 123

as two significant notions concerned with the ample potential of human mind. The

second point has been posited by Cassirer, who takes from Uexküll the notion “that

a biologist should differentiate between the two kinds of Umwelt cycles, the one

formed and shared collectively by one species in nature, and another imagined

idiosyncratically between the biologist and his observing species” (Chien 72-73).

Once again, we are encountering here the problem of human language; specifically,

it is the linguistic communicative ability of the biologist that features his/her human

Umwelt as an interpreting and modelling system. A system cannot be both

interpreting system and interpreted system, except for a language system (Benveniste

1974: 43-66). In the view of the present author, Emmeche probably did not notice

that he is still immersed in anthroposemiotics by asserting the above two points, but

the target realm of his research falls into biosemiotics, which values the biological

foundation as the crossing core of humans’ and animals’ significations. It can be

briefly said about Emmeche’s argument that the mental potential of the subject is the

determining factor with regard to its Umwelt, and for humans, this potential is best

manifested via his/her language performance.

And how about for a robot? Emmeche supplies us with some hypotheses: “the

robot-does-have-an-Umwelt” maintains in itself the premise of a physical and

chemical mimesis of Uexküll’s functional circle, while the opposite view believes

that this instantiation of the functional circle is not working in the sense of semiotics.

In other words, the presumed robot’s Umwelt does not rely on the cybernetic

presupposition of a mimicry of functional cycle that is in operation, but it does rely

on the premise that a “living organism is beforehand constituted as an active subject”

(Emmeche 678), and thus falls into the field of metaphysics.

Barbieri sees the semiotic competence maintained in Uexküll’s Umwelt theory

as coming from one of his amendments to Kant:

He was drawn to it by the fact that animals can play, cheat, threaten,

court and act (and now even dream), all of which suggests that they

can react to the same stimulus in many different ways. Which in turn

means that animals are interpreters, not just receivers, of signals.

Interpreting implies the ability to transform signals into signs by giving

meaning to them, and so we have before us all three basic elements of

semiosis: object, interpreter and sign. (288; emphasis in original)

Taking animals as interpreters of the world, not “programmed puppets,” regardless

of whether biologically or information technology based, Barbieri views the animal


subject’s mental capabilities of interpreting signs (“cues” in Uexküllian terminology)

as the ultimate decisive factor of its Umwelt. In this sense, Uexküll is indeed a

semiotician par excellence. And with Barbieri’s help, a rethinking of the two points

Emmeche stresses about Umwelt leads one to connect the subject’s mentality to its

capabilities of conceiving and interpreting signs as well as to the mysterious and

metaphysical power that makes “a living organism.” In this sense, an artificial life is

not a true life because it is “artificial” and thus cannot have an Umwelt.

Concluding Remarks

The legacy of the Uexküllian Umwelt theory paradoxically implies the

possibility of mutual and reciprocal modelling among natural science, idealist

philosophy, and modern semiotics. It has many connections with idealism, not only

because Uexküll took Kantian transcendental idealism as a meta-philosophical

method to bring forth his own non-mechanistic, constructivist description of an

organism’s relationship with its environment and other organisms, which apparently

situates itself against Darwinian evolutionary theory, but also because this theory

casts light on how the human-animal and non-human-animal’s worlds are made

intelligible, organized, and reshaped by their perceptions and symbolizations in

general.

The Umwelt theory is a theory of meaning for the organic world. To widen

Clifford Geertz’s assumption that humans live in a web of meaning, we believe that

with their Umwelten, non-human animals are meaning subjects, too. Moreover, as

Alexei Sharov puts it, “[t]he Umwelt-theory implies that it is not possible to separate

mind from the world (matter) because mind makes the world meaningful” (211). The

Umwelt theory also sets as its task dealing with the interaction between the material

world and the immaterial world. An animate body paradoxically serves as the

interface of both worlds, while differences in psychological (psychic) capabilities

play the decisive role in differentiating human Umwelten and non-human Umwelten:

the former are mainly lodged in the conventional and symbolic interpretation of

meaning activities, while the latter are mainly lodged in categorial and functional

recognition of meaning activities.

In Die ewige Frage: Biologische Variationen über einen Platonischen Dialog,

a variation on Plato’s Meno co-authored with his father, Thure von Uexküll claims

that man obtains his “special position” (Sonderstellung) in nature due to the ultimate

goal “in everything he does: To raise Nature up into spiritual consciousness” (Jakob

and Thure von Uexküll 360-61). Language, as a constructing force of human

Lei Han 125

Umwelten, is not only one of the human media through which nature attains spirit,

but also gains priority among other human media by serving as an interpreting system

of other natural or cultural systems. This paper has therefore paid considerable

attention to the problem of human language and its relationship with the human

Umwelt. Perhaps it seems to the reader that the author insists on taking the position

of anthroposemiotics, and thus paradoxically puts the biosemiotic nature of Umwelt

aside. However, this has not been the author’s intention. Perhaps it is fitting to

conclude with the words of Uexküll’s “Socrates” in the dialogue referred to above:

“Whoever sees the workings of unconscious Nature in a spiritual light clear enough

to make her shine and speak in a way man will understand, he will during his lifetime

imprint the clarity of his personal existence on Nature, and he will never lose that

clarity” (Jakob and Thure von Uexküll 361).

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About the Author Lei Han is Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University,

China. She has been a visiting scholar at Charles University in Prague (2017). Her research

interests include semiotics, contemporary Western theory, cultural studies, and comparative

poetics. Her monograph Lun Ba’erte: yige huayu fuhaoxue de kaocha 論巴爾特：一個話語符號學的考察 (On Roland Barthes: An Exploration of Semiology of Discourse) was

published in 2019. She is currently working on a Chinese translation of Juri Lotman’s Culture


and Explosion.

[Received 1 July 2020; accepted 1 February 2021]

the idealistic elements in modern semiotic studies: with

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