Umwelt

... Umwelt, a term Uexküll introduced to refer to the phenomenal worlds of organisms, the worlds around animals as they themselves perceive them

Jakob von Uexküll, the author who coined the meaning of the word Umwelt for semiotics, has himself explained it in different ways and from different angles:

1. in terms of its components: "All that a subject perceives becomes his perceptual world and all that he does, his effector world. Perceptual and effector worlds together form a closed unit, the Umwelt" (von Uexküll 1992: 320);
2. in relation to the observer: "Each Umwelt of an animal forms a spatially, temporally as well as with regard to content delimited part of the phenomenal world of the observer" (tranlation by R. Magnus)(Von Uexküll 1980: 281);
3. in relation to the organism: "Umwelt is always this part of the surrounding, which impinges on the irritable substance of the animal body" (von Uexküll 1909: 249, translation by R. Magnus); and
4. presented via a metaphor: "we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows" (von Uexküll 1992: 319).

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The term is made by the proposition 'um', 'around', and the substantive 'Welt", 'world'. It refers, consequently, to the 'world around'; and the center around which the Umwelt displays itself is the experiencing subject.

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Umwelt has sometimes been opposed to the terms 'environment' and 'physical environment' (von Uexküll 2010: 348; von Uexküll 1994:1146), but it is generally done for the sake of distinguishing and specifying the meaning of Umwelt in repect to the established term of environment. Uexküll made a distinction between Umgebung and Umwelt (von Uexküll 1909, 1920). These are antithetical terms as far as an organism's reaction to external stimuli are concerned. In this perspective, the Umgebung is the physical environment at large, whereas the Umwelt is that part of the Umgebung that an organism engages with. Thus, what is Umwelt for an organism, might be mere Umgebung for another - and when we conduct Umwelt research, we must in effect distinguish between another organism's Umwelt and Umgebung, within our own Umwelt.

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In modern biosemiotics, the concept has been adapted to the current biosemiotic theoretical framework and with that the Uexküllian sense of the word has been shifted towards a more explicitly semiotic meaning. The following (bio)semiotic quotations explaining the concept might illustrate the point: "The basis for the existence of an Umwelt is semiosis" (Cobley(ed.) 2009: 348); "Jakob von Uexküll's Umwelt, a qualitative and meaningful model of a species' significant surround" (Sebok 1986: 23); "we define umwelt as a set of relations an organism has in an ecosystem (as in a semiosphere)" (Kull 210: 353); "Umwelt is not a set of objects in the environment but rather a system of signs interpreted by an organism" (Sharov 2001: 211);

... for Uexküll a key component of the Umwelt idea was that just as the Umwelt is no accidental feature of the organism, nor is it an accidental feature of the universe, the world at large. Subjective experience, in Uexküll's perspective, is not simpy one phenomenon among many, on equal footing with other phenomena in the living realm - it is a centerpiece phenonmenon, a phenomenon that other phenomena in the living realm are organized around. This is why Uexküll thought that biology should be organized around notions of meaning and significance - because the life processes themselves are organized around meaning and significance, as manifested in cycles of perception and action.

To sum up Uexküll view, we can characterize an Umwelt as the subjective world of an organism, enveloping a perceptual world and an effector world, which is always part of the organism itself and a key component of nature, which is held together by functional cycles connecting different Umwelten ... Uexküll does not use the term 'Umwelt' unless there is "an interconnected web of sign processes", such as in an individual animal. In other cases, such as biosemiosis in plants and fungi, he refers not to Umwelten, but to 'Wohnhüllen' (dwelling-worlds). In Uexküll's outlook, there are thus two fundamental types of phenomenal worlds, as it were, in nature: Umwelten, and Wohnhüllen, and of these the Umwelt stand out as particularly well organized in terms of functional characteristics. Wohnhüllen, too, are "subjective worlds" of a sort - but in a sense they are worlds without any clear subject.