I found a book called Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze by Brett Buchanan. I mean, oooooooooh. So right up my alley.  For those of you that want to read Uexküll, you can find Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning as a digital book. I’ve got a copy through one of my local universities so I can’t post a link (since you’d need a library login to get to it).

For this post I just want to speak a bit about Jakob von Uexküll and some of his weird-assed ideas.

To begin, please remember that Jakob was born in 1864, Darwin’s Origin was published in 1859 and the core of classical genetics wasn’t in place until 1915.

Weird-assed idea number 1: natural selection is inadequate to explain “the orientation of present features and behaviours toward future ends–purposefulness.” (Dorion Sagan, from Unwelt After Uexküll (introduction, page 3).

Weird-assed idea number 2: “nonhuman perceptions must be accounted for in any biology worthy of the name” (same set of Sagan passages)

Weird-assed idea number 3: Meaning has priority in all living beings.

Weird-assed idea number 4: There’s a master plan somewhere outside of individual form that guides “purpose.”

Weird-assed idea number 5: All living beings are subjects, and not mere objects.

Weird-assed idea number 6: “When a dog runs, the animal moves its feet, i.e., the harmony of the footsteps is centrally controlled. But in the case of a starfish we say: ‘When a starfish moves, the legs move the animal.’ That is, the harmony of the movement is in the legs themselves. It is like an orchestra that can play without a conductor.” The starfish’s legs take the starfish along, whereas you decide where you want your feet to go.” (Dorion Sagan again)

There are other weird ideas but that’s enough to go on with.

Pick them apart. To say “meaning has priority in all living beings” implies that context and environment takes priority because meaning is only found in the relationship between one form and another. That’s actually quite a radical suggestion even today, but to understand what the author was really doing one has to understand, or at least be familiar with, the fight over the concept of life form as subject or object, the fight over the concept of bio-mechanism.

Animals are mere machines: If you could go back in time would you kill Descartes?

I get the concern to pull back from any idea that the non-human living world is mechanistic in the same way my blender is mechanistic but a basic grounding in science today should have already blown that idea apart. But remember Jakob isn’t today’s scientist. He’s still immersed in the idea of vitalism.

Here’s how Jakob shows that particular fight: “We ask a simple question: Is the tick a machine or a machine operator? Is it a mere object or a subject?”

And there you go: down the rabbit hole of assumed shit.

In today’s parlance the machine and the operator are one.  To separate them is to miss the point of the wonders of complex chemical signalling and information processing that occur in the inanimate world, and of which the animate (living) world make use.

So here’s the thing…can we still make use of the weird-assed ideas given vitalism’s influence in Jakob’s work?

Oh yes, I think so. In fact it’s a good thing to do so because we get more practice in pulling apart insight and interpretation. The idea that purpose is a hall-mark of life forms is an insight. Attributing that fact to some “master-plan” is interpretation.

Once purpose is divorced from teleology one can generate new interpretations based on the wealth of fact we’ve gained in recent decades.

And then in a few more decades we’ll do the same with today’s interpretations.

And so science, and thinking, proceed.