Arguing With Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelten

Abstract

The past two decades have witnessed the remarkable rediscovery of the Baltic-German bio-philosopher Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) and his conception of the animal as a creator of meaning, master of its Umwelt (environment). This paper highlights several blind spots in Uexküll’s contemporary revival. Whilst it has not gone unnoticed that his political agitations clash with the spirit of contemporary research agendas, his Staatsbiologie (state biology) and other essays from the 1920s are commonly dismissed as mere mishaps. But as I show in this paper, Uexküll’s political ideas pervade his ostensibly biological works. Indeed, what has been lost in the scramble to reclaim Uexküll is precisely the crucial role which human animals and their music play in his bio-philosophy. His attempts to unite his understanding of the swarm and the bubble through his esoteric and anti-democratic Kompositionslehre (theory of composition) should be borne in mind for any further attempts to fashion him into a thinker of the “more-than-human.”