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PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 1.2

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PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 1.2
Figures:

  • Uexkull (biosemiotics)
  • Kant (his influence on Uexkull)
  • Darwin (Uexkull’s critiques of)

Uexkull introduction:

  • central figure for this class, heavily misinterperreted until D&G

Uexkull’s Kantianism:

  • implementation of Kant’s transcendental tradition into biology
  • SUBJECT is understood as universal (i.e. a species-subject, a subject representing the whole species)
  • animals live in PHENOMENAL WORLDS: no access to WORLD-IN-ITSELF, only bubbles of signs
  • what is the structure of these bubbles? (what are ‘world’ and ‘being’ for animals → ontology)

BIOSEMIOTICS: reading the signs that build an animal’s world
[Semiotics → study of signs as signs, any signs; their functions, referents and references]
[Semantics → the study of the meaning of signs]

  • animal behaviour, ethology, approached through signs
  • against 2 traditions: animal psychology & mechanism
    [MECHANISM: Cartesian view of animals as complex machines]
    [ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY: anthropomorphism, projecting human-ness onto animals]
  • we can understand a subject’s phenomenal world through their signs
  • the pre-requisite for having a ‘world’ is registering signs
  • in mechanism stimuli are simply part of a causal chain making the animal do this or that; for Uexkull stimuli are proper signs, requiring some level of interpretation by the subject
  • animals are perpetually interpereting their worlds
  • EXISTENCE IS HERMENEUTICAL
  • every living being is at the center of its own world
  • animals are not machines, but machine operators
  • the animal’s nervous/psychological structure is what determines the signs building its world
  • the animal’s psychological constitution where signs and stimuli are linked together [this is how certain stimuli/signs fuse]
  • in order for an animal to be affected by something it needs a given constitution (eyes for light-stimuli, etc.)
  • if an animal can react to a stimuli, then for it its already a meaningful sign
  • Uexkull only deals with the stimuli that are meaningful or the animal (not the what-its-like qualia)

UMWELT:
[um - around; Welt - world → around-world, or the animal’s enviornment]

  • the world into which the subject is placed without reflection
  • humans have a more complex Welt (an Umwelt is an animal thing)
  • the Welt-Umwelt difference is one of degree

The Umwelt as a Kantian idea:

  • for Kant, everyone has certain a priori principles, serving as legislative bodies over domains of human thought/capacity (morals, aesthethics, naturalism…)
  • Uexkull’s simpler idea: the subject has an a priori according to which its phenomenal world will unfold (its own scheme)
  • finititude is necessary to have a world, so we only have access to a sliver of the total world
  • the animal’s a priori is part of its nervous system

MERKMAL [the sign]:

  • characteristic marks, or signs, of things in the world
  • animals recognize stimuli via these marks
  • what determines wether an object becomes or doesn’t become a Merkmal
  • a subject needs to recognize the mark as a mark for something (unlike a pure, meaningless stimuli)
    [reading signs and having consciousness are disconnected, thus he was important for the field of cybernetics]

The Tick:

  • ticks crawl up grass (due to the sun’s stimuli/signs)
  • then enter a kind of hibernation for up to 30 years
  • once they detect a mammal via butyric acid they jump (cold → miss; warm → they’ve landed)
  • via warmth they search for a hotspot
  • once full of blood they fall, lay eggs, die
  • signs of the tick’s Umwelt: warmth, butyric acid, sense of skin and veins
  • these signs occasion different behaviours
  • the Umwelt, through the central nervous system can be reconstructed via these signs
  • the questions one should ask: what part of the world does the animal posses, what influences the animal
  • we begin with OUR WORLD (Welt), and then slowly reduce it to THE TICK’S WORLD (Umwelt)
  • we reduce everything to ‘meaning organs’

Innenwelt:

  • network of nerve connections
  • not psychological, purely anatomic
  • a priori determinant of the Umwelt
  • Umwelt and Innenwelt emerge together (morphogenesis - external and internal factors reacting together)

Paramecium:

  • simple organism (single celled)
  • limited signs
  • its stimuli-responses: feeding, fleeing
  • its a world with ONLY ONE stimuli (feeding is mechanic, only fleeing is a proper action, triggered by one singular stimuli)

Uexkull on Darwinism:

  • every Umwelt has only things adapted to the animal
  • struggle against and adaptation to a FOREIGN WORLD is absurd
  • Darwin: only evolution, no understanding of an INDIVIDUAL SPECIES
  • an animal is not adapting to its enviorment, they emerge together
  • species determination is only central nervous system determination

Bauplan [building plan]:

  • all animals of the same species have the same Bauplan
  • animal-enviorment form a functional unity depending on the Bauplan
  • Bauplan connects inner and outer world (Innenwelt & Umwelt)
  • all outside the Bauplan is outside the animal (nothing, unknowable)

Higher & Lower species:

  • differentiated by their capacity to percieve signs

  • higher animals can see something in the world as outside of them

  • deciphering form: relating to SOMETHING ELSE as SOMETHING ELSE

  • earthworm: has such stimuli that it can determine a leaf’s shape/correct side

  • the earthworm is a higher animal, conceptualizing things beyond itself (the leaf)

  • we can construct the earthworm’s Umwelt without our own Welt

  • here Uexkull becomes much more speculative → animal worlds beyond simple Welt-reduction

  • The animal’s stimuli selection cannot be explained my simple mechanism

  • biosemiotics takes into account what affects action & world (via the Bauplan)

  • between the subject and their Umwelt there is a semiotic relationship

  • A NERVOUS SIGN LANGUAGE

Functional Circle:

  • ordered whole
  • there are several functional cycles for one animal
  • they operate within the Bauplan
  • prey circle, enemy circle, reproductive circle, locomotion circle
  • an unconscious choice is made between different circles
  • THUS THE ANIMAL IS NOT A MACHINE, BUT A MACHINE OPERATOR
  • the functional circle is the animal in a biological sense
  • the animal’s manner of being is determined by its functional circles

Operative and Perceptive Signs:

  • operative and perceptive worlds (these 2 make up the Umwelt)
  • everything a subject perceives belongs to the PERCEPTIVE WORLD, everything it produces belongs to its OPERATIVE WORLD
  • the perceptive world is the totality of the sign-world
  • perceptive marks and signs acquire their meaning from the Umwelt (green - grass; blue - sky)
  • translating signs happens on the BEHAVIOURAL PLANE
  • contemplating signs is a purely human actions, animal react to signs

Its unclear wether animals have access to the object X (chair) or only to the stimuli it produces (brown, musty, etc.) without access to the object X

  • most likely they don’t have acces to X

  • they smell, touch, see the same X, but perceive it as a new thing (since theyre new stimuli without the conceptual ‘chair’ to bind them)

  • higher animals likely can do this, but cannot contemplate this fact, only react to the object X and its stimuli as coming from the same object X

  • the tick’s bite is an operative mark, a function it performs upon the world

  • the animal’s environment is changed

  • its a mark/sign, because it prompts a new action (bite → suck blood)

  • EACH PERCEPTIVE SIGN PROMPTS AN OPERATIVE SIGN

  • the animal does not fully perceives its actions, but knows them as a step within a sequence

  • there are no immediate reactions or reflexes, but an unconscious choice between different functional circles [traditional concept of reflex would not allow for this]

  • some parts of the animal’s environment send perception marks, other effect marks

  • for the animal the plane of perception may be completely different from the plane of effection

“One can best sum this up this way: The operative mark extinguishes the perception mark.”

  • perception of a sign disappears once the animal has responded to the sign
  • the operative mark is imparted, not received or read

COLOR-TONE:

  • signs present in higher animals
  • stimuli are ‘colored’ differently within different functional circles
  • prey is given a ‘feeding tone’, for example
  • tones are simply anticipations of the actions the animal will perform in response to the sign
  • the crab will perceive shell-like things differently (different tone/color) depending on if it has or does not have a shell
  • i.e. the looking for shell or has a shell circles will impart different tones on the shell-like object
  • the organism’s mood is coorelated to the color-tone of the object

OPERATIVE IMAGE:

  • Wirkbild, perception of a potential operation
  • perceptive sign enriched by an operative sign
  • operative mark realized as a kind of virtuality, not an immediate operation, but a possible one
  • humans do this with all objects in our world, objects hold POTENTIAL, not always immediate actions

Recap:

  • external world stimuli are translated into signs via the central nervous system
  • all objects in the Umwelt carry meaning
  • meaning is not necessarily conscious
  • combinations of stimuli → objects [theorethical object recognition]
  • Umwelt - knot of signs
  • world in itself is unknown for the animal
  • Uexkull is not anthropocentric, without a clear man-animal distinction
  • humans have more planes than the animal’s behavioural plane (contemplative plane, for example)
  • only humans can assume a neutral relationship to an object (this trait leads us to ontology and metaphysics)
  • humans can understand objects outside of functional circles

Graph View