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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 of Umwelt. It firstly addresses Uexküll’s affinities with and indebtedness to Kant’s , pointing out that Uexküll took Kant’s transcendental 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 has an Umwelt. Arguing that the interpreting, -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 and anthroposemiotics, the paper aims to contribute to shaping a new understanding of the -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).

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“All 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 , 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 maintains within its structure an “objective idealism,” which is a view of regarding all as 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 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 , 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 ).

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 , once properly established, should form part of and therefore also part of general psychology.

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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 , , 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/ 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 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 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

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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 in Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt. Such work shows us that it is not lack of academic 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 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 that we can apply to study the relationship between Uexküll’s Umwelt theory and Kantian . 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 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 was adopted by Uexküll as a philosophical basis for developing his biological studies. Kant argues that all 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 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 . 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 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 .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.

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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 of a mediating mental process as a priori; thus, the schemata is of critical importance in juxtaposing sensory 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 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 , and ultimately scientific itself supplied him with a meta-philosophical method to bear the teleology of anti-mechanism and anti- Darwinism. Kant argues that metaphysics makes on things as 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 and , 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-

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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 with symbolic signs and be compatible with other human subjects’ 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 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 , 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 in terms of sounds or sound sequences rooted in their biological heritage; even linguistic sounds are treated as external stimuli by animals without 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 . 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 , 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

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

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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 © .

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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 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

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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 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 ; 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 ’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. 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 , Werther conceives himself as at the same structural position as Heinrich, a madman who falls in 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” . 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 , 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 toward Darwinist environmental . He also influenced Martin Heidegger in the latter’s development of the

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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 that it

sheds light on recent discussions in cognitive science, artificial life, and robotics about the nature of 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 (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 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 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 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 , 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

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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 ’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

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Umwelten, is not only one of the human media through which nature attains , 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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‘Semiotics’ and Its Fortune Home and Away, 1920-2004.” 2005. National Taiwan U, PhD dissertation. Deely, John. “Umwelt.” Semiotica, vol. 134, no. 1/4, 2001, pp. 125-35. Derrida, Jacques. Discussion about “To Write, an Intransitive Verb?”. The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, Johns Hopkins UP, 1970, pp. 155-56. Dupuis, Damien. “A Peircian Biosemiotic Approach to Understanding Human .” 2016. Swinburne U of Technology, PhD dissertation. Emmeche, Claus. “Does a Robot Have an Umwelt? Reflections on the Qualitative Biosemiotics of Jakob von Uexküll.” Semiotica, vol. 134, no. 1/4, 2001, pp. 653- 93. Esposito, Maurizio. “Kantian Ticks, Uexküllian Melodies, and the Transformation of Transcendental Philosophy.” Michelini and Köchy, pp. 36-51. Fultot, Martin, and Michael T. Turvey. “von Uexküll’s Theory of Meaning and Gibson’s Organism-Environment Reciprocity.” Ecological Psychology, vol. 31, no. 3, 2019, pp. 289-315. Han Lei 韓蕾. “Lun Laozi de renlei zhuti shijie jiangou: yige shengwu fuhaoxue guandian” 論老子的人類主體世界建構：一個生物符號學觀點 (“A Biosemiotic View of the Human Species-specific Umwelt in Laozi”). Fuhao yu chuanmei 符號與傳媒 (Signs & Media), vol. 17, Autumn 2018, pp. 47-58. —. 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). Sichuan UP, 2019. Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. 1983. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, Indiana UP, 1995. Heredia, J. Manuel. “Jakob von Uexküll, an Intellectual .” Michelini and Köchy, Routledge, 2020, pp. 17-35. Koutroufinis, Spyridon. “Animal and Human ‘Umwelt’ (Meaningful Environment)—Continuities and Discontinuities.” Balkan Journal of Philosophy, vol. 8, no.1, 2016, pp. 49-54. Kull, Kalevi. “Umwelt and Modelling.” The Routledge Companion to Semiotics, edited by Paul Cobley, Routledge, 2010, pp. 43-56. Merrell, Floyd. “Distinctly Human Umwelt?” Semiotica, vol. 134, no. 1/4, 2001, pp. 229-62. Michelini, Francesca, and Kristian Köchy, editors. Jakob von Uexküll and Philosophy: Life, Environments, , Routledge, 2020.

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Nöth, Winfried. Handbook of Semiotics. Indiana UP, 1995. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique générale. 1916. Éditions Payot and Rivages, 1995. Sebeok, Thomas A. Contributions to the of Signs. Peter de Ridder P, 1976. Sharov, Alexei. “Umwelt-Theory and .” Semiotica, vol. 134, no. 1/4, 2001, pp. 211-28. Sutrop, Urmas. “Umwelt—Word and Concept: Two Hundred Years of Semantic Change.” Semiotica, vol. 134, no. 1/4, 2001, pp. 447-62. Uexküll, Jakob von. Theoretical Biology. Translated by D. L. MacKinnon, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1926. —. Das allmächtige Leben. Wegner, 1950. —. “A Stroll through the World of Animals and Men.” Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept. Translated and edited by Claire H. Schiller, International UP, 1957, pp. 5-80. —. “The Theory of Meaning.” Semiotica, vol. 42, no. 1, 1982, pp. 25-82. —. “An Introduction to Umwelt.” Semiotica, vol. 134, no. 1/4, 2001, pp. 107-10. —. “Letter to Heinrich Junker”. Semiotica, vol. 134, no.1/4, 2001, pp. 445-46. —. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning. Translated by J. D. O’Neil, U of Minnesota P, 2010. Uexküll, Jakob von, and Thure von Uexküll. “The Eternal Question: Biological Variations on a Platonic Dialogue.” Sign Systems Studies, vol. 32, no.1/2, 2004, pp. 329-62. Uexküll, Thure von. “Glossary.” Semiotica, vol. 42, no.1, 1982, pp. 83-87. —. “The Sign Theory of Jakob von Uexküll.” Classics of Semiotics, edited by Martin Krampen et al., Springer, 1987, pp. 147-79. Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. “Bubbles and Webs: A Backdoor Stroll through the Readings of Uexküll.” Afterword. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning, by Jakob von Uexküll, translated by J. D. O’Neil, U of Minnesota P, 2010, pp. 209-43.

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

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and Explosion.

[Received 1 July 2020; accepted 1 February 2021]