Jakob von Uexküll and Philosophy

Life, Environments, Anthropology

Francesca Michelini, Kristian Köchy, Francesca Michelini, Kristian Köchy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000766028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Zellbiologie

Dismissed by some as the last of the anti-Darwinians, his fame as a rigorous biologist even tainted by an alleged link to National Socialist ideology, it is undeniable that Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944) was eagerly read by many philosophers across the spectrum of philosophical schools, from Scheler to Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze and from Heidegger to Blumenberg and Agamben. What has then allowed his name to survive the misery of history as well as the usually fatal gap between science and humanities?

This collection of essays attempts for the first time to do justice to Uexküll's theoretical impact on Western culture. By highlighting his importance for philosophy, the book aims to contribute to the general interpretation of the relationship between biology and philosophy in the last century and explore the often neglected connection between continental philosophy and the sciences of life. Thanks to the exploration of Uexküll's conceptual legacy, the origins of cybernetics, the overcoming of metaphysical dualisms, and a refined understanding of organisms appear variedly interconnected.

Uexküll's background and his relevance in current debates are thoroughly examined as to appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers in fields such as history of the life sciences, philosophy of biology, critical animal studies, philosophical anthropology, biosemiotics and biopolitics.

Part I
Jakob von Uexküll and his historical background

1
Jakob von Uexküll, an intellectual history

Juan Manuel Heredia

1 Introduction

In order to understand the historical and epistemological significance of Uexküll’s theoretical and methodological approach, it is necessary to elucidate the epochal system of thought within which it arises and develops, as well as the specific conceptual problem which it sought to respond to. In principle, we should be aware that the archaeological ground within which Uexküll’s work unfolds is radically different from that of the 19th century. This difference ensues from the premises on which 19th-century theories were based being radically questioned and from the correlative growth of synchronic formal approaches to different scientific fields. While restructuring Foucault’s archaeological approach, the philosopher and historian Elías Palti (2004, 2017) has conceptualized this epistemological mutation distinguishing an order of knowledge typical of the 19th century (“Age of History”) and a system of thought established at the beginning of the 20th century (“Age of Forms”). Unlike the classical episteme of the 17th and 18th centuries (exemplified at biological level by Linnaeus’s taxonomy, the preformationist theory and the fixist assumptions), in the 19th century, one observes the dominance of diachronic and genetic schemas, which no longer explain beings and nature according to an order of representation but, rather, in terms of a historicity that constitutes them and explains their development in the continuity of time following an order of succession endowed with an immanent logic. As far as biology is concerned, as Canguilhem (2000, 106) has pointed out, von Baer’s ontogenesis and Darwin’s phylogenetic evolutionism share one underlying assumption: the predominance of time and history. In the same vein, Cassirer points out that in the 19th century:

The historical, barely tolerated previously, was not actually to supplant the rational, for there is no rational explanation of the organic world save that which shows its origins. The laws of real nature are historical laws.

(Cassirer 1950, 173)

This order of knowledge begins to show clear signs of decomposition at the end of the 19th century with a series of convergent developments in the natural sciences and already in the first decades of the 20th century, one observes the establishment of a new epistemological configuration (Palti 2004, 66–72, 2017, 125–140). This displacement installs an interscientific setting, in which synchronic totalities (e.g., structures, forms, systems) become the main object of research. Correlatively, a process is triggered based on which scientific categories lose substantiality throughout. This is clear in theoretical physics with Maxwell’s and Faraday’s concept of electromagnetic field, and then with Einstein’s theory of general relativity (which makes time the fourth dimension of a spatial system), and in the biological realm, it brings us to the 1890–1930 period, what Julian Huxley has called “the eclipse of Darwinism”; in the psychological field, it is expressed by the emergence of Gestaltpsychologie and, in linguistics, by the theory of F. de Saussure, and so on. This general displacement is accompanied and reinforced by the emergence of the phenomenon of discontinuity in physics and biology, where the ideas of quantum leap, mutation, and sudden change become decisive elements to dismiss the historicist-evolutionist 19th-century premises and produce a dissociation between the notions of totality and finality. These verifiable but not explainable discontinuity phenomena directly posed the problem of how to rationally conceive the passage from one form to another. Compared to causal sequences and teleologically ordered phases that, in the 19th century, explained the articulation between order and change on the basis of a historical temporality, in the 20th century, new emphasis is laid instead on ruptures.

In theoretical biology, this vast process of conceptual rearrangement can be illustrated very succinctly in reference to three displacements. First, from 1892 to 1905, while working on inheritance, August Weismann presents his theory of germinal plasm, and, by distinguishing germinal cells and somatic cells, he refutes the evolutionary theory of the inheritance of acquired traits. Second, the increasing awareness of the inadequacy of mechanical models of physico-chemical causality when dealing with the organism’s regulation and regeneration processes opens the door to a rehabilitation of vitalist perspectives. Mention should be here made of Gustav Wolff’s and Hans Driesch’s ontogenetic studies that, in detriment of phylogenetic approaches, reactivate the embryological perspective opened by von Baer at the beginning of the 19th century and thus reopen the problem of teleology. Third, further progress in the studies on inheritance leads to further departing from the premises that organized the 19th-century historicist-evolutionist model of explanation. This shift finds its central reference in the figure of Hugo de Vries, who through botanical experiments shows that

[s]pecies are not gradually transformed, but remain unaltered through successive generations. They suddenly produce new forms that are distinctly different from their parents and that are subsequently as perfect, constant, well-defined and pure as may be expected in any given species.

(cited in Jacob 1973, 221)

This finding mobilizes a deep critique of genealogical approaches and will lead to a paradoxical situation in which the genesis of species can be thought according to discontinuous mutations of a contingent character, leaps which, as Cassirer (1961, 179f.) points out, can be established and verified but cannot be explained in causal, evolutionary or teleological terms. And it is precisely this paradoxical situation in relation to genetic explanations that will lead to a rebirth of metaphysics at the beginning of the 20th century and will allow us to understand Uexküll’s anti-Darwinism, as well as his project of structural biology.

2 Genesis of a structural vitalism (1892–1905)

Jakob von Uexküll was born on September 8, 1864, into a family belonging to the German Baltic nobility in the state of Keblaste (now Mikhli) in Estonia, at the time under the control of the Russian Empire. Raised in a rural environment and in contact with nature, he moves with his family in 1875 to the German city of Coburg, where he attends the local Gymnasium for about three years and has his first readings of Kantian philosophy (Brentari 2015, 22). At the age of twenty, after returning to Estonia and finishing high school in Reval (now Tallinn), he begins to study at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the University of Dorpat (now Tartu), where Karl E. von Baer, the vitalist biologist and founder of modern embryology, had taught some decades before. In this period, Uexküll adopts an atheistic, materialistic, and deterministic approach (G. von Uexküll 1964, 24), even refusing to participate in the religious ceremony held for his mother’s funeral (Harrington 1996, 38). At the beginning of his university education, Uexküll is seduced by the Darwinian theory, but with the development of his studies and dismayed by the simplistic, speculative, and Haeckelian vision of Darwinism that the zoologist Julius von Kennel was teaching at Dorpat, he turns to the study of physiology to the detriment of zoology and favors empirical research over the formulation of general theories (Brentari 2015, 25).

After being awarded the title of Kandidat der Zoologie in Dorpat and specializing in the field of marine fauna, in 1888, Uexküll begins to study physiology at Heidelberg University and works at the Physiologisches Institut as Wilhelm Kühne’s assistant, with whom he learns experimental research methods applied to the study of frogs. He graduates as a physiologist in 1890 with a dissertation on the parietal organ (“third eye”) of frogs (Le Bot 2016, 195) and, from 1892 to 1907, regularly publishes in the journal, Zeitschrift für Biologie, the results of his research in neuromuscular physiology (Kull 2001, 16–20; see also Köchy’s contribution, Chapter 3, in this volume). In this period, Uexküll alternates his work in Heidelberg with research stays at the Zoological Station in Naples. And it is in Naples, in 1891, that, while applying the experimental research methods developed by Kühne to the study of octopuses and sea urchins, Uexküll discovers Driesch’s neovitalism. After that, for some time, his theoretical efforts are aimed at reconciling the methodological demands of mechanism and empirical research with von Baer’s and Driesch’s vitalist positions (Mildenberger 2007, 53f.).

In 1899, Uexküll travels to Paris to study the chronophotographic method developed by physiologist Etienne Marey for the study of animal body motion and then implements this technique in the analysis of the body movements of butterflies and fish (Brentari 2015, 27). In the same year, he publishes along with the physiologists Albrecht Bethe and Theodor Beer an article in which the anthropomorphic and psychological terminology used in sensory physiology is questioned, and a new nomenclature to objectively designate the reception of stimuli is proposed (Rüting 2004, 40). The article made waves and influenced the development of North American behaviorism, as well as Pavlov’s and Bekhterev’s reflex concept (Harrington 1996, 42).¹ With Kühne’s death in 1900, Uexküll’s situation in Heidelberg becomes precarious and his research starts to lose institutional support: in 1902, he is denied access to the laboratory of the Physiologisches Institut, and in 1903, the Zoological Station of Naples rejects his request for funding, leaving him with no other option but to self-finance his research stays in Beaulieu, Roscoff, Berck-sur-Mer and Biarritz (Brentari 2015, 28).

In 1902, Uexküll meets the woman who will become his wife and lifelong companion, the German aristocrat Gudrun von Schwerin, with whom he will have three children. In the same year, he publishes “In battle over animal psyche” [Im Kampf um die Tierseele, Uexküll 1902], where he sets out his first biological interpretation of Kantian transcendental philosophy (Kull 2001, 18). This text clearly marks a step further toward a deeper understanding of sensory physiology. The development of these theoretical investigations, his increasingly critical attitude toward mechanism and Darwinism, and the correlative defense of vitalism are regarded with suspicion by the institutionalized world of biology in Germany. His work begins to be perceived as excessively speculative, and it becomes the subject of the same antivitalist criticism which was at that time aimed at Driesch. In this hostile environment, Uexküll will become aware of the impossibility of reconciling mechanism with neovitalism and will adopt a vitalist position (Mildenberger 2007, 71).

In 1905, Uexküll publishes his first book, Guidelines for the Study of the Experimental Biology of Aquatic Animals [Leitfaden in das Studium der experimentellen Biologie der Wassertiere], a text in which – as Brentari (2015, 57–59) has shown – he opposes any kind of metaphysical speculation, defends the legitimacy of theoretical biology as producer of reflective judgments, and proposes a division of tasks between physiology and biology. In this latter respect, he maintains that, while the object of physiology is the organism’s material and energetical functioning – analyzing it as a machine and subsuming it to causal schemes – biology deals with the Gestalt of organisms and thematizes “the relationship that holds together the performance of all organs, from the impact of stimuli by the receptors to the effectors’ resulting answer” (Uexküll 1905, 9, my transl.). In his 1905 work, Uexküll introduces the difference between receptors [Rezeptoren] and effectors [Effektoren], and presents a fundamental notion, that of building-plan [Bauplan]. Although shrouded in teleological assumptions, related to some extent to the concept of reflex and thereby liable of being perceived as an anachronistic “fixism,” this notion has a great epistemological significance. Particular emphasis should be given to the fact that it does not intend to uncritically restore the old final causality, nor is it justified by some kind of intelligent design. On the contrary, as Cassirer (1950, 199–205) has shown, Uexküll’s notion of Bauplan seeks to methodologically ground the possibility of a structural biology, that is, it supports a synchronic and formal approach to the functional unity of organisms. In this sense, far from being merely an anti-Darwinism and antimaterialism metaphysical reaction, it is the expression of a wider theoretical shift connected to contemporary epistemological transformations. Years later, while relying on the distinction between “conformity to a plan” [Planmäßigkeit] and “goal directedness” [Zielstrebigkeit], Uexküll will present this approach in terms of “static teleology.”

3 Sensory physiology, subjective biology and perception worlds (1907–1920)

Deprived of institutional financial support to his research and ambivalently regarded by his colleagues, in 1905 Uexküll settles down with his wife in Heidelberg and starts to outline his theoretical biology. In 1907, Heidelberg University awards him with an honorary doctorate in Medicine for his research on muscular physiology and neuromotor regulation, studies that led to what would later be known as “Uexküll’s law,” which stipulates that nerve excitement flows more easily in relaxed and stretched muscles than in contracted ones (Lagerspetz 2001, 646). In these years, Uexküll adopts a more philosophical perspective and, broadening his knowledge of sensory physiology, builds a subjective biology inspired by Kant. In this regard, in 1907 he publishes the article “Sketches of a Coming Conception of the World” [Die Umrisse einer kommenden Weltanschauung, Uexküll 1907], where he introduces the notions of “subjective anatomy,” “subjective physiology,” and “subjective biology” and challenges Darwinism and the physico-chemical explanations of biological phenomena (Uexküll 1913, 123–154). Furthermore, in 1908, he publishes another article in which he makes a diagnosis of the state of affairs in the life sciences and identifies the new problems and challenges that theoretical biology must address in the context of the eclipse of Darwinism. In fact, in “New Questions in Experimental Biology” [Die neuen Fragen in der experimentellen Biologie, Uexküll 1908a], he flatly rejects the Darwinian theory of accidental variations in favor of Hugo de Vries’s theory of mutations (Uexküll 1913...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword: Philosophizing with animals
• Introduction: a foray into Uexküll’s heritage
• PART I Jakob von Uexküll and his historical background
• PART II Jakob von Uexküll’s relevance for philosophy
• Afterword: a future for Jakob von Uexküll
• Index