A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans Quotes

“but now we see that the subject controls the time of its environment. While we said before, "There can be no living subject without time," now we shall have to say, "Without a living subject, there can be no time.”
― Jakob Johann von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning

“Every subject spins out, like the spider's threads, its relations to certain qualities of things and weaves them into a solid web, which carries its existence.”
― Jakob Johann von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning

“Perception signs are therefore always spatially bound, and, since they take place in a certain sequence, they are also temporally bound.”
― Jakob Johann von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning

“We ask a simple question: Is the tick a machine or a machine operator? Is it a mere object or a subject?”
― Jakob Johann von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning

“Active space is not only a space of movement made up from thousand of steps in all directions but it has a system of coordinates, which is used as a basis for all the space determinations. It is of capital importance that whoever deals with the problem of space is convinced of this fact. Any normal human carries with him a frame of reference formed of three planes of the three semi-circular canals.”
― Jakob Johann von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning

“All the animals which have three circular semi canals also have a notion of three-dimensional space.”
― Jakob Johann von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning

“Each subject lives in a world where there is only of subjective realities and where the same environments represent only subjective realities.”
― Jakob Johann von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning

“Without a living subject, there can be neither space nor time. With this observation, biology has once and for all connected with Kant's philosophy, which biology will now utilize through the natural sciences by emphasizing the decisive role of the subject.”
― Jakob Johann von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning

“At the Zoological Institute in Rostock, they kept ticks alive that had gone hungry for eighteen years.5”
― Jakob Johann von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning

“Figuratively speaking, every animal subject attacks its objects in a pincer movement-with one perceptive and one effective
arm.”
― Jakob Johann von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning

“All our human sensations, which represent our specific perception signs, join together to form the qualities of the external things which serve us as perception marks for our actions. The sensation "blue" becomes the "blueness" of the sky, the sensation "green" becomes the "greenness" of the lawn, and so forth. We recognize the sky by the feature "blue" and the lawn by the feature "green.”
― Jakob Johann von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning

“But we know since Johannes Muller,3 however, that a muscle behaves in a completely different way. It responds to all external interventions in the same way: by contracting.”
― Jakob Johann von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning

“Exactly the opposite is the case," the biologist will reply. "Everywhere, it is a case of machine operators and not of machine parts, for all the individual cells of the reflex arc act by transfer of stimuli, not by transfer of movement. But a stimulus has to be noticed [gemerkt] by the subject and does not appear at all in objects.”
― Jakob Johann von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning

“To coin a Uexküllian-Heideggerian neologism, Jews were to Uexküll the epitome of Umweltvergessenheit or the “forgetfulness of Umwelt”—an inability to grasp and experience one’s own preordained environment that is both brought about and glossed over by vague appeals to universal liberty and justice. But this was nothing specifically or uniquely Jewish; historical circumstances conspired to make the Jews the avant-garde of modern decline universal, a portent of what was to come if the world succumbed to newfangled notions of absolute time, absolute space, absolute symbolic exchange in the shape of money and mathematics, and the abstractions of modern science. This “regrettable laying-waste of the worlds-as-sensed [that] has arisen from the superstition started by the physicists”38 could be averted if people—or rather, the elites—were to accept his new biology, but while Uexküll could pass on the knowledge of what it means to inhabit and shape one’s own Umwelt next to all the myriads of other human and animal Umwelten, he was not able to impart the experience. That is the business of artists.”
― Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning

“It was a fundamental error on the part of Herbert Spencer13 to interpret the annihilation of surplus offspring as a “survival of the fittest” in order to predicate progress in the development of living beings on that. It is hardly a matter of the survival of the fittest, but rather, of the survival of the normal in the interests of an unchanging further existence of the species.”
― Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning

“Nature does not weep over academia’s fractious territorialisms, nor take pleasure in the university’s attempts at interdisciplinary cross-fertilizations.”
― Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning