The Online Umwelt

The Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) used the German word umwelt (meaning environment) to refer not just to an animal’s surroundings, but to its experience of those surroundings; its ‘perceptual world’ — or, as it is sometimes translated, its ‘self-centered world’. Within the same physical space, there can be completely different umwelten, depending on the organism:

We comfort ourselves all too easily with the illusion that the relations of another kind of [animal] to the things of its environment play out in the same space and time as the relations that link us to the things of our human environment. This illusion is fed by the belief in the existence of one and only one world, in which all living beings are encased. From this arises the widely held conviction that there must be one and only one space and time for all living beings

One’s umwelt feels all-encompassing, but this is an illusion — one that all organisms share. According to Uexküll, ‘only when we can vividly imagine this fact will we recognize in our own world the bubble that encloses each and every one of us on all sides’. This was, according to Ed Yong, a ‘radical notion at the time’, but we have since assimilated it into our thinking (in concepts such as standpoint epistemology and perspectivism).