Author(s): Mihai Beniuc / Language(s): Romanian
Issue: 1/2019
We present a study written in German in 1934 for an anniversary volume in the honour of Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944), which unfortunately the authors did not succeed to publish. Afterwards, the author of this study – Mihai Beniuc (1907-1988), then a master student in Hamburg of one of the most notable biologists of the 20th century - has translated it into Romanian and completed it in 1937. This abstract focuses on three problems: 1. the famous theory of Umwelt/perceived or felt surrounding milieu/ambient of the living being, andHeimat/individual “home” within the Umwelt, theory taken over by Beniuc and considered by him as a founding paradigm not only for the animal psychology he was interested in, but also for biology as such; 2. some aspects highlighted in the analysis of Beniuc, and 3. some information related to the author of this study. 1. The first reason of the re-edition of the Romanian text is that of the inter- and trans- disciplinary perspective of von Uexküll’s theory in a historical context already imbued with the spirit of exceeding the former academic fragmentation of the scientific research. As we know, the Einstein turn – accrediting the big qualitative elements in physics and chemistry discovered and provided in the last decades of the 19th century – the progress of biological sciences after Darwin, including neuro-physiology, and the shock produced by the Great War in the conscience of an epoch when to the burden of instability and incertitude the scientists could oppose only the ideas of interdependencies and holism, all of these have fuelled the search for a new and better understanding of the world. This is the epoch when the ideas of ecology have appeared; but also the epoch of the understanding of the material/inorganic and organic entities (as Earth2) as both intertwined hierarchies and organisations in complex feedback types; as well as the epoch of the – as later on Chapouthier has formulated – “mosaic structures” of systems, i.e. both the inclusionand interpenetration/interdependence of living systems and their environment, as von Uexküll has demonstrated: the impossibility of the analysis of the living being outside its environment, and the felt (psychoid) experience of the interdependence of the living being with its environment. Therefore, this was the epoch of the triumph of Kantian constructivist paradigm in epistemology – stating that all our ideas, even the most reflective, about the concrete world are not only more or less faithful copies of this world but also constructed during the whole processing in the mind (comparison, selection and relation to other already existing ideas etc.) –. And this was the epoch of the triumph of the Kantian founding of the epistemological difference between the known and the knowable (because graspable) phenomenon and, on the other hand, the un-graspable thing-in-itself, and moreover, of the Kantian suggestion that the phenomenon is both felt and (scientifically) understood. Actually, just in the frame of these epistemological presumptions von Uexküll has driven attention to both the broader systemic approach of the living systems – thus treated only within their environment – and the fact that the essential/constitutive aspect of this broader system is the result of the specific interaction of the living systems (with their environment), so the result of the felt experiences of these living systems. Generally, the scientists were interested to scientifically understand – in the Aristotle’s tradition of science as search for causes – the morphology and internal mechanisms of the living beings. Von Uexküll has showed that this tackling must compulsorily join the phenomenological perspective (emphasised by Husserl and Heidegger) that considers the (surrounding) world according to the experience, and thus “feelings”, of the living being. Obviously, neither for von Uexküll nor for us, these two approaches are not exclusive to each other. Only, the problem was that in order to understand the living beings, the objectivist description of their internal functioning is not enough. And again, certainly, the phenomenological approach does not substitute the scientific one either. Rather, both and only together have the power to explain both the broader living beings-environment system and the world of the 1 Acest studiu a fost scris în anul 1934 cu ocazia împlinirii a 70 de ani de viaţă a lui J. von Uexküll. Fiecare din colaboratorii la volumul omagial nepublicat, a rămas să-şi publice singur studiul. Acest studiu, tradus din limba germană, apare în româneşte cu o mare întârziere, care poate fi însă compensată măcar parţial prin completările ce i s-au adus (n.a./nota autorului). 2 See Vladimir Vernadsky, La géochimie, Paris, Librairie Félix Alcan, 1924 (AB/Ana Bazac). 48Mihai BeniucNOEMA XVIII, 2019 living system within environment: as a world having meanings3 for the living being and thus generating the innerreactive/psychical world of the animal, that needs to be explained with biochemistry etc., but not only, because this inner world is the world of experience and feelings, including related to the meanings that the animal does experience and arrives to; a “sense island”, as the scientist called it. Consequently, the inner world is related to the really surrounding world /ambient where the living being lives – Umwelt –4 and thus it is not enough to speak generally about the environment to which the species adapt. Briefly, von Uexküll has constructed a new paradigm in biology5, linking in fact the constitution of the vital functions, as they are fulfilled in the complex sense organs-nervous system, to the perception of the most fundamental features of existence: space and time. Hence, for the living being, the objective aspect is interdependent with the felt aspect. The laws of physics have appeared now as manifesting through the (subjective) experiences of the living beings, just opposite to the naïve scientism of the objective observation of Helmholtz, for example6. This interdependence is used today, for instance, in the correlation between the psychology of Piaget and the molecular coding of information7. But this interdependence means a plurality of interdependencies: the environment is formed by n Umwelten, these ones by n Heimaten (dwelling-worlds), and thus the environment is formed by the acts of perception/meanings given to new objects8 as well as by perceiving/feeling the interfaces9, and perceiving/feeling both the abstract and the concrete as well as the interfaces within them. The consciousness of all these aspects meant, in fact, the abolition of the naïve distance between the subject and the object. Or, in conclusion, the usefulness of the von Uexküll’s paradigm transcends the reality of the sensible “mezzo-world” and, although there is nodirect relation between a feeling and the chemical and quantum physical movements and reactions, the relationship as such is emphasised just by this “visible” paradigm. 2. Translating the study, Mihai Beniuc has introduced von Uexküll’s nonconformist view to the Romanian researchers. Even this intention is highly praiseworthy, because the view as such sends to both a materialist and dialectical, anti dogmatic and anti mechanist Weltanschauung; and in the dominant spiritualism of the time – manifested in the world of scientists as the strict separation between the research and measurement of material causes and, on the other hand, the alignment with the dominant ideology – this was challenging, indeed. Beniuc has explained in a clear language the structuring of the Umwelt of the species and the Heimat of the individual member of the species, within the general Umgebung/environment. He used some very interesting 3 See the clear Jakob von Uexküll, Bedeutungslehre (1940), translated as A Theory of meaning (in 1982), and then as A Forray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen, 1934), Translated by Joseph D. O’Neil, Introduction by Dorion Sagan, Afterword by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Minneapolis, London, University of Minneapolis Press, 2010 (AB).4 Jakob von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. Berlin, J. Springer, 1909. It is noteworthy that this novel theory of the living being/animal as having both a biological/material body and biological functions and mecanisms related to the sensitivity towards the milieu and towards its own well-being, and on the other hand a surrounding space sine qua non to its existence, thus somehow constituting the extension of the living being as such, was later on took over by the philosophy of Helmuth Plessner, educated as a biologist too. In his master piece Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie (1928), Gesamelte Schriften, IV, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981, Plessner has showed that the internal world of the animals means a kind of sensitivity/”consciousness” towards their own states (or, as today we formulate in a simpler way, but for humans, as meanings) as if they would see themselves from outside. “In the distance to himself the living being is given as an inner world”, p. 368. The animals have an Aussenwelt /outside world too, while the humans have a supplementary world, that of meanings created as a Mitwelt or the world of the social/ of living together. But all these ideas were already floating in the scientific atmosphere of the time [AB]. 5 Jakob von Uexküll, Bausteine zu einer biologischen Weltanschauung. In Gesammelte Aufsätze, herausgegeben und eingeleitet von Felix Gross. München, F. Bruckmann A.-G., 1913 (AB). 6 Jakob von Uexküll, Theorethical Biology (Theoretische Biologie, 1920) Translated by D. L. MacKinnon, New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1926, pp. XIV-XV. 7 See Robert R. Trail, “Thinking by Molecule, Synapse, or Both? From Piaget’s Schema to the Selecting/Editing of ncRNA” (2005), The General Science Journal, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1-34 (AB). 8 See the new world of the virtual – as the virtual objects or the informationally simulated beings – but also the interfacewith all of these virtual entities and the connections of interfaces (AB). 9 Stéphane Vial, L’Être et l’écran: comment le numérique change la perception, Paris, PUF, 2010 (AB). Mediu, Preajmă, Vatră. Principii de psihologie animală.49NOEMA XVIII, 2019 words as Romanian correspondents: old genuine Romanian words (though of Albanian, thus old Thracian origin, vatra; and of Slav origin, preajma) but used even today, showing in fact the authentic origin of a very up-to-date theory. He showed the difference between the physical reaction of the living being in the environment and the “psychical” reaction of animals in their Umwelten and Heimaten. He concluded that von Uexküll’s concepts are/form not a hypothesis, but are demonstrated /proven in the whole living world: as a result, the theory emphasises the different levels of biological reality. The first is of physical nature, although this level is already organised in the specific organic manner of biological systems; the second is already of “psychical” nature, making visible the phenomenal manner of interaction of the species/members of a species with their surrounding environment, but anyway this phenomenal manner is somehow part of the predetermined organic functions; while in the third, the individual member of a species arranges its “destiny”/trajectory according to its own experience in its own Heimat. Beniuc has stopped at the functional cycles of animals in their Umwelten and Heimaten and, because he has announced that his goal was rather related to the Heimat, he developed the psychology of animals as they pass from Heimat to abroad/its exterior that is always felt by the animals as foreign (Fremde). The account of the experiments he and other colleagues made (von Uexküll refers to them in the 1934’s work, without naming Beniuc) was the opportunity to underline 1) the frontiers between Heimat and the unfriendly/threatening exterior (in the way these frontiers are constructed and felt by the animals), as well as the possibility to enlarge/reduce the frontiers, and 2) especially thesense of individual property in the animal world. Actually, as von Uexküll has insisted, both the frontiers and the sense of individual property are related to the animal’s experience of the familiar path in a territory. The Heimat’s centre is the shelter, or even the nest, but the familiar space is more inclusive, it is that of the hunting area too, as well as of the “warehouse” of food storage, and in this whole space another psychical function manifests, that of cleanness of the shelter. The frontiers, but also the internal organisation of the Heimat, are related to the first experience of the animal. The final part of the study raises some methodological problems related to the necessity of infra-human psychology (as a comparative psychology) and to the multi and interdisciplinary nature of the study ofHeimat, but at its best relevance in psychology. The ideas are richer than mentioned here, all proven through the narration of experiments. And what is very important is that by picturing the habits of animals in their environments, the necessary discontinuity between them and the humans became evident to every reader (who could only continue with the conclusion of the reasoning that, alas, this discontinuity is rather flattened in the current society). 3. The author was an enthusiastic animal psychologist. But he lived in the pre-war and during the WWII. Thus, he certainly was educated in the spirit of prudent disinterestedness towards the social problems; but nevertheless, their ardent bursting out have jolted him. And actually, just the principles of Kantian epistemology and von Uexküll’s approach have constituted the ground and at the same time the impulse to looking in a critical manner at the phenomena and to giving a coherent image about the causes of the existing social system. He became a communist, carrying in poetry the ideals of equal dignity for all. Twenty years he thought that the mobilising power of poetry and his political activism are more valuable for society than his scientific research. However, he did not abandon it even in those years. (He was also a member of the Romanian Academy). After 1965 he returned to the university, in order to teach comparative/animal psychology10. But the poetry he continued to write until his last years has shown that not the opportunity to being a dignitary of the new regime was that which has attracted him to communism, but its ideals. In the Romanian translation of the study discussed here, he stressed (so, already in 1934) that “The tendency of accumulation develops indefinitely, beyond the vital necessities. The man in this respect does not differ from a squirrel. How many of the wealthy citizens can give a rational justification for the often blocked property unnecessarily? But if in such squirrels or other animals such a pile of goods does not bring any harm to the interests of other people, man, by lack of hindrance to this tendency, can bring serious harm to human interests”. Therefore, to strengthen the discontinuity between animals and man was considered by Mihai Beniuc very important.
More...
