Synthese DOI 10.

1007/s11229-009-9634-5

Simple animals and complex biology: Von Uexklls two-fold inuence on Cassirers philosophy
Frederik Stjernfelt

Received: 29 November 2005 / Accepted: 30 June 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract It is a well-known fact that Ernst Cassirer was inspired by his colleague, the biologist Jakob von Uexkll at the university of Hamburg. This paper claims this inspiration was doubleaffecting both Cassirers philosophical anthropology and Cassirers epistemology of biology, but in two rather different ways. Thus, the paper intends to shed light on a corner of the history of the development of German thought of the interwar period. It may also have an actual interest because both Cassirer and Uexkll enjoy, for the time being and each in their way, a renaissance, e.g. in the recent eld of biosemiotics. Keywords Cassirer Uexkll Epistemology Anthropology Biology Biosemiotics

1 Introduction It is a well-known fact that Ernst Cassirer was inuenced by his colleague, the biologist Jakob von Uexkll at the University of Hamburg: references to Uexkll may be found scattered throughout Cassirers mature work, beginning from around 1928 until his death in 1945.1 But what did this inuence amount to? The point I want to make in this paper is that this inuence was two-foldaffecting both Cassirers philosophical anthropology and Cassirers epistemology of biology, but in two rather different ways.

1 As indicated in van Heusden (2001). The extended second version of Uexklls Theoretische Biologie came out in 1928; thus, it is possible that Cassirers knowledge of him is prompted by his reading of that book. Cassirer later also refers to Umwelt und Innenwelt der Thiere (1909) as well as Die Lebenslehre (1930).

F. Stjernfelt (B ) University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: semfelt@hum.au.dk

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The relevance of this paper is also two-foldrst, it intends to shed light on a corner of the history of the development of German thought of the interwar period and secondly, it should be of actual interest because both Cassirer and Uexkll are currently enjoying, each in their own way, a renaissance. More specifically, the nascent discpline of biosemiotics, studying the use of signs in biology, being inspired especially by Uexkll but also to some extent by Cassirer, and might prot from a clarication of the interrelations between their doctrines. It should immediately be said that the evident course of inuence between the two seems to be primarily one-way, from the older Uexkll to the younger Cassirer, even if an inuence the other way around can of course not be precluded.2 Both of them were professors at the young University of Hamburg during overlapping periods. The university was founded only in 1919 by the rst democratically elected city council in Hamburg (with a social democrat majority) and emphasized interdisciplinarity, made possible by cooperations with, e.g., Aby Warburgs famous Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek and A.M. Bartholdys Institut fr Auswrtige Politik. The University of Hamburg quickly rose to international fame during its short owering period in the Weimar years until the Nazi takeover in 1933. Cassirer was a philosophy professor in exactly that period, from 1919 to 1933, serving as rector in 19291930 (being the rst Jew in German university history to occupy such a position), and the older Uexkll enjoyed a late recognition as a professor from 1925 to 1940, from 1926 on presiding over his own innovative Institut fr Umweltsforschung. The parting of their ways is obvious: as a Jew, Cassirer ed Germany already in the spring of 1933, briey after the Machtergreifung, to pursue a career in exile, taking him to England, Sweden, and the USA, while Uexklls ambiguous or complicated relation to Nazism is less well understood and probably not even sufciently researched to this day. These political sides of their carreers may be indicated by the comparison of their doctrines in political science: Cassirers posthumous The Myth of the State (1946) is an unraveling of the philosophical origins of Nazism and provides an analysis of the ressurrection of myth as a decisive force in mid-twentieth century politics, while Uexklls Staatsbiologie (1933, an extended second edition of the 1921 original) is a political scientic sketch

2 The only reference I have found concerning Uexklls relation to Cassirer stems from Uexklls widow, Gudrun von Uexkll, who in her biography of her late husband records two incidents connecting the two men. The rst relates how Uexkll gave a lecture, apparently in the early 1930s, on how dogs take everything within their smelling eld as their property. Cassirer is said to have been in the audience and remarked that Rousseaus saying, that the rst man claiming private property should have been killed, now ought to be extended to dogs (von Uexkll 1964, p. 168). The second, more interesting, anecdote relates how Uexkll protested over Cassirers eeing from Hamburg in early 1933. Gudrun von Uexkll makes, not surprisingly, a point about her husbands opposition to Nazism. What he did, according to her, was to write a letter in May 1933 to Eva Chamberlain, the widow of the racist ideologist Houston Stewart Chamberlain. According to Gudrun von Uexkll, her husbands idea was that this letter should reach Hitler, based on the close relation between the Fhrer and the Chamberlains. In this letter, Uexkll complained that Chamberlains idealism was being converted into the most brutal materialism in contemporary German politics (von Uexkll 1964, p. 171), and took Cassirer as an example. He ended the letter by encouraging Ms. Chamberlain to go to Hitler and make her inuence felt (von Uexkll 1964, p. 173). Uexklls own general anti-Semitism, however, seems to be well-established, and the reconstruction of his precise points of view on this issue and their development over his career merits a whole separate investigation into which we can not here go any further. Cassirers biography, written by his widow, Toni Cassirer (1981), does not mention Uexkll.

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built on the metaphor of the state as an organism, and in some respects it amounts to little but a fascist theory of state. Philosophically speaking, both of the two are Kantians, if in rather different ways. Cassirer, of course, was the professional Kantian, biographer and publisher of Kant, who erected the whole of his own philosophy on a sophisticated elaboration of the Marburger neo-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. Uexkll, on the other hand, was rather a sort of self-made Kantian, less well-versed in the body of Kants writings, but with an original Kant interpretation which is both fertile and problematic. We might schematically say that while Cassirer is an epistemologizing neo-Kantian with strong objectivist tendencies, Uexkll is a naturalizing Kantian with strong subjectivist leaningsa sort of interesting chiasm to be explained in further detail. Uexkll explicitly attempted to generalize Kants philosophy from its basis in the faculties of the human mind in two related directions: (1) by extrapolation to the body, taking the bodily Bauplan (organization) and its anatomy and physiology to play an important role in the shaping of the mind inhabiting that body, thus making him a forerunner of the embodiment trends in current philosophy; and (2) by extrapolation to other kinds of living beings, taking each animal species to possess a specifically formed environment, an Umwelt (surrounding world), determined by its specic Bauplan and the possibility it yields for classes of perceptions and actions. Seen from his point of view, an obvious meeting point with Cassirer might be the construction of a complexity ladder of Umwelten in different species (just like Cassirer contemplates a complexity ladder in the unfolding of symbolic forms in cultural development). As an anti-Darwinist, Uexkll vacillated, however, with respect to the feasibility of constructing such a ladderhis romantic vitalist tendency rather predisposed him to see each animals Umwelt as a monadic phenomenon sui generis. Cassirer also worked to generalize Kants doctrine, but in quite another direction: taking his point of departure from the neo-Kantian core discipline of epistemology, of theory of science, he maintained that Kants idea of the constitutive role of mind should be extrapolated to cover all other elds of human intellectual activity, language, myth, science, art, technology, as is evident in Cassirers well-known general notion of symbolic forms. These different cultural devices should be grasped as different means of world constructing, parallel to that of science. His Enlightenment contention that science constituted the highest and most explicit of such devices made him immune, however, to relativism, and in much of his work objectivism plays a strong role, leading him to the idea that philosophy must constantly survey all special sciences, from physics to history of art, in order to track the crucial conceptual innovations in the ongoing objectication process of human thought. Cassirer himself struggled to achieve such an overview over the special sciences of his day, with remarkable success, and it is probably not too much to say that he, as a polyhistor, was second to very few minds in his period. A meeting point with Uexkll is that the simplest human symbolic forms, according to Cassirer, are the always emotional expressions (Ausdrcke) which are shared with higher animalsonly in turn systematized by man in myth. Only the next step in cultural development, representation (Darstellung), creates independent objects by means of the subject-predicate distinction inherent in language, and only the nal step, pure meaning (reine Bedeutung) takes the decisive anti-metaphysical

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step beyond language, in dissolving the metaphysical distinction between subject and predicate in order to leave behind only functional relations between entities. Cassirers references to Uexkll are to be found especially in two different loci, one a discussion of philosophical anthropology, using Uexklls biology as a contrast, another a discussion of the epistemology of biology. 2 Uexkll in Cassirers philosophical anthropology The former Uexkll inuence has its rst and major appearance in the outlines of a fourth volume of Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, originally written around 1928 and published only recently. The existing texts from that project fall in two categories. One is a large, nished essay on the metaphysics of symbolic forms, originally meant to gure as a closing essay in vol. 3; the second is a bundle of notes using the conceptual apparatus outlined in the rst three volumes of the Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (19231929) in a piece of contemporary philosophical criticism. The essay opens this discussion with a sharp, polemical opposition between Geist and Leben, as a preface to the outline of a philosophical anthropology set out to bridge this opposition. In the notes, Cassirers overall idea was to go into further detail with a criticism of the then current and politically inuential fads of vitalism (Bergson, Scheler, Klages, Heidegger, et al.), based on the contrast to his own brand of philosophical anthropology and his doctrine of symbolic forms.3 Here, the references to Uexkll thus function to provide a biological contrast to his own basic understanding of manand, in turn, to function as an argument against the anti-Enlightenment vitalists who tend to make mere animal being a sort of utopian state for man to pursue. Man is thus, by contrast, the animal symbolicum. The same use of Uexkll, as the biologist providing decisive arguments for the contrast between man and animal, recurs in Cassirers attempt at a systematic methodological philosophy in his Ziele und Wege der Wirklichkeitserkenntnis (Goals and Directions of the Cognition of Reality, written around 1940, only recently published in Cassirer (1999)), as well as in his American recapitulation of the doctrine of symbolic forms under the title An Essay on Man, written at Yale during his exile to be published in 1944. Let us investigate Cassirers argument in the planned parts of the fourth volume of Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. As a Kantian, Cassirer turns against the monist idea taking meanings to develop continuously from natural beings. A central human artefact like tools presuppose the existence of possible objects (detached, in turn, from their correlative subjects). Hence, the Umwelt of man can not be constructed on the basis of the Bauplan of human anatomy, unlike the case in animals whose Umwelten are exactly so dened:4 Tools can arise only where the mind has become capable
3 It should be remarked in passing that this critique of different philosophies of life is extremely well-

executed and possesses an acute incisiveness even today, and Cassirers arguments may easily be repeated against various brands of (de-)constructivism and other current irrationalisms.
4 See Cassirer (1995b, p. 43, 1996, p. 41)the rst reference is to the German original, the second to the English translation. Uexkll was no standard Watson-Skinner behaviourist, but his conception of Umwelt has strong behaviourist features. The Umwelt of a species should be constructed, not on the basis of any empathy with animal minds, but on meticulous studies of animal physiology and behaviour, charting which

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of conceiving of a possible object instead of giving itself over directly to a real one and losing itself in it.5 While the animal is locked, in direct perception-action chains, to certain aspects of reality, aspects functioning as signals only, never as objects, man is able to step back and contemplateand indeed constituteworldly objects at a creative distance. Man is so to speak driven out of the paradise of Umwelt with its close-knit perception-action circuits and he is thus condemned to build his own Umwelt, which he may do because he is der Form fhig , he is capable of form.6 Thus, there is a sharp contrast, no continuity, between Geist and Natur quite on the contrary, Geist must use nature as a contrast in order to obtain understanding of itself (as against the irrationalisms of Bergson and Driesch recommending different ways of circumventing, or even abolishing, mind in order to reach back into a natural state)while the world of the animal remains pre-mythical, pre-linguistic, and pretheoretical. Only through an Abbau (dismantling)7 of the symbolic forms used in reality construction, may we hope to reach the genuine and original metal of reality.8 Thus, unlike man, animals do not have objects. Cassirer quotes an example from the biologist Hans Volkelt concerning a spider catching a y, able to recognize its prey only when it lies struggling and shaking, caught in the net, and not at all able to recognize it when presented to it as a freshly killed but quiet specimen.9 The y as an object in itself does not exist for the spider. Thus animals, by contrast, only have Reizketten chains of emotional stimuliand hence they may never entertain any relation between pure objects and a pure ego as required in Kant.10 Animals thus live in the present now only (what Cassirers despised Lebensphilosophen considered a utopian state for man to pursue), and this implies that the animal Umwelt forms an impenetrable shell around the animal, quite unlike the plastic and malleable human Umwelt, subject to ongoing further elaboration, investigation, and construction.11

Footnote 4 continued phenomena the animal in question is able to perceive, and which phenomena it is able to act upon. The result is the functional circle of that animal dening its Umwelt by the set of interlinked perception-signs and action-signs relating it to its surroundings.
5 Cassirer (1995b, p. 41, 1996, p. 40). 6 Cassirer (1995b, p. 46, 1996, p. 44). 7 Cassirer (1995b, p. 64, 1996, p. 52). 8 Cassirer (1995b, p. 51, 1996, p. 49). Cassirers notion of symbolic forms is interesting in that the whole

set of cultural devices, of course, function as so many tools of world construction, yet science seems to play a special, enlightened role, because in addition to all this building of symbolic constructs, science adds the possibility of analyzing them through a process of Abbau making humans conscious of their own symbolic form use, thus enabling them to emancipate themselves from arbitrary constraints in those symbolic forms. This is how we must interpret Cassirers rendering of the tension between the symbolic forms of myth, language, art etc. on the one hand, and science on the otherin a classical Enlightenment stance placing science as that which may penetrate more cloudy symbolic forms. But the appearance of language and art as means of representation seems to play a similar critical role with respect to mythso maybe an enlightenment framework (we dare not say dialectics) is constantly working within the development of symbolic forms.
9 Cassirer (1995b, p. 65, 1996, p. 63). 10 Cassirer (1995b, p. 64, 1996, p. 62). 11 Cassirer (1995b, p. 71, 1996, p. 69).

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In these lines of argument, Cassirer takes over Uexklls preference for using primitive animals as prototypes for animals as suchobviously because his argumentative interest is contrastive and dualist. Even if animals and man alike do in fact have Ausdrcke, unlike human beings animals have no possibility for synthesizing them into a mythical world view. Thus, while man from there undertakes the whole cultural development of symbolical forms, there is no analogous biological evolution of such forms. Man erects his own counterworld (Gegenwelt ) by turning from mere an-sich-Sein to fr-sich-Sein,12 from states to objects, meanings, and states-ofaffairsgradually das Tun (act) of man becomes more and more saturated with mental forms (geistigen Formen). Man is thus estranged or alienated from immediate being, but at the same time this alienation is a price worth paying for the enlightenment and emancipation process unfolding in culture. And for this reason, the dreams of the vitalists of a return to immediacy are not only impossible but decidedly reactionary. Funnily enough, from Uexklls far right-wing position it is equally tempting to thus emphasise the difference between immediate animal being and alienated man in this fashion, but with a completely opposite aim: to highlight the tragedy of man being estranged from his natural state by the ever-growing thicket of intermediary constructions of culture and technology, so as to form a pessimist, conservative version mirroring Cassirers enlightened optimism. While Uexkll sees the openness and indefiniteness of human culture as a dark destiny taking man still further away from his paradisic embeddedness in nature, Cassirer celebrates it as the emancipation of man from nite, brute animal being into the innity of ideal forms. Even if the two of them thus hold completely opposite views of the animal man relation, they focus on the same underlying structure: both of them emphasize the difference between man and animal, and thus prefer very simple animals as prototypes for animals as such.13 One of Uexklls favourite examples is that of the tick, whose Umwelt consists of the perception signs of butylic acid (a sign of mammal sweat), heat (a sign of the thinness of the skin of its host), and the action signs of dropping, possibly to hit upon a passing mammal, crawling to the thinnest skin location, biting and sucking blood to become able to procreate by parthenogenesis. In such an Umwelt, perception and action signs are extremely closely linked with a minimum degree of interpretational variability. The generalization of this example permits Uexkll to maintain his claim that all animal Umwelten basically possess the same character of tightness and closureand it permits Cassirer, in turn, to inherit the same sharp distinction between animal closure and human openness.

12 Cassirer (1995b, p. 61, 1996, p. 59). 13 At the end of the thirties, Cassirer attempted to write a systematic companion to the three domain-based

volumes of Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (on language, myth, and science, respectively) which should, as the title indicates, focus on different methodological ways of approaching reality. The notes have been published as Ziele und Wege der Wirklichkeitserkenntnis. It is interesting to see that even if written almost simultaneously with the fourth and last volume of Cassirers impressive history of epistemology, The Problem of Knowledge, with its completely different application of Uexkll, Ziele und Wege der Wirklichkeitserkenntnis remains in exactly the same interpretative tradition as we just discussed: Uexkll as biologist providing contrast material to philosophical anthropology.

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It is interesting, however, that here, in the very beginning of his being inuenced by Uexkll, Cassirer, as honest as he is, does in fact admit the existence of a specic problem arising in the face of the abilities of higher animals: The totality of these achievements can in no way simply be read off from mankinds organization (Bauplan), such as from the organization of the brain and the nervous system. Uexkll conducted his research primarily in the area of the lower animals, and from the results that he attained he inferred the general schema that he termed the functional circle(Funktionskreis) of living creatures.14 So Cassirer perfectly realizes the danger in generalizing too far on the basis of very simple animals, because their xed function circuit tends to unravel in higher animals: The closed nature of this functional circle, this interrelation of noticing and effecting, appears to loosen up the more we approach the human world until nally, in this world, even the bond that otherwise everywhere denes the unity of the organism seems to be broken.15 This is the only place Cassirer approaches the issue of the evolution of the specic human openness via intermediate degrees of openness in higher animals, giving rise to the striking observation: Hence, if we say of higher animals that they use their eyes, we must say of the pilgrim scallop that the eyes use the animal16 the lack of objects correlates with the lack of subject in simple animals, while both tend to emerge in higher animals. The constitution of an I and an object are thus interdependent, and object consciousness and self-consciousness necessarily appear together. What characterizes higher animals is that, in them, sensory and motor systems are no longer completely independent, so that the sensory system becomes able to know about the actions of the motor system, forming a feedback loop facilitating the reective relationship [] according to which every higher creature is a body and at the same time has a body of its own.17 After these early admissions in his very rst discussion of Uexkll, Cassirer seemingly forgets the problem because the closed nature of animal Umwelt ts his dualism so well. In the 1940 Ziele und Wege der Wirklichkeitserkenntnis, he thus approaches the same issue much more sceptically: In the evaluation of the singular phenomena, e.g., the so-called performance of intelligence [Intelligenzleistungen] of the higher species of animals, this limit [between mere expressions and representations] often appears to be more uid and controversial.18 And already in the planned fourth volume of Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, these interesting ideas are bracketed in order to emphasise its conclusion of a sharp distinction between mere animal action circles and human Gesichtskreise , between the Kantian duality of Nature and Freedom with which the essay ends.

14 Cassirer (1995b, p. 43, 1996, p. 41). 15 Cassirer (1995b, p. 44, 1996, p. 42). 16 Cassirer (1995b, p. 63, 1996, p. 61). 17 Cassirer (1995b, p. 65, 1996, p. 63). We quote Cassirers admissions about these issues, also because

they show that an evolutionary account for the emergence of Umwelt openness in the animal kingdom is not necessarily prohibited in his thought.
18 Cassirer (1999, p. 145)translation by the editors.

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3 Uexkll in Cassirers epistemology of biology The other central locus for Uexkll references in Cassirer has a very different character and occurs in his magisterial history of epistemology from the seventeenth century to the present day, the enormous Das Erkenntnisproblem in die Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, whose fourth volume was written in 1940. The 100-page second book of that volume, with the title Das Erkenntnisideal der Biologie und seine Wandlungen (The Ideal of Knowledge in Biology and Its Transformations) contains Cassirers impressive account of the epistemology of biology. Similar to Cassirers rst treatment of Uexkll, this discussion of Uexklls epistemology of biology occurs in Cassirers late period, simultaneously, in fact, with one of the works displaying that rst use (Ziele und Wege der Wirklichkeitserkenntnis). Nevertheless, Uexkll plays a different rolein this discussion, he is taken up as the one who safeguards sound elements of vitalism in a brand of organicism functioning as the Aufhebung , the mediation, of the tension between simplifying mechanicism and mystifying vitalism. Uexkll is tted into a picture of the epistemological landscape of biology in the early twentieth century with the zoologist and philosopher Hans Driesch as the radically vitalist countergure. The confrontation between the two takes place towards the end of Cassirers large treatise on biological epistemology, in which he briey charts the development of modern biology from its philosophical roots in Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft and Goethes plant morphology to the idealist morphologists of early nineteenth century. These developments are confronted with the rise of Darwinism and the theory of evolution, the causalist attempts at constructing a developmental mechanics, and terminates in the Vitalismusstreit of the early twentieth century where vitalists like Driesch and Uexkll take up new sorts of vitalism against Darwinism. Cassirers overall aim is, of course, not only historical: his interest in the history of science is guided by a philosophical interest, namely to subject the concepts produced in the development of the sciences to a philosophical, purifying critique in order to bring forth which valid symbolic forms have in fact been produced in and through that scientic development. In the case of biology, the nal part of the presentation takes up the debate over vitalism in order to resolve it and further the discussion. Cassirers overall aim is to nd a mediate position between purely causalmechanical Darwinism, on the one hand, and its vitalist, teleological opponents, on the other hand. To him, the vitalists are right in attacking Darwinism for overlooking the irreducible specicity of biological concepts like organism, inner causes, self-organization, anatomy, etc. which may never be reduced to mechanical concepts only. Conversely, the Darwinists are equally right in attacking vitalists for assuming the existence of mystical forces without any empirical or positive basis at all. In Cassirers mediation attempt, Uexklls special version of vitalism plays a conciliatory role as opposed to the more radical vitalism of Hans Driesch. Driesch was, of course, the main proponent of vitalism in the debate over vitalism that broke out once more in the biological theorizing of the interwar period. The proponents of vitalism found encouragement in the philosophy of Henri Bergson and other philosophical vitalists. Driesch was notoriously known for his assumption of special, yet unknown forces being responsible for the specicity of biology, as expressed in concepts like soul, entelechy and psychoid. These non-spatio-temporal forces Driesch suggested inhabit all living beings.

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Cassirer takes care to present the basics of Drieschs viewpoint by comparing them to his predecessor Wilhelm Roux and his idea of an Entwicklungsmechanik . Roux was, in his own self-understanding, a material reductionist, but Cassirers ingenious analysis of his position brings to light its inner contradictions. Rouxs account of embryogenesis involves a reinterpretation of Aristotles concept of dynamis, of potentiality: The animal has an Anlage, a disposition, determining its typical growth, and on the basis of this idea, Roux demands that this growth is described in functional terms referring to a whole series of self-determinations and self-organizations, AutoErgasien, performed by the organism. The determination of such self-government is possible only because it is based on Rouxs fundamental distinction between inner and outer causes working on the organism, and the very description of embryogenesis is deemed impossible without such concepts. Contrary to Rouxs own idea, however, Cassirer points to the fact that no purely mechanical reason for the distinction between outer causes and inner, self-organizing causes can be given. Thus, Rouxs idea of a causal morphology as a substitute for the tradition of idealist morphology is simply a contradictio in adjecto, Cassirer argues.19 Drieschs basic idea is to build on and improve the inheritance from Roux. He realizes, just as Cassirer does, that the very idea of a developmental mechanics does in fact embrace incompatible elements. Drieschs overall strategy to cope with this discovery is to posit a metaphysical dualism, separating in two realms what was confusedly mixed together in Roux. In addition to mechanical causes, a primary teleology must therefore be assumed. Drieschs experiments showed that even very severe spatial distortions of embryos had no serious effect on their grown-up destiny.20 This discovery led him to presume a teleologya sort of force lying outside space, a non-observable force known only in its effects, namely to inuence the direction of other physical forces (originally a Cartesian idea), that is, to turn the direction of other forces and in so doing constrain them to work together. The formal analogy with the mind-matter problem led Driesch to call this force a soul, later to be replaced by his version of Aristotles entelechy or his own concept psychoid.21 Even if Driesch himself understood his own position as a further development of Kant, calling himself a critical idealist, Cassirer is predictably harsh on his metaphysical vitalism. While Kant, in the third Critique, outlined two different organizing points of view on reality, cause and purpose, each with their set of rules, Driesch commits the error of hypostasising these two ways of organisation into two competing sets of metaphysical forces. But entelechy is a free invention, as Cassirer says, it is both insensible and suprasensible at one and the same time, and hence it is only describable in the negative. In short, Driesch falls prey to the transcendental illusion, we could say; he assumes we have a special intuition giving us
19 See Cassirer (1950, p. 192, 1995a, p. 222). 20 Driesch interestingly began his career as an anti-vitalist, but his experimental ndings during the 1890s

made him change his position. Especially one experiment is associated with Drieschs turn to vitalism: his separation of a two-cell sea urchin embryo into its two cell components which turned out to each give rise to a grown-up sea urchin, as against earlier assumptions by Wilhelm Roux that such cells would develop into two halves of a mature organism (see Driesch 1905, 185ff). To Driesch, this proved the impossibility of a purely mechanical explanation of such biological phenomena and led him to assume a sort of organizational force towards acting outside space-time to govern biological ontogenesis.
21 Cassirer (1950, pp. 198199, 1995a, pp. 230231).

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direct access to suprasensible entities, and such a quasi-theological ability is of course completely ruled out in Cassirers cool neo-Kantianism. Looking for an alternative, Cassirer turns attention to the biology of Uexkll, perfectly realizing that Uexkll is another vitalist, counting Driesch and himself as two of a kind. Accordingly, Cassirers interpretational work consists in an analysis of the theoretical foundation of biology of Uexkll and turning it against Uexklls own self-conception. This manoeuvre is made possible by the fact that Uexklls vitalism differs from Drieschs at a very decisive point. While Driesch is a physiologist and hence has a preference for dynamics, Uexkll is an anatomist with a preference for statics, in the tradition of the idealist morphologists from Cuvier on. This is why the former claims the autonomy of Wirken, the latter of Form. Cassirer takes care to quote how Uexkll argues that biological form has a status parallel to that of geometry, i.e. irreducibly spatial relations which may never be reduced to their material basis.22 Geometrical form is thus a construct wrongly rejected by Darwinism and materialism, for any true biological description must necessarily resort not only to force and matter, but also to form. Thus, it is only form, and the related concept of typical development, which allow biology to perform deductions. Thus, Uexklls research program is seen as one of Strukturforschung, and its implicit dismissal of a Drieschian notion of entelechy opens the gates for a completely new knowledge interest in Uexkll: that of form as an autonomous problem. Purpose is here taken, not as a separate force, but as Zweckmssigkeit , purposivity, lying in the very structural composition of biological entities, in their Planmssigkeit , their plan-like structure. In this account, every living being has its point of gravity within itself: He [Uexkll] could dismiss the causal problem of physics and chemistry if only it were recognized that causality is not the whole of science and that there is an independent problem of form, for which biology has to develop its own concepts and methods of thought. Once this was granted, the conict between mechanism and vitalism was over so far as Uexkll was concerned. He was interested in the fact that there is a nonmaterial ordering, a rule of the living process that gives to organic matter whatever arrangement it may have.23 Cassirer obviously selects a friendly reconstruction or even modication of Uexklls special brand of vitalism as his brother-in-arms in this struggle. Uexklls emphasis on anatomical structure, on form, and on function, and his parallelism between physical forces and organization in physics and biology, respectively, are applauded as sane methodological constructions delimiting the objectivity of biology as a eld. Contrastively, Drieschs parallel notions of entelechy, force, ontogenesis, and his contrasting of physics and supposed non-spatial forces are taken to be metaphysical constructs to be discarded. One cannot help but think that this is eine rettende Kritik, a saving criticism, of Uexkll which Cassirer sets out to perform here. True to the doctrine of Kants outline of a theoretical biology in Kritik der Urteilskraft, there cannot be posited any real teleology in nature, neither in art nor in biology; we only
22 Cassirer (1950, p. 200, 1995a, p. 232). 23 Cassirer (1950, p. 202, 1995a, p. 235).

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have Zweckmssigkeit ohne Zweck (purposiveness without purpose). The pervasive teleology assumed in primitive vitalism must be replaced by the notion of organized wholes with interrelated parts, by the integration of functions into a system. While Driesch thus posits the autonomy of a global, biological force, analogous to psychological intentions on a larger level, we could say, Uexkll is taken to stress the autonomy of biological form on a local level only, a nonmaterial ordering, localized only in the specic, circular animal-Umwelt -system. Thus, Cassirer appreciates the construction, on this basis, of a whole series of concepts specic to biology: the distinction between inner and outer causes, Anlage (disposition), organism, system, function, typical development etc., which may not merely be dened causally/mechanically. Related ideas, of course, are already to be found in Driesch, but there such biological concepts are uncritically taken for global concepts and thus made to work as real entities in the ontological framework of Drieschs biology. Uexkll, in Cassirers account, subjects biological concepts to a critique avoiding any such metaphysical pitfalls. As many differences between Uexkll and Cassirer as there remain, the common Kantian grounding of their theoretical work, seems to be what allows for Cassirer to construe a sort of cleansed, sanitized Uexkll in his epistemology of biology. Cassirers recovery of Uexkll as an epistemologist of biology is constructed after the orthodox pattern of Kants third Critique, where the concept series of physics/ constitutive rules/mechanics/mathematics/deduction are opposed to biology/ regulative rules/ teleology/ description/ induction. The introduction of Uexklls epistemology of biology, being the last step before Cassirers conclusion, has a central function in Cassirers overall argument: it is what allows him to generalize the Uexkllian form concept to the concept of wholeness (Ganzheit ), covering also eld physics and Gestalt psychology. This allows Cassirer further to specify this concept of wholeness in biology: To employ a teleological method in the study of living organisms means only that we examine the process of life so as to discover to what extent the character of wholeness manifests itself. [] The expression wholeness has the advantage of being completely free from hypothesis. It contains nothing psychic, nor does it assert that the events of life must always proceed in such a way as to achieve the highest degree of purposiveness.24 Thus, according to Cassirer, the introduction of wholeness, of Aristotelian potentiality, of animal-Umwelt -systems as quasi Leibnizian monads is unproblematicthese suspiciously metaphysical imports in the concept networks of biology are deemed innocentas long as the incorporations take place within the theoretical connes of form and function. Similarly, Drieschs metaphysical concepts of constellation harmonies, causal harmonies, and functional harmonies in biology should be reinterpreted as categories of form, not of cause. 25 In this account, form generally functions as a sort of secularization of all sorts of vital forces, also because it, contrary to all versions of vital forces, opens the gates for empirical research:
24 Cassirer (1950, p. 213, 1995a, p. 247). 25 Cassirer (1950, p. 214, 1995a, p. 248).

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In establishing this idea that life is ordered toward wholeness we are simply concerned with a phenomenon that can be demonstrated by purely empirical methods. No theoretical scepticism can prevent our recognition of this ordering as something factually given.26 Cassirers sophisticated correction to Darwinism, thus, amounts to the fact that biology, without the conceptual work of forms, wholes, and a whole series of related concepts, is simply impossible. This gives Cassirer the occasion to turn the tables in an interesting way. Cassirer argues that the protagonists of Darwinism commit the same error as the vitalists whenever they ferociously try to force every organ or every single feature of a living being to comply with the notions of immediate utility and selection value.27 Cassirers criticism of biological vitalism is trivial today, less so his criticism of Darwinism. Yet, this criticism appears to be validated, if we, in the Cassirerian method, look at what is today produced in biology, from biophysics and molecular biology up to ecology and ethology: nowhere are concepts of form and wholeness absent. And even if biologists tell you such notions are mere metaphors, which might easily be discarded, it is, for a Cassirerian, a revealing fact that they are not, in actual science, discarded.28 4 The problem of form in Cassirer Thus assessed in correlation, Cassirers Uexkll references paint a double portrait of the biology of Uexkll. We see: 1. Uexkll as the biologist who provides contrast material to a philosophical anthropology: animals are dened as living beings that, contrary to man, are conned to closed Umwelten and have no access to geistige Formen. 2. Uexkll as the biologist providing (parts of) an organicist solution to the tension between mechanicism and vitalism in the epistemology of biology, thereby showing biology to display the same irreducible duplicity between cause and form as do the humanities. These two doctrines can be summed up in the assertion that animals have forms but they do not know it. Cultures, too, have forms and neither have immediate access to their own symbolic forms, by means of which they construct themselves. But cultures may learn about their inherent forms in the process of enlightenment, establishing at the same time a development and unfolding of symbolic forms and an Abbau of these same symbolic forms, a construction and a deconstruction, so to speak.
26 Cassirer (1950, p. 215, 1995a, p. 249. 27 Cassirer cites the German biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy for stating: In fact, the idea of the whole-

ness of life, conceived of purposively, has been badly used many times, rst in Darwinism, which in its endeavors to discover a use and survival value for every organ and characteristic [] (Cassirer (1950, p. 215), 1995a, pp. 249250).
28 Structurally, it is exactly the same argument which has been forcefully made by current biosemioticians,

e.g., Jesper Hoffmeyer and Claus Emmeche: biology never stops using semiotic vocabulary (genetic code, DNA information, RNA messenger, transcriptase, etc.), so we might as well take such expressions seriously and make a thorough investigation of the roles of signs in biology.

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The question of how the passage from animals, caught within the closed connes of circular chains of expressions, to human beings, opening the world for themselves by means of Darstellungen, comes to pass during evolution, is simply not asked by Cassirer. The semiotic missing link between expressions and representation is consequently not posed as a problem. In the employment of Uexkll as animal biologist, Cassirer downplays the problem of higher animals and their ability at recognizing neutral objects (objects not directly relevant to any immediate biological need), a tendency which emphasizes the strong (but not the only) tendency in Uexkll not to recognize the existence of neutral objects in the Umwelten of higher animals. Cassirer, in other words, makes animals simpler than they are by bringing Uexkll in as a provider of biological contrast to his own philosophical anthropology. In the employment of Uexkll as an epistemologist of biology, on the other hand, Cassirers appreciation of Uexkll as an organicist comes at a price. Uexklls many vitalist features must be ignored; thus, Cassirer benignly overlooks Uexklls ardent anti-Darwinism, even anti-evolutionism, and his romanticist idea of the complete perfection and harmonious t of living nature. This is related to the issue of neutral objects: if all functions in the functional circle of a living being immediately nd their perfect Umwelt counterpart and are thus satised, then no neutral objects are perceived. By contrasting Uexkll to the Drieschean type of vitalism, Cassirer succeeds in presenting Uexkll as less a vitalist than he in fact is. Thus, Cassirer performs a saving criticism of Uexkll, on which to form the basis of his own sophisticated organicism, which realizes the high complexity of biology, as against the simpler mechanicism or the simpler vitalism. The rst of these readings of Uexkll does in fact correspond to substantial parts of Uexklls writings.29 From todays point of view, Uexklls schema of biology crudely simplies reality to the extent that the cognitive and behavioral abilities of higher animals are, as a tendency, reduced to the simple set of interrelated perceptions-reactions of a tick. The second of Cassirers readings, on the other hand, makes the best of Uexklls vacillation between a crude vitalism and a more sophisticated organicism. While both of these tendencies in Uexkll might peacefully coexist in a reconstruction of Uexklls theory because they, respectively, operate on the object and method levels, it is interesting that the ambiguous Uexkll portrait resulting from the comparison between Cassirers two Uexkll readings points back to an ambiguity in the notion of form in Cassirers own writings: 1. On the one hand, Cassirer claims that the distinction between form and cause constitute a basic tension in all sciences, at least in all sufciently complicated sciences. This is especially clearly stated in Cassirers marvelous 1945 structuralism article, where structure/Gestalt concepts are charted within a lineage of
29 Uexkll also vacillates on this issue; in the earlier Theoretische Biologie, he is surprisingly more favorable towards neutral objects than it the late Bedeutungslehre. Why he tends to downplay the intelligence of higher animals in his later work is difcult to determine. We remarked that in his political musings, he tended to embrace the same sharp distinction between animal and man as did Cassirer (albeit for opposite reasons), so we cannot exclude a political motivation for this tendency in Uexkll.

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form thinking, ranging from Goethes botanic sketches over Maxwellian eld theory in physics and Gestalt theory in psychology, to Jakobsonian structural linguistics and, of course, in the cultural sciences in general (thereby, as a matter of fact, generalizing the physics/biology distinction in Kants third Critique to cover causal and structural aspects of all sciences). The distinction is basic also in the sciences of cultureas claimed in the Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften (1942). 2. On the other hand, the Form concept is of course central to Cassirers general notion of symbolic formwhich is a concept comprising both causes and forms as principles of understanding (in myth, art, science, language, politics, technology). Symbolic forms are not necessarily explicit; rather, as a rule, they are implicit. While animals may never achieve the abilities required for explicit form shapingthey are not Form fhig , humans may, in the development of cultural processes, constitute a whole range of symbolic forms allowing them to objectify their surroundings. Subsequently, humans even have the possibility of becoming conscious of these forms in an ongoing quasi-Hegelian loop of self-interpretation via the ongoing interpretation of man-made symbolic artefacts. The aim of enlightened philosophy and science, in Cassirers account, seems to be nothing less than to support this making explicit and hence making more controllable the plethora of symbolic forms developed throughout history. There is obviously a tension between the two concepts of form. First, form and cause are envisioned as different methodologies of (primarily scientic) understanding of the empirical given. And secondly, form is understood as the constructive device of the human mind as such, comprising both cause and form in the former sense. Maybe there need be no tension between the two. The symbolic forms in Cassirers philosophy are precisely not passive moulds that shape experience at a remote and unreachable location deep within the human mind, such as traditional Kantianism may easily claim. Quite on the contrary, the symbolic forms are vehicles for action, they are constructive, causative tools. By highlighting this notion and the productive aspect of human culture, Cassirer, as a matter of fact, aims to mend that fateful fault of modern epistemology from Descartes and Locke onwards, namely the tendency to marginalize or even completely eradicate action, with all the well-known sceptical implications. Just like in Uexkll or in Peircean pragmatism, action is always inextricably interlinked with perception in Cassirers account. So in this sense, symbolic forms are not only forms, but causes and purposes at the same time. A related issue is the status in reality of the intermediate form concepts of biology, which the whole Uexkll construction was aimed at legitimizing. The Kantian balance on the blade of a knife in the third Critique may be read as denying such concepts any objectivity. That is not Cassirers contention, even though he maintains the difference between the form concepts and physical objects. But if form, function, and signs in biology are indeed objective, for which Cassirer argues very convincingly, another question is whether we should not prefer a sort of Husserlian middle way between ontology and epistemology in order to secure such concepts against nominalists? Accordingly, the issues and concepts of biology should not merely be

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comprehended as epistemological; on the contrary, they pertain to regional ontologies which are nested within each other on top of physical ontology. Of course, concepts like form, sign, and function do not have the same status as concepts capturing physical entities. All the same, they should not be seen as merely epistemological conventions. Cassirers reconstruction of Uexkll on this point should be taken to pertain to materially ontological concepts belonging to the regional ontology of biology, which is, in turn, dependent upon physical ontology. Thus, there is no need to dualistically oppose the notions of cause and teleology. The latter is no more than a local concept dened by the more or less complicated function circles of the organism in question, and it depends upon the concept of cause. Thus, I agree with Cassirer that organicism is the middle way to pursue, and that concepts like form, order, and wholeness are simply indispensable to biologybut such concepts should be interpreted realistically, corresponding to biosemiotics actual claim that semiotic vocabulary in biology is ineradicable, or the claim by current theoretical biologists like Stuart Kauffman that evolution presupposes evolvable order, not the other way around.

5 To conclude: neutral objects and the complexity of biology Finally, Cassirers two readings of Uexklls biology indirectly address an issue which is a delicate matter both for Uexkll as well as for Cassirer, namely the question of the existence of neutral objects in the Umwelten of higher animals. As we argued, both advocate a sharp dichotomy between animal and human capabilities, albeit for directly opposed reasons. Uexkll, on the one hand, celebrates the perfection of animals t into its surroundings and contrastingly attacks the extravagant ways of technology and civilization. Cassirer, on the other hand, celebrates humans capability of form-shaping and the ensuing development of culture, and contrastingly criticizes the conservative naturalistic political and philosophical utopias of the vitalists of his time. Both, as a consequence, hesitate to fully approach the issue of a gradual, even if evolutionarily quick, transition from animal to human. Uexkll may ignore this for the very basic reason that he is simply no Darwinist, so, for him, any evolutionary explanation of the specicities of the human mind is deemed out of bounds. Cassirer, of course, endorses evolutionism, but due to the sharp Kantian dualism between ideas and the empirically given, he sees the human capacity for form as a faculty complex sui generis. This capability is opposed to the closed capabilities of animals within cause-like association chains. Thus, it does not occur to Cassirer to investigate further into the evolutionary connections of human capabilities to animal capabilities. In the Theoretische Biologie, it is true, Uexkll admits that some animals with complex Umwelten do in fact have access to neutral objects. This idea is, however, rejected again later in the Bedeutungslehre (cf. Stjernfelt 2001), probably due to the tension between this idea and Uexklls perfect t idea of the relation between animal and Umwelt. For a neutral object is, of course, dened by its being grasped by the organism in question, on the one hand, without immediately entering into any specic perception-action circle, on the other. The existence of neutral objects is thus the

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prerequisite for the formation of stable Umwelt territory mappings (a map necessarily involving lots of features which have no direct bearing on any actual action series performed by the animal, features which have the status of merely possibly entering into future action sequences). At the same time, neutral objects form the prerequisite of any kind of learning exceeding mere association conditioning. Neutral objects give the organism in question a sort of representation involving blank slots which may be lled in by means of further experience. Thus, a whole series of capabilities only present in higher animals are intimately connected to the appearance of neutral objectse.g., mappings of surroundings, attention, memory, exible ontogenetic learning. In the cognitive ethology tradition developed since Cassirer and Uexkll, research has shown without any possible doubt that neutral objects are common in the perception elds of higher animals (see, e.g., Beckoff et al. 2002).30 To that extent, any debate for or against neutral objects in higher animal Umwelten has long since been decided empirically. Clearly, the issue has ceased to be subject to purely philosophical discussions. This, nevertheless, does not mean that these results have been philosophically interpreted in a satisfying manner. For what does the increasing recognition of surprising degrees of cognitive capabilities in higher animals entail for philosophical anthropology? That discussion is only in the beginning phase todaya couple of promising answer attempts are Terrence Deacons idea that the ability to process Peircean symbols is what largely distinguishes animal and human cognition, or Michael Tomasellos idea that the faculty of shared attention is a human privilege which sets us apart from even our most able primate relatives. Here, as we saw, Cassirers idea would be the introduction of language, facilitated by the appearance of the subject-object distinction as well as the predicate-subject distinction. I myself would name Peircean hypostatic abstraction as a good candidate, but it is to this day unclear what would be the precise criteria for a common solution to the issue. Perhaps some of the proposed solution quoted are simply equivalent. Must we not assume intersubjectivity as a prerequisite to pure subjects and objects? Is not shared attention required for any sophisticated language learning? Are not abstract symbols needed for language acquisition? The answer is, in any case, far more complex than the mere appearance of neutral objects, but the answer must necessarily obey Cassirers epistemology of biology rather than the crude biology he paints in the background of his philosophical
30 In the multitude of papers displaying the state of the art of cognitive ethology, a striking amount of

intelligent behaviours are charted, each highlighting aspects of what appeared as the neutral object issue in Uexkll. To name just two examples: the ingenious tactics used by ground squirrels to assess their snake predators, involving judging their size and temperature while they are partially hidden; orientation by means of cognitive maps and concept formation (such as in the recognition of human letters apart from size, color, position, or font) in honey bees. So, complicated cognitive-behavioural competencies seem ably to transgress what was expected by Uexkll (and by Cassirer), and all of them involve aspects of neutral object perception and action, because aspects or objects of the surroundings, which are not immediately involved in perception-action-circles, are necessary for their completion. Both Uexkll and Cassirer seem to have fallen prey to what is called anthropomorphism by omission (Rivas and Burghardt, 2002, 10ff), that is, the idea that the Umwelten of animals are basically rather close to ours, which easily leads to the idea that the abilities of animals in that world are far inferior to ours. Curiously, this kind of anthropomorphismcontrary to its normal formoften leads to the assumption that the animals in question can do considerably less than what they can in fact do.

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anthropology. For it would be strange to admit a complex biology inhabited only by simple animals. References
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