“Umwelt” is My New Favorite Word
How about we move empathy from the heart to the brain?
I can’t remember where I first read the word “umwelt,” but as soon as I looked it up, it rocked my world. And by “my world,” I mean my umwelt.
Because that’s what umwelt means: the world as defined by the organism perceiving it. Every creature on the planet has a different umwelt. And while I understood that a caterpillar sees the world differently than I do before I discovered this “new” (to me) word, somehow having a word to describe that changed the way I see things.
Wikipedia gives German biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) credit for developing the idea of umwelt, which in German means simply “environment” or “surroundings.” But Uexküll (and others) expanded the definition to include “all the meaningful aspects of the world for any particular organism.” One common translation is “self-centered world.”
For example, consider the deaf and blind tick, who navigates her world solely via smell and touch. Here’s a paraphrase of Uexküll’s thinking, written by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, which describes the tick’s umwelt.
“…this eyeless animal finds the way to her watchpoint [at the top of a tall blade of grass] with the help of only its skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach…
