Bodily Houses: The Worlds of Animals and Humans · by Jakob von Uexküll
If we compare an animal's body with a house, then the anatomists have studied closely the way it is built and the physiologists have studied closely the mechanical appliances located in the house. Ecologists, too, have demarcated and investigated the garden in which the house is located. But the garden has always been depicted as it offers itself to our human eye, and it has therefore been neglected to take into account how the garden changes when looked at by the subject who lives in the house.
This view is extremely surprising. The garden does not demarcate itself from a surrounding world of which it represents only a section, as it seems to our eye. Rather, it is surrounded by a horizon which has the house as its center. Each house is covered by its own canopy on which the sun, moon, and stars, which belong directly to the house, wander along.
Each house has a number of windows, which open onto a garden: a light window, a sound window, an olfactory window, a taste window, and a great number of tactile windows. Depending on the manner in which these windows are built, the garden changes as it is seen from the house. By no means does it appear as a section of a larger world. Rather, it is the only world that belongs to the house—its environment.
The garden that appears to our eye is fundamentally different from that which presents itself to the inhabitants of the house, especially with regard to the things filling it. While we discover a thousand different plants, stones, and animals in the garden, the eye of the homeowner perceives only a very limited number of things in his garden—and only such as are of importance to the subject who lives in the house. Their number can be reduced to a minimum, as in the tick's environment, in which only the same mammal with a very limited number of properties appears. Of all the things we discover around the tick—the colorful, scented flowers, the rustling leaves, the singing birds—none enters the tick's environment.
Uexküll’s summer house in Puhtu, Estonia, where he spent the summers with his family between 1928 and 1939. Image Source
I have shown how the same object, placed in four different environments, takes on four different meanings and, each time, changes its properties fundamentally. This can only be explained by the fact that all the properties of things are nothing other than the perception signs imprinted upon them by the subject with which they enter into a relation.
In order to understand this, one must recall that the body of each living being is built from living cells that together form a living carillon. The living cell possesses a specific energy that makes it possible for it to respond to any effect which approaches it from outside with a "self-tone." Self-tones can be combined with one another into melodies and do not require the mechanical interrelation of their cell bodies in order to have an effect on each other.
In their basic features, the bodies of most animals are similar in that they possess as a basis organs, which carry out metabolism and provide the energy gained from food for their vital functioning. The vital functioning of the animal subject as a carrier of meaning consists in perceiving and affecting. They perceive with the help of the sensory organs, which serve to sort the stimuli pressing in from all sides, to block out the unnecessary ones and to transform the ones useful to the body into nerve excitations that, once they arrive in the center, make the living carillon of the brain cells sound. The self-tones that respond serve as perception signs of external events. According to whether they are auditory signs, visual signs, olfactory signs, etc., they are stamped as perception marks corresponding to the respective source of stimulus.
At the same time, the cellular bells sounding in the perception organ induce the bells in the central effect organ, which send out their self-tones as impulses, in order to set off and conduct the movement of the effector's muscles. It is therefore a sort of musical process that, starting from the properties of the carrier of meaning, leads back to it. It is therefore permissible to treat the receptor as well as the effector organs of the recipient of meaning along with the corresponding properties of the carrier of meaning as counterpoints.
As one can see over and over again, a very complicated physical structure is required in most animals in order to connect the subject smoothly with its carrier of meaning. Physical structure is never present from the beginning, but rather, each body begins its construction as a single cellular bell, which divides itself and arranges itself into a resounding carillon according to a certain formative melody.
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If we let the environments pass once more before our mind's eye, then we find in the gardens that surround subjects' bodily houses the most incredible figures serving as carriers of meaning, the interpretation of which often causes great difficulty. From this, one gets the impression that the carriers of meaning represent secret signs or symbols, which can only be understood by individuals of the same species and remain completely incomprehensible for members of other species.
The silhouette and the water streams of the pond mussel provide the bitterling its love symbol. The change in taste between the tip and the stem of the leaf become a form symbol for the earthworm. The same tone is a friend symbol for the bat and an enemy symbol for the moth, and so on in an endless series.
If we have finally convinced ourselves, based on the overwhelming number of examples, that every environment is in principle only filled with meaning symbols, then a second, even more surprising fact will impose itself upon us: that every meaning symbol of the subject is at the same time a meaning motive/motif for the physical formation of that subject.
The house of the body is, on the one hand, the producer of the meaning symbols that populate its garden and, on the other hand, the product of the same symbols, which intervene as motifs in the construction of the house.
The sun owes its light and its image in the sky above, which forms a vault over the garden, to the house's eye-window. At the same time, it is the motive/motif for the construction of the eye-window. That is true of animals and human beings and can only be caused by the fact that the same natural factor appears in both cases.
Let us suppose that moths have become extinct because of some natural event and we were faced with the task of replacing this loss on the clavier of life with the help of natural technology. How would we proceed in this case? We would probably take a butterfly and retrain it for nocturnally blooming flowers, in which case the development of the olfactory feelers would have to take priority over the development of the eyes.
Since the new moths would be delivered over defenselessly to the bats, which are agile flyers, a sign of recognition must be invented for this enemy that makes it possible for the majority of butterflies to escape their enemy in time. The peeping sound of the bat can be used best as an enemy symbol, since the bat always uses it as a friend symbol. In order to perceive this peeping tone, the butterfly must be reconstructed and receive a hearing organ that can place it in relation to the enemy symbol. This means that the symbol enters the construction plan as a motif:
If the moth were not batlike,
Its life would soon be over.
One can well imagine that the tick arose in order to fill a gap in the clavier of life. In this case, the carrier of meaning which consists of the general properties of mammals would be at once a symbol for the prey and a motif in the structural plan of the tick.
Let us now attempt, in concluding, to regard our own body-house with its garden from the outside. We now know that our sun in our sky, along with the garden which is filled with plants, animals, and people, are only symbols in an all- encompassing natural composition, which orders everything according to rank and meaning.
Through this overview, we also gain knowledge of the limits of our world. We can certainly get closer to all things through the use of increasingly precise apparatuses, but we do not gain any more sensory organs thereby, and all the properties of things, even when we analyze them down to the smallest details—atoms and electrons—will always remain only perception marks of our senses and ideas.
We know that this sun, this sky, and this earth will disappear upon our death; they will survive in similar forms in the environment of coming generations.
There are not only the manifolds of space and time in which things can be spread out. There is also the manifold of environments, in which things repeat themselves in always new forms. All these countless environments provide, in the third manifold, the clavier on which Nature plays her symphony of meaning beyond time and space.
In our lifetime, the task is given to us to form with our environment a key in the gigantic clavier over which an invisible hand glides, playing.
