Dissertation Construction 05

Wilderness Matters: Understanding Interconstituent Wilderness Lifeworlds

05

Lifeworld (Umwelt)

The notion of umwelt goes back to Jakob von Uexkull (2010) and his pioneering work in animal ethology. The 1933 introduction to his work, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (where umwelt is translated as environment), keenly connects the Heideggerian notion of tools to Uexkull's project. He is critiquing a purely mechanistic theory of animality that in an oversight, "has stitched together the sensory and motor organs like machine parts (without taking into account their perceptive and effective functions" (p. 42). This mechanistic view omits "the machine operator who is built into the organs just as we are into our body" (p. 42). This view gives rise to a notion of creatures "whose essential activities consist in perception and production of effects"...."for everything a subject perceives belongs to its perception world [Merkwelt], and everything it produces, to its effect world [Wirkwelt]. These two worlds, of perception and production of effects, form one closed unit, the environment" [umwelt] (p. 42).

Dasein, umwelt, involvement, and significance 

What Dasein is already familiar with is not particular entities but rather a united lifeworld (umwelt). In the activity of dealing with gear Dasein "frees" the gear to stand out from the unity as the thing that it is in its relation to the referential totality of the lifeworld. The ontological structure of readiness-to-hand "has in itself the character of having been assigned or referred [Verwiesenheit]. An entity is discovered when it has been assigned or referred to something, and referred as that entity which it is. With any such entity there is an involvement which it has in something. The character of being which belongs to the ready-to-hand is just such an involvement. If something has an involvement, this implies letting it be involved in something. The relationship of the 'with...in...' shall be indicated by the term 'assignment' or 'reference' (Heidegger, 1962, p. 115).  This and what follows in Being and Time are crucial passages for my argument.

The assignment or referential character is the character of entities involved with Dasein in its lifeworld. The assignment character is the semiotic character of being-in-the-world. The "having been assigned" is the moment of withdrawl that is the 'turning towards' whatever it is assigned to or turns to; i.e., the being of the gear goes from being to having been turned (like a sign). This turning is related to what Harman has taken to be the tension between sensual objects (entities prior to withdrawl) and their real qualities. He relates it to eidos and the work of Husserl "in which the sensual object differs not from its shifting accidental facades (sensual qualities), but from the plurality of qualities that it truly needs to remain what it is from moment to moment" (2010, p. 98).

The worldhood of the lifeworld is much deeper than today's work will show. Next week, we go further into this through involvement and significance.