Introduction

In Bringing Forth a World: The Phenomenology of the Organism, I approached the organism as a living centre that does not simply receive an external environment but brings forth a world of significance through its own activity. Evolution extends that argument beyond the lifetime of the individual. An organism does not inherit an Umwelt as a finished representation, yet neither does it construct one from nothing. It inherits the bodily capacities through which certain features of reality can matter, enters surroundings already changed by other lives, and leaves alterations that may become significant to organisms that follow. Evolution can therefore be understood as a history not only of changing forms, but of changing relations between living beings and the world they inhabit.

The purpose of this essay is to give this process a history: to ask how an Umwelt can be inherited without being transmitted intact, how earlier relations become embodied in the capacities of living organisms, and how those organisms in turn alter the conditions under which significance will arise for those that follow.

Umwelt, Organismic activity, and the Inheritance of Significance.

Jakob von Uexküll found one of his most difficult problems inside a pea. The female pea-beetle lays her eggs on a young pod. A larva enters a soft pea, feeds, and before the pea hardens cuts a tunnel towards the surface, finishing it with a circular door. Only later does the usefulness of this work become apparent, as the mature beetle would otherwise be sealed inside what had first nourished and protected it. The same passage may also betray it, for a small ichneumon wasp finds the door, inserts its ovipositor through the prepared route, and lays an egg in the beetle larva, which is then consumed from within. The wasp finally leaves through the tunnel made by its host. Uexküll called the relation “a trio of meanings” (TM, p. 44). The pea is food and shelter, its hardening becomes danger, the tunnel is an escape for the beetle and access for the wasp.

Uexküll thought such exact correspondences could not have arisen from inherited experience, because the larva could not learn by surviving the mistake of being trapped in the hardened pea. He therefore concluded that “meaning must…have been transferred from the archetype of the pea to the archetype of the pea-beetle” (TM, p. 44). The observation was better than the explanation. His archetypes placed the finished harmony before the lives whose history had produced it. Evolution preserves what was strange in the example without requiring a composer who had written beetle, pea, and wasp into the same score.

The larva does not invent the significance of the pea from nothing. It arrives with a body already capable of feeding, tunnelling, metamorphosing and acting before the consequences of those actions can be known by the individual that performs them. Those capacities have a history. Nor does it act in virgin surroundings. The wasp encounters a passage made by another creature and turns that work to another use. At every point the present organism enters relations already prepared by lives preceding its own. An Umwelt is brought forth by the living animal, but the powers through which it brings that world forth are partly the work of the dead.

An eye alters what light can become for a creature, just as the pea-beetle’s inherited development makes the soft interior of a pea inhabitable and its later hardness a threat. Evolution changes bodies, but in changing bodies it also changes the manner in which a common material world can become significant to a form of life. Natural history includes a history of what could matter.

Semiotic Inheritance and the Persistence of Ancestral Relations.

Uexküll’s theory of meaning begins from an ordinary fact: the same physical thing takes on a different significance according to the organism entering into relation with it. What changes is the role it plays for the subject that encounters it. In that relation, it becomes what Uexküll called a ‘meaning-carrier’ (TM, p. 28).

The Umwelt is therefore neither a second universe sealed inside the organism nor the whole world seen without distortion. It is the world as selectively disclosed through the organism’s own perceptual and practical capacities. Different creatures can encounter the same physical reality under radically different aspects because different features of it matter to their forms of life. The tick and the human may encounter the same mammal, but what appears within each Umwelt is not the same. Yet because these worlds arise within a common reality, they can intersect: one organism can become host, predator, obstacle, or companion within the world of another. Reality exceeds every Umwelt, and this excess is precisely what makes error, frustration, adaptation, and death possible.

In the work of Merleau-Ponty, this relation extends into the activity of the organism itself. Vital structures, he wrote, attain equilibrium in relation to conditions “which the system itself brings into existence,” executing “a work beyond its proper limits” and constituting “a proper milieu for itself” (SB, pp. 145–46). The organism is acted upon by its surroundings, yet its activity also changes which surrounding conditions become relevant and sometimes changes those conditions materially. In each case the milieu belongs to the circuit of life rather than standing outside it as a completed stage.

This circularity also has an evolutionary dimension, as life persists not by reproducing one fixed arrangement, but by maintaining its organisation through forms that can change across generations. A lineage acquires history through these changes, as inherited structures preserve earlier ways of dealing with the world while remaining capable of modification under different conditions.

A present organism therefore bears within its capacities the history of relations it never experienced for itself. The beetle larva has no ancestral recollection of peas, yet its development embodies a history in which particular ways of living within them were preserved. The eye contains no memory of the conditions encountered by earlier generations, but its sensitivities have been shaped through a long history of relations with light. The past survives not as representation, but in the organism’s disposition to perceive certain differences, perform certain actions, and enter some relations more readily than others.

What matters to an organism is never determined afresh at each encounter. The body arrives already shaped by descent, with inherited sensitivities, metabolic requirements, forms of movement, and capacities for response that make some differences consequential while allowing countless others to pass without effect. Evolution therefore gives significance a history before the individual life begins.

An Umwelt is not transmitted intact from parent to offspring. What passes forward are the structures and developmental capacities through which characteristic relations with the world can be formed again under conditions that are never exactly repeated. Each generation reconstructs its world from inherited possibilities rather than receiving one ready-made. What persists is not an identical Umwelt, but a historically formed capacity for bringing certain relations into being.

Such semiotic inheritance does not require anything resembling a message passed from ancestor to descendant. Butyric acid is important to the tick because its inherited sensory organisation allows such chemical difference to enter the sequence of actions by which it finds a host and feeds. The individual tick did not establish that relation for itself. Its capacity to respond belongs to a much older history in which organisms bearing similar sensitivities survived and reproduced.

Returning to the pea-beetle: the larva cuts its escape tunnel while the pea is still soft, before it could have learned that the hardened seed would later trap it. What looks like foresight belongs instead to the inherited organisation of the animal. Its behaviour already bears the consequences of relations established before its own life began. The inherited behaviour has consequences beyond the beetle itself, as by cutting the tunnel, the larva alters the pea, and that alteration becomes part of the environment encountered by the wasp, which uses the opening to reach its host.

Evolution therefore changes the conditions under which later organisms live as well as the organisms themselves. The world into which a creature is born has already been worked upon by other forms of life, just as its own body carries capacities shaped by earlier relations with that world. The beetle inherits a way of living in the pea, while the wasp inherits an environment in which beetles have already altered peas. Neither receives a finished world, but neither begins from nothing.

Musical Ecology, Evolutionary Novelty, and the Rejection of a Finished Score

Uexküll repeatedly turned to music when describing how meaning holds the living world together. Things do not enter an animal’s Umwelt merely as objects possessing neutral properties, but according to the significance they acquire within its life. A couch can possess a sitting-tone for a dog, a staircase a climbing-tone, while objects that enter none of its practical relations may scarcely appear as meaningful things at all. At the level of the organism itself, perceptual and effector capacities form corresponding tones through which surroundings can be sensed and acted upon. The relation then extends beyond the individual animal. Uexküll described the animal and its medium as “united in a duet,” their properties formed in counterpoint to one another (TM, p. 54). Light answers to the eye, the resistance of the ground to limbs capable of walking or climbing, and the scent of the female moth to a male whose receptors allow that scent to stand out from everything around it.

The same musical language allowed Uexküll to move from these individual relations towards ecology. Every animal possesses its own range of perceptual and effector “tones,” but those tones continually enter into relations with the tones of other living beings. The colour and scent of a flower acquire significance within the bee’s Umwelt, while the bee in turn becomes part of the reproductive life of the flower, yet neither relation exists in isolation. As such couplings multiply, duet becomes counterpoint and counterpoint becomes something resembling a composition. Uexküll wrote that the perceptual and effector tones of different animals are “joined to each other in counterpoint,” and that only from these relations can “one arrive at nature’s score” (TM, p. 63).

Musical form offers Uexküll a way of explaining how living beings can remain distinct while nevertheless being fitted to one another. A melody is not reducible to any single note, just as the relation between bee and flower cannot be located wholly inside either organism. The significance lies in the relation they form. Uexküll eventually extended the image still further, describing individual Umwelten as “voices that take part in a universal score” (TM, p. 72).

The difficulty begins when the metaphor of music becomes elevated to the level of a score, for it already contains the relations its performers are expected to realise. A melody may unfold through time, but the score’s sequence has been settled before the first note is played. Uexküll’s anti-Darwinism encouraged him to understand biological correspondence in much the same way, so that the remarkable fit between organism and environment appeared to disclose an order established in advance. Evolution allows us to retain his counterpoint without accepting the prior composition. The relations between organisms are real, often extraordinarily precise, but they have histories. They arise, persist, change, and sometimes become the means by which entirely different relations are made possible.

The pea-beetle’s tunnel is a good example. It solves one problem for the beetle by providing an escape from the hardened pea, yet the same structure gives the wasp a route to its host. Its usefulness to the beetle does not determine everything that the tunnel can become within the wider ecology. What looks like harmony from one relation can become vulnerability from another.

In Will to Believe, while discussing Darwin,William James had already distinguished between “the causes which originally produced the peculiarity in him and the causes that maintained it after it is produced” (WB, p. 167). Selection can explain why a heritable difference becomes more common once it affects survival and reproduction. That does not make the production of the difference and its subsequent preservation the same event. Looking backwards from a successful form easily disguises this distinction because whatever endured begins to appear as though it were the only possibility that could have occurred.

The beetle’s tunnel tempts us to think in exactly this way, as once we see the hardened pea and the surviving beetle, the tunnel appears almost demanded by the problem. But evolution did not confront an abstract problem called escape from a pea and then design the optimal answer. Variations in development and behaviour occurred within already living populations, under material constraints, and their consequences differed. Selection works upon differences that exist first.

Writing in the Creative Mind, Henri Bergson objected to philosophies that made the actual future secretly pre-exist as a possibility waiting to be realised. He described “the continuous creation of unforeseeable novelty,” insisting that what actually happens contains an “unforeseeable nothing which changes everything” (CM, p. 73). Bergson’s point is that novelty disappears when we look backwards from what eventually survived. Once a form has become established, its emergence can seem almost inevitable, as though the past had been moving towards it all along. Evolutionary history was never experienced in that way. Before the outcome existed, other developments remained possible and the form that later endured had no guaranteed future

Crotchety C.S. Pierce made room for genuine novelty within nature when he wrote, “We must suppose an element of absolute chance, sporting, spontaneity, originality, freedom, in nature” (EP1, p. 243). Evolution depends upon such departures from what already exists, but most of them disappear without consequence. Some are preserved through reproduction and become part of the conditions from which later variations arise. Novelty matters historically only when it lasts long enough to alter what comes after.

Nature can still be called musical, but its music is closer to improvisation than performance from a completed score. Existing bodies, environments, and inherited developmental constraints provide the tonal range within which something new can occur. The new relation then alters what later organisms inherit. The pea-beetle’s tunnel was not made for the wasp, but the wasp turns it to its own purpose. What began as one relation becomes the basis of another. The music is made as the organisms live it, not written before they arrive.

Learning, Consciousness, and the Reconstruction of an Inherited World

Evolutionary inheritance does not bind every organism to a rigid repertoire. Even comparatively simple nervous systems can alter the significance of a stimulus through experience. In experiments on the humble Aplysia californica (California sea hare), directional light changed the animal’s head-waving, while whole-field illumination could be used to modify the response through conditioning. The evidence establishes discrimination and learning without settling the harder question of how much consciousness should be attributed to the animal. More important here is the change in relation, as light can acquire a different behavioural consequence within the lifetime of one organism.

The world inherited through evolution is therefore worked upon again within the individual life. An organism begins with capacities shaped before its birth, but experience can modify the relations those capacities make possible. James understood consciousness within this continuity of animal life, remarking that “consciousness grows the more complex and intense the higher we rise in the animal kingdom,” so that “that of a man must exceed that of an oyster” (PP, p. 141). His language of higher and lower animals need not commit us to a single evolutionary ladder. The important point is that consciousness did not enter nature suddenly with the human being but emerged from capacities already developing within animal life.

As those capacities become more flexible, the present stimulus need no longer determine an immediate response. What happened before can alter what the organism does now, while present action can be organised in relation to what has not yet happened. The Umwelt consequently acquires a greater temporal depth. Its significance is no longer given only by inherited sensitivities or the immediate situation but can be revised through the organism’s own experience. What evolution has handed down becomes something the individual can, within limits, learn to use differently.

In human life this temporal depth extends well beyond individual memory. A child can learn to recognise a path, boundary, danger, or place of importance because others have taught it to matter, even when those who first established the relation are long dead. Language and other symbolic forms allow such distinctions to outlive the particular lives in which they arose. The human Umwelt is therefore inhabited by the dead in a more explicit sense: we encounter the present through meanings that have already passed through other lives before reaching our own.

Continuity, Ecological Inheritance, and Extinction

Hans Jonas located the earliest form of freedom beneath conscious choice, in the organism’s relation to the matter that sustains it. “The organic form stands in a dialectical relation of needful freedom to matter” (PL, p. 80). A living body cannot exist without continually taking matter from its surroundings, yet it is not identical with any particular matter passing through it. Its constituents are replaced while the organisation of the organism persists. Hence Jonas could speak of “a certain independence of form with respect to its own matter” (PL, p. 81). Life continues by changing what materially composes it.

A lineage persists differently, but the same problem of continuity through change appears at another scale. No descendant reproduces an ancestor exactly, nor could a lineage survive indefinitely by preserving one form unchanged while its conditions altered around it. What is inherited has to be realised again in new bodies, under circumstances that earlier generations did not encounter in precisely the same way. Continuity therefore depends upon variation as much as resemblance. A lineage endures because enough is retained for descendants to belong to the same history, while enough can change for that history to continue.

The pea-beetle shows why this cannot be understood only as a change within the organism. Its tunnel solves a problem created by the hardening pea, but in doing so it alters the pea itself. The wasp encounters that alteration and turns it to another purpose. What helps preserve one form of life becomes part of the conditions under which another can attack it. The beetle’s relation to the pea is therefore never settled once and for all, because other organisms are continually entering the same material world and making different uses of what they find there.

The consequences of living also outlast the lives that produced them. The beetle that cuts the tunnel will die, but the alteration it makes can still enter the life of the wasp. Across longer periods, organisms leave behind changed surroundings, altered relations, and descendants whose capacities bear the effects of earlier encounters. Evolution extends the consequences of life beyond the lifetime of the individual. What one organism does may become part of what another, perhaps much later, has to live with.

Conclusion

The argument has brought us somewhere beyond Uexküll’s original Umwelt. A living subject brings forth a world through its perceptual and practical capacities, but those capacities do not begin with the subject itself. The eye through which light becomes significant has an evolutionary history, just as the behaviour through which the pea-beetle inhabits its seed was formed before that individual larva began to act. The surroundings into which an organism enters also bear the consequences of earlier lives. The wasp encounters not an untouched pea, but one already altered by the beetle. The world disclosed by a living organism in the present therefore contains relations whose origins lie beyond the limits of its own life.

The Umwelt has, in this sense, a past, not because an ancestral world has somehow been stored and transmitted intact, but because earlier relations persist in the capacities of living bodies and in the conditions those bodies encounter. The dead remain present without perceiving, intending, or remembering anything themselves. They remain in the organisation of the living. An animal sees, feeds, escapes, learns, and acts through capacities whose history it never experienced for itself.

Bringing forth a world is therefore never something the present organism accomplishes alone. It renews relations that began before its birth, modifies them through its own activity, and leaves consequences that may enter lives not yet begun. Evolution gives the Umwelt this temporal depth. What Uexküll described phenomenologically as the relation between a subject and its meaningful world becomes, when extended through natural history, a process in which the capacities for forming such worlds are inherited, altered, and realised again under changing conditions. The history of life is consequently also a history of significance. New differences become perceptible, existing structures acquire uses they did not previously possess, and relations that endured for immense periods can disappear.

When a species disappears, the physical world remains, but one way of inhabiting it disappears too. Certain features of that world no longer matter in the same way because the organism through which those relations existed is gone. Certain differences are no longer sensed through that body, certain possibilities are no longer acted upon, and relations dependent upon that form of life can no longer be renewed. If the pea-beetle disappeared, peas and wasps would remain, but the peculiar relation in which a larva hollows a seed, prepares an escape before it is needed, and thereby provides another creature with access to itself would disappear with it. Something real would have vanished, not from physical reality itself, but from the ways in which that reality could be lived.

Natural history therefore produces and extinguishes worlds while remaining the history of one common reality. Reality exceeds every Umwelt, and precisely for that reason can sustain ways of being encountered that no existing organism exhausts. Evolution changes which of those relations are realised. A new sensory capacity does not create the physical difference it detects, but it allows that difference to acquire a significance it did not previously possess for that form of life. A new behaviour alters what can be done with existing things. Other organisms encounter those alterations and make different uses of them in turn. The common world remains, while the forms under which it becomes meaningful continue to change.

Every organism begins in the middle of this history. It receives a body whose capacities were shaped by relations older than itself, enters surroundings already altered by other lives, and acts into a future it cannot determine. The world it inhabits is genuinely its own without ever being solely its own creation. Its present belongs to a history extending in both directions beyond the limits of its individual life.

Evolution is therefore the inheritance of worlds: not the transmission of finished Umwelten, but the historical passage of capacities and relations through which reality can continue to become significant in new ways. Every organism receives a world from the dead, alters it by living, and leaves another to the unborn.

Sources and References

~ (TM) “The Theory of Meaning” [1940], Semiotica 42.1 (Mouton Publishers, 1982) by Jakob von Uexküll.

~ (SB) The Structure of Behavior (Beacon Press, 1967) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

~ (WB) The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897) by William James.

~ (CM) The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (Dover Publications, 2007) by Henri Bergson.

~ (EP1) The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume I (Indiana University Press, 1992) by Charles Sanders Peirce.

~ (PP) The Principles of Psychology (Harvard University Press, 1981) by William James.

~ (PL) The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Northwestern University Press, 1966) by Hans Jonas.