Self-world and world of language:

Jakob von Uexkull's theory as a basis for

integrational linguistic research
HELMUT GIPPER

Biology and particularly ethology or behavioral research owe a signicant discovery to the important biologist and Baltic Baron Jakob von
Uexkull. It consists in the empirically founded insight that every living
being, due to its physical organization and sensory apparatus, can only
perceive a certain section of the world, a section which is characteristic of the species. The creature is, in Uexkull's words, embedded in
an Umwelt which corresponds exactly to its vital needs. Its senses reveal
to it a certain `perceptual world', which determines its grasp of the
world, and this `perceptual world' corresponds with an `operational
world', which delimits its range of possible actions in the world. The
animal and its Umwelt are closely interrelated; the animal is an
integral part of the functional circles of its medium (water, earth, or
air), of its nourishment, of its enemy, and of its sex. It ts its Umwelt
like the key ts the lock and the lock ts the door. These interrelations
are impressively corroborated by numerous examples. Insects and
owers, spiders and ies, starshes and mussels, parasites and hosts,
moths and bats are clearly made to t. Uexkull was looking for
appropriate terms to describe these relations, and, being a person with
a well-developed sense of art, he liked to make use of musical
terminology. Thus, he spoke of `contrapuntal relations', of a `theory of
composition of nature', and he felt that it was the task of biology to
record the `score' for the `symphony of nature' with its immense
systematic regularity.
Understandably, these new views triggered discussions. The unfamiliar
and unusual terms and comparisons with art alone did not t in with
the framework of the prevailing schools of thought. On the one hand, the
relations which Uexkull had shown to exist between animals and their
Umwelten were quite comprehensible, and it did seem quite possible
to accept his thoughts and views as far as the world of animals was
concerned, but, on the other hand, there were serious objections to his
claim that they were applicable to mankind as well.
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# Walter de Gruyter

464 H. Gipper
This is where he himself oered unnecessary points of attack by
portraying some of his friends, who lived under the inuence of certain
subjective ideas, incapable of crossing the borders of their self-established
worlds. Even though it was with a very observant eye and with his usual
stylistic mastery that Uexkull described how individual people, scholars
not excluded, were imprisoned, as it were, under a dome of glass, these
depictions, published as memoirs with the title Nie geschaute Welten
(Uexkull 1957), moved him a long way from the premises he himself
had drawn up in his theory of Umwelt (Umweltlehre), for these
had always referred to entire species, never to individual animals.
A closer investigation of the matter and of the subsequent debate
shows that it is mainly the term Umwelt, suggested by Uexkull, which
lies at the root of the quarrels and which proved to be particularly
unclear and misleading. For by Umwelt, we generally understand the
environment (Umgebung) every human being and every animal lives in,
and our growing awareness of the necessity to protect and conserve our
environment, our Umwelt, is directed towards the whole of nature.
Environmental protection means the protection of nature. Considering
that part of the world in which the individual person lives, one can
also use the French term milieu, which the philosopher and historian
Hippolyte Taine used in this context. In this connection, cultural and
societal conditions must also be taken into account.
If all of this is taken into consideration, this disapproval becomes
understandable, since now the objection could be raised that animals
are indeed restricted to certain habitats in certain terrestrial regions
and, in fact, even would have to perish in others. Humans, however, can
live and survive anywhere on earth, because they are able to adjust, by
means of clothing and housing, to the various climatic zones.
Thus, the discussion about Uexkull's theory of Umwelt reached a point
at which animals were attributed an Umwelt, in the sense that they
are restricted to a certain milieu, whereas human beings were ascribed
Weltoenheit, a certain openness towards the world, which means
that, due to their physique, they can adjust to all surroundings and
live anywhere on earth.
In the chapter `Eigenwelt und Sprachwelt: Ausbaumoglichkeiten der
inhaltsbezogenen Sprachtheorie im Anschlu an die Lehre Jakob vonUexkulls'
in Gipper (1969 [1963]),1 which also forms the basis of this article, there
is a survey of the positions of several researchers which support what has
been stated above.2 It shall be sucient to mention their names.
Biology: Otto Storck, Karl Friederichs, Adolf Portmann, Friedrich
Brock, Konrad Lorenz.

Self-world and world of language 465

Biology and Physiology: Frederick Jacobus Johannes Buytendijk.
Anthropology: Wilhelm Emil Muhlmann, Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt.
Philosophical Anthropology: Arnold Gehlen.
Philosophy: Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Metzger, Theodor Litt,
Erich Rothacker.
Psychology: Paul Feldkeller.
Sociology: Werner Sombart.
Medicine: Friedrich Stump, Hans Petersen.
Psychosomatic Medicine: Thure von Uexkull.
Most of these researchers are willing to accept that animals are bound
to their environments or habitats: they acknowledge their Umweltgebundenheit. And yet, they all have dierent reasons for stressing the
exceptional position of the nature of man who is open towards the
world (weltoen) and able to create culture. Their arguments prove that
they have more or less misunderstood Jakob von Uexkull's intentions.
His son, Thure, oers a divergent interpretation, which cannot be discussed here. Uexkull's colleague Friedrich Brock and his friend Hans
Petersen are the only ones to defend his position, with Petersen even
preferring the expression self-world/Eigenwelt to the term Umwelt.
It thus proves to be inappropriate to label Uexkull's basic thoughts as
a theory of Umwelt. This term should rather be replaced by `self-world'
even Uexkull himself used this expression at times, and also his former
student Friedrich Brock recommended that this be done for this term
expresses more clearly what is meant by it.
May I add at this point that I also sent my book Bausteine zur
Sprachinhaltsforschung to Uexkull's wife Gudrun, nee countess von
Schwerin, and to his sons Gosta and Thure, as a result of which we
began corresponding. Gudrun von Uexkull, who, in 1964, had written the
beautiful biography Jakob von Uexkull, seine Welt und seine Umwelt,
thanked me very much for explicitly pointing to the works of Jakob von
Uexkull and welcomed my pleading for the term `self-world', which the
medical student Petersen had done, too, both verbally and in writing.
She said that Jakob, however, believed that the term as he understood
it had the connotation of `self-world', and he did not want to change
it. Thure, too, whom I then had a chance to meet in person, agreed with
my suggestion.
What is crucial and worth being repeated is that a subject's self-world
as Uexkull understood it is a function of its physical organization and
sensory apparatus. Obviously, this is also true for the human subject. On
account of their organization or structure, the individual sense organs
select and restrict what can be felt and experienced. The visual organs

466 H. Gipper
determine what is visible, the organs of hearing determine what is
audible, and the organs of locomotion determine how and where
a subject can move. For humans, the hands are of primary importance.
Man's ability to walk erect made it possible for them to become tools
par excellence, and it was only through his hands that man was able to
create culture, but this was only possible because they were controlled
by the central nervous system. This control organ needs further stimuli
which presupposes the ability to think and hence the ability to plan.
Finally, the ability to think does not reach a human level, either, unless
the ability to speak is added, for thought and language are very closely
connected it is even possible to say that the ability to think develops
through language during language acquisition. It is thus that the physically and sensually experienced world can be broadened by a mental
world, which completes the self-world typical of humans. However,
Uexkull did not or could not take this into account adequately, and
even the critics who attribute Weltoenheit to man but not to animals,
have considered these factors either insuciently or not at all.
Be that as it may, it is certain that Uexkull's theory has been harmed
by these misunderstandings.
And yet, Uexkull was a thinker exceptionally aware of problems. The
way he carefully considered the epistemological presuppositions of his
research shows this very clearly. For instance, he rightfully asked the
question whether it is at all possible for a human subject to gain an
insight into the self-worlds of other beings through observation. Is this
access possible and explicable through observation alone? One possible
presupposition is that the self-world of a human subject is undoubtedly
considerably wider and much more extensive than that of all other
beings. Numerous animals may well be superior to humans in certain
respects. Some may be able to see and hear a good deal better, but
their seeing and hearing is directed at and restricted to something
very particular, such as their prey or certain dangers they have to avoid
in time.
The physique, too, of some species allows them higher performance,
but again this is only the case for isolated elds. Some can run and swim
faster, jump higher and farther, and climb better than a human subject.
This is why some have called man a `defective being' (Mangelwesen).
Those who did so neglected the fact that man compensates for these
defects and is, on the whole, much more versatile than any animal.
No animal could ever come near the physical performance of a decathlete. Furthermore, a circus artiste performs acrobatic feats which the
human physique hardly seems capable of. Hence, it is even justiable to
call man a `luxurious being', which, in fact, has been done. Konrad Lorenz

Self-world and world of language 467

comes to a similar conclusion when he calls man a `specialist in being
unspecialized'. And, on top of this, there are also the mental abilities
mentioned above, which, through the invention of numerous devices and
gadgets, enable man to expand the scope of what is perceptible to the
senses to an undreamt-of extent. Just think of the most powerful microscopes and very large telescopes, which give us an insight into minute
elements of matter and distant cosmic space. Thus, man's limits lie far
beyond those of the animal kingdom, so that he is, in fact, capable of
nding out what the individual animal species can feel and perceive, and
of gaining from that a well-founded insight into their behavior. Hence,
the positivist prejudice that we cannot cross the border between man
and animal and not even that between man and fellow man, proves to
be untenable.
In the introduction to his book Streifzuge durch die Umwelten von
Tieren und Menschen (Uexkull and Kriszat 1970 [1934]), which Uexkull
wrote together with a colleague, he illustrates with a prime example, which
is often referred to in secondary literature, how the self-world of a simple
parasite, namely the wood tick, can be deduced from a very close, careful,
and long-time observation of its physique and behavior. As this special
case permits a good insight into his empirical research, a translation of
this passage shall be quoted here:
The wood tick may not be dangerous, but it is still a rather unwelcome guest of
mammals and human beings. Recent work has claried many details of its life
so that it is possible to get a good idea of it.
The newly-hatched tick still lacks one pair of legs and its genital orices. At
this stage, it is already capable of attacking cold-blooded animals, like for
example lizards, which it lies in wait for on the tip of a blade of grass. After
sloughing several skins and after acquiring the missing organs, the tick starts
chasing warm-blooded animals.
With its four pairs of legs, the fertilized female climbs up to the tip of
a protruding branch of any kind of shrub or bush. When it is up at a sucient
height, it either drops down on smaller mammals running past underneath it or
it waits until it can seize hold of larger animals brushing by.
The eyeless animal nds its way to its watch-tower with the aid of a general sense
of light of its skin. Being both blind and deaf, the tick notices the approaching host
through its sense of smell. The smell of butyric acid escaping from the glands of
the skin of all mammals serves as a stimulus to the tick, to which it responds by
leaving its look-out and dropping down. If it happens to fall onto something
warm, which it feels with its acute sense of temperature, it has reached its host
and nds, with the aid of its sense of touch, a hairless place where it bores its way
headrst into the integument of its host and slowly starts sucking its warm blood.
Experiments with articial membranes and other liquids than blood have
proved that the tick lacks a sense of taste, for after piercing the membrane, it will

468 H. Gipper
suck any liquid, as long as it has the right temperature. If, after noticing the
smell of butyric acid, the tick falls onto something cold, it has missed its host
and has to climb back onto its look-out. This substantial meal of blood is the
tick's last meal at the same time. There is nothing left for it than to fall to the
ground, to lay its eggs, and to die. (Uexkull and Kriszat 1970 [1934]: 78)

This correlation is amplied by the schematic representation of a functional circle, which is now comprehensible without further comment.3
A few self-coined technical terms have been added to some of the
expressions.
The following text contains important indications for the self-world
of man, which have to be considered on account of their fundamental
importance: the prerequisites for our perception of time and space. From
an early age, we nd it self-evident that we live in a three-dimensional
space, and we rarely think about where we get this certainty from. Even
with our eyes closed or by night we can tell up from down, front from
back, and left from right. It is not easy to dene the center of this
coordinate system, but it can be proved that the structure of our body
and its central axis are of a certain relevance. If one moves one's hands
up and down in a horizontal position in front of one's face, one can easily
determine the borderline between what we feel is `up' and what we feel
is `down', and our body, viewed with our own eyes, shows us what is
`front' and what is `back'. The position of our arms, nally, tells us what
`left' and `right' mean. Every person thus has a coordinate system composed of three planes, which determines his sense of space. Further
precise research has revealed that this three-dimensionality can be traced
back to a sense organ located in the inner ear, namely to the semicircular
canals, which at the same time function as our organ of equilibrium
(Uexkull and Kriszat 1970 [1934]: 16, Der Wirkraum). It is unnecessary
to explain in detail how this works, for it is explained and depicted in
every handbook on anatomy.
What is important is the conclusion drawn from this fact: It is justiable to say that every animal which has such semicircular canals perceives
space as being three-dimensional, which conrms Immanuel Kant's
claim of time and space being a priori forms of perception, i.e., prior
to experience, with time being the form of perception of the outer and
space being that of the inner sense. One should add, though, that the
infant still has to learn what is obvious to an adult. It goes without saying that animals without semicircular canals perceive space dierently.
There are many explanatory statements by Uexkull about this.
It is much more dicult to determine what the experience of time,
Kant's a priori inner sense, is based on. It is necessary to consider the

Self-world and world of language 469

physiological preconditions of our powers of vision. It is a proven fact
that man is able to perceive emissions of light of extremely short
duration, for example, 1/1000 seconds. It is, however, characteristic of
the way we see images that usually only those series of images merge
into one moving image which are presented to the eye with intervals
shorter than 1/18 seconds. Uexkull calls this smallest distinguishable
interval a `moment' (Uexkull and Kriszat 1970: 33, Die Merkzeit).
We are not capable of analyzing movements faster than that, for
example, rotating propellers or radar, for they become blurred and merge
into ickering images. This is conrmed by a lm, where a corresponding sequence of images is necessary for us to get the impression of
movement. The jerkiness of old lms dating back to the time when the
moving picture was only just starting to appear shows us what happens
when the images follow each other too slowly. In modern color lms, the
merging eect has been improved considerably by doubling the speed
at which one picture follows the other. And yet, even with this technique
our eyes meet with certain diculties, for example, when watching the
spokes of a turning wheel sometimes the spokes even seem to be turning backwards. However, the medium of lm opens up further possibilities, namely, that of time-lapse photography as opposed to that of slow
motion. If an extremely slow process is photographed from the same
angle in a slower sequence of images (from thirty seconds to ve minutes),
this same sequence, if run at normal speed, impressively allows us to
witness the blooming of a ower or the metamorphosis of a buttery. If,
on the other hand, a process is lmed with a much larger sequence of
images per second and is then presented at normal speed, we get the wellknown impression of slow motion, which even makes trajectories visible
and has become quite indispensable in measuring sport results.
Jakob von Uexkull explicitly awards the ingenious biologist Karl
Ernst von Baer the merit of having been the rst to discern this interrelation and of having initiated its investigation. Baer (1864 [1860])
showed with impressive Gedankenexperiments how man would perceive
the world if his average lifespan were not 80 years but a thousandth
(29 days) or even a millionth (40 minutes) instead and if, at the same
time, he had the same amount of sensory impressions and a pulse beat
a thousand or a million times faster than normal. Such a person or
`minute-person' would consider nature to be virtually unchangeable,
because he would fail to notice the changes in men, animals, and plants.
He would neither be able to perceive the soundwaves, but he might
possibly be able to hear the lightwaves. On the other hand, Baer imagines
a human being who lives for 80,000 years with a pulse-beat a thousand
times slower than normal who perceives a whole year's events as if they

470 H. Gipper
were condensed into eight hours. He would see plants grow and the sun
chase across the sky. Slowed down another thousand times he would
no longer perceive the dierence between night and day, and he would
see the `orbiting sun' as a shining ring. To him, the rotation of seasons
would seem to be a matter of seconds.
These ideas may be daring, but they can give us a rst idea of how
much our perception of the world would dier from what we are used to
if the premises were extremely dierent. Jakob von Uexkull has come
to the important realization that there are, in fact, animals which, due to
the way their sensual organs operate, perceive the world, including time
and space, in a manner which diers considerably from ours (Uexkull
and Kriszat 1970 [1934]: 34f ).
In order to allow further insights into the self-worlds of humans and
animals and in order to illustrate the dierences, Uexkull gives further
instructive examples in his book (Streifzuge durch die Umwelten von
Tieren und Menschen. Ein Bilderbuch unsichtbarer Welten). By doing this,
he proves to be a great researcher, for he develops an amazing imagination, which is characteristic of all discoverers. He also includes the ndings
of others in his system.
An exceptionally original example shall be given at this point in order
to illustrate how dierently humans and animals perceive the same
objects (Uexkull and Kriszat 1970 [1934]: 65, Merkbild und Wirkbild).
Uexkull demonstrates this by means of a colorful drawing of a room
containing various pieces of furniture, a table with dinner service, chairs
and other seating-accommodations, a bookshelf, a desk, and a lamp. He
then indicates the meaning and signicance of these furnishings for
a human being, a dog, and a y. Those properties which are most
important for each subject Uexkull calls `qualities' (Tone). For the human
subject, there are numerous qualities: the chair has a `sitting-quality'
(Sitzton), the table and the dinner service have an `eating quality'
(Speiseton), the bookshelf has a `reading-quality' (Leseton), the desk
a `writing-quality' (Schreibton), the lamp can be said to have a `lightquality' (Lichtton), and the oor a `walking-quality' (Gehton). The room
has been designed for a human subject and furnished according to his
needs. All this must look very dierent to a dog. All he is interested in
are those objects with a `sitting-' or a `lying-quality', which would include
the oor, and also those objects which have, for him, an `eating-quality'.
The cupboards and the other pieces of furniture, however, are nothing
but obstacles to moving around freely. The room has an essentially
dierent appearance for the y: every single object has a `sitting-quality',
even the lamp and the ceiling, for it can land anywhere. Many of those
things which are nourishment for the human subject will also have an

Self-world and world of language 471

`eating-quality' for the y. In any case, the three self-worlds of the human
being, the dog, and the y vary considerably, and so does the number of
qualities perceived by each of them.
Uexkull's interpretation of the cobweb (Uexkull 1970: 125128, Die
Deutung des Spinnennetzes) is immensely instructive, too, and shall
hence not be omitted. It concerns the web of the common garden
spider (cross-spider), which everybody must have seen at some time or
other. We usually notice the web once it is completed; hardly anybody
has ever seen a spider in the process of building it. This is done in such
an amazing manner that the observer cannot but call it truly artful
and rened.
What is important in the rst place is the right choice of location
for building the web. Amazingly, the spider always nds an appropriate
spot, which Uexkull suggests calling `runways' of ies. The spider starts
o with a three- or four-sided frame, for which it already has to surmount
considerable diculties. For the actual web, it uses two dierent kinds
of threads which it produces at the end of its abdomen. First, it stretches
radial threads, which are rather thick and smooth. The spider then
connects the radial threads with thinner circular threads full of sticky
droplets. The size of the resulting mesh corresponds with the size of the
expected prey. The strength of the web is suited to resist the force of the
insect in ight. When the y hits the web, the exible and sticky circular
threads yield, enclose, and entangle the prey. The vibration caused by
this alerts the spider which has been lying in wait outside the web. On
one of the smooth radial threads, it rushes to the captured prey, wraps
it in further threads, and keeps it ready for early or late consumption.
All this is amazing in itself, but what is most extraordinary about it is
the fact that the spider knows how to do this due to an innate skill, and
it builds its rst web without ever having been confronted with an
actual y. On top of this, there is also the fact that the y cannot see
the web because of the structure of its eyes and consequently heads
blindly into disaster. Because of all this, Uexkull calls the cobweb `ylike' ( iegenhaft), which is an apt description of the relation between
web and y.
There are plenty of examples in Uexkull's writing which draw attention to the relation between various animals and the objects which are
meaning-carriers in their self-worlds. As far as man is concerned, there
are additional peculiarities within the preconditions which hold for
everybody. A forest, for example, can be perceived in various ways,
depending on the occupation and personal interests of the observer.
Forest wardens, hunters, strollers, and those who go mushrooming notice
entirely dierent aspects of the same part of nature (Uexkull and Kriszat

472 H. Gipper
1970 [1934]: 94100, Das gleiche Subjekt als Objekt in verschiedenen
Umwelten). Every woodland creature, however, experiences the forest in
a manner specic to its species.
Thus, through his skilled descriptions, Uexkull presents the whole
score of the symphony of nature very convincingly to the reader and
oers him varied and really thrilling reading.
And yet, however impressive everything Uexkull wrote about the
human self-world may be, it is still mainly restricted to physical and
sensual endowments. Even though he did mention certain factors going
beyond those, he apparently failed to notice them on the whole and
hence took them into account rather insuciently.
All of this is a matter of specically human achievement Homo sapiens
is capable of due to the way his brain is structured. The ability to think
enables man to analyze and utilize to an undreamt-of extent what is
sensually perceptible. The extension of the perceived world by a more
dierentiated mental world is only possible due to and by means of
language. Without it, man's ability to think would not develop either.
With language, however, man goes far beyond the animal kingdom,
and it is the task of the human sciences to investigate and prove this.
At this point I shall, even though I am not a biologist, engage in the
discussion in my capacity as a general linguist and try to demonstrate
the prime importance of Uexkull's theory of self-world for integrational
linguistic research, for it enables us to view the mental self-world of man
which is conditioned by language.
`Integrational' (Ganzheitlich) means that language is not only viewed
rst and foremost as a means of communication, but rather as a means
of cognition and as a mental gateway to the world. What determines this
type of linguistics is what is meaningful for man. The content of language
is the decisive factor. For all animals communicate unicellular organisms as well as higher species. The English biologist Earl W. Count
reduced this to the formula `To live is to communicate' (cf. Count 1969:
71), but it remains unsolved what it is that has to be communicated in the
individual case, which ought to be the prerequisite of any communication. It may be easier to nd out what animals communicate. Their
communication is about choosing a partner or searching for food.
Human communication, however, is almost fathomless. And yet it is
limited by what is possible in the individual languages. As this varies
from language to language, it is dicult to generalize it.
It is essential to realize that the world which the speakers of a language
experience and perceive is `worded' or put into words in a manner
characteristic of the language in question. Here, the close interrelation
between language and thought has to be taken into account. The great

Self-world and world of language 473

linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt expressed in a unique and unsurpassed
manner how this is to be understood. It should therefore suce to
mention this here. A single quotation saves us every additional remark.
It is worthwhile to read these lines twice and to direct one's attention to
the last detail in order to understand fully what he said.
It becomes obvious through the mutual interdependence of thought and words
that languages are not so much a means to represent the truth established before,
but rather a means to discover the truth previously unknown. The dierences
between languages are not dierences between sounds and signs, but between the
views of the world themselves. This is the reason for and ultimate purpose of all
linguistic research. The sum of what can be perceived is the eld to be examined
by the human mind. It is situated in the middle of all languages and is independent of them. Man can only approach this purely objective realm in accordance
with his own ways of perceiving and feeling, i.e., in a subjective manner. (Humboldt
1968, 4: 27)

Humboldt's nding that there is a characteristic view of the world

(Weltansicht) inherent in every language which imperceptibly inuences
thoughts and actions of every member of the speech community, starting
as early as during language acquisition, is a great idea which has challenged linguistics to such an extent that the problems have not been
solved to this day.
For a long time, nineteenth-century linguistics did not know what to
do with this. Only few linguists tried to research further into this matter
or to conrm Humboldt's ndings, but with little or no success. In fact,
linguists of that time, such as Heymann Steinthal or August Friedrich
Pott even distanced themselves from Humboldt on decisive points instead
of interpreting his works in a way which would have enabled this great
scientic heritage to develop and spread further. It is necessary, though,
to know that linguistics in those days was entirely under the spell of the
Indo-Germanic or Indo-European trend (see also Gipper and Schmitter
1985).
The epoch-making discovery of scholars like Franz Bopp, the Dane
Rasmus Rack, and Jacob Grimm, to name only the most important
ones, that nearly all European languages are cognate and traceable to
the same origins and even related to Sanskrit, the rediscovered sacred
language of ancient India, was almost revolutionary. Whole generations
of linguists tried to clarify the connections and to nd out the individual
steps of this long development. The most pioneering observation was that
certain chronologically determinable sound changes had taken place,
especially the Germanic sound shift in the rst place and later the second
German sound shift. As numerous early examples show, these sound

474 H. Gipper
shifts obviously took place in such a regular manner that it seemed well
justied to refer to them as sound laws. Special attention was drawn to
the exceptions to these laws, and a long ght ared up whether or not
there were any exceptions to these laws at all. It is obvious that this
historic, vertical, or diachronic approach could not lead anywhere near
Humboldt's linguistic views of the world, for these can only emerge
through a horizontal or synchronic view of the whole speech organism,
which must not be restricted to the sound level but has to include the
meaning and content of language.
A synchronic turn in linguistics did not take place until the rst half of
the twentieth century and is mainly the achievement of the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure (1978). Also, Wilhelm von Humboldt was rediscovered. It is much to the credit of the Bonn linguist Johann Leo
Weisgerber that the concept of a linguistic view of the world was taken
notice of again. Weisgerber himself began his career in the Indo-Germanic
tradition, but he became so dissatised with this approach to language
that he started seeking other methods. By reading the rst volume of
Ernst Cassirer's Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1956 [1923]), he
took notice of Wilhelm von Humboldt where he nally found what he
had been looking for. He then made it his business to actually test and
verify, by studying a concrete language, Humboldt's pioneering concept
of a linguistic view of the world, which Humboldt himself had advanced
but not proved. Weisgerber chose his mother tongue as an example, and
published his rst results in the book Vom Weltbild der deutschen Sprache
(1950). He then expanded on this approach and increased it to two
volumes which he included in the four-volume work Von den Kraften der
deutschen Sprache (Weisgerber 1953, 1954). Weisgerber preferred the
expression Weltbild (picture of the world) to Weltansicht (view of the
world), which he felt to be too static. With the German word Bild (picture)
being akin to the verb bilden (to form, to shape), he wanted to draw nearer
to Humboldt's view of language as energeia (action) rather than ergon
(work/achievement). His readers, however, found this hard to follow.
And yet, this inconspicuous change from Ansicht to Bild had unforeseen
consequences, for some critics confused Weltbild with Weltanschauung.
In conjunction with `German', this placed Weisgerber's views somewhere near Nazi ideology, which brought his justied eorts into great
discredit.
Humboldt himself spoke of Weltanschauung at times, but in those days,
this was completely harmless. Nowadays, however, it is imperative to
draw a clear distinction between the terms Weltbild and Weltanschauung
and also to distinguish from it the linguistic picture of the world or
rather to speak of a linguistic view of the world. It is easy to explain the

Self-world and world of language 475

dierence: Weltbild means rst and foremost a scientic picture of the
world, such as those presented by Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo,
and Einstein, which are interpretations of cosmic interrelations in the
world based on their respective levels of knowledge. As opposed to this,
Weltanschauung refers to certain ideological convictions concerning
man's position in this world, which can have a religious, but also social
or political cause. Therefore, one should be more precise and speak of
`ideological Weltanschauung', which is basically a belief, even if it was
meant to be scientically founded, like, for example, Marxism. A scientic picture of the world is a matter of science and of knowledge, as the
expression implies. A linguistic picture, though, is neither the one nor
the other, but rather a background phenomenon, which makes it, however, a precondition for scientic pictures of the world and ideological
Weltanschauungen to emerge and to be expressed. They may be inuenced
by the individual languages, but this is dicult to prove. Apart from
this, linguistic pictures of the world as such are value-free, which can be
proved by the fact that it is possible to express many dierent pictures
of the world or Weltanschauungen in a language.
Let us return to the idea of a linguistic picture of the world. It has
been said before how this expression is to be interpreted and why this
idea is so important for evaluating man's mental position in the world.
And yet, it is necessary to explain further in what way the sensually
perceptible world is mentally grasped through language and how the
capacity to think is thus considerably increased. Firstly, there is the
vocabulary of each language, which contains all that the speech community has considered important and worth being worded throughout
history. Through language use, old expressions are continually expunged
while new ones are added. Some additional scientic terminology is
included in everyday language, too. On the whole, the vocabulary of
a language is continually growing so that no speaker can ever master it
in its entirety. By `vocabulary', however, one must not understand the
alphabetical order in dictionaries, but rather has to take the term `picture
of the world' into consideration, for it means that our insights into
the characteristics of our world nd expression in the individual languages and that the natural order, organization, and structure of things
is reected in languages, albeit in a modied manner. These structures
of vocabulary can be proved.4 It turns out that certain elds of existence are subdivided into semantically related elds of words and that
these elds are arranged in an order in which each word keeps its own
value but gains an additional value within the eld. Subdivisions like
these are called semantic elds. Their discovery is after some previous
attempts the achievement of the Germanist Jost Trier (1973 [1931]).

476 H. Gipper
Leo Weisgerber immediately took up the idea and used it to describe the
picture of the world of German. In the meantime, numerous pictures of
the world have been examined and described, and it has also been shown
how they have changed over the years. In the comparative analysis of
languages, dierences have been proved. At least the eld of color words,
of kinship terminology, of terms of mind and reason, and of expressions
characterizing the dying of man and beast shall be mentioned here. But
there is a similar structure in the eld of syntax. What is important here
is the idea of sentence construction. There is only a limited number of
phrase structures available in each language which can be used to make
statements concerning states and events.
These explanations should have claried further why Uexkull's theory
of self-world is so important for Humboldt's idea of Weltbild and the
integrational view of language based on it. It was my intention to show
that the focus is on a necessary supplementing of the biological premises
by the mental component, which is decisive for man. This is the only way
of fully grasping the human self-world.
It has also been stressed that there are certain dierences between
both components. The physical and sensual component is valid for all
humans, for the whole species of Homo sapiens. In principle, the mental
component, too, holds for all humans, but, because of the dierent
worlds of language due to dierent cultures, there are varied realizations
of it. In a way one can say, following Humboldt, that all humans share
one language, that is a language characteristic of humans, but that every
language has its characteristics and that, furthermore, every human
makes individual use of his language.
It should be stressed that no man is a prisoner of his mother tongue,
but can learn any other language and can also acquire its picture of the
world. But he can only leave his own language by changing to another
one. He is not capable of reaching an entirely extralingual, `objective'
point of view.
The following reection is utopian, but it can indicate what is imaginable: If a person were granted the privilege to have an overall view of
all languages including their views of the world, he would gain an overall
view of all humanly possible views of the world at the same time. Just
like the picture seen through the compound eye of an insect is composed of many individual parts, here, too, many individual parts make
a whole. Even the mastery of only a few languages can give an insight
into this.
If one wants to gauge these dierences, one must look for a touchstone
rst. One possible measure is the translatability of one language into
another. The translation of this article, which was originally written in

Self-world and world of language 477

German, into akin English has once again shown that this is dicult even
in languages as highly developed as ours. The terms coined by Uexkull
and the counter-expressions invented by the critics were especially hard
to translate, and in some cases it seemed reasonable to add the German
expressions in parenthesis.
Some have claimed that everything can be translated into every language. But there are others who hold the opposite opinion and illustrate it
with the phrase `Traduttore traditore', the translator is a traitor.
As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Whether or not
something translates into another language depends, on the one hand,
on the stage of development of both source and target language and, on
the other hand, on the type of text and its degree of diculty. With the
languages of the civilized world being highly developed, it should be
easier to translate scientic texts with international technical terminology than, for example, philosophical texts with very special coinages.
The attempt to translate poems, the beauty of which depends to quite an
extent on their sonority and verse form, is often doomed to failure. This
can also be the case if texts are to be translated from world languages
into the languages of less developed tribes whose vocabularies are not
even close to being suciently extensive.
In conclusion, I shall try to summarize briey the main points of this
article. First of all, we can base our argumentation on the assumption that
there are two poles, namely, the extralingual world on the one side and,
on the other side, man, who is placed into this world and has to live
his life in it. It is obvious that he ts into this world from birth and that
he is endowed with a physical and sensory apparatus, which still has to
develop during the rst years of his life, but which, once it is fully developed, meets the requirements of life and enables man not only to perceive
and feel the worlds accessible to him, but also to understand them and
to work in them. One can only assess this achievement adequately if one
takes into account that the senses can only perceive very few of the
many physical and chemical stimuli coming from the outside world. It is
possible to say that this is a lter specic to the species. This ltered
input is then ltered again, and this time, this is a mental process in
which the input is made accessible to thought. This happens through
language, or rather through the individual languages, which bring out
what is important and signicant to the speakers. All of this nds
expression in the view of the world of each language. This view is also
inuenced by geographic and climatic conditions and by cultural
background, which has developed slowly over time. The physical and
sensory preconditions, i.e., the characteristics of the rst lter, have
become apparent through Uexkull's magnicent theory of self-world.

478 H. Gipper
Wilhelm von Humboldt pointed out the special features of the second,
the mental lter with his integrational language research. In order to
understand all of this, one has to consider the close interrelation between
language and thought, the discovery and eect of which can be followed not only in phylogeny, but can be rediscovered even today during
the process of language acquisition in any child and can also be well
described linguistically.
This is from where I derive my thesis that it is not possible to judge
and assess the nature of man as a creature of speech without Uexkull's
great achievement or without the view of the philosophy of language
based on Humboldt.
The Baltic baron was a very original researcher, a pronounced
`noticer' (Merkling), which is how he himself used to identify this type
of person. Because of his new ideas, he had to ght against resistance
from within his own ranks throughout his life. Even though he was
given several honorary doctorates and awarded various other honors,
he was never appointed to a chair at a university, which is a disgrace. His
Institute for Umwelt Research in Hamburg, which he had established
with great diculty, was continually faced with nancial problems. His
life was full of ghts and disappointments. He lost all his Baltic possessions. His last place of refuge was the beautiful Isle of Capri where
he had to live through the advance of the American and British troops,
which occupied the island. This is where he died in solitude, lovingly
cared for only by his wife Gudrun, after a brief illness, on 25 July 1944,
aged 79. His grave is situated, under pine trees and cypresses, on
a mountain slope covered with vineyards, which inclines towards the
Gulf of Naples.
Notes
1. Includes a detailed bibliography.
2. See chapter 6, `Eigenwelt und Sprachwelt. Ausbaumoglichkeiten der inhaltsbezogenen
Sprachtheorie im Anschlu an die Lehre Jakob von Uexkulls', in Gipper (1969 [1963]:
389426). See also the section on the problem of Umwelt (Das Umweltproblem), in
Plessner (1952: 333353), with contributions by F. Brock, P. Feldkeller, K. Friederich,
H. Kunz, A. Metzger, W. E. Muhlmann, H. Plessner, O. Storck, J. Thyssen, and
H. Weber. Participants in the discussion were: W. Brugger, A. Gehlen, M. Hartmann,
E. v. Holst, K. Lorenz, S. Moser, and E. Rothacker. Further articles on biological selfworld research by F. Brock, R. Bilz, K. Friederichs, K. Lorenz, H. Plessner, H. Schalsky,
and F. Stump, see in Studium Generale: Zeitschrift fur interdisziplinare Studien 3 (2/3),
1950.
3. See Uexkull's gure of the functional cycle at the beginning of this volume.
4. There are numerous examples in the works of Leo Weisgerber.

Self-world and world of language 479

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Gipper, Helmut (1969 [1963]). Bausteine zur Sprachinhaltsforschung: Neuere Sprachbetrachtung im Austausch mit Geistes- und Naturwissenschaft. Dusseldorf: Schwann.
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Uexkull, Gudrun von (1964). Jakob von Uexkull, seine Welt und seine Umwelt: Eine
Biographie. Hamburg: Christian Wegner.
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Helmut Gipper (b. 1919) is Professor Emeritus at the University of Munster, in Germany.
His research interests include the philosophy and theory of language, ethnolinguistics,
child language, and evolutive grammar. His major publications include Bausteine zur
Sprachinhaltsforschung (1969), Gibt es ein sprachliches Relativitatsprinzip? (1972), Sprachwissenschaftliche Grundbegrie und Forschungsrichtungen (1978), and Sprachwissenschaft und
Sprachphilosophie im Zeitalter der Romantik (with P. Schmitter, 1985).