concept

Umwelt

The private world an organism actually lives in, built entirely from the signals its senses can admit and its body can act upon. The biologist Jakob von Uexküll coined the term in 1934, drawing a sharp line between the Umgebung - the objective physical surroundings, shared by all - and the Umwelt - that same environment as filtered and built by one particular species. A tick and a deer share a forest but not a world. The crucial point: your own Umwelt is an edited slice too, even though from the inside it feels like the whole of reality.