An umwelt (from the German word for “environment”; plural umwelten) is the world as one particular animal senses and experiences it, the small slice of reality its senses let in. The idea, from the zoologist Jakob von Uexküll, tells us that every animal, ourselves included, lives inside its own sensory bubble, and that other animals’ worlds are not lesser versions of ours but different worlds altogether. It sits close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s teaching that other beings have their own kinds of consciousness, and its warning against measuring everything by ourselves.
What is an umwelt? #
The science writer Ed Yong explains it in his book An Immense World (2022). The word was “defined and popularised by the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909”. An umwelt is not simply an animal’s surroundings: “an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience, its perceptual world.”1
Uexküll’s most famous example was the tick. “A tick, questing for mammalian blood, cares about body heat, the touch of hair, and the odour of butyric acid that emanates from skin.” Colours, sounds and everything else pass it by. “The tick doesn’t wilfully ignore them. It simply cannot sense them and doesn’t know they exist.”2 Uexküll compared each body to a house, with windows for light, sound, smell, taste and touch, each looking out on its own garden.
Importantly, Yong says, Uexküll “saw animals not as mere machines but as sentient entities, whose inner worlds not only existed but were worth contemplating.” And the idea applies to us too. Our human world is bigger than a tick’s, but “we are still stuck inside one, looking out. Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way.”3
What does Ed Yong’s book show? #
Yong is a science writer who wrote for The Atlantic, where he won a Pulitzer Prize.4 An Immense World takes the reader through the senses one by one: smell, taste, sight, colour, pain, heat, touch, hearing, echolocation, and the electric and magnetic senses that some animals have and we lack entirely.
A dog out on a walk, for example, lives in a world of scent. Yong spends time with the psychologist Alexandra Horowitz and her dog Finn: “When Finn sniffs, he is not merely assessing the present but also reading the past and divining the future. And he is reading biographies.” For Horowitz, the lesson is, “Let dogs be dogs.” Yong suggests that the right question is not how good an animal’s sense of smell is, but “How important is smell to that animal?”5 Humans, too, have more of a nose than we think. Yong mentions the Jahai people of Malaysia, “the Semaq Beri, the Maniq, and the many other hunter-gatherer groups who have dedicated smell vocabularies.”6
Throughout, he refuses to rank. “This is a book not about superiority but about diversity.” He warns that “we childishly rank animals according to the sharpness of their senses”, when “Each species is constrained in some ways and liberated in others.” Animals, he writes, “have worth in themselves.”7
Can we ever know what it is like to be another animal? #
Only partly, and that calls for humility. Yong draws on the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous essay asking what it is like to be a bat. Nagel concluded that we cannot fully know, but Yong reads him as offering “a call for humility.” Perhaps the commonest, and least recognised, way we project ourselves onto animals, he suggests, is “the tendency to forget about other Umwelten, to frame animals’ lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs.”8
The writer Carl Safina, who holds a doctorate in ecology, in Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (2015), comes at the same question from the side of animal minds and feelings. Watching elephants with the researcher Cynthia Moss, he heard her say that “Elephants experience joy”, adding, “It may not be human joy. But it is joy.” Her comment, he writes, “implied that humans are not the measure of all things.”9 Safina is more hopeful than Nagel about how much we can understand. Of other animals’ minds, he writes, “The differences are a lot, but the similarities are enough.”10
The philosopher Vinciane Despret, in What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? (2016), takes the idea in another direction. What an animal shows us depends on the questions we put to it and the setting we put it in, and the question the umwelt really raises, she suggests, is what matters to the animals themselves.11 See Do animals think and feel?
Has science underestimated animals? #
Safina thinks it has. For much of the twentieth century, scientists were trained to avoid any suggestion that animals think or feel. “By banning what was considered anthropomorphic, the behaviourists perpetuated the opposite error. They helped institutionalise the all-too-human notion that only humans are conscious and can feel anything.”12
He is equally wary of the tests used to measure animal intelligence. “When we look for ‘intelligence’ in other species, we often commit Protagoras’s error of believing that ‘man is the measure of all things.’” On the famous mirror test, in which animals with a mark on their face are shown a mirror, he notes that when an animal fails, “all it proves is that they don’t understand reflection.”13
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely, though Paul Francis’s books do not use the word umwelt. They make the same case against measuring other beings by ourselves. Of intelligence tests built around human abilities, drawing on the writer Derrick Jensen‘s book The Myth of Human Supremacy: “This is ‘garbage in, garbage out’. It is blinkered and nonsensical because the tests are biased.”14 The mirror test has the same flaw: “One of the problems with this experiment is that it is not measuring consciousness but self-awareness.”15 See What is the myth of human supremacy?
It also teaches that other beings have their own kinds of consciousness, often so different from ours that we miss them. Plants are not less conscious than we are; “Rather, it is because they have a different kind of consciousness.”16 And, “we are the aliens, moving too fast most of the time to realise the sentience of plants.”17 The right response, as with Yong, is humility: “This is not about hierarchy, but about family.”18 See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
Therapeutic Shamanism also has its own way into another being’s world: shapeshiftingShapeshifting. Becoming another being within a journey, fully enough to know it from the inside: one of the two routes to grokking, a transformation practice, and a direct experience of interconnection. Read the full answer, in a shamanic journey. It “helps us to understand what it is like to be that thing”, and “This is not an intellectual understanding, but a deep felt-senseFelt sense. Eugene Gendlin’s term for the whole bodily ‘feel’ of an issue: deeper than emotion, deeper than words, reached through Focusing. Read the full answer, a knowing from the inside out.”19 See What are transformation practices and shapeshifting?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
In how far consciousness reaches. Yong writes that “Consciousness isn’t an inherent property of all life. It arises from nervous systems”,20 and Safina places sentience on a sliding scale, “from complex in people to seemingly none in plants.”21 Animism goes much further: “Animists believe that everything is alive and conscious”, and “This is far more than just a belief, though, for animists actually experience the world in this way.”22
There is a difference, too, over whether we can step into another being’s world. Yong believes that understanding another animal needs what Horowitz calls “an informed imaginative leap”, but he doubts the stories in which humans literally step into an animal’s body: “You can’t simply imagine how a human mind would work in a bat’s body or an octopus’s, because it wouldn’t work.”23 Therapeutic Shamanism does not offer shapeshifting as a scientific account of another animal’s senses; it is a felt experience that brings “a sense of connection and bonding with the thing that we have shapeshifted into.”24 See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
