Meaning-Making in Animals and other Creatures Whiteheadian Reflections on Biosemiotics after listening to Professor Kalevi Kull
"Prof. Kalevi Kull University of Tartu, Estonia Kalevi Kull is Professor of Biosemiotics at the University of Tartu in Estonia. A leading figure in biosemiotics, he investigates the semiotic processes in living systems – how organisms produce and interpret signs. His background spans field ecology and theoretical biology, and since 1997 he has served as a professor in Tartu’s Department of Semiotics. Kull’s work covers biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, and theoretical biology, examining how meaning-making and communication occur in organisms and ecosystems. He has also been President of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies since 2015. "The Biosemiotic Leap into Life’s Freedom" Biosemiotics is the study of prelinguistic meaning-making throughout the entire realm of living.
If living systems are those capable of meaning-making, biosemiotics is biology. As it occurs, the most interesting problems studied earlier in philosophy converge in biosemiotics: the preconditions of free choice, indeterminacy, freedom itself, the origin of logic and contradiction as such, but also of representation, categorization, anticipation, emergence, autonomy, agency, knowing, value, and moreover, the aesthetic. I’ll focus in my talk on the conditions of free choice and the origin of umwelt as understood in semiotic biology. It is important that the explanation is not based on evolution or survival conditions."
Reflections on Biosemiotics
Biosemiotics is a field of academic inquiry that studies the capacities of living biological organisms to interpret their worlds and make meaning of them. It begins from the idea that living organisms are not mere machines devoid of interiority, whose behavior can be fully understood by reference to external forces that determine that behavior, but are also, and more deeply, living subjects with interiority of their own. In interacting with their environments, such organisms make decisions about how to receive and respond to what they encounter and thereby generate meaning, if only for the moment at hand. A leading figure in the field is Prof. Kalevi Kull University of Tartu, Estonia, I offer Whiteheadian reflections on his lectures.
Six Ideas From Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism provides a cosmological framework that both affirms and deepens this biosemiotic intuition. Whitehead proposes that all actual entities—whether they be electrons, cells, animals, or human persons—are concrescing subjects of experience. Each has an interiority, a subjective aim, and a desire for satisfaction in the immediacy of its own becoming, whether conscious or unconscious. From this perspective, meaning-making is not an accidental or late-emerging feature of the universe but is woven into the very fabric of actuality. Whitehead’s philosophy further offers specific ideas for understanding how processes of interpretation and meaning-making might occur within such subjects.
First, there is Whitehead’s notion of prehension, which can be understood as a fundamental means of social signaling and responsiveness in the universe. Prehensions are the basic acts by which a subject feels, takes account of, and responds to other entities. They are not limited to conscious perception or symbolic communication but operate at every level of actuality, from molecular interactions to animal behavior and human social life. From a biosemiotic perspective, prehensions can be understood as the most primitive form of semiosis: ways in which organisms register relevance, attraction, threat, or opportunity in their environments and in one another. Through prehensions, organisms “signal” simply by being what they are and by how they affect others. Social coordination, communication, and mutual influence thus arise not only through explicit signs and codes but through the felt transmission of states, tendencies, and intensities across relational fields.
Second, there is Whitehead’s notion of the subjective aim at satisfaction, understood as the immanent lure by which a concrescing subject is oriented toward its own completion. The subjective aim is not an externally imposed goal nor a consciously formulated intention (except in rare cases), but an inwardly felt directionality shaping how the many data of experience are integrated into a unified moment of becoming. It expresses what this subject, in this situation, is striving to become. Satisfaction, in Whitehead’s technical sense, is the fulfillment of this aim—not as mere pleasure or efficiency, but as an achieved intensity of experience, in which contrasts are harmonized into a coherent whole. From this perspective, meaning is not something added to experience after the fact; it is intrinsic to the process of becoming itself. To have meaning is to feel that one’s moment of existence “hangs together” in a way that is fitting, vivid, and complete relative to the possibilities available. The subjective aim thus functions as a primordial orienting principle of meaning-making, guiding each subject toward the most appropriate realization of value that the situation allows.
Third, there is the Whiteheadian notion of decision as a unique act of self-determination made by the concrescing subject. In such decision, a possibility space is narrowed in a way that can be analogized to a collapse of a wave function: one possibility is selected and actualized, and in being actualized, other real alternatives are excluded. Meaning, on this view, is inseparable from choice; it arises through the decisive act by which a subject commits itself to one way of becoming rather than another.
Fourth, there is Whitehead’s account of physical purposes, especially as these apply to very simple actual entities, such as quantum events in the depths of atoms. These entities receive information and feeling from their environments through experience in the mode of causal efficacy, whereby the past is felt as an efficacious presence. In the course of concrescence, such entities abstract from what they have received certain potentialities that were actualized in their sources and then “decide,” in a minimal but real sense, whether to re-embody or not re-embody those possibilities in arriving at their own satisfaction.
Fifth, there is Whitehead’s account of propositions. In more complex concrescing subjects, propositions function as lures for feeling: they present possibilities for how the world might be taken up, interpreted, and integrated. Propositions do not merely represent what is the case; they propose what might be felt, valued, or enacted. In this way, they guide decision-making by shaping the possibility space within which choices are made. Propositions thus function as semiotic structures internal to experience itself, mediating between what has been received from the past and what may be creatively actualized in the future. Through propositions, meaning becomes anticipatory as well as retrospective, oriented not only to what has been but to what might yet come to be.
Sixth, there is Whitehead’s concept of societies of concrescing subjects and, more specifically, linear ordered societies, within which concrescing subjects inherit from predecessors and contribute to successors in a continuous line of succession. In such societies, each new moment of experience builds upon the past and helps shape the future, giving rise to a temporally extended unity—a self that endures through change. The meanings generated within these societies are therefore not merely meanings for a single moment but meanings sustained and transformed over time.
Such organisms have histories and trajectories; they have stories that can be told about where they have been and where they are going. All organisms seek meaning in the moment, insofar as each concrescing subject aims at satisfaction in its immediate becoming; some organisms, however—those which are linear ordered societies, which have, as it were, psyches shaped by but not reducible to their bodies—also seek meaning over time. In these cases, meaning is not confined to momentary satisfaction but unfolds across successive occasions of experience, forming patterns of continuity, expectation, and response.
Thus we can speak of two kinds of meaning: meaning in the moment, understood as satisfaction, and meaning over time, understood as narrative continuity. We seek meaning not only in the immediacy of the moment but also meaning over time, whereby we sense that our lives as a whole have meaning, and not just the moments at hand. Human beings exemplify this most clearly, but Whitehead’s philosophy opens the door to recognizing that other organisms, too, may participate in story-shaped, semiotically structured forms of existence, possessing their own kinds of continuity, memory, and identity through time.
If, as Whitehead suggests, something like this is occurring at every level of the universe wherever there is actuality, then the universe itself can be understood as biosemiotic—provided that the term bio is used in an expanded sense. On this view, bio refers not only to biological organisms in the conventional sense but to any entity with subjectivity, a lifeworld, subjective aims, and affective tone. Understood in this way, the universe is a vast field of interpretation and response, alive with meaning-making at every scale of existence.
The Lure of Beauty
In light of Kull’s talk and the discussion that followed, I am struck by how general a Whiteheadian framework is when set alongside the highly specific and nuanced discussions now taking place within biosemiotics. Some biosemioticians may find such a framework helpful as a cosmological horizon; others may find it too abstract to be of direct use. One issue that emerges clearly at this intersection concerns the question of teleology. If organisms seek meaning—either as satisfying intensity in the moment or as narrative continuity over time—are they driven by predetermined goals or teloi?
At one level, Whitehead’s answer is "no." The possibility spaces within which organisms make their decisions are contextual, historically conditioned, and continually evolving. They are not fixed in advance, nor do they determine outcomes in a mechanical way. The only broadly invariant telos in Whitehead’s scheme is that each concrescing subject seeks satisfying intensity, whatever the situation it faces.
At another level, however, Whitehead’s answer may be “yes, in a way.” For concrescing subjects include within their own constitutions an inner aim not merely to enjoy some intensity, but to enjoy the best possible intensity relative to what is genuinely possible in the situation at hand. This “best possible” is not merely a matter of personal preference; it is shaped by the objective conditions of the universe and by the needs of the wider wholes—societies, ecosystems, and communities of life—within which subjects find themselves. In this way, Whitehead affirms an immanent normativity without fixed final causes.
At this point, Kalevi Kull’s concept of Umwelt can be fruitfully reinterpreted in Whiteheadian terms. An organism’s Umwelt may be understood as the subjective space of concrescence: the particular way the actual world is present within a concrescing subject as its world—the field of relevance, significance, and affordance within which it finds itself. This subjective space is not a private mental construction, nor a neutral objective environment, but a lived world constituted through prehensions of what matters to the subject. Different organisms inhabit different Umwelten, even when sharing the same physical surroundings, because they prehend and interpret the world differently.
Crucially, these subjective spaces are not sealed off from one another. In Whitehead’s terms, they are interwoven within nexūs—networks or patterns of actual entities that mutually prehend one another without collapsing into a single perspective. A nexus is thus a field of non-determining mutuality, in which subjects partially share their worlds without losing their distinctiveness. From a biosemiotic perspective, this helps explain how meaning-making can be simultaneously individual and relational: organisms inhabit their own Umwelten while participating in shared nexūs of interaction, communication, and co-constitution.
It is within these shared but non-identical subjective spaces that Whitehead’s notion of beauty becomes especially salient. Beauty, for Whitehead, names the achievement of harmony with intensity—the integration of diverse elements into a coherent, vivid, and mutually enhancing whole. Beauty is not an aesthetic overlay added after meaning is made; it is the evaluative standard by which the “best possible” intensity is discerned within a given Umwelt and across the nexūs in which that Umwelt is embedded. To seek the best possible intensity is thus to seek beauty: a fitting, relational achievement of value that respects both the subject’s own perspective and the wider web of relations it inhabits.
Seen in this light, teleology is neither imposed from without nor rigidly predetermined. It emerges immanently within subjective worlds and shared relational fields, as a lure toward richer, more coherent, and more inclusive forms of meaning. Whitehead’s cosmology thus offers a way of honoring the pluralism of Umwelten emphasized by biosemiotics while also affirming a normative orientation toward beauty that operates without erasing difference or freedom.