Photo by Alexander Naglestad on Unsplash
Concrescence and the
Subjective Worlds of Animals
Animals have their own subjective worlds—humans very much included. They—we—have our umwelten. Literally, the German word Umwelt means “environment” or “surroundings,” but in biology and semiotics (as introduced by Jakob von Uexküll) it refers to the unique, subjective sensory world, or perceived environment, of a particular organism. An umwelt is shaped by an organism’s senses, needs, and capacities, and it constitutes a distinctive “world” of its own—different from that of other organisms, including members of the same species, even when they occupy the same physical space. As individuals, human and more than human, we have worlds of our own.
On this page you will find a talk by Professor Tim Elmo Feiten on umwelten, followed by a process-relational, or Whiteheadian, commentary. Feiten argues that the subjective worlds of animals are real, but self-enclosed and devoid of state-sharing with other animals. A Whiteheadian approach, by contrast, proposes that the subjective worlds of animals are porous: they include, in limited and selective ways, the feelings of other animals. Both Feiten and Whitehead will emphasize that the subjective worlds of animals are filled with feeling, decision, and purpose, and that the "metaphysics" of animals requires respect for individuality, for uniqueness, for the dignity of the 'other.'
- Jay McDaniel
On this page you will find a talk by Professor Tim Elmo Feiten on umwelten, followed by a process-relational, or Whiteheadian, commentary. Feiten argues that the subjective worlds of animals are real, but self-enclosed and devoid of state-sharing with other animals. A Whiteheadian approach, by contrast, proposes that the subjective worlds of animals are porous: they include, in limited and selective ways, the feelings of other animals. Both Feiten and Whitehead will emphasize that the subjective worlds of animals are filled with feeling, decision, and purpose, and that the "metaphysics" of animals requires respect for individuality, for uniqueness, for the dignity of the 'other.'
- Jay McDaniel
Talk by Tim Elmo Feiten
An Animal's Umwelt is a Closed
(Non-Porous) Subjective World
For more many more videos like this, see the YouTube channel of the Center for Process Studies.
Prof. Tim Elmo Feiten (Pennsylvania State University) is an interdisciplinary philosopher of science with a focus on the sciences of life, mind, and artificial intelligence. He uses the lens of embodied cognition to develop new readings of Jakob von Uexküll and Max Stirner, and to ask questions about art, science, technology, and society. Other research projects deal with public engagement with science, democratizing AI research, the status of LLMs, and methodological issues with computational modeling in the humanities and social sciences.
What if Uexküll Was Right? Facing the Ethnical
and Metaphysical Implications of Umwelt
Jakob Johann von Uexküll’s admirers have almost all agreed on one point: denying Uexküll’s view that each human individual inhabits its own private Umwelt and can never access the Umwelten of other subjects. This position has been variously decried as solipsist, idealist, or relativist and criticized for its alleged ethical and metaphysical implications. I address the problem of the privacy of Umwelt by outlining two kinds of response: a straight and a skeptical solution. I argue that straight solutions are unlikely to succeed and suggest that the ethical and metaphysical outcomes of a skeptical solution are nothing to be afraid of.
Jakob von Uexküll
Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) was a Baltic German biologist and philosopher whose work fundamentally reshaped how scientists and philosophers understand the lives of organisms. Trained as a zoologist, Uexküll challenged the dominant mechanistic and behaviorist models of biology by insisting that living beings are not passive machines reacting to external stimuli, but active subjects inhabiting meaningful worlds of their own. He introduced the influential concept of the umwelt—the perceptual and experiential world as it exists for a particular organism—which emphasized that every creature lives within a reality structured by its own sensory capacities, bodily needs, and practical concerns. A tick, a dog, and a human do not share the same world, even when they occupy the same physical environment; each inhabits a distinct field of significance shaped by what matters to it.
A Whiteheadian Response
An Animal's Umwelt is an
Open (Porous) Subjective World
of Emotion, Purpose, and Decision
In the talk above, Tim Elmo Feiten explains that there are two distinct senses of umwelt in Uexküll’s work. The first is the ethological umwelt—the umwelt as scientific description made by an outside observer. The second is the phenomenological umwelt—the subjective experience of the animal itself.
Feiten argues, following Uexküll, that phenomenological umwelts are private to the organism in question and that their experiences are not shared with others. They are, in his words, "closed" not open. Rather than seeing this as a problem, he regards it as an advantage, insofar as it makes possible—especially among humans—a genuine respect for otherness, which he understands as a precondition for ethical attitudes and behavior.
A Whiteheadian perspective both affirms this ethical concern for otherness and rethinks it by asking whether respect for difference requires closed experiential worlds, or whether it might instead emerge from a relational openness in which the experiences of others are inwardly felt by others. From this perspective, umwelten are not sealed interiors but porous fields of experience, constituted in part by the experiences of other experiencing subjects.
Indeed, the Whiteheadian point of view offers a fairly detailed account of the constitutive elements of an organism’s porous yet individualized umwelt—an account that may serve the purposes of science as well as philosophy. Below I offer a general outline of Whiteheadian concrescence, highlighting some of its most important elements: physical prehensions, subjective forms, conceptual feelings, awareness of possibility, acts of decision, and temporality.
From a process perspective, the phenomenal umwelt of a given organism (an individual animal, for example) has two inseparable sides: the organism’s subjective experience of the world as it is received through its senses, and the objective world as experienced. The subjective experience is private to the animal; the objective world is the public world that it experiences. The organism’s experience includes both the private and the public together in a single act of experiencing. The many of the objective world are together in the animal’s experience, unified in each moment of becoming.
There is also an emotional and cognitive side to this. Experiences, in this view, are private acts of feeling the presence of other things, and they are always accompanied by an emotional tone, which Whitehead calls a subjective form. In human life, these emotions include joy, sadness, courage, fear, gratitude, anger, disgust, delight, trust, mistrust, admiration, envy, love, and hate. Analogues to these emotions are likely found in other organisms as well—at the very least attraction and repulsion, pleasure and pain, and perhaps many others.
These emotions are not opposed to cognition; they are integral to it. In Whiteheadian terms, an animal’s experience includes both physical prehensions, through which it feels the causal presence of actualities, and conceptual prehensions, through which it feels possibilities--eternal objects—relevant to its situation.
Through conceptual prehensions, the animal anticipates possible ways of responding to what is given to it. These possibilities need not be consciously entertained or reflectively considered; they are often felt prereflectively as tendencies, appetitions, aversions, or lures toward action. In this way, emotion, anticipation, and decision are intertwined. This anticipatory feeling of possibilities is also the basis of meaning-making: what is felt matters to the organism because it bears on how the organism may continue its life. Meaning, in this sense, is not imposed from above or constructed through abstract representation; it emerges from the organism’s felt orientation toward possibilities for action within its world.
A given moment of experience in the ongoing umwelt of an animal is composed of many such feelings, or prehensions, and every prehension involves both an object prehended and a subjective form through which that object is felt, guiding the animal’s ongoing becoming and behavior.
The objects prehended are diverse. Some are other actualities, some are pure possibilities (eternal objects), and some are complexes in which actualities and possibilities are felt together. Crucially, the aspects of others that are included within a given organism’s umwelt include feelings that other organisms felt within their own phenomenal umwelts. The feelings of other animals are felt as energetic presences that have an impact on the organism in question. These presences may be felt through the organism’s senses, which provide the originary grounds for symbolic reference, and they may also be felt more directly as hybrid physical feelings of the mental states of others—that is, as causal influences not reducible to sensory representation alone. Through what Whitehead calls experience in the mode of causal efficacy, the concrescing subject of a given umwelt feels—always selectively and partially—the feelings of others.
In this way, umwelts are open and porous rather than closed. They incorporate aspects of others into themselves even as those others retain their own autonomy and integrity.
General Reflections
From a process perspective, a framework such as this can be of service scientifically, insofar as it invites empirical research into whether, and to what extent, animals can in fact share feelings and emotions. This includes, of course, human relations with one another.
It also has implications for ethics—particularly for the role of empathy in ethical life. By empathy I have in mind both imaginative empathy, that is, imagining what it might be like to be inside the experiential envelope of another organism, and direct empathy, that is, feeling the feelings of others, sometimes described as state sharing. A process perspective can help make sense of both forms of empathy. Whether or not other animals have imaginative empathy is an empirical question. Some may have an imaginative sense of the lived subjectivity of others; and others may not.
If must be emphasized, however, that empathy is not sufficient for an ethical life. As Feiten explains, an ethical life also includes respect for the integrity of the other and the dignity of the other—of human persons, to be sure, but also of other creatures, especially our closest kin, the animals. Such respect includes a willing of the well-being of the other, not merely a feeling with the other. This willing of another’s well-being must complement empathy if ethical life is to be sustained.
At the same time, it must be recognized that empathy itself is always partial. No matter how deep or direct, empathy never exhausts the life of another, nor does it fully include all the feelings of others. There is always more to the other than what is felt or shared. Respect for otherness, therefore, is not undermined by the limits of empathy; it is grounded in them. Such recognition of partiality—combined with care for the other’s flourishing—is the basis of a process ethic.
Expanded Horizons
From a process perspective, ethical life grows outward from local bonds toward world loyalty, without leaving the local behind. Local bonds include life-affirming relationships with family, friends, neighbors, and strangers, together with respect for the otherness of the more-than-human world that participates in every biotic community within which human beings are nested. These bonds arise through concrete encounters, shared vulnerabilities, and ongoing responsiveness.
Within this relational field, a process ethic allows for forms of empathy with nonhuman life—especially other animals—with whom there may be limited but genuine forms of state sharing. These empathic connections do not erase difference; rather, they deepen attentiveness to the particular ways other beings pursue their own forms of satisfaction and well-being.
At the same time, process thought insists that ethical concern cannot remain confined to proximate relationships alone. Because lives are interwoven within wider ecological and historical processes, ethical responsibility extends toward the larger whole of which local relations are parts. World loyalty names this widened sense of commitment: a loyalty not to an abstract totality, but to the ongoing flourishing of life on Earth as a community of communities.
The aspirational horizon of such loyalty is an ecological civilization—not a fixed endpoint, but a continuing practice of becoming in which human societies seek ways of living that honor diversity, sustain ecosystems, and cultivate mutual care among humans, with other animals, and with the Earth itself, recognizing that human beings are participants within, not masters over, the living world.
- Jay McDaniel with help from OpenAI
Feiten argues, following Uexküll, that phenomenological umwelts are private to the organism in question and that their experiences are not shared with others. They are, in his words, "closed" not open. Rather than seeing this as a problem, he regards it as an advantage, insofar as it makes possible—especially among humans—a genuine respect for otherness, which he understands as a precondition for ethical attitudes and behavior.
A Whiteheadian perspective both affirms this ethical concern for otherness and rethinks it by asking whether respect for difference requires closed experiential worlds, or whether it might instead emerge from a relational openness in which the experiences of others are inwardly felt by others. From this perspective, umwelten are not sealed interiors but porous fields of experience, constituted in part by the experiences of other experiencing subjects.
Indeed, the Whiteheadian point of view offers a fairly detailed account of the constitutive elements of an organism’s porous yet individualized umwelt—an account that may serve the purposes of science as well as philosophy. Below I offer a general outline of Whiteheadian concrescence, highlighting some of its most important elements: physical prehensions, subjective forms, conceptual feelings, awareness of possibility, acts of decision, and temporality.
From a process perspective, the phenomenal umwelt of a given organism (an individual animal, for example) has two inseparable sides: the organism’s subjective experience of the world as it is received through its senses, and the objective world as experienced. The subjective experience is private to the animal; the objective world is the public world that it experiences. The organism’s experience includes both the private and the public together in a single act of experiencing. The many of the objective world are together in the animal’s experience, unified in each moment of becoming.
There is also an emotional and cognitive side to this. Experiences, in this view, are private acts of feeling the presence of other things, and they are always accompanied by an emotional tone, which Whitehead calls a subjective form. In human life, these emotions include joy, sadness, courage, fear, gratitude, anger, disgust, delight, trust, mistrust, admiration, envy, love, and hate. Analogues to these emotions are likely found in other organisms as well—at the very least attraction and repulsion, pleasure and pain, and perhaps many others.
These emotions are not opposed to cognition; they are integral to it. In Whiteheadian terms, an animal’s experience includes both physical prehensions, through which it feels the causal presence of actualities, and conceptual prehensions, through which it feels possibilities--eternal objects—relevant to its situation.
Through conceptual prehensions, the animal anticipates possible ways of responding to what is given to it. These possibilities need not be consciously entertained or reflectively considered; they are often felt prereflectively as tendencies, appetitions, aversions, or lures toward action. In this way, emotion, anticipation, and decision are intertwined. This anticipatory feeling of possibilities is also the basis of meaning-making: what is felt matters to the organism because it bears on how the organism may continue its life. Meaning, in this sense, is not imposed from above or constructed through abstract representation; it emerges from the organism’s felt orientation toward possibilities for action within its world.
A given moment of experience in the ongoing umwelt of an animal is composed of many such feelings, or prehensions, and every prehension involves both an object prehended and a subjective form through which that object is felt, guiding the animal’s ongoing becoming and behavior.
The objects prehended are diverse. Some are other actualities, some are pure possibilities (eternal objects), and some are complexes in which actualities and possibilities are felt together. Crucially, the aspects of others that are included within a given organism’s umwelt include feelings that other organisms felt within their own phenomenal umwelts. The feelings of other animals are felt as energetic presences that have an impact on the organism in question. These presences may be felt through the organism’s senses, which provide the originary grounds for symbolic reference, and they may also be felt more directly as hybrid physical feelings of the mental states of others—that is, as causal influences not reducible to sensory representation alone. Through what Whitehead calls experience in the mode of causal efficacy, the concrescing subject of a given umwelt feels—always selectively and partially—the feelings of others.
In this way, umwelts are open and porous rather than closed. They incorporate aspects of others into themselves even as those others retain their own autonomy and integrity.
General Reflections
From a process perspective, a framework such as this can be of service scientifically, insofar as it invites empirical research into whether, and to what extent, animals can in fact share feelings and emotions. This includes, of course, human relations with one another.
It also has implications for ethics—particularly for the role of empathy in ethical life. By empathy I have in mind both imaginative empathy, that is, imagining what it might be like to be inside the experiential envelope of another organism, and direct empathy, that is, feeling the feelings of others, sometimes described as state sharing. A process perspective can help make sense of both forms of empathy. Whether or not other animals have imaginative empathy is an empirical question. Some may have an imaginative sense of the lived subjectivity of others; and others may not.
If must be emphasized, however, that empathy is not sufficient for an ethical life. As Feiten explains, an ethical life also includes respect for the integrity of the other and the dignity of the other—of human persons, to be sure, but also of other creatures, especially our closest kin, the animals. Such respect includes a willing of the well-being of the other, not merely a feeling with the other. This willing of another’s well-being must complement empathy if ethical life is to be sustained.
At the same time, it must be recognized that empathy itself is always partial. No matter how deep or direct, empathy never exhausts the life of another, nor does it fully include all the feelings of others. There is always more to the other than what is felt or shared. Respect for otherness, therefore, is not undermined by the limits of empathy; it is grounded in them. Such recognition of partiality—combined with care for the other’s flourishing—is the basis of a process ethic.
Expanded Horizons
From a process perspective, ethical life grows outward from local bonds toward world loyalty, without leaving the local behind. Local bonds include life-affirming relationships with family, friends, neighbors, and strangers, together with respect for the otherness of the more-than-human world that participates in every biotic community within which human beings are nested. These bonds arise through concrete encounters, shared vulnerabilities, and ongoing responsiveness.
Within this relational field, a process ethic allows for forms of empathy with nonhuman life—especially other animals—with whom there may be limited but genuine forms of state sharing. These empathic connections do not erase difference; rather, they deepen attentiveness to the particular ways other beings pursue their own forms of satisfaction and well-being.
At the same time, process thought insists that ethical concern cannot remain confined to proximate relationships alone. Because lives are interwoven within wider ecological and historical processes, ethical responsibility extends toward the larger whole of which local relations are parts. World loyalty names this widened sense of commitment: a loyalty not to an abstract totality, but to the ongoing flourishing of life on Earth as a community of communities.
The aspirational horizon of such loyalty is an ecological civilization—not a fixed endpoint, but a continuing practice of becoming in which human societies seek ways of living that honor diversity, sustain ecosystems, and cultivate mutual care among humans, with other animals, and with the Earth itself, recognizing that human beings are participants within, not masters over, the living world.
- Jay McDaniel with help from OpenAI