Using Intelligent Self-Limitation to Explore the Distinction Between Environment and Umwelt

In this post, author Morten Knudsen reflects on the inspiration behind his article, “Environment and Umwelt: Grand Challenges and Intelligent Self-Limitation,” published in Business & Society. His reflection can be found below the paper’s abstract.

This commentary presents an epistemological perspective on grand challenges (GCs) suggesting that the distinction between Umwelt (what social systems observe) and environment (the surrounding but unobserved world) can help us provide deeper analyses of GCs. I argue that indifference to the environment outside the observed Umwelt is a root cause of GCs and suggest that organizations must compensate for society’s inability to address GCs by developing forms of intelligent self-limitation.

In 1934, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll published the beautiful book A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds. In text and drawings, Uexküll describes what the world looks like from the perspective of various animals. Each creature forms the center of its own world, its Umwelt, which surrounds it like a bubble. Umwelt, Uexküll suggests, is what an organism has access to through its sensory apparatus. The environment, on the other hand, is the world that surrounds the organism but is unobserved by it.

In my commentary, I suggest that the distinction between Umwelt and environment is relevant to the social sciences today because it can help us to provide deeper analyses of grand challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss. In a capitalist society, the bubble of capital’s Umwelt includes only those elements that are or can be made relevant to exchange values. This results in a marked indifference to the ways in which capitalism and its growth imperative affect and potentially destroy both social and natural preconditions for society that it does not observe as part of its Umwelt.

I suggest that organizations must compensate for society’s indifference to its environment by developing forms of intelligent self-limitation. Intelligent self-limitation means that organizations – based on reflections on the difference between Umwelt and environment, and thus on the unobserved, the unknown – adopt procedures that encourage them to refrain from activities that have a negative impact on the environment. I also argue that research has an important role to play in the development of intelligent self-limitation because it can qualify the political discussion about the conditions of possibility of intelligent self-limitation – when it is possible and when it requires regulation or even revolution to be realized.