Magic Worlds

A magic world comes into being when one is driven by hidden forces to act in a certain way, or as in the example of the pea weevil larva, the innate path appears to be a magical phenomena. But is not the larva impelled to burrow into the pea based upon instinct? Uexküll says ‘It is quite sure that we are here dealing with an activity which, though conforming to a plan, is yet utterly senseless from the weevil larva’s point of view, for no sensory stimulus of the future beetle can possibly reach its larva.’ (Uexküll,68). In the case of the little girl who shouts at the match stick “’Take away the witch, I cant bear to look at her horrid face any more.”’(, 67) her magic world seems vastly different from that of the larva. While the larva is acting upon something innately determined, and as yet hidden from view, the little girl experiences a kind of magic that seems to arise from her imagination. That I feel is the distinction which I am having trouble with. How can one take imagination into account with regards to an insect that is compelled to burrow into a pea? Uexküll doesn’t elaborate upon imagination as playing a part in the magic world of a human beings, and to me that is a crucial part of it, or at least something I would like to explore further.

It is surely baffling how one species can be innately driven to take action regardless of any external forces that might dissuade it. It is magic perhaps, and yet how can that be compared fairly to the case of a human being? The magic world of the larva and that of the little girl seem to me so vastly different in nature that one simply cannot compare or contrast them; however, the problem is also due in part to what Uexküll presents to us at the beginning of the book. ‘We are easily deluded into assuming that the relationship between a foreign subject and the objects in his world exists on the same spatial and temporal plane as our own relations with the objects in our human world. This fallacy is fed by a belief in the existence of a single world, into which all living creatures are pigeonholed’ ( p.14). One is bound by the confines of her umwelt, unable to conceive of the umwelt of any other living creature.  There is no objective reality beyond the subjective one which each of us inhabits. The umwelt of anyone or anything is an impenetrable and in many ways magical world simply because it is unknown and irrevocably closed off to us. I suppose this is why we cannot really speak of the magic world of either the larva or the little girl, because how could one climb out of the umwelt in order to peer into someone elses? It is unknowable and shall remain so, it seems.

Could Teilhard’s theory of the noosphere as the unification of all human thought provide a way in which human beings might see beyond their respective umwelten?  He states, ‘We are faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousness equivalent to a sort of super-consciousness. The idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection. (Teilhard, 252).  Is the final stage of noogenesis, the transcendence of umwelt on a cosmic scale?  Uexküll presents to his reader the definition of umwelt, saying, ‘We thus unlock the gates that lead to other realms, for all that a subject perceives becomes his perceptual world and all that he does, his effector world. Perceptual and effector worlds together form a closed unit, the Umwelt.’(p.6) So in a certain sense the examples of the larva and the little girl, absurd as it seems to place them in juxtaposition to one another, is evidence of the magic that is everywhere amongst life and which remains inexplicable. It is however all the while quite evident that there are several differences between Teilhard and Uexküll which may make it impossible to equate their philosophy. Uexküll was investigating not only human life, but he studied in depth the world of animals, while Teilhard wrote of human consciousness. I should hasten to restate my question, asking instead, if the noosphere could be the transcendence of all human umwelten? This might result in total disaster, unspeakable damage might ensue, for as Uexküll warns us at the end of the book when speaking of nature ‘Should one attempt to combine her objective qualities, chaos would ensue.’(p.80).