Jakob von Uexküll tra Kant e Leibniz. Dalla filosofia trascendentale alla topologia del vivente

Abstract

To outline his conception of living being as a subject of a closed world where it is perfectly “adapted”, the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll constantly refers to Kant’s philosophy, according to which «reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own». Yet the Kantian transcendentalism also requires pure a priori structures, allowing the transfer from elementary sense-data to concepts, but such structures are not fully compatible with Uexküll’ environmental topology, which is dominated by the “language of the signs”. Instead the monadology of Leibniz seems more corresponding to this biosemiology, because it allows to reconcile the materiality of signs with the immateriality of their countless meanings. But this requires the introduction of an alien factor to the topology of Uexküll and perhaps present in Kant: the time as functor of the genetic identity or “genidentity”.