The technical milieu and its evolution: Uexküll, Kapp, Cassirer, Simondon

This paper rethinks the classic biosemiotic model of the Umwelt, an organism’s lived, perceptual world arising via the functional circle of the body and the environment, by proposing a triadic Umwelt model in which technics, alongside body and environment, forms a foundational element of human evolution and perceptual experience. Drawing on the primary ethology of Jakob von Uexküll, and the later work on technical and human evolution by Ernst Kapp, Ernst Cassirer, and Gilbert Simondon, it explores how humans and technical objects have coevolved in ways that shape perception, cognition, and cultural expression. Uexküll’s biosemiotic Umwelt theory is modified through a number of historical contributions to the philosophy of technology that are still of great importance today, including Kapp’s organ-projection model and Cassirer’s view of technics as a symbolic form that mediates how humans relate to the external world and one another. Simondon’s theory of individuation further reveals how technologies are not static instruments but evolving entities that shape and are shaped by human environments. In a world increasingly structured by digital and algorithmic systems, this article argues that technics is a constitutive element of how humans understand and inhabit different environments, whether physical or virtual. This shift carries various ethical implications, particularly as digital infrastructures mould, influence and even govern human perception, agency, and autonomy. By modifying the Umwelt through viewing technics as a fundamental component of its structure, this article proposes a framework for digital ethics rooted in relational, embodied, and coevolutionary understandings of human-technical entanglement.