The Serpent’s Egg and its Surroundings. A Political Mystification of Jakob von Uexküll’s Umweltlehre

This article critically reassesses the alleged intrinsic connection between Jakob von Uexküll’s Umweltlehre and the biopolitics of National Socialism, as recently advanced by Gottfried Schnödl and Florian Sprenger. Against the claim that Uexküll’s biological theory structurally entails totalitarian outcomes, the paper develops a twofold argument. First, it reconstructs Uexküll’s political writings, particularly the Staatsbiologie (1920/1933), showing their fragmentary, inconsistent, and largely occasional character. Rather than constituting a coherent political philosophy, these texts reflect shifting historical contingencies and biographical circumstances, thereby undermining the thesis of a systematic ideological program. Second, the paper offers a detailed analysis of the metaphysical foundations of Umweltlehre , focusing on the concept of Planmäßigkeit . It argues that this notion functions as a regulative, non-empirical principle akin to a Kantian idea, grounding the harmony between organism and environment without prescribing normative or political order. By emphasizing the primacy of functional activity over fixed form and the plurality of subject-specific Umwelten , the paper demonstrates that Uexküll’s framework resists both holistic reductionism and authoritarian unification, proving that there is no necessary derivation from Uexküll’s theoretical biology to totalitarian biopolitics. While acknowledging the problematic aspects of his political views, they ultimately remain theoretically inconsistent with his biological system. Consequently, the wholesale dismissal of Umweltlehre on political grounds is unwarranted, and a critical but nuanced engagement with Uexküll’s work remains both possible and philosophically productive.