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51 pages 1 hour read

Ed Yong

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2022

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IntroductionChapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction Summary: “The Only True Voyage”

Yong introduces the early 20th-century bio-philosopher Jakob von Uexkull’s theory of the umwelt, which roughly translates to “environment,” but which Uexkull uses much more specifically to refer to the “sensory bubble” each animal species inhabits. Yong claims that Uexkull’s theory of the umwelt is the guiding philosophy for his presentation of scientific research about animals’ senses. He aims to provide a glimpse of the amazing range of umwelten (the plural of umwelt) in the world.

“This is a book not about superiority but about diversity” (7), Yong insists, providing this array of information not so that humans can learn about themselves by way of animals but so that they can learn about different species within their umwelten while also recognizing that their own imaginations are limited by their umwelt. Because each animal’s umwelt is determined by its unique sensory adaptations, each species experiences the world “partially.” While people may be able to recognize that animals perceive their worlds differently than humans do and, thus, experience the world differently, people cannot inhabit animals’ umwelten or ever fully understand it.

Uexkull’s insistence that each species creates unique worlds of meaning through its sensory experiences guides Yong’s presentation of the senses across species lines. Thus, he also must contend with the seemingly simple question of how many senses there actually are. To answer this question, he begins with Aristotle’s argument almost 2,400 years ago that there are five senses for humans and other animals: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. But Aristotle was wrong; there are many other senses that Yong will explore, some of which have only recently been “discovered” by humans. He also considers the ways that some senses overlap with others. For example, rattlesnakes can detect body heat, but their heat sensors are connected to the visual part of their brain.

While the chapters are organized around stimuli such as light, sound, and heat, the book is not limited to these categories in themselves. Instead, it uses them as an organizational tool through which humans can open up to the diversity of umwelten and what animals do with different stimuli.

Introduction Analysis

The book is written in the first person, and Yong presents himself as personally invested in demonstrating the range of animals’ umwelten. Yong hopes that the response he provokes will challenge the reader to respect different ways of being in the world, even though these umwelten may be confounding. While the unique umwelt of each species, including humans, necessarily limits its experiences and knowledge, one of the tenets of the book is that there are millions of umwelten in the world that humans will never understand.

While Yong is explicit about his indebtedness to Uexkull, who was adamant about animals’ worlds being different from but not less than humans’, he ironically refers to other-than-human animals throughout the book as “it,” except when other humans have given these animals a proper name. This use of the neuter pronoun denies them the subjectivity that the book claims to work so hard to reveal. It is unclear whether this is a conscious choice on the part of Yong or whether it reflects Western culture’s objectification of animals in general.

Science, in particular, has a history of denying animal subjectivity and continues to experiment on animals. Yong points to the “limitations” of studying animals in captivity, but the limitations Yong points out are those of researchers, not those imposed on animals by these researchers. Yong never asks the reader to consider the ways that animal captivity and experimentation limit the lives—and frustrate the umwelten—of the animals who are subjected to this research.

This ethical oversight may be because the book depends on animal experimentation that, in part, revealed the knowledge that the book tries to make accessible. Yong is interested in presenting the outcomes of this research rather than in questioning its methodologies. The book’s central assertions that it will approach “animals as animals” and that animals’ lives “have worth in themselves” (7) are at odds with the experiments that discount animal lives in their pursuit of scientific knowledge. The book’s methodology, then, is in tension with its claims to diversity, its assertion of animal lives as valuable in and of themselves, and its ostensible goal.

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