Umwelt - June 7 2022

 

Umwelt

June 7 2022

You know the feeling,

you see something

   —  maybe a car

like the one your new girlfriend drives   —

and suddenly they're everywhere.

Or a great new word

you never heard before

catches your ear,

and now it's turning up

over and over again.

It was a black Nissan Pathfinder

and fit her perfectly.

But that was years ago;

I'm sure that now

she's in something new.

And the word today is umwelt.

It must be in the zeitgeist

to have reappeared like this;

also German, of course,

the people who gave us shadenfreude

and weltschmerz.

It means “worldview”.

Perhaps how a bat perceives its surroundings,

a small airborne animal

who can see with reflected sound.

Or a dog

following her nose,

a spider

tuned to vibration.

Perhaps your neighbour,

who holds strange paranoid views

and votes for the wrong people.

Or that old girlfriend

(now, like me

old as well as former)

who saw things differently

and was probably right.

But back then, I had never heard umwelt

and couldn't have imagined

anything but

a singular world,

one objective truth.

That right and wrong

could be anything other

than absolute.

Umwelt brings to mind another foreign word that – although not widely used – has also been conscripted into English: ubuntu. The actual word, in its various forms, appears in many places in Africa, and represents a world view very much at odds with our individualistic, consumerist, and capitalist West: the idea that we as individuals only exist as part of a larger community; a communal, societal, environmental and spiritual world. We are not sovereign individuals. Rather, we would be better off seeing and defining ourselves in terms of relationship. A person is a person through other people. It's telling that no equivalent to ubuntu appears in any Western tongue.

This is one of the great strengths of the English language. While the French are preoccupied with purity and preservation, English is a living thing, omnivorous and not at all fussy: it will appropriate whatever word works, from any and all languages. Neither umwelt or ubuntu are much used. Still, they strike me as very useful words, and are there for the taking.

In this short clip, Nelson Mandela elaborates on the philosophy of ubuntu.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HED4h00xPPA