Perhaps there has not been, in the history of the thought of the century that passed, a book as read and "agenciada" as own by the philosophers. And this is made all the more remarkable by the fact that it is a book written by a non-philosopher. Indeed, these "wanderings" of the Estonian-German ethologist were celebrated by his contemporaries Cassirer, Heidegger, Husserl, Ortega and Gasset, then by Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem, etc., closer by Deleuze, Lacan, Sloterdijk, Agamben , Latour.
Wanderings that describe the animal worlds, but not from the human subject as the first and last reference, but from themselves. How is it possible? Only through the invention of a concept, that of the surrounding world, which involves an enormous effort to objectively, and not anthropologically, grasp the existence and life of animals.
The key distinction is between the surrounding worlds, those species of bubbles where each being is king, territory where he is always victorious, where the animal acts and perceives according to the plan of nature; And the wider environment, in which we commonly get lost in a profuse and confused sign, where the sign is separated from the thing, and where we always lose, we lose our surrounding world.
The consequences of this concept are incalculable, and exceed the great blow that in its time meant, as part of the battle that freed the biology against the physiology and the evolutionism. That is why the fervor of philosophers. But also the endless ethical-political drifts of glimpsing, for example, the wanderings of a small tick: All the wealth of the world around the tick contracts and transmutes into a needy picture, consisting mainly of just three perceptual signs and three Signs-their surrounding world. The poverty of the surrounding world, however, guarantees certainty in working, and certainty is more important than wealth.