**6. A mereology of the Septuagint's G-d: Philo's** *huparxis*

If both Husserl and Augustine offer mereologies of bodiless wholes without organs or parts, an interpretative move of Philo of Alexandria in his understanding of relationships between the Septuagint's G-d and the world (*cosmos*) can be revealing of the common structural foundation of the three mereologies.17

<sup>15</sup> Ref. [14], pp. 428-463.

<sup>16</sup> This similarity undergirds the connection Husserl draw between the singularity of the holist earth and singularity of the humanity, as well.

<sup>17</sup> I am very far from proposing an account of the "influences" of Philo on Augustine or Augustine on Husserl, in the style of historical realism. Rather, three different instances of thinking collectively unfold a common foundation (either the one in the past or the one yet to come from that past and towards our future), a foundation which might not have been available to any of these thinkers in a historically "realist" or call it historically "experientialist" sense. This foundation however has everything to do with, and as we will soon see, extend the mereology of this kind, as this mereology is glaringly missing in environmentalism and in approaches to the environmentalist crisis today.

At this juncture, the key is a polemical background, against which Philo' creates a notion (and a neologism): *huparxis*. In his *On Creation of the World*, Philo argues against the so-called a-theists. Unlike modern atheists denying the existence of G-d, Philo's atheists feel abandoned by G-d. They affirm that, because the G-d of the Septuagint is not a part of the world, the G-d cannot affect worldly matters either. Neither a part of the world nor a thing among other things, the G-d must have either withdrawn from the world soon after the act of creation, or was unable to interfere in the matters of the created world from the get-go. The underlying stance was that a non-created G-d, who produced or created the world, cannot care for or get involved with its creations: Only a creature can help a creature, the creator, however, cannot. The stance gave two respective versions of a-theists— G-d has withdrawn from or G-d has never been a part of the created world, and therefore, G-d cannot take care of people in it. Far from denying G-d's existence (a move which could not even occur to them), these "atheists" felt left or abandoned by G-d, who has created the world but cannot help anybody in it. In response, at the end of *On Creation of the World*, Philo invents the new philosophical concept. Literally meaning "under the *arche*" and by extension "under the beginning" or "under the principle" or "under the rule," the concept of *huparxis* suggested that the world is "under the rule" of G-d, even if G-d is not a part of it. Neither a part nor having parts, the G-d is a whole under the sway of which the world stands and from which the world stems in all of its parts. The whole controls and cares about the world, even if this whole is not a part therein, Philo intimates. He thereby defeats the a-theists of his time.

The world "subsists" under G-d, even if G-d is not a part of the world, Philo's innovation further suggests to his Latin adherents. With Marcus Victorinus (fourth century C.E.), Latin theology mirrors Philo's invention of *huparxis* with a Latin one, *existentia*. 18 The notion allows to claim the "existence" of G-d, even if G-d can be neither defined nor fit the grid of genres and species. If in an Aristotelian tradition after Porphyry (268–270) in his *Isagoge* and in the Latin translation thereof by Boethius (c. 477–524 C.E.) "to be" (as opposed "to seem to be") means to be definable in terms of genres, species, differences, property and accident, Victorinus allows for G-d to be without any possible definition of G-d. If essence means a definition of what a thing is, then, after Victorinus, *existentia* or existence comes to mean G-d who *is*, even without essence. This Latin interpretation of *huparxis* as *existentia* features a philosophical notion now distilled from its polemical context. *Existentia* and *subsistentia* provide two Latin renditions for *huparxis*, thus allowing to claim what Philo did not: The G-d of the Bible exists and everything else subsists under G-d. Moreover, and as a consequence of the move, the existing G-d is not a (definable) "what" (essence) but rather the undefinable Who (existence). What we have here is a mereology of G-d as existence without parts and without *whats*: the mereology of the who.

<sup>18</sup> See: Courtine, Jean-François « Essence, substance, subsistence, existence » in Ref. [15], pp. 298–310. On *Huparixs* versus *ousia* and a transition to *existentia* see idem: 301ff. Courtine mentions the polemical context of Philo, but seems to be reading the transition retroactively, as if that polemical context was extraneous to the concept of existentia, which as it were, was already in Philo.

*Down to Earth?: A Crisis of the Environmental Crisis DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104595*

In this context, Husserl's "earth" and Augustine "mind" present themselves as versions of Philo's polemical mereology of huparxis.19 Augustine argues against reducing *mens* to a property of any substance; in that, he is similar to Victorinus, for whom G-d exists because G-d has no essence. Husserl arguably continues Augustine move. The result is that Victorinus, Augustin and Husserl, however different from one another, afford a mereology of the whole without parts, focusing as it does in all the three versions on what Augustin characterizes as the memory of the present, Victorinus as existentia and Husserl as Earth. Because all the three are versions or interpretations of Philo's mereology of huparxis, the question becomes: Does Philo's mereology have yet another *elan*? We will detect this other elan of Philo in Palestinian rabbinical schools of rhetoric, which will allow to palpate the limits of the direction the mereologies of Victorinus, Augustin and Husserl are taking.
