**3. Husserl's bodiless earth**

Looking for a logically necessary foundation ("source," *Ursprung*) from which space and nature arise, Husserl arrives to a surprising result. Contrary to how one experiences earth (a locality and its extensions to national territory and to the Globe), on the level of a logical necessity, earth as a whole is not a body, and all bodies we know or can know empirically emerge by a separation from that bodiless whole.6 This whole has neither parts nor organs. Every mereology sees the whole as more than a sum of its parts; Husserl's mereology is not an exception; what, however, is exceptional is that if "parts" are "Copernican" bodies—planets and the Earth as one of them—the "whole" is not a body. In this, Husserl differs from organic mereologies, in which not only "parts" or strictly speaking "organs" are bodies, but the whole, the organism is a body as well.7 Earth is not.

However, Husserl's is not the only mereology, in which the whole consists of neither parts nor of organs; Augustine view of the *mens*, mind—human and divine alike—is another.8 Thematically different, "earth" versus "mind," the two mereologies, however, approximate each other in structure. Drawing connections and differences between the two thinkers, a slower reading of the core elements of Husserl's 1934 theory of earth is in order. I commit such a reading by reclaiming the importance of the Husserl's argument in the context of environmentalism and environmental crisis. In this context, Husserl allows us to see that however much environmentalism finds both the cause of and solution for the environmental crisis in the modern—read "Copernican," or heliocentric—science; the Ptolemean, geo-centric and humancentric approach remains to be a necessary core of environmentalist thinking. Husserl opens up a possibility to advance beyond the opposition between Ptolemy and Copernicus, toward its root in understanding earth as a ground of all experiences (of all environments); Husserl's work thus allows and demands to move beyond that ground toward an earth, which is not a body. That means to move toward a critique of environmentalism for missing what environmentalism attempts to defend most daringly: the earth.

<sup>6</sup> "The earth is a whole, the parts of which can be thought of as … itemizable, dividable bodies; yet as "whole" the earth is not a body" [1], p. 313; my transl. In Fred Kersten's translation, "The earth as a whole whose parts—if conceived by themselves as they can be as separated off, as separable—are bodies; but as a "whole" the earth is not a body.) Husserl adds polemically: "Here is a "whole" consisting of Copernican bodies as its parts, yet as a whole, the earth is not a body." (idem).

<sup>7</sup> In this essay, I do not address a line of thinking unfolding from Husserl notion of *Leib* ("visceral ego") through Merleau-Ponty to Deleuze's "body without organs." Below, I will justify this interpretation of Husserl's *Leib* as "visceral ego" in differentiating it from body-objects such as organic bodies in medicine, fashion bodies on podiums, cars, trains, or planets; but also from the bodiless ego, one often ascribes to Descartes. *Leib*, however important, and however (as we will see) Ptolemean is still only one of the split-offs from Husserl's bodiless Earth. See, for example [7], Ref. [8], pp. 9–16. Deleuze develops Husserl's visceral body into a "body without organs;" in parallel and in distinction, this essay highlights the other line in Husserl's argument, the simple mereology of the bodiless (and thus also organ-less) earth.

<sup>8</sup> I refer primarily to Augustine's approach to *mens* in *De Trinitate* (datable to the first third of the fifth century, C.E.) addressed in the second part of this essay. See: Ref. [9].
