**4. Husserl's mereology of the bodiless earth**

Husserl departs from an understanding of the Earth as a body in either Ptolemean or Copernican sense and arrives to a mereological understanding of Earth "as a whole which is not a body," from which, however, all bodies—planets, stones, cars but also visceral living bodies, like "my own" living body emerge through a process of separation. Highlights of Husserl's argument are as follows. (1) Apodictically (but not necessarily empirically) on the way to earth and people in space, there first must be an initial absolute earth-body (either an ellipsis or a flat plateau), which neither moves nor rests; this would be a base-earth in relation to which the movement and rest of all other bodies become determined in the first place. (2) On such a base-earth, there is and must be a visceral, living Ego, which, like the initial (Ptolemean) base-earth, is neither moving nor resting, thereby allowing for the Copernican earth-planet to move and to rest. The visceral ego allows to transition from the (1) to the earth-planet as a relatively moving and relatively resting body among other bodies. That means that the visceral living Ego takes place of the base-earth in (2): the visceral Ego neither moves nor rests, giving a foundation for movement and rest of all bodies. (3) This living visceral Ego logically *precedes* all actual and all possible entities [*Seinden*], and gives them the very sense of their being in the first place: They are entities presented *to* or present *for* that visceral Ego.9 (4) The psychological or "empirical" time (the time as one experiences it) conceals the apodictic time, the time of the origin, source, *Ursprung*, in which the necessary moves from (1) to (3) occur. The result of these moves is a mereology of the bodiless earth.

Husserl builds this argument in response to what for him are unsurpassable "difficulties in establishing Earth as body."10 However, as shaped as they are by the notion of environment, the discussions of the environmental crisis do not account for these difficulties, thereby, as Husserl helps see, missing the very earth these discussions purport to preserve. Yet, making this missing of the earth clear and loud might invite rethinking the terms of the "environmental crisis" in the first place. As this interpretation of Husserl highlights, these difficulties in establishing Earth as body apply to both Copernican and Ptolemean notions of the earth, thus revealing the common ground behind the two worldviews, a ground pertaining to the very notion of environment, however conceived. Whether the earth is thought of as a Copernican body (a planet among others) or as a Ptolemean body (an absolute center and an absolute neither moving nor resting ground for determining movement and rest), the "difficulties" Husserl lays bare remains the same: It is only possible to establish earth

<sup>9</sup> A reference to Heidegger's question of what gives sense to "beings" (*Seineden*) is hard to miss, especially in light of Heidegger's 1936 "The Essence of Truth" [10], where he is explicitly addressing modern "mathematical" (read 'Copernican') science to say that its core is not in the mathematization of nature (which, as he has it, the medieval schoolmen also had) but rather in the "space-time determined interconnection of the movement of the mass-points" [10], p. 61, which, in his broader argument hides rather than opens up the role of "being" in giving law-commensuration to the beings in their essentiality or one might say in the stability of their presence as opposed to their immediate presentation of themselves, which can be merely a shadow, with no access to essence. Being is what gives beings their having an essence, Heidegger argues. Where for Heidegger stands being, for Husserl is earth. Any further elaboration of this connection between being in Heidegger and earth in Husserl requires a separate treatment. Here it is only necessary and possible to indicate this connection.

<sup>10</sup> Ref. [1], p. 313.

as body when and if earth is a mereological premise, foundation or ground (logical, physical and humanitarian alike) on which and only on which a body, indeed any and every body, can be ever thought or experienced.

To understand these "difficulties," a more detailed exposition of Husserl's 1934 argument is required. In the development of his argument, Husserl has four notions of earth: (1) a neither moving nor resting ground/base of experience of all moving and resting bodies; this is an outlook, which "I" gets through transferences to other Egos; this for Husserl holds for Copernican and Ptolemean and all other possible world-outlooks alike; (2) a moving and resting body (a planet among other planets); (3) the Ego-viscera [*das Leib*], the neither moving nor resting visceral ground of experiencing all moving and resting bodies (which for him is a necessity of Copernican outlook)11; and (4) the mereological earth, which as a totality is not a body at all; but of which all bodies emerge as spilt-offs. This mereological earth cannot be reached by transferences from my Ego to the experiences (and in particular travels) of other Egos. Rather this is a purely mathematical, "phenomenological" nonperspectival "view" of the earth.

Moving through these four senses of earth, Husserl arrives to a practical application of his mereology: If earth is not a body, there is and there can be only one earth12 and only one humanity: On whichever planet you (the visceral ego) go, you cannot arrive to another earth as such a whole or such a totality which is not a body.

The result of his argument is especially important in the context of polemics between local and national environmentalists on the one hand and the global environmentalists on the other: Both parties reduce the pieces of earth (Germany, France, continents) or even the whole planet Earth to a body, and this precludes the discussion of how to preserve earth by reaching its proper scope: How to think the only earth and the only humanity in the first place.

How then to evaluate Husserl's mereology, both in its own terms, that is, as a mereology, and in terms of its application for the discussion of the environmental crisis? The second part of the question cannot be addressed without a due diligence with the first part. How then to place, that is to say, how to find proper limits to Husserl's mereology of the bodiless earth. As already noted, his is not a mereology of an organic whole, for his earth is not a body, and thus is not an organism either. The closest to Husserl's mereology of the earth can therefore be found in Augustin's mereology of the mind. As we will momentarily see for Augustin mind is a whole without parts, which therefore entails a bodiless whole, as well.
