**5. Augustine mereology of the mind**

Augustine *De Tritinate* is as much a theology as it is an anthropology. The figure of *theos* to have become *anthropos*, that is, of G-d to have become a human transpires in Augustin in a move which is at once that of a theology of the human and of the

<sup>11</sup> Merleau-Ponty [11] developed this line of argument in rethinking the visceral body, and Nigel Thrift [12] interpreted organelles mereology in terms of his "Non-representational theory, NRT) thus developing this specifically Copernican element in Husserl's analysis.

<sup>12</sup> One can perhaps argue that where Heidegger places being is where Husserl places mereological earth. In other words, that there is a parallelism between the two thinkers. One should ask, however, whether Husserl's and Heidegger's positions are fully commensurable. If they are, placing Earth and Humanity where Being and *Existenz*.

anthropology of the divine. I follow Alain de Libera13 in his analysis of Patristic theology as intrinsically anthropology. I further follow his suggestion that a theological treatment of G-d to have become a human is the birthplace of anthropology, as long as the latter were to answer the question of "Who is human?" rather than "What is human?" The latter question was answered along the lines of "an animal possessive of logos," "rational animal," "the one who has four legs on dawn, two in mid-day, and three by the evening," etc. All these answers implied a what-question and an exhaustive answer to it. The question of "Who is human?" comes about by differentiation from the "What is human?": The main difference would be that for the Who-question no answer suffices. In the Who-question, there always remains an excess, for which there is no answer. This excess has everything to do with Augustine mereology of the mind.

This mereology comes by way of polemics Augustine stages against Cicero.14 For Cicero, he argues, at stake is a virtue of prudence. A prudent one is to differentiate three kinds of phantasms one experiences from one's intellectually clear cognition. The phantasms about the *before* are recollections, they cannot be certain or sure, and a prudent one is to take them as such. The phantasms of the *after* are even less certain (unless one is a future-teller or "prophet"). A prudent one is not to take his or her bodily sensual perceptions of the *now* for certain either, however compelling they might appear. The only things certain are those achieved by and through intellectual cognition. These are about what truly is or certainly "present"; that means "present" not to bodily senses but to the bodiless mind, *mens* (Examples are the mathematical or moral truths, considered by intellectual contemplation).

Based on this concern with the prudent person, Augustine creates a time structure. Phantasms of the *before* become recollections and memories of the past; prudent anticipations of the *after* relate to the future; and seeing the world with one's eyes or with one's mind relates to the present, now understood as an element of time. Augustine both introduces and disagrees with this time structure. In his argument, a line between recollection of the past and memory comes afore: There can be a prudent memory of the future (e.g., *memento mori*) but there can only be a recollection for the past. Moreover, unlike recollection, memory does not have to relate to a specific phantasm; in fact, memory is not phantasm at all. Rather, as Augustine argues, because memory ties with no phantasm, there is a memory of the one *who* is present, the who, who is not fully definable as any kind of what. Augustine innovation is the paradoxical concept of the "memory of the present" or the memory of the one who is present. That means of a *who* without the *what*. That allows Augustine to solve a problem: Mind, as he argues, is not adventitious to itself: Mind does not come across itself as a "something." Rather, mind is a who, who remembers (but not recalls oneself *without* or at least prior to knowing anything or anybody else). This move allows Augustine to posit *mens*, mind as a bridging concept allowing him to find the divine *who* in the human *who* and vice versa—without giving a classificatory definition of either the divine or human. Thereby, Augustine is able to create a theology which is anthropology and an anthropology which is theology. *Mens* as a who, who is the memory of the presence, or rather of the present. This present, the who, is first of all, a memory

<sup>13</sup> See: Ref. [13].

<sup>14</sup> See: *De Trinitate* (c. 428 C.E.), Book XIV: Chapter XII—14. For English, see: Ref. [9].

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

of the who, who is present: that means present but not defined. It is only second of all that this present encounters things, recalls the uncertain before, anticipates the unpredictable after and perceives the deceptively certain now or cognizes the certainly present with intellect. The memory of the present15 and the memory of the who without any definitions or answer is Augustine innovation, a theological and anthropological one in one move.

Augustine result is a mereology of the mind which is a whole—in his case the who—who does not encounter oneself as a part of oneself, but only remembers oneself as a whole, that is to say as the present without parts.

What Husserl's earth and Augustine mind have in common is a presence (Earth or Human/Divine mind) which/who is not defined as anything specific. For Husserl, it was the Earth which is not a body, from which all bodies are stemming. For Augustine, it was the mind remembering its own presence before the mind recalls, anticipates, perceives and/or contemplates things and matters.16 Mind is first of all memory and humanity is first of all earth; the two thinkers conclude respectively and almost in structural unison with each other. For both, there is a whole, a presence, which has no parts and from which all parts stem.

The differences between the two mereologies are too obvious to enumerate, yet one is particularly important: Husserl locates thinking in the visceral ego, while Augustine does not afford for the mind (which would be the best candidate for that) any bodily status whatsoever beyond what transpires from the memory of the present.

To understand the limits of these two mereologies is to relate them to what might be revealing about their common theological root. Other derivations from that same root can be instructive for understanding a particular direction Augustine mereology took and Husserl's mereology followed. That common root will become clearer through juxtaposing the two mereologies with that of Philo of Alexandria in his philosophical reading of the G-d of the Septuagint.
