Down to Earth?: A Crisis of the Environmental Crisis

Abstract

Are we down to earth in our connection to earth? If we are environmentalists concerned with “environmental crisis,” then does our guiding notion of “environment” (and the by necessity implied notion of a center—most often with a human there) get closely enough to the earth? Departing from either localism or cosmopolitanism in thinking earth, globe, and the environment, this chapter aims at a theoretical critique of the very notion of “environment” as the guiding notion of what the expression “environmental crisis” spells. Perhaps, “environmental crisis” is less a description of “our” situation, and more an indication of a problem formulated not strongly enough? The notion of “environment” and “environmental crisis” predetermines the currently regnant approaches to global warming, air and soil pollution, nature preservation, and reducing the human impact on the environment. At the same time, the notion of “environment” steers its adherents toward the modern natural science as both (1) the ultimate contributor to the environmental crisis due to technology and (2) the ultimate instrument to save us from the apocalyptic swirl, in which technology drives humanity. Linking environmental crisis to science, which is only an instrument of both its creation and management, forecloses a more fundamental human dimension of that crisis. This essay asks to attend to one element of that more fundamental dimension.

1. Introduction

A necessity animates the argument in this essay: to expand the horizon of our thinking about earth beyond the opposition between Ptolemean (geocentric) and Copernican (heliocentric) worldviews. The Copernican worldview undergirds modern science and technology in approaches to the environmental crisis today. By contrast, the Ptolemean worldview is relegated to outdated beliefs. Yet the both run a version of centrism, a claim that there always is a center or a number of them. Opposing Ptolemy and Copernicus too strongly takes any other (call them “a-centric”) approaches to earth off the table. These tacitly suppressed approaches can promise more in how one goes about environmental crisis today.

The argument is also responding to a much more obvious but much harder to face necessity: The environmental crisis is political and human in nature; as such, it cannot be fully addressed—let alone understood—by technology. Instead, a critical rethinking of the fundamental assumptions about politics and about humanity in approaching earth becomes due. The essay contributes to such rethinking by asking how thinking earth as “environment” preempts one from thinking earth¹ Attempting to manage the crisis is always only the second step. The logically first step is in having committed to the terms in which one thinks of the crisis. One has to rethink the first step before getting too far into second.

Facing the contemporary “environmental crisis,” one therefore needs “to step back” both in time and in the conceptual scope, in order to revisit the notion of environment as defining and possibly also blindfolding one’s approach to the crisis. This essay commits such a stepping back to rethink the relationships between earth and environment. By necessity to become clear below, that evokes “old” bodies of text and thought, not only from the last century, when environmentalism was first taking shape, but also from the late antiquity, from the long durée of the Western thought. The working assumption is that a simple passage of time does not automatically render “old” irrelevant, but rather that placing a modern issue into a framework of an “older” tradition of thought yields a double new result. It invites “to step back” in thinking through a modern issue and also to rethink the pertinence of the “old” corpora of thought in a new light.

To provide an in-advance outline of the argument-structure and result of this essay: The analysis first turns to Edmund Husserl’s (d. 1938) deductive-analytical mereology (a theory of whole as always more than its parts) of earth as a simple bodiless whole, from which all bodies split off. The essay further compares Husserl’s mereology with Augustine with structurally (but not thematically) similar mereology of “mind” in Augustine (d. 430 C.E.), for whom mind is an equally simple whole without parts. That in turn allows to juxtapose both approaches to the the nineteenth to twentieth centuries mereologies of organic and complex bodily wholes, from which modern notions of environment and environmentalism stem. That delineates the origin and the limit of organicist mereologies and of environmentalism having stemmed from them. This framework of analysis allows to show that environmentalist crisis is not only a crisis of preserving environment but also and more foundationally a crisis spurred by environment as a notion purporting to regulate human attitude toward the earth.

My argument arises in rethinking Edmund Husserl’s 1934 work about earth² as a way to address limitations of the notion of environment as the constitutive notion for any discussion of “environmental crisis.” After a preliminary exposition of such limitations, I will first of all show how, in thinking the earth, Husserl committed a more radical move than either environmental localism³ or environmental cosmopolitanism (or globalism) can afford. Husserl was offering a more demanding and, in his view, more precise notion of the earth than any locality-driven nationalist environmentalists did, as they sported the specter of “blood and soil.” (I take the most extreme version of this kind of political thought, which also manifested itself in the magnanimous figure of “the Soviet Land” and in a miniature of “the little motherland,” each one was to love.) Husserl was not a localist. Nor was his notion of the earth a cosmopolitan one: The cosmopolites’ specter of the “citizen of the world” would only negate and thus still depend upon (even if only negatively) on the locality-driven politics of “blood and soil.” Effectively leaving both the locality-oriented and cosmopolitical versions of environmentalism behind, Husserl offers what I interpret as a holistic approach to earth—a mereology of the earth, which both localism and cosmopolitanism fail to account for properly.

After outlining Husserl’s mereology of the earth, I will second of all introduce its structural (rather than thematic) parallel, Augustine mereology of the mens (mind), and draw a connection between Husserl’s “earth” and Augustine mind as two mereologies of a whole without parts—in contradistinction from modern mereologies of organic wholes. To articulate the structural differences and limitations of Augustine and Husserl’s mereologies, I will third of all introduce a broader context for the two thinkers, having to do with Philo’s interpretation of the Biblical G-d via a philosophical neologism, huparxis (G-d’s involvement with the world without being a part of that world), which I will further juxtapose with the Palestinian Rabbinic mereology of the divine law arising, as I will show it is, from the sense of impossibility and necessity to cite the divine law of the past. I will fourth of all chart an implication of this analysis for a conceptual critique of modern environmentalism, its disproportional belief in science as both cause and remedy of environmental crisis, and its reduction of the humanitarian core of the crisis to an opposition between national locality and cosmopolitan universality. This reduction, I will ask to show, precludes an understanding of environmental crisis as a crisis of mereology, that is to say as the advent of the mereology of organic wholes (the wholes with organs) at the expense of the more foundational mereology, that of a bodiless whole without organs, which and only which promises a fuller and more sober access to earth.

2. Environment: a preliminary critique of a guiding concept

A constitutive and guiding notion in all discussions of “environmental crisis” is that of “environment.”

According to Oxford English Dictionary, etymologically “environment” suggests an “action of surrounding something.” The German synonyms for “environment”—“Umwelt”⁴ (lit. “the world around”) and “Umgebung” (lit. that which is around) along with other modern languages—amplify that suggestion. “Environment” means surrounding and even periphery, therefore implying a center. That suggests: Whoever is either talking or thinking about or goes about the environment is compelled to place oneself at the center.⁵ “Environment” is in other words a centrist notion. Whoever or whatever then stands at the center of any environment faces a choice: to keep one’s centrality or to reconsider and displace one-self from the center. This choice is not as radical as it seems, for the centrism of any notion of environment is unavoidable. By necessity, a version of centrism is at the core of any version of environmentalism whatsoever; even if one chooses to step aside from the center, one still always begins from the center.

The notion of environment is thus unavoidably centrist. This remains unchanged, no matter whether one subscribes to Ptolemean views, which are considered by some outdated; or to Copernican views, which are considered by others misleading in their reduction of humans to just objects of science. Do humans on the earth mark the center of the universe (the word “universe” designates no more than an extended version of the “environment”) around which the sun and stars are rotating? Alternatively, is the earth only one of the many planets? Is there one privileged center of the world (which is also “ours”) or are there many centers and thus no Center with the capital “C”? Either answer must begin from a version of centrism. There simply is no environment without at least one—but potentially also several—centers. Centrism and environmentalism are inseparable one from another.

The notion, of “environment,” is thus too geocentric and too anthropocentric to not obfuscate the discussion of the “environmental crisis,” which it seemingly purports to be leading. My argument below responds to that obfuscation. Is that possible, and if so, how to avoid such a centrism? In search for an answer, I first turn to the geo-thought of Edmund Husserl.

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 human-centric 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.

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 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” non-perspectival “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.

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 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 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.

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

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.

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.

7. A mereology of divine law: the Palestinian םויק “kiyum” (a suspended testimony/testament to the law as a whole)

The masters and students of rhetoric in Palestinian Rabbinical schools did not consider polemical contexts extraneous to the results of polemics. This general stance of any school of rhetoric found a particular configuration in a mereology of the Divine law the Palestinian rabbinical schools of rhetoric displayed in their extant archives, known today as the Palestinian Talmud or Jerusalem Talmud.²⁰ What pertains to the context of this essay is that the Palestinian’s schools developed a mereology of the past as mereology of the divine law. Looking at their mereology sheds a new light on the mereology of existentia versus essentia in Victorinus, of mens as the memory of the present in Augustin, and of the earth as the whole which is not a body, in Husserl.

The Palestinian schools concern with a necessity and impossibility to testify for the divine law of the past. Such testifying, testimony or testament come in two forms: as an exemplary act (ma’aseh, deed) or as a procedural rule (halakhah) spelling out a contractual obligation.²¹ The both must arrive by way of a recollection; more specifically in a recitation of respectively an exemplary act or of a rule of procedural obligation (between Israel, G-d and the nations of the world). The necessity is to recall/cite/testify the divine law that comes from the past;²² for otherwise how can one comply to one’s obligation? The impossibility is in the very nature of a recollection and citation: To recall and to cite are to make the past present. That in turn makes the past lost as such, that is to say as past, behind the present of the law cast by its citing. In yet other words, by becoming present (in a testimony of recollection or recitation) the law of the past loses its character and its power of the past.

The conflict of the impossibility and necessity to recall the law of the past is a version of mereology. The past is a whole that has no parts (in this case no fully specified laws/rules of procedure); and the recitations stemming from that past are (to use Husserl’s language) separations from the law of the past (just as the planets and other bodies were separations from the bodiless earth.) The paradoxy is that the characters in the Palestinian rabbinical schools of rhetoric in reciting the law make it present and thereby loosen or weaken its power, the power of the law of the past. This is why the characters in the Palestinian Talmud are often concerned with “what are we to testify to” or “what are we to establish” as the divine law (lit “what are we making stand” [ma anu mekaymin]). The characters express such concerns by juxtaposing the recollections and recitations with one another, thereby showing how unstable the grounds of such testifying and establishing are. The resulting tension is that the characters must and cannot testify to the laws of procedure (halakha) without making this very testifying and testament suspended between the impossible and the necessary.²³

What does that mean by way of differing versions of mereologies considered heretofore? The Palestinian schools display a mereology of the past, which celebrates uncertainty of one’s standing between the impossible and the necessary, rather than committing to the would be false certainty about parts and parcels of the law of the obligation. Whereas this law comes from the past as a whole with no parts thereto, citing and detailing this law threatens its very power. Standing between Scilla of necessity and Haribdah of impossibility, the Rabbis, however, do not refuse to testify. They instead suspend testimony, thereby humiliating their own power of citation. They thereby suspend both the impossibility and the possibility to testify to the Law.

By comparison with Augustine memory of the present, the rabbis and students in the schools prefer the memory of the mereological past of the law over the recollection of the law in the present. That also means they prefer the memory of the law of the past to a recollection of that law in the form of definitive rules. Yet, facing the necessity of such recollection, they suspend such recollection/citation by committing to no final formulation of the law but only to a provisionally accepted number of recollections/citations. A community living by mutual obligations with G-d lives in suspension of any given recollection about the past of these obligations. Back to Augustine, instead of certainty of the memory of the present, this community lives by the uncertainty of the memory of the past. That celebrates a programmatic uncertainty as an authentic condition versus any certainty that Augustine offers in his “memory of the present.” Huparxis, or subsisting under the arche of existing G-d means remembering G-d there where G-d cannot be recalled.

What that means, however, is that the mereologies of the bodiless whole without parts in Husserl and Augustine alike find a contrasting parallel in the rabbinic Palestinian mereology of the divine law. If the former strive for a certainty in the foundations of human life in a such a bodiless whole without parts, the Palestinian rabbis in their continuation of Philo’s mereology of huparxis display a contrasting standing, that of a human in suspension of her position vis a vis the whole without parts.

8. Beyond the environment: a conclusion

To conclude, Husserl’s mereology of the bodiless earth induces reservations about approaching the earth as environment. In its either localist or globalist versions, the notion of environment not only reduces the earth to a body, but also either begins with or stays within the anthropo- and geo-centric element. Husserl gestures toward a way to overcome such centrism: to approach earth as more than a body, that is, as not a body. His mereology of the bodiless earth, however, is as promising as it is also limited by his commitment (shared with Augustin) to finding a certain bodiless whole, a whole which can give certainty, in his case that of “one earth and one humanity”. A contrasting sense of programmatic uncertainty in the rabbinic memory of the past, rather than the recollection of the past, and the version of mereology that such past as past is proposing yields a structure to apply in thinking not only about law but also about earth as such a bodiless whole, to which one is better off to relate with a well-structured uncertainty than with being certain about what can or cannot be.

Then what? Ascribing science the sole or even predominant responsibility for creating and resolving the “environmental crisis” needs a radical rethinking in view of the competing mereologies outlined above. For, they collectively put both earth and humanity back into consideration, while letting the Copernican science do what it does best, to work with the bodies. That also means keeping Copernican science apart from what is not a body, that is to say from the humanity and the earth.

The above analysis affords a conclusion that environmentalist thinking needs a sustained critique of its over-commitment to science, including the scientific view of wholes as organisms. Beyond and in addition to organicist holism of the bodies, a mereology of bodiless wholes without parts, in the competing versions thereof outlined above, needs to be brought forth and to claim its role in the understanding of what we do not understand when we lock ourselves into thinking about nature in terms of “environmental crisis” today.

Author note

Preparation of this article for publication was in part supported by Gordon and Gretchen Gross Professorship in Jewish Thought, University at Buffalo, SUNY. I thank Edouard Nadtochii and Elad Lapidot for many conversations and exchanges that contributed to shaping this argument.