A Critique of the Husserlian and Heideggerian Concepts of Earth: Toward a Transcendental Earth That Accords with the Experience of Life

This paper presents an exposition and critical appraisal of the concepts of earth that appear almost simultaneously in essays by Husserl and Heidegger in the mid 1930s (the former in a fragment from 1934 on the ground of all possible experience of motion and rest, and the latter most famously in his 1935–6 essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art”). I argue that while both of these earths are noteworthy insofar as they suggest, each in its own way, the isolation of a non-worldly dimension of disclosure, nevertheless, neither Husserl nor Heidegger succeeds in fully emancipating the earth from the logic of the world. In Husserl's case, the earth is implicated in a fourfold schema involving: the absolute fixity of the world; the horizon of all being, sense, and judgment; the transcendental unity of the world; and the lifeworld as the basis of a common humanity. In Heidegger's case, the earth is construed as the “stream of boundary-setting” that, as the primordial adversary of the world, accomplishes the rising-up of beings into the open of being. The effect of this failure on the part of both philosophers to achieve an adequate ontological segregation of world and earth is to devalue the naïve image of the earth apprehended in the natural attitude even while the earth-dimension is divested of any discernable earthly character, leaving the earth itself barren and abstract, a pure category of thought rather than the horizon of actually lived life.