Abstract

The article seeks the cognition of the essence of the political through the phenomenological analysis of its object.With reference to Kant, Schopenhauer and Husserl, the article first clarifies how the world is constructed in human consciousness, thereby differentiating three levels of constitution. In a second step it shows respectively how specific motives of action are constituted on these three levels, deducing three ideal types of human action. In a third step, the phenomenological analysis is extended to the political, understood as collective action, following Hannah Arendt. For a collective action to be constituted, beside the acts of consciousness necessary for the constitution of individual action, the acts of articulation and representation of the common will are required. It can be shown that it is the political institutions of the executive, legislature and judiciary which represent this will on the three differentiated levels of constitution of action.