ABSTRACT
The appropriate philosophical footing for undertaking an ontology of the political community is reached through what in phenomenological parlance is called the eidetic reduction. The final knowledge aimed at in such an inquiry will not concern individual existing regimes, but rather will begin with concrete particulars as a means of seeking a priori essences through “eidetic intuition.” The transcendental reduction is achieved through a methodological “bracketing” or “putting out of action” of ordinary, unreflective assumptions concerning the real existence of the world. Such an alteration, called by Husserl the epoche, will figure in our coming analysis, most explicitly in relation to the question of foreign worlds. In identifying and analyzing the objects, actions, and experiences that most directly determine or represent the order of the whole, the ultimate overlapping of the political community with the life-world makes the political difficult to discern.
