The Constitution of the State as a Problem of Phenomenology

Abstract

Roman Ingarden the early phenomenologist is regarded as a theorist in the area of aesthetics and ontology rather than being a political philosopher. The aim of the article is to reconstruct a non-existent philosophy of the state, one that could have been developed by Ingarden by taking as a starting point his ontological analysis of the structure of a literary work of art. In his book of 1931 Ingarden defined very broadly the literary work of art, including as its borderline cases among others scientific works, letters, memoirs etc. The thesis of the article is that state constitution may be also interpreted as a borderline case of that work. In reference to Ingarden’s analysis of stage play as the concretisation of a piece of drama, an attempt will be made to reconstruct in terms of his ontology the relation between the state constitution and the state itself.