At first glance, a certain tension may be noted between the theme of our panel, "Issues in the Human and Social Sciences," and the overall theme of the congress, "Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos." The latter seems to float serenely above history, while the former pulls us down to earth into a moment when human history is awash in conflict. Political science today has its work cut out for it. But the size of the task now - after September 11, 2001 - may exceed the scope of the conceptual tools of the twentieth century. The inadequacy of concepts such as "sovereignty," "freedom," and "nation-building" has become alarmingly clear. We must go back to the drawing board in a radical way; that is, not merely to draw up replacement concepts, new for old, but instead to uncover the presuppositions that have served as the unquestioned drawing board for Western states, with their theories and rhetorics, their governments and practices, their definitions of public versus private realms. This move is a phenomenological one, as members of this audience will surely concur.

Some political presuppositions are easy to recognize. For example, there is the assumption that "freedom" has a single universal meaning, and is universally desired. In another example, there is the assumption of simple equivalence between "nation" and "state" or "government." These terms need some sorting out. But this is easily accomplished through careful definition, which will be done swiftly in the first part of this paper. After terms have been clarified, we will consider the phenomenon of choosing as it occurs in a variety of settings: the marketplace, personal relationships, and political life. This consideration will confront us with the paradox of politics: the incommensurability of personal values with communal choices. The paper goes on to criticize the fiction of community as "person of a higher order" and the corollary of this fiction: that sovereignty is to the state as free will is to the person. With those naive notions out of the way, the paper describes political choice as occurring among finite alternatives, each of which is a possible state-of-affairs whose value can be measured and compared to that of other possibilities. The constitution of a state is a choice to conduct future choosings according to certain procedures that will honor personal value-assessments to a greater or lesser extent. The maximization of personal value is proposed as a principle to guide the choice of what kind of state to found and maintain (if any): whether parliamentary democracy, Islamic theocracy, super-national market economy, or whatever.

1. Coming to terms

"Nation" and "state": though they may happen to coincide in many respects, let us note how they differ according to value. Given any particular instantiation, one of them may be loved and cultivated while the other is being hated and attacked. That is, without contradiction you could love the American people (as a nation) while acting to destabilize the political entity that governs that people (as a state). Alternately, you could love and fortify the state at the expense of the nation (as may happen when the state mobilizes for war). While such cases of opposite valuing are unfortunate, we can see from them that nation and state must be distinct concepts; for they can be objects of contrasting intentional valuation even when they coincide empirically in their geographic, demographic, and temporal boundaries. (This distinction is not merely a convenient or arbitrary definition.)

Moreover, value accrues to them in different ways. The current term "nation-building" shows us this difference, obscured by a slick rhetorical move. What can be built, by design, is a state; nations grow organically. A nation, that is, a people, can be recognized only when there are more than one: nations, plural. Otherwise we see only people, human beings. The grammatical articles (a nation, the people) and the demonstrative adjectives (this nation, that people) indicate that difference has been constructed, perhaps through language, cultural products, landscape, or architecture. These achievements come to our attention as particular values only through the basic value, humanity, that is shared and recognized by all - ideally speaking, of course. To do the human thing is to live, love, laugh, and be happy, providing our loved ones with opportunities to do the same. This is birthright, which is what "nation" means. Plurality of nations signals merely that we see different modes of enabling the human thing - which itself remains singular and undifferentiated. Some nations build themselves states, as a means of enabling their humanity. This tells us two things. (1) States are intrinsically plural: no undifferentiated civil state is coextensive with humanity. (2) The value of any particular state derives from its service to a sector of humanity and to humanity as such.

States are instruments through which individual human beings coordinate their actions so as to provide for their needs, needs which may range across a spectrum from food and shelter to education to health care to entertainment. From the whole spectrum of human need, those portions to be addressed by a given state are assigned to a "public" realm, and the rest are defined as "private." This difference is neither necessary nor absolute, but porous and flexible, with distinctions and connections to be managed through some process of negotiation prescribed "by law." For example, taxation transfers resources from private pockets to public coffers. Law enables this. But we now can distinguish three levels of law (described by Adolf Reinach and by Edith Stein.)⁽¹⁾ (1) Laws that are legislated to address particular circumstances, year by year. (2) The law or civil constitution that establishes a given state with its legislative powers and institutions. (3) An even more basic law or right (Recht, auf Deutsch) that is neither legislated ad hoc nor established constitutionally, but rather subsists as a dimension of humanity itself. This is the right and duty to act to provide for the well-being of human beings. At this most basic level, we speak of human rights as overriding the authority of the other two levels; that is, particular legislation and civil constitution. In turn, the authority of the latter derives from their expediency as means for protecting human beings and enabling them to pursue their culturally creative endeavors. The value of human creativity is absolute; the values of the two enabling kinds of law are relative to that.

This clarification of terms now supports a tightening of focus for the concerns of this paper. The "choice to choose" that interests us here is the creativity arising from humanity as such, as a free response to a material historical situation. The choice is whether and how to design and set up a state with institutions for handling a range of everyday needs, including the need to render those very institutions enduring, responsive, and flexible. What is needed is effective government. In phenomenological terms, this is the challenge facing people in Iraq, Kosovo, Bosnia, etc.

2. The phenomenon of choice

How do states effectively govern? We say that states have "agencies." But they do not have agency: they are not agents who can make creative choices. Only persons choose. This can be shown by contrasting choice with three other kinds of event-sequences that we commonly perceive: causality, logical entailment, and random coincidence. Each of these registers for consciousness as a flowing connection linking a series of more or less discrete perceptions along the forward arrow of time. (1) Causality, as Husserl famously declared, is the principle of coherence and unity for that realm that we recognize as Nature: the material world.⁽²⁾ As a causal network, Nature is a closed system although a very large one. Every natural event has causes occurring earlier in time, as well as effects occurring afterwards, all of which are discrete and external to each other and to the observing scientist. Or rather, the scientist adopts that standpoint, and practices observation as a discipline of minimizing any impingement by herself and her actions upon the causal chain that is observed - thus achieving a merely virtual objectivity, one must admit.⁽³⁾ Causal necessity constrains physical events.

(2) Logical entailment also involves necessity. We might even say that the term "necessity" is best reserved for logic and its ideal realm. Since we do not and cannot observe the physical realm of Nature in its entirety, the principle of its causal closure is hypothetical.⁽⁴⁾ It is a rule stipulating what sorts of event-sequences make up the physical realm and invite empirical investigation. Nuclear physicists describe events that apparently occur without cause, and this fact points up the provisional character of the rule of causal closure for Nature. Logic is not temporal sequence; it is pattern. Although of course the rules of inference must be articulated and explained temporally, nevertheless the validity of their forms is grasped instantaneously and as existing outside of time. In other words, the premises do not "cause" the conclusion, nor does assent to the premises causally produce assent to the conclusion. Rather, the mind is internally constrained to recognize patterns, to register the validity of certain truth-relationships among statements; that is, to detect entailments, to make inferences. In science, statements express empirical observations which fall into place as premises in formal patterns of inference - patterns that pre-exist any observation - and conclusions follow according to those patterns. The causal "if-then" of Nature thus comes to us through the non-causal, non-temporal "if-then" of logical inference. The latter has absolute necessity; while the former has merely provisional, virtual necessity.⁽⁵⁾ Close enough for practical purposes.

(3) "Random coincidence" describes an event that appears to have no necessity. It seems not to fit into the causal nexus, nor does it fit into any network of motivated choices. This elusive, disconnected character of randomness bears closer examination. Randomness seems not so much to elude necessity as to bound and define it. At one edge of the causal necessity of material reality, so to speak, are the antics of certain subatomic particles that serendipitously crop up in two places at once, or blink out of existence for awhile before rejoining the material world. Another edge of causal necessity is the sort of behavior exhibited by a chaotic process like the weather or the competition of a million sperm cells to reach one egg. We believe that every event in such a process has its discrete causes and results, but the chain of that causality is too complex to model, at least for the time being. Formerly, human heredity was that kind of system; but now that the genome has been mapped, the causal chains are being discovered for many human metabolic processes and for the diseases associated with their malfunctions. Breast cancer, for example, is moving out of the realm of random events and becoming a predictable event - an event whose causal genesis is explainable, and therefore, we hope, preventable.

Complex series of events like the weather and heredity, then, are "random" only in that they lie on the edges of knowledge, but those edges are rolling back as natural science expands in its ability to offer causal explanations of them. We come now to the question: is human choice like the weather? In other words, can trends in voting behavior, purchasing, fashion, economics, and the like be explained as aggregate phenomena comprising very many tiny caused effects? This premise is widely accepted in social science, because statistically, one observes quasi-causal phenomena in human behavior at the aggregate level. One can reliably predict that a certain portion of a target population will enact the choices proposed after exposure to a skillfully constructed message. The rate of actualization of the desired response can be manipulated - that is, caused to rise - by an intervention. This happens in advertising, politics, education, public health.

But on closer inspection, we can see that the causality here is not an unbroken chain. The "effect" of a rise in the rate of desired choices is pointillistic, atomized. Each of the individual actions that comprise the overall trend has in fact come about through a break in the causal chain. The meaning of the persuasive message, the intervention, had to be understood before it could be acted upon, or not. This uptake of meaning occurred at the level of the individual person, and its outcome could not have been predicted in any particular case. The meaning proposed in any persuasive message is the divergence of multiple possible future states-of-affairs, each promised to unfold out of a choosable action.

Choice occurs at the absolute edges of necessity. In choice, the partial constraint of the givenness of past events enables the partial freedom to actualize one out of a range of possible future scenarios. Choice intervenes, as it were, to breach the hypothetical causal closure of Nature. Obviously, with this statement I am rejecting the materialist account, according to which choice is illusory and causes are to be found for every human behavior. More about that in a moment. I argue on the contrary, that the evidence constrains us to recognize another principle of world-coherence besides causality : the principle termed "motivation" by Alexander Pfänder and the phenomenologists who followed him.⁽⁶⁾ Subsequently this term in English acquired an opposite sense, such that in everyday parlance one's "motivation" is taken for a kind of internal causal mechanism driving behavior through motives causally produced and causally operative. By contrast, in Pfänder's sense, motivation was the alternative to causation. These two contrasting principles founded the intelligibility and unity of the one and only world we all inhabit. This is in keeping with Dilthey's distinction between understanding and explanation. To explain is to identify causes and effects, while to understand is to follow the flow of motivated choices. These are two distinct kinds of experience of access to this our world, where causal sequences intertwine with motivated sequences. Human behavior exhibits both causal and motivated elements. (This phenomenon prompted Edith Stein to elaborate a philosophical anthropology in which the human is the bridge between the physical world and the world of value. The body mediates by virtue of its participation in both. )

Choice is personal and partial. The object of choice is always an object of a complex sort: that is, a state-of-affairs that does not yet exist but is projected in imagination as both desirable and possible, given present circumstances. This stipulation - that choice creates its object and the object is a state-of-affairs - may at first seem counter-intuitive. When I choose cookies instead of an apple for my snack, aren't both cookies and apples mere items already in existence right there on the table? True, the food is there; it does not come into existence through the choice to eat it. Yet the object of that choice is not the cookies, but rather a valued future state-of-affairs. In the short run, what I choose, and actualize through my choice, is myself enjoying the taste of the chocolate chips and the crunch of the baked dough. In the longer run, what I choose is myself infused with energy from the carbohydrates, blood sugars to be either spent in physical activity or stored in body fat. In this scenario, I also choose to create a world where I am either livelier or fatter, and where fewer cookies are left for others to eat.

Hence the partial character of the freedom. Choice is constrained in a number of ways. I cannot see far into the future, so I cannot foresee the entire ensemble of effects that will ensue from my choice. My options in the moment of choice are limited to the cookies and apples that confront me; I cannot choose to eat food that is not there. Once I ingest the sugars in the cookies, I cannot turn back the causal processes of metabolism in my stomach and bloodstream. There may be additional kinds of unfreedom as well. In selecting the cookies, my choice may be constrained to some extent by habit or addiction, that is, by the physical configuration of my brain or body, built up through past behaviors. It may even be constrained by suggestions imparted to me through advertising pr parental urging. These psychological influences may be overwhelming, to the extent that I feel that "I can't help myself" - I must eat those cookies. On the other hand, I may be constrained by fears instilled by medical advice, and find that I cannot eat cookies.

Susceptibility to manipulation by advertising, operant conditioning, or fear-mongering is the limit to freedom of choice. But to grant this is a far cry from the reductionist materialist contention that all behavior is explainable through causes of that sort. Such an argument would be self-subverting, for it would have to explain as well just how the decisions to launch those manipulative acts were initially caused, and so on in an infinite regression. Let us proceed, then, on the premise that uncaused choice is real, even though mitigated by causal determining factors. Those unchosen situational factors in fact become the material conditions that lend themselves to a certain range of possible future configurations. Thus the very factors that prevent choice from being absolute also make it real. The present state-of-affairs in this our one real world today does not roll over automatically into the one and only necessary state-of-affairs that will be tomorrow's real world. Perhaps such causal roll-overs occurred before life appeared on the planet. But today, today's circumstances do not "cause" tomorrow's. Numerous unpredictable personal choices bring about the state-or-affairs that will be tomorrow.

But is choice really unpredictable, spontaneous? Not completely so. Choices are partly predictable because the motivations attending them are experiences that flow rationally and thus can be understood by other people. The ability to understand and anticipate motivation is what makes manipulation possible. If human behavior were completely caused, it would be perfectly predictable and controllable. But of course in that case, those who undertook to do the predicting and controlling would not be humans mired in the causal nexus; they would have to stand outside the causal nexus and somehow solve the problem of breaking into it without themselves becoming affected by it. Motivation presupposes both the reality and the non-closure of the causal nexus.

(In the human sciences, it is possible to predict the probability that certain actions will follow upon the introduction of certain stimuli. Predictable and quantifiable trends in behavior accompany certain conditions that are causally produced. A kind of pseudo-causality is postulated. But this is merely a virtual mimicking of real causality. For the response of a given individual cannot be predicted with absolute certainty, and by the same token, the average response trends of the whole group are predicted only with a stated level of probability.)

Motivation occurring in another person can be understood as that coherence within her behavior that allows me internal access, distinguishable from other factors that do not offer me access. She eats the cookies, and causal processes occur that deliver the taste of chocolate chips only to her. I perceive that she is eating, but I do not taste chocolate. The reason why no chocolate taste registers for me, is that there are no nerve fibers connecting her mouth to my brain. Since the causal chains activating the taste buds remain private and closed, they deliver the pleasant sensations to her sentience only. Yet her eating makes sense to me: I understand it. I understand because I follow, empathically, a flowing conscious series in which she noticed the cookie, entertained the possibility of eating the cookie and chose to reach out, pick it up, and bite in. I understand the contours of the interplay of choice and cause in this simple act, precisely because some parts of her experience are accessible to me while other parts are not. Empathy (auf Deutch, Einfühlung) means in-feeling, that is, accessing of coherences that present themselves to consciousness as creative responses to possibilities.

Creativity is not random chance, but is personal response to possible future value. All objects are constituted with value, whether those objects are past, present, or future. Some values are absolute. For example, the concept of humanity elicits from all who grasp it an acknowledgment that every human being is of immense and indestructible value. Other values are relative. The chocolate chip cookies are good for you or bad for you according to your circumstances. Value figures into choice as a motivating factor. In Pfänder's account, one recognizes value in an object through the tug that the object exerts upon the consciousness that constitutes it. The act of object-constitution gives rise to an experience of inclination with regard to that object. It registers for me as something desirable, as something that ought to be. When we stand in the present and imagine a range of possible futures, some of them tug at us more powerfully and with different values than others. The tug, or "inclination," can be intense. But it is not causal. The person for whom the value intensely registers still may or may not choose to commit to it. Either she chooses to invest herself in making this possible object actual, or she does not. If she adopts it and commits to it, then there is a moment of "fiat" as Stein calls it. This fiat kicks off the deliberate activity to achieve the desired state of affairs. I grab that cookie and bite into it. With that, I choose and inaugurate a future state of affairs and I launch myself into that chosen future, realizing it. The fiat comes from nowhere in the material world, but engages that world through the body.

Only persons choose, because only persons register the tug of the desirability of one possible state of affairs over and above other possibilities. The fiat is a personal act. How then does the personal become the political?

3. Critique of state sovereignty

One way for the personal to become the political is for one individual simply to coincide with the state by acquiring the role of absolute boss, dictator, monarch, Führer. His decisions are then the decisions of the state. That case is unfortunate but uninteresting, phenomenologically. Another solution to this conundrum has recourse to analogy. Accordingly, the state is likened to a big person, having some structures analogous to those of human persons. This solution, found in the political writings of Scheler, Stein, Husserl, and others, is a development of the notion of Leviathan in British political theory, stemming from Hobbes.⁽⁷⁾ Sovereignty is said to be the defining characteristic of the state just as freedom is the defining characteristic of the person.⁽⁸⁾ Individual persons are entitled to the freedom to make creative choices to provide for their individual flourishing, it is said, and by analogy, states are entitled to sovereign control of territory in order to provide the means for their people to flourish.

Unfortunately, this analogy breaks down when it comes to the recognition of value. For at best, the state is a deponent person, lacking the ability to register and respond to value.⁽⁹⁾ There's no structure or region in a state where an internal tug toward actualization of value might make itself felt, no faculty for constituting a range of possible future states-of-affairs differentially endowed with value. The state doesn't want anything. The state cannot choose. The state is just a means for actualizing situations and scenarios that are desired and chosen by persons, individually. In this, the state acts coercively. It compels persons to do actions that they would not do except for the fact that non-compliance will likely result in reprisals. The state has (or is) the means of assuring that the scenario developing out of non-compliance is less desirable overall than the scenario developing out of compliance. (Better to pay taxes than go to jail, for example.)

We can see, then, that sovereignty is expressed in two directions: not only toward other states, as resistance to coercion from without, but also toward inhabitants of the home territory, as coercive constraint on their choices. Yet as I argued above, the material conditions that narrow down our choices to a finite range of possible futures also, by that very fact, render real choice possible. (In our example: I am limited to those cookies and apples; if I were somehow to be confronted with the complete set of material items small enough to fit into my mouth and soft enough to chew, I would starve before I found appropriate food.) Someone pre-chose for me those cookies and apples. The scenario enabling effective, creative choices for me was designed and set up beforehand.

With this, we have in hand an analogy for "state-building," the present international agenda in Iraq, Kosovo, Rwanda, and elsewhere. What needs creating is civil society, a state-of-affairs in which personal choices of all sorts - political, economic, educational, relational, market, religious - are limited, defined, and thereby enabled. The creating of such a state-of-affairs, or rather of the optimal possible version of it, is the problem. How can it happen? More specifically, how can it happen in such a way that the coercive sovereign power to be wielded by the state's various agencies will be recognized at home and abroad? "Recognition" means that human persons are convinced that future scenarios involving non-compliance with state directives are less desirable than compliant scenarios, in all or most relevant situations. A state must be built in such a way that its coercive capabilities are convincing, both within its territory and outside.

States do not bootstrap themselves into existence. Some states seemingly have evolved out of national customs; but this is a hit-or-miss process and in crisis spots, by definition, it has already sadly missed. The nation or nations residing in these territories either did not evolve effective states, or had that evolution tampered with from without. In the United States, a story is told wherein "We, the People" acted as one person to create our government in the late eighteenth century. The intention of many to act as one, and to make a choice setting up the constraints for future choices, is taken as having endowed that government with legitimate authority ever after. This story works as a symbol - a phenomenon to be discussed in the final section of the paper. But the story is not literally true; nor if true, would it resolve the phenomenological difficulty introduced above: the lack of a value-detecting faculty in the so-called "person of higher order," the state. The story is not true, because "we the people" were really "we, a few rich white men" establishing a system of constraint for children, women, and other workers as well as for themselves. Besides, they're all dead now. Living Americans still must detect values and make choices on an individual basis. There's no creative, responsible "big self" running any of our public or private institutions. There is no Uncle Sam. We only pretend he's there. We pretend he's wise and benevolent, or we pretend he gets angry if other countries disrespect him. We pretend he rolls up his sleeves, flexes his muscles, and reaches out his powerful arms to assist his friends and control malefactors abroad.

The pretense of absolute self-determination is a useful fiction, as we shall see. The mistake, indeed the crime, would be to demand a bootstrapping act of state-design out of a nation of distressed people, as if Leviathan or Uncle Sam could spring to life spontaneously. State-building is no job for Pygmaleon.

4. Possible scenarios (Sachverhalten, states-of-affairs)

Political self-determination is positively valued in modern Western culture. This general concept finds expression in various concrete systems. We have parliamentary democracies, two-party representative republics, constitutional monarchies. Instantiations of Western political systems are states-of-affairs in which there are provisions for voting, law-making, administration of agencies, taxation, a judiciary, police, prisons, and so forth. Government interfaces with the so-called private sector directly through a network of regulations, legislation, commerce, and support; and indirectly as laws facilitate oversight by special-interest watchdog groups. What imparts positive value to government, in the perceptions of the persons who steadily choose to accept its coercions and abide by its constraints, is an ideology: the appearance of responsiveness to individual choices - votes.

This final section of the paper examines the role of such symbolic, ideological elements within the phenomenon of choice. The vote is one kind of choice. But there is no inherent reason to make a distinction between political choices and private ones. Casting a vote during an election is in many respects quite like selecting an automobile to purchase or deciding on a certain career to train for. One is faced with a limited range of alternatives and must assess their values relative to one another. Ideally, one will consider all the possible states of affairs that would unfold out of each decision, and in constructing those possible scenarios, would detect their relative values. But in practice, the complexity of those states-of-affairs condenses down into little pellets of value, so to speak. I just grab the cookie I like, averting my attention from the consequences that may ensue in the long run: a state-of-affairs in which my health deteriorates. I may select the SUV (sports utility vehicle) for the sparkle of its image, averting my attention from considerations of long-term safety, overconsumption of fuel, and strain on the budget.

It appears that we seldom do a thorough job of projecting the expectable complex states-of-affairs that would ensue from our decisions, and then allowing ourselves to register their different values and deliberate before choosing. For expediency, we respond instead to simple images that have become attached to the complex scenarios. This is why handsome politicians who "look the part" attract more votes than homely ones with better skills and ideas. This is why "supersize fries" are purchased by people who in no way need the extra energy or weight. This is why your son is dating the young woman who chose breast augmentation surgery, not the sensible girl who opted to conserve her money and her health. We let icons stand in for desirable states-of-affairs, without examining the plausibility of the assumption that the present concrete choice will actually lead into that scenario. (Does your son really want to invest his future in someone with a record of risk-taking and frivolous spending for short-term benefits?)

Some image-driven choices are good, even heroic. Perhaps someone spontaneously stops to help a child in distress, without thinking of the consequences. The tug on the heart immediately issues in action and quick gratification. I wish only to point out that this simple spontaneous choice-routine - the so-called gut reaction - transfers to other situations, including that of voting within an already-established democratic state. In the last weeks and days before an election, we see advertising in which arguments reduce to sound-bites and candidates are buffed up into icons. The governmental apparatus in the U.S., as set up in the eighteenth century, lends itself to this. Political self-determination in practice, for a great many Americans, is phenomenologically identical with grabbing a cookie. But established democracies are not the concern of this paper. The question before us is whether and how new democracies should be established today.

To establish a state is to establish a mechanism for making future choices in both public and private affairs, and indeed, for defining, distinguishing, and then coordinating those two realms. Current political rhetoric asserts that "freedom" is the ultimate value recognized and desired by all human beings. To the objection that obviously, not all human beings want the version of "freedom" that is on offer, this rhetoric has a ready answer: those who hate freedom are bad people. They are powerful but few. (They have names like Sadam and Osama.) Once those bad guys are eliminated, the universal human desire for freedom will quickly blossom into recognition of the value of Western-style democracy. A brief period of coercive civil stabilization by benevolent outside forces will give way to a golden age of constitutional creativity. Uncle Sam rolls up his sleeves. In the spring of 2004, as I draft these lines, the political debate over American involvement in Iraq is entirely contained within that image. How long should Uncle Sam "help out"? Some argue that the invading military force has a narrow role: "fight, win, depart." Others argue that the troops must stay on for the slow business of building up civil institutions and suppressing opportunistic local bad guys.⁽¹⁰⁾

The impediment, from a phenomenological point of view, is that the slogan of "freedom," brokered by the icon of "Uncle Sam," fails to generate the enormous power required for the creative design and establishment of a new government.⁽¹¹⁾ For Americans, the value adhering to those images, the value worthy of our choice, was condensed and transferred from a long process of building civil states-of-affairs, of seeing how different arrangements worked out in practice. That history, that experience, is ours, not theirs. To be sure, other peoples might profit from carefully following and understanding our political experiences. Yet even Americans themselves hardly ever take the trouble to recall all the steps. The slogans and icons stand in, more or less effectively, in the U.S. But they simply do not work that way elsewhere.

There is the further consideration that no humans are absolutely free. Government is coercion, and must be so in order to facilitate limited, structured, and real free choice. To invade another country can hardly be justified by appealing to freedom as such. By the same token, allegiance to freedom gives no guidance for the design of a new government. Democracy is not self-evidently the best form of government, as many Western thinkers have argued. The principal classic objections are easily listed: majority rule tends to oppress minority interests; members of parliaments vote on matters in which they lack expertise; wise and good people are governed by stupid and evil people. To this we may now add the observations discussed in this paper: that voters often choose by opting for values that confront them in images rather than in the complex expectable future results of their choices.

Thus to design a new government, one cannot use a "drawing board" propped up on alien meanings and experiences. Value does not attach absolutely to "freedom and democratic self-determination," as we Westerners construe those terms. Value attaches to them only relatively, in that they are ciphers for the long and continuing process of creation and maintenance of state agencies in the West that both coerce and enable choices. Other symbols might function just as well, or better, in other situations. Value attaches absolutely only to that which can generate, recognize, and respond to value: that is, to each unique human person. On phenomenological grounds, then, three proposals are offered to further the tasks of state-building.

First, stop trying to use indigenous western slogans to energize people with another history.

Second, take note of indigenous cultural icons. In our continuing metaphor: find out what cookies they like. For example, in the classic political thought of Islam, there is the figure of the Caliph who under divine authority assumes responsibility for civil administration. The Calif does not tolerate terrorism. He stamps out warlords and networks of resistance. The institution of the Caliphate is coercive, but no more so than parliamentary democracy. Just as with the latter, the limits to absolute freedom double as the concrete conditions for creative choices.

Third, the touchstone of value, the norm to found evaluation, must be something far more basic than any particular political system or slogan. We might call that touchstone the flourishing of the human person. Only the person registers value inhering in objects, items, situations. Only persons are capable of creating new value as they engage with the finite possibilities offered to them by their concrete circumstances. This touchstone justifies the measures, including military measures, that halt the killing and maiming of people. This is the first step of political stabilization. From there, possible states-of-affairs are to be weighed against one another in terms of the opportunities that they offer for personal welfare. The activities of weighing, building, legislating, stabilizing need not be democratically guided. In any given situation, human welfare might be better served by paternalistic administration, or religious, or royal, or aristocratic, or even American imperial administration, depending on the circumstances.

The political cost of this, for Americans, is the unmasking and demotion of our slogans and icons. But this demotion, as it drains rhetorical power from the slogans, is also a benefit. When the cookie-slogan of "freedom" and the icon of "Uncle Sam" lose their aura, Americans will need to choose to choose differently. Perhaps some will merely substitute other powerful images, such as the horror and hate-evoking image of an American being beheaded. Most, it is to be hoped, will take time to reconsider. The choice to choose is a choice of a state of affairs in which one must continually monitor the results of choices. Choice for the mere sake of "doing something" is not self-justifying. Choice to enable others to chose, however, well may be.

Juniata College

Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, USA

NOTES

1. See Edith Stein, "Eine Untersuchung über den Staat," Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 7 (1925) 1-123. A translation is forthcoming from ICS Publications in Washington, DC. See also Adolf Reinach's work on legal theory, "Die aporischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechts," Sämtliche Werke pp. 141-278, ed. Karl Schuhmann and Barry Smith (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1989), trans. John Crosby as "The Apriori Foundations of Civil Law," Aletheia 3 (1983), pp. 1-142.

2. See Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Book 2, Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Marly Biemel; Husserliana IV (1952); Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy, Book 2, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989).

3. Elsewhere I have shown that scientific data are constructed through subtraction of motivations from observations. See Marianne Sawicki, Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein, Phaenomenologica 144 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), chapter six.

4. This was argued by William Stern, Person und Sache: System des kritischen Personalismus, vol. 1, Abteilung und Grundlehre des kritischen Personalismus (Leipzig: J.A. Barth, 1923). See chapter 16, "Kausalbezeihung und Gesetz." See also Edith Stein's discussion in Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, pp. 117-8, 209-10; Collected Works of Edith Stein 7, ed. Marianne Sawicki, trans. Mary Catharine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2000); and the "Editor's Introduction" xiv-xv.

5. Husserl made these distinctions long ago. See his Logische Untersuchungen, part 2, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis (Halle: Neimeyer, 1901); Logical Investigations, Vols. 1 and 2, trans. J.N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970).

6. See Alexander Pfänder, "Motive und Motivation," Münchener philosophische Abhandlungen. Theodor Lipps zu seinem sechzigsten Geburtstag gewidmet von früheren Schülern, pp.163-95 (Leipzig: Barth, [1911] 1930); "Motives and Motivation," trans. Herbert Spiegelberg, Phenomenology of Willing and Motivation and Other Phaenomenologica, pp.12-40 (Evansville: Northwestern University Press, 1967).

7. See Stein's Philosophy of Psychology 132-96. Stein's work was first published in 1922 in Husserl's Jahrbuch. Subsequently Husserl took up this question in his Kaizo essays, Husserliana 27: 3-124. See also Marianne Sawicki, "Edith Stein's Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities: The Jahrbuch Treatises of 1922," The Philosophy of Edith Stein, pp. 69-95, Eighteenth Annual Symposium Volume of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University, 2001).

8. See Stein, "Untersuchung über den Staat," pp. 4-11.

9. See Stein, Philosophy of Psychology, pp. 135-45, 167-98, 201-25, and the "Editor's Introduction," xix.

10. Writing in the New York Times on April 11, 2004, James Traub discussed this divergence of views among military officers. The decision process boiled down to slogans, diverting attention from analysis of the complex expectable outcomes.