Roman Ingarden

Works

• 1931The Literary Work of Art

  The literary work consists of four layers – sounds, meanings, represented objects and schematised aspects – and contains places of indeterminacy that reading concretises.

• 1947The Controversy over the Existence of the World

  A large ontology (1947–48) of modes of being, written against Husserl’s transcendental idealism.

Position

Ingarden adopted Husserl’s method of describing essences but not the turn to transcendental idealism that Husserl had taken from the “Ideas” (1913) onwards. His answer was a large ontology: “The Controversy over the Existence of the World” (1947–48) distinguishes existential, formal and material ontology and several modes of being – absolute, ideal, real and purely intentional – in order to show that the real world cannot be reduced to a correlate of consciousness. To sharpen the contrast he studied purely intentional objects, above all works of art. “The Literary Work of Art” (1931) describes four strata and “places of indeterminacy” that readers fill in their concretisations; later studies extended the analysis to music, painting, architecture and film and to aesthetic values. From the Lwów–Warsaw side, Ajdukiewicz gave the problem of idealism a semantic formulation (1937). Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss built reception aesthetics in part on Ingarden’s concepts, though Iser’s “blanks” give readers more freedom than Ingarden, who distinguished adequate from inadequate concretisations, allowed. Critics have found his ontology elaborate and his realism defended more by distinctions than by a decisive argument.

Life & context

Roman Witold Ingarden was born on 5 February 1893 in Kraków. In 1911 he began studying mathematics and philosophy in Lwów with Kazimierz Twardowski, and in 1912 went to Göttingen to study with Edmund Husserl, whom he followed to Freiburg in 1916; in Göttingen he also befriended Edith Stein, with whom he kept up a long correspondence. In Freiburg he received his doctorate in 1918 with a thesis on intuition and intellect in Henri Bergson. Back in Poland he taught at secondary schools in Lublin, Warsaw and Toruń, habilitated in Lwów in 1924 and became professor there in 1933. “Das literarische Kunstwerk” appeared in Halle in 1931. During the war he remained in Lwów and worked on his ontology of the existence of the world. In 1945 he moved to the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. From 1950 he was barred from teaching because his philosophy was considered idealist; in these years he translated Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” into Polish (1957). He was reinstated in 1957, retired in 1963 and lectured widely abroad. He died in Kraków on 14 June 1970.

Further main works

• Intuition and Intellect in Henri Bergson (Intuition und Intellekt bei Henri Bergson, 1921)
• Essential Questions (Essentiale Fragen, 1925)
• Ontology of the Work of Art (Untersuchungen zur Ontologie der Kunst, 1962)