Roman Ingarden (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Cite this entry Search the SEP • Advanced Search • Tools • RSS FeedTable of Contents• What's New• Archives• Projected ContentsEditorial Information• About the SEP• Editorial Board• How to Cite the SEP• Special CharactersSupport the SEPContact the SEP ©Metaphysics Research Lab,CSLI,Stanford University  Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. Please Read How You Can Help Keep the Encyclopedia FreeRoman IngardenFirst published Thu Jun 12, 2003; substantive revision Fri Jun 6, 2008Roman Ingarden (1893 -- 1970) was a Polish phenomenologist,ontologist and aesthetician. A student of Edmund Husserl's from theGöttingen period, Ingarden was a realist phenomenologist who spentmuch of his career working against what he took to be Husserl's turn totranscendental idealism. As preparatory work for narrowing downpossible solutions to the realism/idealism problem, Ingarden developedontological studies unmatched in scope and detail, distinguishingdifferent kinds of dependence and different modes of being. He is bestknown, however, for his work in aesthetics, particularly on theontology of the work of art and the status of aesthetic values, and iscredited with being the founder of phenomenological aesthetics. Hiswork The Literary Work of Art has been widely influential inliterary theory as well as philosophical aesthetics, and has beencrucial to the development of New Criticism and Reader ResponseTheory.1. Life and Work2. Ontology and Metaphysics 2.1 Criticisms of Transcendental Idealism2.2 Modes of Being3. Aesthetics 3.1 The Literary Work of Art3.2 The Musical Work, the Picture, the Architectural Work3.3 Aesthetic Objects and Aesthetic ValuesBibliography Select Works in GermanSelect Works in PolishSelect Works in English TranslationSelect Secondary SourcesOther Internet ResourcesRelated Entries1. Life and WorkRoman Witold Ingarden was born on February 5, 1893 in Kraków.He initially studied mathematics and philosophy in Lvóv, and in1912 went to Göttingen where he studied philosophy under EdmundHusserl, taking four semesters of seminars with Husserl, from 1912 to1914, and again during the summer of 1915. Husserl considered Ingardenone of his best students, and the two remained in close touch untilHusserl's death in 1938 (their philosophical correspondence waseventually published as Husserl's Briefe an Roman Ingarden).Ingarden also studied philosophy in Lvóv with KazimierzTwardowski (who, like Husserl, was a student of Franz Brentano). WhenHusserl accepted the chair at Freiburg, Ingarden followed him,submitting his dissertation “Intuition und Intellekt beiHenri Bergson” in 1917, for which he received his Ph.D. in1918, with Husserl as director.After submitting his dissertation, Ingarden returned to Poland forthe remainder of his academic career, first teaching mathematics,psychology and philosophy in secondary schools while he worked on hisHabilitationschrift. That work, published as Essentiale Fragenin 1925, attracted some attention in the English speaking philosophicalworld, being reviewed twice in Mind (by A.C. Ewing in 1926 andby Gilbert Ryle in 1927).With the publication of hisHabilitationschrift, Ingarden was appointed as Privatdozent at the JanKazimierz University in Lvóv, where he was promoted to Professorin 1933. During this time his most well known work, The LiteraryWork of Art, was first published (1931, in German), followed byThe Cognition of the Literary Work (1936, in Polish). Hisacademic career was interrupted from 1941-1944, when (due to the war)the university was closed, and he secretly taught philosophy at theuniversity, and mathematics to secondary school children in anorphanage. At the same time (and despite the bombing of his house inLvóv), Ingarden was working intensively on his magnum opusThe Controversy over the Existence of the World (the first twovolumes of which were published in Polish in 1947 and 1948respectively). In 1945 he moved to Jagellonian University inKraków, where he was given a chair in 1946, however in 1949,(under Stalinization) he was banned from teaching because of hisalleged "idealism" (ironically, a philosophical position against whichIngarden fought for most of his life) and for being an “enemy ofmaterialism”. The ban continued until 1957, at which pointIngarden was reappointed to his post at Jagellonian University, wherehe taught until his retirement in 1963 and continued to write,publishing such works as The Ontology of the Work of Art(1962) and Experience, Artwork and Value (1969). Ingarden diedsuddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage on June 14, 1970, while still fullyengaged in his philosophical projects. A careful, detailed, and fullydocumented account of Ingarden's biography may be found in[Mitscherling, 1997], which also does much to settle theinconsistencies in earlier partial accounts of Ingarden's life.Like many of Husserl's students from the Göttingen period,Ingarden is a realist phenomenologist who ardently resisted Husserl'sapparent turn to transcendental idealism in the Ideas andthereafter. Although his training is phenomenological, his work on thewhole is directed not towards understanding the basic structures ofconsciousness, but rather towards ontology. Indeed, Ingarden is one ofthe foremost practitioners of phenomenological ontology, which attemptsto determine what the ontological structure and status of objects ofvarious types must be, based on examining essential features of anyexperience that could present or provide knowledge of suchobjects—a method based in the assumption that there are essentialcorrelations between kinds of objects and the modes of cognition bymeans of which they can be known.Ingarden's best-known works, indeed the only ones known to most ofhis readers in the English-speaking world, are his works on aesthetics,especially literature—works that offer unrivalledly sophisticatedand subtle accounts both of the ontological status of works of art ofvarious kinds, and of our means of cognizing them. His phenomenologicalapproach to aesthetics strongly influenced the work of MichelDufrennes, and there are also strong resonances between his work on theontology of art and contemporary analytic work in aesthetics, e.g., byJoseph Margolis, Nelson Goodman and Jerrold Levinson. The LiteraryWork of Art has been particularly influential in literary studies,where its effects are visible in Wolfgang Kayser's work Dassprachliche Kunstwerk and in the development of the schools of NewCriticism and Reader Response Theory in the work of such theorists asRené Wellek and Wolfgang Iser, respectively.Nonetheless, the frequently exclusive focus on Ingarden's work inaesthetics is somewhat unfortunate and can be misleading about hisoverall philosophical focus and goals, for Ingarden produced anenormous body of work on a wide variety of topics. He was among thefirst to (in 1934) raise the classic criticism of logical positivismthat the verifiability criterion of meaning is itself unverifiable, andproduced a large body of work in epistemology, ontology, metaphysics,phenomenology, and value theory. The relative obscurity of Ingarden'swork in these other areas is attributable in part to the relativeisolation and interruption of academic philosophy in Poland in theperiod of World War Two and Soviet occupation, and in part to languagebarriers. Before the second world war, Ingarden (being German trained)published his works mainly in German, thus his early works such asThe Literary Work of Art appeared in German early in hiscareer, and were to have a broad impact. But during the war, Ingarden(in a gesture of solidarity) switched to writing in Polish, a languagespeakers of English and other Western European languages were unlikelyto read, and so his major works on ontology went largely unnoticed bythe wider European and Anglo-American philosophical circles. His majorwork in ontology, The Controversy, for example, was nottranslated into German until 1964, and (except for a small part,printed under the title Time and Modes of Being) remainsunavailable in English.Seen more as a whole, Ingarden's body of work revolves not aroundaesthetics, but rather around the realism/idealism problem -- an issuethat was to dominate his thinking ever since, as a young man, herecoiled against Husserl's transcendental idealism. As I will discussin §3.1 below, Ingarden's work in aesthetics was actuallymotivated by his interest in the realism/idealism problem. His studiesin fiction and the ontology of art were intended to form part of alarge-scale argument against transcendental idealism, based inemphasizing the difference between ‘real’ entities entirelyindependent of our minds, and social and cultural entities that (as‘purely intentional objects’) owe their existence, at leastin part, to human consciousness -- thus showing that, in virtue of thevery meanings of the ideas involved, the ‘real world’ as awhole cannot be properly treated as a purely intentional object owingits existence to consciousness.In developing a positive position, Ingarden sought a middle pathbetween the reductive physicalist realisms popular among analyticphilosophers, and the transcendental idealism adopted by Husserl,rejecting the simplistic bifurcation between entities that are‘mind-independent’ and those that are ‘merelysubjective’. His most important and lasting contribution may liein providing a richer ontological framework that could track thedifferent ways in which many objects of the ‘life-world’ ofdaily experience depend on human intentionality and on mind-independentreality, and in developing a moderate realist position that offeredroom not only for independent physical reality and for consciousness,but also for the whole variety of life-world objects that owe theirexistence, in part, to both.2. Ontology and MetaphysicsMost of Ingarden's major work focuses on ontology, which heconsiders a purely a priori enterprise, concerned not withwhat actually exists, but with what could possibly exist (whichconcepts are non-contradictory), and with what (according to thecontents of the relevant ideas) it would take for objects of variouskinds to exist, or entail if they existed. He thus contrasts ontologywith metaphysics, which is concerned with answering factual questionsabout what sorts of things actually exist and what they are like.Ontology, in Ingarden's hands, thus bears close resemblance to thesorts of conceptual analysis that became common in analytic philosophyin roughly the same period. Ingarden's work on the ontology of art isontological in this sense, e.g. he attempts to determine, by analysisof the essential meanings of experiences that could present somethingas a work of literature, music, or architecture, what sort of an entitysuch an object would have to be to satisfy those experiences andmeanings, and how it would have to relate to consciousness and physicalobjects.2.1 Criticisms of Transcendental IdealismDespite Ingarden's deep admiration for Husserl, one crucial issue --transcendental idealism -- divided them. Indeed, Ingarden was already“tormented” by the problem for years before he completedhis dissertation [“Letter,” 422], and by 1918 haddefinitively determined that he could not share Husserl'stranscendental idealism [Streit, vii]. Ingarden's concern withand rejection of transcendental idealism directly or indirectlydetermined the course of much of his later philosophical work, so muchso that in 1961 he describes his process of working on idealism as one“which has been in fact occupying my entire scholarlylife.” [“Letter,” 437].The transcendental idealism Ingarden rejects is the position thatthe so-called ‘real world’ depends on consciousness for itsexistence and essence; that it exists only for consciousnessand beyond that is a ‘nothing’. While there is some debateamong Husserl scholars over whether or not Husserl genuinely took the‘turn’ to transcendental idealism in a metaphysical sense(as opposed to merely treating it as if it were true while undertakingthe methodology of transcendental reduction), Ingarden clearly sawHusserl as turning from the realism of the LogicalInvestigations to a metaphysical form of transcendental idealismby the time the first volume of Ideas was published, and thetwo frequently debated this topic in letter and in person during theperiod from 1918-1938.Ingarden takes Husserl to have been driven to transcendentalidealism largely by his epistemological goals and transcendentalapproach to phenomenology. If the very idea of three-dimensionalexternal objects makes sense, it would be essential that ourperceptions of them are inevitably inadequate: They may be presentedfrom one point of view or another, but never exhaustively and entirely-- so room is always left open for new perceptions that would lead usto entirely revise our past judgments. Such objects thus wouldinherently transcend any finite set of experiences of them; no externalobject could be part of any experience of it, and any judgments weattempt to make about them would be open to doubt. Thus ifphenomenology is to be a ‘rigorous science’ grounded onlyin what does not go beyond our experience, it must limit its study toobjects of ‘immanent perception’, the meaningful series of(actual and possible) contents of consciousness rather than anysupposedly transcendent objects presented by them. Moreover, as Husserlargues in §41 of the Cartesian Meditations, since thetranscendental ego is the source of all sense, any meaning of‘transcendent object’ ‘outside ofconsciousness’, etc. must be a meaning constructed throughlayerings of the senses of our conscious acts, and transcendentalphenomenology can analyze how these meanings are built up out of othermeanings of individual acts of perception and intention (e.g. ‘isperceived from this angle’, ‘could be perceived fromanother angle, in these other ways’, etc.) This is the meaningthat the question e.g. ‘is this object real?’ may have fromwithin the standpoint of transcendental phenomenology. Any attempt togo beyond this understanding of ‘transcendent object’ or‘real object outside of consciousness’, however, to talk ofsomething beyond what can be constituted by any actual or possibleexperience is literally going beyond what can be meaningfully asked; itis literally non-sense. The very idea of a world outside of andindependent from all actual and possible experience is thus, from thispoint of view, an illegitimate concept, a kind of disguised nonsense.The only ‘real world’ of which we can legitimately speak,have knowledge, or enter into other intentional relations with is the‘real world’ as constituted by, and essentially correlatedwith, meaningful series’ of intentional acts.Ingarden accepted that, as long as we approach the realism problemfrom the standpoint of epistemology, or from within the standpoint oftranscendental phenomenology, there is no way out to establish theexistence and knowledge of a mind-independent world. Nor, however, canone establish that the real world depends on consciousness, since anyattempted talk about the world in-itself and its nature would bemeaningless -- thus from that standpoint, the controversy over theexistence of the world would have to remain undecided. But he alsothought that other approaches to philosophy were legitimate, and indeedthat one should begin from ontology rather than epistemology.According to Ingarden, the realism/idealism problem is fundamentallya metaphysical problem (about the actual existence of the so-called‘real’ world and its relation to consciousness), but may benon-circularly approached via ontology by examining what the possiblesorts of relation between consciousness and the world could be. Inparticular, Ingarden hoped that an ontological approach to therealism/idealism problem could lead to a solution by attempting toidentify what the possible modes of being would be of the‘real’ world and of consciousness, and how the two couldpossibly be related. This was the motive for his monumental work inontology, The Controversy over the Existence of the World,designed to describe the different possible modes of being and theirpossible interrelations, with a view to narrowing down possiblesolutions to the realism/idealism problem. Unfortunately, the work wasnever fully completed (although the first two volumes were publishedand the third in progress at the time of Ingarden's death), but theportions that exist nonetheless contain many important and detailedontological analyses valuable in their own right as well as having thepotential to contribute to the discussion of the realism/idealismcontroversy. Prominent among these is his distinction between formal,material, and existential ontologies, and distinguishing ‘modesof being’ as highest existential categories.2.2 Modes of BeingMost traditional category systems, such as Aristotle's, lay out asingle dimension of categories supposed to be mutually exclusive andexhaustive. Ingarden, by contrast, develops a multi-dimensionalcategory scheme by dividing ontology into three parts: formal, materialand existential ontologies, corresponding to three distinct aspectsthat may be discerned in any entity (its formal structure, materialnature, and mode of being respectively). These different formal,material and existential aspects of the object, studied by thedifferent types of ontology, may thus be used to classify an object inany of three interpenetrating dimensions (although not all combinationsamong formal, material and existential modes are possible).The formal categories are marked by such familiar ontologicaldivisions as those between objects, processes and relations. FollowingHusserl, in addition to these, Ingarden distinguishes materialcategories, with high-level material kinds including, e.g., works ofart and real (spatio-temporal) objects. Finally, claiming there is anessential ambiguity in the term ‘exists’, Ingarden alsogoes on to distinguish different existential categories or “modesof being” -- different ways in which entities may exist, e.g.,dependently or independently, in time or not, contingently ornecessarily, etc.The modes of being are defined in terms of different characteristiccombinations of ‘existential moments’. The existentialmoments mostly concern either an object's temporal determinations (orlack thereof), or the different dependencies it bears (or does notbear) to other sorts of object. Indeed in drawing out his existentialmoments, Ingarden goes beyond Husserl's influential work on dependenceto distinguish four different existential moments of dependence (andtheir contrasting moments of independence): Contingency (the dependenceof a separate entity on another in order to remain inexistence); Derivation (the dependence of an entity on another in orderto come into existence); Inseparateness (the dependence of anentity that can only exist if it coexists with something else in asingle whole); and Heteronomy (the dependence of an entity for itsexistence and entire qualitative endowment on another). In sodoing, Ingarden develops one of the richest and most detailed analysesof dependence ever offered, providing distinctions in the notion ofdependence that can clarify many philosophical problems including butcertainly not limited to the realism/idealism problem.Ingarden's four highest existential-ontological categories or‘modes of being’ are: Absolute, Real, Ideal, and PurelyIntentional. The absolute mode of being could be exhibited only by abeing such as God, which could exist even if nothing else whatsoeverever existed. The ideal mode of being is a timeless mode of existencesuitable for platonistically conceived numbers; the real mode of beingis that of contingent spatio-temporal entities such as the realistassumes ordinary rocks and trees to be; while the purely intentionalmode of being is that occupied by fictional characters and otherentities which owe their existence and nature to acts of consciousness.Thus the realism/idealism controversy can be reconfigured as thecontroversy over whether the so-called ‘real world’ has thereal or purely intentional mode of being.3. Aesthetics3.1 The Literary Work of ArtBy far Ingarden's best-known and most influential work, especiallyin the English-speaking world, is The Literary Work of Art,which was written around 1926, and first published in German in 1931.It is fundamentally a work in ontology, in Ingarden's sense (see§2 above), laying out the essential features anything must have tobe counted as a literary work, what parts it must have and how they areinterrelated, and how such entities as literary works relate to othersorts of entities such as authors, copies of texts, readers, and idealmeanings.As with so much of Ingarden's philosophical work, he undertakes thisstudy of the ontology of the literary work in part with the motive ofutilizing its results to argue against transcendental idealism --indeed he conceived of The Literary Work of Art as apreliminary study for The Controversy. Literary works and thecharacters and objects represented in them were to provide examples ofpurely intentional objects -- objects owing their existence and essenceto consciousness. Thus a detailed study of works of literature andtheir represented objects could serve to explicate the purelyintentional mode of being, with a view to contrasting this with thereal mode of being and ultimately demonstrating that it is impossibleto reduce the ‘real world’ to the status of a purelyintentional creation. [Streit, vii-viii]. Nonetheless, thismotive remains largely behind the scenes of the detailed studies oflanguage and literature in The Literary Work of Art, which canbe (and largely has been) described and evaluated without reference tothese broader motives, as an independent contribution to aesthetics andliterary theory.The work begins by attempting to determine the ‘mode ofexistence’ of the literary work -- essentially the same problemthat today goes under the heading of understanding the ontologicalstatus of works of literature, music, etc. In twelve concise pages, heprovides compelling reasons to reject both attempts to identifyliterary works with “real” objects or events such as copiesof texts or the psychological experiences of authors or readers, andattempts to identify them with platonistic “ideal” objectssuch as ordered manifolds of sentences or meanings. Each such attemptedidentification leads to various absurdities, e.g. the view literaryworks are physical objects would lead us to say that such works differby chemical composition; the view that they are experiences of theauthor would make them completely unknowable, while the view that theyare experiences of readers would prevent us from postulating a singlework Hamlet known by many readers; and the view that they areideal objects would entail that literary works may never be created andcannot be changed, even by their authors.As a result, works of literature cannot be classified in either ofthe major categories of objects accepted by traditional metaphysics --neither the categories of the real nor the ideal are suited for them.Any acceptable ontology of literature thus must accept entities ofanother category. As Ingarden ultimately argues towards the close ofthe text, the literary work is a “purely intentionalformation,” derived from the sentence-forming activities of itsauthor(s), and founded on some public copy of these sentences, and alsodepending for its existence and essence on a relation to certain idealmeanings attached to the words of the text.While the question of the ontological status of the literary workforms the work's beginning, most of the details of the text arededicated to drawing out an “essential anatomy” of theliterary work, determining its essential parts and their relations toone another. He conceives of this task as preliminary to any questionsof the values that works of literature may or may not have, as we willbe better able to see where values of different types can inhere oncewe know what the different parts of the literary work are.According to Ingarden, every literary work is composed of fourheterogeneous strata:Word sounds and phonetic formations of higher order (including thetypical rhythms and melodies associated with phrases, sentences andparagraphs of various kinds);Meaning units (formed by conjoining the sounds employed in alanguage with ideal concepts; these also range from the individualmeanings of words to the higher-order meanings of phrases, sentences,paragraphs, etc.)Schematized aspects (these are the visual, auditory, or other‘aspects’ via which the characters and places representedin the work may be ‘quasi-sensorially’ apprehended)Represented entities (the objects, events, states of affairs, etc.represented in the literary work and forming its characters, plot,etc.).Each of these strata has room for its own typical sorts of aestheticvalue (or disvalue); thus we may distinguish the values of rhythm,alliteration, or mellifluousness at the level of word sounds, from thevalues in interesting (or jarring) juxtapositions of ideas and conceptsat the level of meaning units, from the quasi-visual splendor of thescene presented, from the values of sympathetic or complex charactersand intricate plots.The values of a literary work, however, are not exhausted by theseparate values of its several strata, for the strata do not existseparately, but rather form an ‘organic unity’. Among thestrata are various forms of mutual dependence and influence, and theharmonies or disharmonies among the strata (e.g. between the haltingrhythms of a character's speech and his timid personality) maycontribute other aesthetic merits or demerits to the work. Mostimportantly, in cooperation with the other strata, the stratum ofrepresented objects may present “metaphysical qualities”such as the tragic, the dreadful, the peaceful and so on, whichcharacterize true works of art. The work of literature as a whole,thus, is a “polyphonic harmony,” much like a piece ofpolyphonic music in which each singer's voice may lend aestheticqualities of its own to the value of the whole, while the greatestvalues of the work as a whole may lie in the intricate interrelationsamong the values of all of the individual elements.A stratified theory like Ingarden's has considerable strengths. Itprovides a framework within which we can offer detailed analyses ofliterary works identifying their many sorts of value or disvalue,rather than simply passing judgment on the whole. As a result, manyapparent conflicts in judgments of taste may be resolved withoutembracing subjectivism, by noting that the individuals concerned may bepassing judgment on different strata of the literary work. It alsoenables us to understand stylistic differences among authors and overtime as differences in which strata are emphasized and whichde-emphasized, e.g. as many modernist works de-emphasize thetraditionally foregrounded stratum of represented objects in favor ofjuxtaposed images at the level of schematized aspects (e.g. VirginiaWoolf's The Waves), or even background both of these to therhythms and sound patterns at the level of phonetic formations (e.g.Edith Sitwell's nonsense poetry). Yet we can do so without seeing suchchanges as forming a radical break or undermining the idea that theseare all part of a continuous literary tradition.3.2 The Musical Work, The Picture, The Architectural WorkIn 1928, immediately after writing The Literary Work ofArt, Ingarden expanded his analyses of the ontology of art fromliterature, to also discuss music, painting, and architecture in aseries of essays originally intended as an appendix to The LiteraryWork of Art. As it happened, however, the appendix was notpublished along with The Literary Work of Art, and remaineddormant until after the war, when (in 1946) essays on the picture andthe architectural work were published in Polish. The three studies wereexpanded and finally published in German in 1961, along with an articleon film, and were not translated into English until 1989. The late dateof their release and the fact that they remain little known is a greatshame, as they address many of the same ontological issues as thosedebated in ‘analytic’ aesthetics, and provide not onlycompelling arguments against many popular positions but also analysesof the ontological structure of works of various kinds unsurpassed insubtlety and detail.The first three essays of The Ontology of the Work of Art,“The Musical Work,” “The Picture,” and“The Architectural Work” each attempt to determine theontological status of the work of art in question, its relation toconcrete entities such as copies of the score, sound events, paintedcanvasses or buildings, as well as to creative acts of artists and theconscious states of viewers. Each also examines whether and to whatextent the form of art in question, like the literary work, may turnout to have a stratified structure.The musical work, Ingarden argues, is distinct from experiences ofits composer and listeners, and cannot be identified with anyindividual sound event, performance or copy of the score. But nor canit be classified among ideal entities, since it is created by acomposer at a certain time, not merely discovered [Ontology,4-5]. It thus apparently falls between categories such as the‘real’ and the ‘ideal’, and so accepting theexistence of musical works (like literary works) seems to require us toaccept the existence of things in a category distinct from either ofthose -- that of purely intentional objects. The musical work is apurely intentional object with its ‘source of being in thecreative acts of the composer and its ontic foundation in thescore’ [Ontology, 91]. In itself, a traditionally scoredwork of Western music is a schematic formation full of places ofindeterminacy (e.g. it may be indeterminate exactly how loudly a noteis to be played, or how long it should be held), which are filled outdifferently in various performances. Unlike the literary work, however,the work of music is not a stratified entity, there being no essentialrepresenting function of the sounds of the musical work (unlike thesounds of a novel).The picture, too, is a purely intentional object, created by anartist and founded both in a real painting (a paint-covered canvas),and in the viewer's operations of apprehending it. The picture as awork of art cannot be identified with the real paint-covered canvashanging in a gallery, for the two have different properties anddifferent modes of cognitive accessibility. The picture can only beseen, and indeed only seen from certain points of view; the painting,by contrast, can be seen, smelled, heard, or even tasted, and can beobserved from any point of view. Ingarden also holds that the pictureas such (unlike the painting) is not an individual object of any sort-- one and the same picture may be presented in many paintings (if theyare all perfect copies of an original). (It might be worth noting thatwhile this is plausible enough for the picture, considered as such, wedo typically treat works of visual art as one-off individual objects(distinct from perfect copies or forgeries).) Moreover, the picture, tobe seen, requires that viewers take up a certain cognitive attituderegarding it, not required to observe the painting.“The Architectural Work” is perhaps the most interestingof the three major essays in the Ontology of the Work of Art,for it suggests how Ingarden's examination of works of art may bebroadened out to form the framework for a general theory of social andcultural objects and their relations to the more basic physical objectsposited by the natural sciences. The architectural work might seem topose the crucial objection to Ingarden's view that works of art are‘purely intentional objects’ having at least afoundation of their existence in the intentional states of their makersand viewers: “After all, the Notre Dame of Paris appears to be noless real than the many residential buildings that stand in itsvicinity, than the island upon which it was built, the river that flowsnearby, and so on” [255]. Nonetheless, even in this case,Ingarden argues, the architectural work is not a mere independent‘real’ object, although it is founded on one (the‘heap of stones’ forming its physical basis). For itsexistence as an architectural work requires not only its creation by anarchitect (rather than its coming into existence as a mere naturalformation), but also requires the ‘reconstructive acts of theviewer’ taking up a certain attitude towards the real object andhelping co-constitute its aesthetic and even its sensible properties.The work of architecture is thus a doubly founded object, which“refers back not only to the creative acts of the architect andthe reconstructive acts of the viewer, but also to its ontic foundationin a fully determined real thing shaped in a particular way”[Ontology, 263].(The fact that even such purely intentional objects as works of artof various kinds are founded not exclusively in consciousness, but also(in various ways) on real spatio-temporal objects, is also an importantpart of Ingarden's arguments against idealism, suggesting that even ifthe proper mode of being for the world of experience waspurely intentional being, that still would not be sufficient to showthat all that exists is a pure product of consciousness.)This situation for architecture parallels that for a great many ofthe social and cultural objects of our everyday experience in whatHusserl called the ‘life-world’. As Ingarden emphasizes, aflag, for example, should not be identified with the mere piece ofcloth of which it is fashioned, for it has different essentialproperties, and has an additional foundation in the mental acts of thecommunity that accept it as a flag and endow it with meanings and embedit in norms of action (e.g. we are not to clean pots with it but to useit in rendering military honors). Similarly, a church is not identicalwith the real building on which it is founded, but rather is createdonly through acts of consecration and the preservation of appropriateattitudes in the relevant community. In virtue of its secondarydependence on acts of consciousness, the church is endowed with various(social and cultural) properties and functions that a mere ordered heapof building materials cannot have. In this way Ingarden provides thebasis for an account of the nature of cultural and social objects thattakes neither the reductionist route of identifying them with theirphysical bases, nor the subjectivist route of treating all objects asmere social constructions. The life-world takes its unique place as thecommon product of acts of consciousness and an independent real world,and its existence (in quite specific ways) presupposes that of both ofthose foundations.3.3 Aesthetic Objects and Aesthetic ValuesIn addition to his work on the ontology of art objects of variouskinds, Ingarden also undertook general work on the ontological statusof the aesthetic object and the nature of aesthetic values. On theobject side, as we have seen he distinguishes in each case between themere physical object and the work of art; but he also distinguishesboth of these from what he calls the “concretization”(sometimes translated as “concretion”) of the work of art,which he considers to be the true ‘aesthetic object’. Thework of art itself, in the case of most forms of art such asliterature, painting, or music, is what Ingarden calls a“schematic formation.” That is, it has certain‘places of indeterminacy’, many of which are filled in byan individual interpretation or ‘reading’ of the work. Thusin the case of literature, there are many places of indeterminacy atthe level of character and plot -- unlike in the case of real people,it is often simply indeterminate what a literary character had forbreakfast, how far she sat back from the table, what the table was madeof, etc. Such indeterminacies are generally partially filled in by thereader in reconstructing the work, as the reader's backgroundassumptions help (at least partially) flesh out the skeletal imaginaryscene directly presented by the words of the text. Similarly, arepresentational painting generally leaves indeterminate, e.g., whatthe back of the person's head looks like in the case of a portrait,what they are thinking, or what happens immediately before or after themoment visually represented in paintings of historical events. Yetagain, viewers' reconstructive acts typically supplement theseindeterminacies in various ways, e.g. automatically grasping the lowerright corner of Breugel's ‘Fall of Icarus’ as presentingthe moment between a fall from the sky and the complete disappearanceof the body under water (not, e.g., as presenting an attempt at anunderwater handstand). Finally, in the case of music, a score leavesindeterminate various elements such as the precise timbre and fullnessof tone, and these are filled out in different ways in differentperformances of the work. In each case, (at least partially) filling inthe indeterminacies of the work through a reading, performance, orviewing renders the work more ‘concrete’. Each work of artpermits of a variety of legitimate concretizations which, unlike thework of art itself, may vary from viewer to viewer. If the concretionoccurs within the aesthetic attitude, an aesthetic object is formed[Selected Papers, 93], and so many aesthetic objects may bebased on one and the same work of art.Corresponding to this three-fold distinction between physicalobject, work of art, and aesthetic object, Ingarden posits a three-folddistinction among properties. While the mere physical object possessesonly value-neutral physical properties, the work of art may possessboth ‘axiologically neutral’ properties such as having acertain sentence structure or bearing patches of color arranged incertain ways, and artistic value qualities founded on these, such asclarity or obscurity of expression, technical mastery in the way thematerials are worked, balance of composition, etc. Aesthetic valuessuch as serenity, sublimity, profundity, etc., though they exist‘potentially’ in the work of art, only manifest themselvesin the aesthetic objects created through concretizing the work of art,and characterize the aesthetic object as a whole, although theirappearance may depend on that of many particular properties of the workof art and physical object. Since various aesthetic objects may bebased on one and the same work of art, these may also differ in theiraesthetic values. This can, at least in part, help account for thevariety of aesthetic judgments that may be formed apparently concerningthe same work of art.Yet as usual, Ingarden is concerned to account for the role ofconsciousness in constituting aesthetic values and the variations inaesthetic judgments without embracing a subjectivism that would denythat there is any better or worse in aesthetic judgment, each being amere report of the pleasure experienced by the one judging. Suchsubjectivism is to be avoided by noting first, that someconcretizations are better suited to the work's demands than others,more faithful, or better able to bring out the potential values in thework. A careful interpreter and evaluator can, through repeated contactwith the work, come increasingly close to separating out idiosyncraticelements of her interpretations from what is proper to the work.Secondly, the aesthetic properties of the resulting concretization arenot arbitrary inventions of the viewer, nor are they based on thepleasure she derives from the experience. Instead, their appearancesimply requires a competent viewer to observe the work's neutral andartistic values in an aesthetic attitude. Thus here, as elsewhere,Ingarden's goal is ultimately to account for the legitimate role ofconsciousness in constituting many of the objects and propertiesexperienced by us, while also avoiding a pure subjectivism or universalsocial constructivism by acknowledging the role of an independent‘real’ world in founding the cultural objects and valueproperties we so often concern ourselves with in daily life.BibliographyA complete (as of 1985) bibliography of Ingarden's works in English,French, German and Polish and of secondary sources is available in theedition of Ingarden's Selected Papers in Aesthetics citedbelow.Select Works in GermanIntuition und Intellekt bei Henri Bergson. Halle: MaxNiemeyer, 1921.Essentiale Fragen. Ein Beitrag zum Problem des Wesens.Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1925.“Bemerkungen zum Problem Idealismus-Realismus,”Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung,Ergänzungsband: Festschrift, Edmund Husserl zum 70. Geburtstaggewidmet. Halle: 1929, pp. 159-190.Das literarische Kunstwerk. Eine Untersuchung aus demGrenzgebiet der Ontologie, Logik und Literaturwissenschaft. Halle:Max Niemeyer, 1931.Untersuchungen zur Ontologie der Kunst: Musikwerk. Bild.Architektur. Film. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1962.Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt. Bd. I, II/I, II/2.Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1964.Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks. Tübingen:Max Niemeyer, 1968.Erlebnis, Kunstwerk und Wert. Vorträge zur Ästhetik1937-1967. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1969.Über die Verantwortung. Ihre ontischen Fundamente.Stuttgart: Reclam, 1970.Über die kausale Struktur der realen Welt. Der Streit umdie Existenz der Welt, Band III. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer,1974.Select Works in PolishO poznawaniu dzieła literackiego. (The Cognition ofthe Literary Work of Art). Ossolineum, Lvóv: 1937.O budowie obrazu. Szkic z teorii sztuki (On the Structureof the Painting: A Sketch in the Theory of Art). Rozprawy WydziałuFilozoficznego PAU Vol. LXVII, No.2, Kraków, 1946.“O dziele architektury” (On the Architectural Work ofArt). Nauka i Sztuka, Vol. II, 1946, No. 1, pp. 3-26 and No.2, pp. 26-51.Spór o istnienie śwaita (The Controversy overthe Existence of the World), PAU, Vol. I, Kraków: 1947, Vol. II,Kraków, 1948.Szkice z filozofii literatury (Sketches in the Philosophyof Literature). Vol. 1, Spółdzielnia wydawnicza“Polonista,” Łódź, 1947.“Elementy dzieła muzycznego” (Elements of theMusical Work of Art). Sprawozdania Towarzystwa Naukowego wToruniu, Vol. IX, 1955, Nos. 1-4, pp. 82-84.Studia z estetyki (Studies in Aesthetics). PWN, Vol. IWarszawa, 1957, Vol. II, Warszawa, 1958.O dziele literackim (The Literary Work of Art). PWN,Warszawa, 1960.Przeżycie -- dzieło -- wartość(Experience -- Work of Art -- Value). WL, Kraków, 1966.Studia z estetyki, Tom III (Studies in Aesthetics, Vol.III). PWN, Warszawa, 1970.U podstaw teorii poznania (Foundations of the Theory ofKnowledge). PWN, Warszawa, 1971.Książeczka o człowieku (Little Book onMan), Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków, 1972.Select Works in English TranslationThe Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Translated byRuth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson. Evanston, Illinois: NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1973.The Literary Work of Art. Translated by George G.Grabowicz. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press,1973.“The Letter to Husserl about the VI [Logical]Investigation and ‘Idealism’.” InTymieniecka, 1976.Man and Value. Translated by Arthur Szylewicz.München: Philosophia Verlag, 1983.On the Motives which led Edmund Husserl to TranscendentalIdealism. Translated by Arnor Hannibalsson. The Hague: 1976.The Ontology of the Work of Art. Translated by RaymondMeyer with John T. Goldthwait. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press,1989.Selected Papers in Aesthetics. Ed. by Peter J. McCormick,München: Philosophia Verlag,1985.Time and Modes of Being. Translated (from parts of DerStreit) by Helen R. Michejda. Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas,1964.Select Secondary SourcesChrudzimski, Arkadiusz, ed. Existence, Culture, Persons: The Ontology of Roman Ingarden. Frankfurt: Ontos, 2005.Dziemidok, B. and McCormick, P., eds. On the Aesthetics ofRoman Ingarden: Interpretations and Assessments. Dordrecht, TheNetherlands: Kluwer, 1989.Ewing, A.C. Review of Essentiale Fragen. MindVol. XXXV, 1926, No. 138, p. 250.Graff, P. and S. Krzemień-Ojak, eds. Roman Ingarden andContemporary Polish Aesthetics. Warsaw: PWN, 1975.Husserl, Edmund. Briefe an Roman Ingarden. The Hague:Martinus Nijhoff, 1968.Küng, Guido. “Ingarden on Language and Ontology,”Analecta Husserliana, Vol. II, 1972, pp. 204-217.Mitscherling, Jeff. Roman Ingarden's Ontology andAesthetics. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1997.Nowak, Andrzej and Lesnek Sosnowski, eds. Dictionary of RomanIngarden's Philosophical Concepts. Kraków: Institute ofPhilosophy, Jagellonian University, 2001.Rudnik, Hans H., ed. Ingardeniana II: New Studies in thePhilosophy of Roman Ingarden (Analecta Husserliana, Vol.XXX). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1990.Ryle, Gilbert. Review of Essentiale Fragen. MindVol. XXXVI, 1927, No. 143, pp. 366-370.Smith, Barry. “Roman Ingarden: Ontological Foundations forLiterary Theory,” in Language, Literature and Meaning,I, ed. by J. Odmark, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1978, pp. 373-390.Spiegelberg, Herbert. The Phenomenological Movement. TheHague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982.Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa, ed. Ingardeniana (AnalectaHusserliana, Vol. IV), Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel,1976.Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa, ed. Ingardeniana III: RomanIngarden's Aesthetics in a New Key and the Independent Approaches ofOthers: The Performing Arts, the Fine Arts, and Literature.(Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXIII ), Dordrecht, TheNetherlands: Kluwer, 1991.Wellek, René. Four Critics: Croce, Valery, Lukácsand Ingarden. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982.Other Internet ResourcesThe Roman Ingarden Philosophical Research Centre(maintained by Marcin Waligóra, Faculty of Philosophy,Jagiellonian University, Poland)Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology(maintained by Lester Embree, Philosophy, Florida Atlantic University, USA)Descriptive and Formal Ontology: Ingarden(In "Ontology: A Resource Guide for Philosophers", maintained by Raul Corazzon)Related Entries categories | facts | Husserl, Edmund | ontology and ontological commitment | phenomenology | |
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