Abstract
The objective of this article is to discuss the problem of ontology in terms of the critique of Husserl’s so-called ‘idealistic turning point” by the two phenomenologists, Hartmann and Ingarden. While different in their approaches to the problem – for Hartmann, it is more a matter a metaphysics of knowledge, while for Ingarden, it involves clarifying the controversy on the existence of the world – both seek to reconstruct an ontology that recovers the meaning of the real world. The relationship between essence and existence is thus re-examined in the light of a different interpretation of reality that moves from a methodological framework that grants validity only to a reduction that is eidetic, rather than transcendental.
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Notes
- 1.
For the influence and importance of Hartmann’s Russian professors on his thought, see Harich 1983, pp. 1303–1322.
- 2.
Hartmann acknowledges that his study of Plato seeks “traces of the logical elements in order to demonstrate their determining function, as explained by Plato, where it is possible to find them […]. In this sense, the logic of being, as we are trying to interpret the doctrine of ideas […] does not claim to be the only point of view possible, but rather the decisive one for the purposes of philosophical evaluation» (Hartmann 1965a, pp. V-VI).
- 3.
Notwithstanding Hartmann’s profession of faith in Cohen’s outlook, Sirchia observes: “In accepting the logical-methodological meaning of the idea, he does nothing other than appropriate as a “working hypothesis”[…] that which in Cohen instead was a sure point of departure for a whole long-range autonomous theoretical reconstruction” (Sirchia, 1969, p. 28). See also: Werkmeister (1990).
- 4.
But, he warns, “a phenomenology of knowing as essential analysis of the metaphysics of the cognitive phenomenon is not yet present to date” (Hartmann 1965b, p. 38).
- 5.
This approach differs from Husserlian metaphysics: “Hartmann’s metaphysics, explains Vanni Rovighi, is realistic, while that of Husserl is idealistic, but the position of the problem of knowledge is idealistic in Hartmann, realistic in Husserl, because for Hartmann, I know some facts of my consciousness and from these I have to deduce a reality in itself, while for Husserl, I know some realities, even though he then concludes that these realities are created by a transcendental ‘I’” (Vanni Rovighi 1939, p. 181).
- 6.
He also deals with this problem in Hartmann 1931.
- 7.
Hartmann writes in regard to emotional acts such as loving, hating, living, etc., “that all these emotional acts have a counterpart to whom they are directed, and the real world consists precisely in the totality of these counterparts, in the measure in which it is conceived (and becomes an object for us). The transcendent acts represent the ways of relationship between consciousness and the world in which it finds itself. One could also say: such acts represent this staying-inside itself” (Hartmann 1982, p. 17).
- 8.
Also from Ingarden’s same school in Göttingen was Conrad-Martius who, in his Realontologie (1923), called attention to the themes of an ontology understood as science of being, and thus criticized as idealist the position of his professor after Ideas.
- 9.
Ingarden recalls that the difference in position between Husserl and the Göttingen school that gathered his ex-students of that university, began precisely with the publication of Ideas I. During the lesson following discussion of some sections that should have been read at home, “very lively discussions arose because many of Husserl’s older students advanced various objections against the idealistic tendencies that surfaced in Ideas I, as well as in reference to the sense and function of the transcendental reduction” (Ingarden 1968, p. 113).
- 10.
Cfr. the study of Haefliger 1994, which deals analytically with the possibility of an existential theory in Ingarden, conducting a wide-ranging, thorough analysis of his ontology, beginning with the problem of meaning of Husserlian logic and of Frege, to produce what, to his mind, are the modalities of being of the Ingardian ontology.
- 11.
Cf. in this regard the brilliant study of Tymieniecka (1957), highlighting the differences and similarities between the two ontoloiges regarding their respective conceptions of existence (Dasein) and essence (Sosein). From Tymieniecka’s point of view, both give rise to an ontology in opposition to dogmatic ontology ; but, while for Ingarden this “analyzes the structures and the laws of being as pure possibilities, independenly of all existential theorems, Hartmann, in contrast, seeks being as being without an existential opening” (ivi, p. 180). In this sense, the existential that Ingarden does not know of lies in the fact that he, concerning the foundation of an ontology, is interested in identifying the eidetic aspect of the phenomenological reduction, while Hartmann strives to analyze the structures and stratifications of being in order to find being’s existential meaning, of which transcendental phenomenology had known nothing.
- 12.
According to Ingarden, it is wrongheaded to consider the transcendental reduction as a scientific method to attain a rigorous science. “By suspending (in one or another way) the belief in the existence and determination of the objects of knowledge of certain investigated kind, e.g. of the outer perception, it is to prevent prejudging in a positive manner the cognitive validity of the investigated cognition at the moment when this validity is still to be disclosed or evaluated in the very epistemological investigation […]. We meet here the principal difficulty how not to make use, in the investigation on knowledge of objects of a certain type, of the justified knowledge of these obiects without losing cognitive contact with reality which concerns the given cognition” (Ingarden 1975, pp. 39–40).
- 13.
In regard to the question of ontology and knowledge, Ingarden propsed in The Controversy on the Existence of the World a gnoseology that holds tight to the eidedic (the constitution of ideas) but that contemporaneously opens to a recovery of the existential dimension in every format. In addition, the theory of knowledge must aim at an objectivity. However, such an objectivity must not merely address current events, the current status revealed by scholars. Like Husserl, Ingarden holds that one must begin from the pre-scientific state of knowledge in order to give a valid definition that corrects previous stages (cfr. in this regard Chrudzimski 1999).
- 14.
“In his ontological and phenomenological inquiries into Husserl, writes Tymieniecka, Ingarden follows two roads: one recognizes the role of ideas in the constitution of concrete being inasmuch as concrete, in linea entis; the other, the directive role that aims at ideas in their development, from their origin to their decline […] the critical analysis – formal, material, essential – the second aspect of the role of ideas is what Ingarden considers the key that permits access to the permanent structure of being” (Tymieniecka 1959, pp. 162–162). Cf. in addition: Id. “Analecta Husserliana” 4 (1976); Id. 1989; Id. “Analecta Husserliana” 30 (1990); Id. “Analecta Husserliana” 33 (1991); Mitscherling 1997.
- 15.
For Ingarden, constitution must stop at the eidetic level and deal with essences (ideas and their formation) beginning with the lived experience of consciousness. It cannot become constitution of the objective world because it would invalidate the transcendence of the world that is irrepressible. The experience of transcendence must then remain as for Hartmann the limit with which gnoseology must always return to settle accounts. For its part, the reduction can call itself scientific, that is, give rise to a “rigorous science” only when it deals with the eidetic sphere without claiming to reach the constitution of the objective world.
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Ghigi, N. (2010). Phenomenology and Ontology in Nicolai Hartmann and Roman Ingarden. In: Poli, R., Seibt, J. (eds) Theory and Applications of Ontology: Philosophical Perspectives. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8845-1_15
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