Roman Ingarden and His Time

Abstract

When Roman Ingarden died suddenly on June 14, 1970, the body of his writings on philosophy of art was certainly more extensive than that of any other Polish thinker of his time. It also encompassed almost half of his output of writings on philosophy. The other half consisted of his famous treatise Controversy about the Existence of the World, which was directed against the epistemology of idealism; one volume deals with the history of contemporary philosophy, basically with that of Edmund Husserl, but also with that of Henri Bergson (his doctoral dissertation), Franz Brentano, Max Scheler, and in a very critical negative sense with neopositivism, the bête noire of his philosophizing. Yet despite the copiousness of his aesthetical studies, he stated¹ three months—to the day—before his death, at a lecture in Amsterdam on March 13, 1970, that his two main works on philosophy of art did not even mention aesthetics but were called Investigations on the Borderline of Ontology, Logic and Literary Criticism and Investigations on the Ontology of Art. The reason, he said, for this striking omission was that these two books were first supposed to serve as a preparation for dealing with certain general philosophical problems, notably the issue of realism versus idealism. “The specifically aesthetic questions,” Ingarden continued, “were to me at that time of secondary importance … it was clear to me from the start that we should proceed in aesthetics not in an empirical-inductive way but work out an eidetic view of a general idea of a work of art and of the less general ideas of the works of the particular arts.” In other words, Ingarden asserts that he

A resident of New York City and a frequent contributor to journals of philosophy and aesthetics, the late Max Rieser was a lifelong friend of Roman Ingarden.