Ontology and the literary work: the realistic Ingarden’s response to Husserl

Abstract

The transcendental idealism announced by Husserl as identical to phenomenology itself was one of the most controversial points of his philosophy. In this respect, one of the first critics of the philosophical position espoused openly by Husserl since Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology was his old student Roman Ingarden. Its dense and resolute criticism in relation to Husserl’s idealistic perspective is supported by deep ontological investigations, contained mainly in his magnum opus, Controversy over the Existence of the World. However, some of the discussions displayed there were already present in his famous writing The Literary Work of Art, from 1929. Indeed, in this text, which seeks to demarcate the ontological status of literary works, Ingarden already undertakes analyses that allow him to question some of the central assumptions of the transcendental idealism advocated by Husserl. The proposal of this work is to present some of the basic notions of Ingarden’s ontology, as well as his views on the mode of being of literary work, and try to understand how these elements coordinate in order to provide to Ingarden some elements that allow him to attempt a realistic response to Husserl’s position.