Roman Ingarden's Ontology and Aesthetics

CHAPTER TWO: INGARDEN'S INTERPRETATION OF HUSSERL

CHAPTER TWO INGARDEN'S INTERPRETATION OF HUSSERL A. INTRODUCTION: HUSSERL AND METAPHYSICALIDEALISM In this chapter I offer a critical examination of Ingarden's interpretation of Husserl as a 'metaphysical idealist'. Whilethe idealist interpretation antedates Ingarden's first statementofcriticism, his ceaseless endeavour to drive home his point for his entire career has resulted in his being designated its chief proponent. The current debate concerning Husserl's metaphysical position may be said to have been initiated by Richard Holmes's 1975 paper "Is Transcendental Phenomenology Committedto Idealism?,"1 which, like most of the recent literature, identifiesIngarden as such.With regard exclusively to Ingarden's interpretation, the issue as addressed in the recent literature focusseson two possibilities: either Ingarden incorrectly understood Husserl's transcendental idealism as entailingmetaphysical idealism, in which case most of his criticisms are misdirected,2 or Husserl failed to recognize the metaphysical dimensions ofhis transcendental idealism, in which case at least some of Ingarden's criticisms are incisive.3 Most recent commentators have chosen the former of these two possibilities . While I shall be arguing for the latter, it must be pointed out that there remains an obvious third option, which the following analyses tend in fact also to support—namely, that each of the two above possibilities may hold to some extent. In concentrating on the "traditional" metaphysical conclusions to be drawn from 41 Roman Ingarden's Ontology and Aesthetics Husserl's analyses, Ingarden may well have failed to appreciate fully the revolutionary character of Husserl's variety of transcendental idealism, which Husserl claimed to be radically distanced from the traditional philosophies within whose context the idealism/realism debate arises. Ingarden's concentration on this feature of Husserl's thought should not be regarded as all that unusual or surprising. The fact is generally overlooked that the idealism/realism controversy was an intensely debated topic in the first few decades of this century, and in Poland the discussion was quite heated. Leon Chwistek, for example, offered a booklength study of the issue, and it was a central philosophical concern of that enfant terrible of Polish arts and letters, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz(Witkacy), who wrote a lengthy study entitled "Realism and Idealism."4 Husserl's brief flirtation with psychologism in the Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) and his vehement attack on that doctrine in the Prolegomena of Logical Investigations (1900/01) have immediate bearing on the idealism/realism debate, but his primary motivations, most obviously by the time of the latter work, lay not in the metaphysical but in the epistemological issues involved. In subsequently concentrating exclusively on these epistemological issues, however, Husserl may indeed have failed to discern the extent to which his analyses lend themselves to, if not in fact demand, the elaboration of a consistent metaphysical idealism. In other words, while Husserl explicitlydenied that he was committed to such a position, he may simply have failed to draw the necessary metaphysical conclusions of his research, conclusions that would have forced him to retract that denial. As I shall explain in what follows, much of the confusion surrounding the issue of Husserl's metaphysical position results from the failure of previous commentators to distinguish between two distinct sorts of metaphysicalidealism, the (Berkeleyan)'subjective ' and the (Husserlian) 'transcendental'. This same failure may occasionally have crept into the thought of both Ingarden and Husserl. As far as we need concern ourselves here, the story of this interpretation begins toward the end of July 1918, when Ingarden, in a letter to Husserl, directed a number of criticisms against the latter's idealism. In 1961,while preparing the letter for publication (forty-three years after he had first drafted it), Ingarden added a paragraph of "Final Comments," the last sentence of which reads: "The present letter constitutes the incipient element of that theoretical process, which has been in fact occupying my entire scholarly life"5 (1918 Letter 419^38). The "theoretical 42 Ingarden's Interpretation ofHusserl process" he isreferring to isthat which wefindin his ongoing concern with the idealism/realism debate, a concern that appears to have been triggered by what he took to be metaphysically suspect presuppositions and implications of Husserl's transcendental idealism that Husserl himself never explicitly disclosed or elaborated . Husserl's failure to clarify the precise nature ofhis idealism and systematically to develop its metaphysical implications brought about a break between him and several of the Munich phenomenologists as early as 1904, when they interpreted his transcendental...