Ingarden's realist philosophy of sociocultural dynamics

   Roman Ingarden, one of Husserl’s most prolific students, interpreted his teacher’s works with the aim of restoring the realistic value of phenomenology and correcting idealistic metaphysics. Starting from the image of culture as text, Ingarden makes literary works the primary subject of his research, but the ultimate motives of this approach extend beyond the debate between idealism and realism. Quite unexpectedly, aesthetic conclusions help counter extreme idealism, where the world and all its objects depend on subjective consciousness. Never considered the primary philosophy, aesthetics now introduces correctives to the metaphysical ontology of transcendental idealism. The mode of being of the external world, which Ingarden seeks to define through multilayeredness, constitutiveness, intentionality, points of indeterminacy, and intersubjectivity, allows for the creation of a comprehensive ontology of the world and its diverse objects. An analysis of the formal-ontological components of various objects leads Ingarden to the conclusion that objects exist independent of consciousness, contrary to the assertions of Husserl’s transcendental idealism, which describes the world and the entirety of its objects as dependent on consciousness. A pure intentionality of all being would be too radical even for Berkeley. Thus, Ingarden’s rich phenomenological corpus is based on the debate between idealism and realism. At the same time, Ingarden utilizes Husserl’s phenomenological reduction to shift attention to perception, its conditions, and context. The existence of cultural objects as intentional correlates of acts of consciousness and the constitutive cognitive process is where the phenomenological continuity between Ingarden and Husserl is preserved.

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