Existence, Culture, and Persons: The Ontology of Roman Ingarden 9783110325621, 9783110325027

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction
Substances, States, Processes, Events.Ingarden and the Analytic Theory of Objects∗GREGOR HAEFLIGER / GUIDO KÜNG
Ingarden and the Ontology of Dependence*PETER SIMONS
Roman Ingarden’s Ontology: Existential Dependence, Substances,Ideas, and Other Things Empiricists Do Not Like*DANIEL VON WACHTER
Brentano, Husserl und Ingardenüber die intentionalen GegenständeARKADIUSZ CHRUDZIMSKI
Ingarden and the Ontology of Cultural ObjectsAMIE L. THOMASSON
Concretization, Literary Criticism, and the Lifeof the Literary Work of ArtJEFF MITSCHERLING
Ingarden: From Phenomenological Realism to Moral RealismEDWARD SWIDERSKI
Roman Ingardens Ontologie und die WeltANDRZEJ PÓŁTAWSKI
Roman Ingardens Ontologie und die WeltANDRZEJ PÓŁTAWSKI
Contributors
Index of Names

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Arkadiusz Chrudzimski (Ed.) Existence, Culture, and Persons

PHENOMENOLOGY & MIND Herausgegeben von / Edited by Arkadiusz Chrudzimski • Wolfgang Huemer Band 5 / Volume 5

Arkadiusz Chrudzimski (Ed.)

Existence, Culture, and Persons The Ontology of Roman Ingarden

ontos verlag Frankfurt I Paris I Ebikon I Lancaster I New Brunswick

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de

North and South America by Transaction Books Rutgers University Piscataway, NJ 08854-8042 [email protected]

United Kingdom, Ire, Iceland, Turkey, Malta, Portugal by Gazelle Books Services Limited White Cross Mills Hightown LANCASTER, LA1 4XS [email protected]



2005 ontos verlag P.O. Box 15 41, D-63133 Heusenstamm nr Frankfurt www.ontosverlag.com ISBN 3-937202-84-6

2005 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use of the purchaser of the work Printed on acid-free paper ISO-Norm 970-6 FSC-certified (Forest Stewardship Council) This hardcover binding meets the International Library standard Printed in Germany by buch bücher dd ag

Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................... 7 Substances, States, Processes, Events. Ingarden and the Analytic Theory of Objects .......................................... 9 GREGOR HAEFLIGER / GUIDO KÜNG Ingarden and the Ontology of Dependence ............................................. 39 PETER SIMONS Roman Ingarden’s Ontology: Existential Dependence, Substances, Ideas, and Other Things Empiricists Do not Like ............................................ 55 DANIEL VON WACHTER Brentano, Husserl und Ingarden über die intentionalen Gegenstände ..... 83 ARKADIUSZ CHRUDZIMSKI Ingarden and the Ontology of Cultural Objects .......................................115 AMIE L. THOMASSON Concretization, Literary Criticism, and the Life of the Literary Work of Art .....................................................................137 JEFF MITSCHERLING Ingarden: From Phenomenological Realism to Moral Realism ............. 159 EDWARD SWIDERSKI Roman Ingardens Ontologie und die Welt ............................................ 191 ANDRZEJ PÓŁTAWSKI Notes on Contributors ...................................................................... 221 Index of Names ................................................................................ 225

Introduction Roman Ingarden (1893–1970) belonged to those phenomenologists who never accepted Husserl’s transcendental idealism. Beginning with the Bemerkungen zum Problem ‘Idealismus-Realismus’ (1929) he devoted a great part of his intellectual energy to the analytical studies in which he hoped to develop an ontological framework suitable for an ultimate refutation of Husserl’s idealistic doctrine. The most important of his works, like the monumental Controversy over the Existence of the World (Polish edition 1947, German edition 1964/65) or The Literary Work of Art (1931) were explicitly classified by their author as such preparatory studies; and even in his later “personalist” studies, like Über die Verantwortung (1970), he still returned to the old realism / idealism problem. Nonetheless, it would be a huge mistake to think that a study of Ingarden’s work could be valuable only for those who are fascinated by all the subtleties of the Husserlian tradition or esoteric dialectics of the idealism / realism debate. Gregor Haefliger and Guido Küng are perfectly right, when they write about The Controversy over the Existence of the World that “[a] contemporary ontologist may find it more interesting to read this study […] not in connection with the realism / idealism controversy, but as a treasury of numerous ontological distinctions, problem formulations, and detailed analyses” (p. 9 in this volume), and exactly the same holds also for Ingarden’s other “preparatory” works. Actually, the majority of philosophers who find Ingarden’s work valuable and inspiring belong to the growing community of “naïve” or “straight” realists who typically don’t even consider transcendental idealism as a serious philosophical option. Ironically, the main goal of Ingarden’s philosophical struggle – the refutation of idealism – remained something that very few of his reader are really interested in. Most of the papers collected in this volume follow this strand of Ingarden’s reception. The first three articles concern the basic ontological categories and distinctions. Gregor Haefliger and Guido Küng concentrate on categories of substance, state, process, and event, and compare Ingarden’s solutions with some contemporary developments. Peter Simons investigates several concepts of ontological dependence that are central for the especially Ingardenian branch of ontology that Ingarden called “existential Existence, Culture, and Persons: The Ontology of Roman Ingarden. Arkadiusz Chrudzimski (ed.), Frankfurt: ontos, 2005, 7–8.

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INTRODUCTION

ontology”. Daniel von Wachter proposes “a Europe-in-seven-days tour through Ingarden’s ontology” (p. 55 in this volume). The next three papers concern the topic of Ingarden’s philosophy that happened to become the best known of his achievements: the philosophy of fiction and of cultural objects. Arkadiusz Chrudzimski sketches the general problematic of intentional objects and argues that they are by no means useless fictions. Amie L. Thomasson presents an Ingardenian ontology of social and cultural objects such as money, churches, and flags. Finally, Jeff Mitscherling investigates the difficult topic of the “life” of a literary work of art. The last two papers open a somewhat wider perspective on Ingarden’s work. Edward Swiderski points out an interesting change of perspective that occurred in Ingarden’s late work, which was devoted to the problem of responsibility. He argues that there is a tension between the hypotheticalscientific and phenomenological sides of his philosophy. Andrzej Półtawski tries to answer the question of what Ingarden’s ontology would look like if he developed it according to his deeply personalist picture of the world. I would also like to thank all of the contributors who have made this collection possible. My particular thanks go Anna Sierszulska, who translated the paper by Gregor Haefliger and Guido Küng from German and to Brian Armstrong, Johannes Brandl, Norbert Gratzl, and Edward Swiderski for their help with proofreading the English and German contributions. My work was supported by the Austrian Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF). Last but not least: Ingarden was not only a great thinker but also an excellent teacher and I want to dedicate this book to the memory of his most famous student: Karol Wojtyła – John Paul II (1920–2005).

The editor Salzburg, April 2005

Substances, States, Processes, Events. Ingarden and the Analytic Theory of Objects∗ GREGOR HAEFLIGER / GUIDO KÜNG

Decisively influenced by the phenomenologists in Göttingen, in 1913, the year in which Ideas I appeared, Ingarden set himself the task of examining Husserl’s transcendental idealism.1 The systematic results of these investigations are contained in his monumental main work, Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt (The Controversy over the Existence of the World).2 A contemporary ontologist may find it more interesting to read this study, which in fact remained unfinished, not in connection with the realism / idealism controversy, but as a treasury of numerous ontological distinctions, problem formulations, and detailed analyses. A good example is Ingarden’s distinction, in the style of analytic object-theory (Gegenstandstheorie), among substances (‘things’), states of substances, processes,3 and events. However, we would like to begin with a presentation of Ingarden’s conception of ontology, in order to show its connection with the analytic theory of objects.

∗

The original German version of this paper appeared as: Gregor Haefliger / Guido Küng, “Substanzen, Zustände, Prozesse, Ereignisse: Ingarden und die analytische Gegenstandstheorie” in: Hans Rainer Sepp (ed.), Die Münchener-Göttinger Phänomenologie (Orbis Phaenomenologicus. Perspektiven), Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2006. With kind permission of the editor. 1 On the development of his considerations cf. Haefliger (2); (3). 2 Cf. Küng (2); Haefliger (2). 3 In the Polish edition of Der Streit Ingarden uses the expression ‘proces’, while in the German edition, beside and instead of the expression ‘Prozess’, mostly the expression ‘Vorgang’ is used. The English expression ‘process’ is as a rule synonymous with ‘Prozess’, or to be precise ‘Vorgang’, as Ingarden understands these expressions, whereas the English expressions ‘event’ and ‘occurrent’ may mean either processes or events in Ingarden’s sense. Existence, Culture, and Persons: The Ontology of Roman Ingarden. Arkadiusz Chrudzimski (ed.), Frankfurt: ontos, 2005, 9–37.

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1. Ingarden’s Ontology and the Analytic Theory of Objects 1.1 Ingarden’s Ontology as Theory of Objects The aim of Ingarden’s ontology is to work out an extensive spectrum of eidetic possibilities, i.e. necessities in regard to all possible entities. The most important axioms of Ingarden’s concept of ontology are the following: (A 1) Any object whatsoever can be analyzed in regard to its mode of existence, its ontological form, and its material qualitative makeup.4 (A 2) Apart from the domain O of individual objects (i.e. real substances and objects such as processes, events etc., as well as ideal individual objects) there are two further domains to be distinguished, namely the domain Q of ideal qualities and the domain I of ideas.5 (A 3) Ontology consists in a priori analysis of the contents of ideas.6 (A 4) Ontological analysis assumes neither the existence of individual real objects, nor the existence of individual ideal objects.7 (A 5) Properly ontological statements (i.e. statements about the contents of ideas) can be reformulated as equivalent applied ontological statements (that is, as statements about objects falling under the ideas in question).8 4

Cf. Ingarden (1), 58. Cf. Ingarden (1), 39. 6 Cf. Ingarden (1), 33. This requirement is based on an ontological theory of ideas. Concerning the ontic structure of ideas and their division into formal and material ideas, cf. Ingarden (2), Ch. X. 7 Cf.: “Die ontologische Betrachtung setzt keine individuelle, gegenständliche Tatsache im erweiterten Sinne voraus, in welchem er sowohl die reale Welt und die in ihr eventuell vorhandenen Gegenständlichkeiten, andererseits aber auch die Gebiete individueller Gegenständlichkeiten, die durch ein entsprechendes Axiomensystem bestimmt werden, umfasst.” (Ingarden (1), 34). On the latter, ideal objectivities, cf. also Ingarden (1), 23 ff. On the relation between ideas and the individual objects possibly falling under these ideas, cf. Ingarden (2), 264 ff. 8 Cf.: “Diese auf Individuelles gerichteten Feststellungen werden wir ontologische ‘Anwendungssätze’ nennen. Sie sind immer gewissen ontologischen Sätzen über Ideengehalte äquivalent.” (Ingarden (1), 43–44). 5

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Explanatory Remarks: (i) According to A 2, the ‘universe of discourse’ of Ingarden’s ontology can be determined as follows: D = {Q, I, O}. In addition, there are 3 basic relations to be considered, schematically: CO Ideal Qualities (Q)

Ideas resp. Contents of Ideas (I) CT

FU EX

IN

Individual Objects (O)

For the purposes of further explanation we assume the distinction between singular abstract terms, such as ‘redness’ (F+), and corresponding general concrete terms, such as ‘red’ (F).9 We assume two numerically different red things (substances), a and b, exist. Therefore, according to Ingarden, two numerically different individual properties10 of being red, of which the ‘bearers’ are a and b respectively, also exist. The truth of (1)

Fa . Fb

presupposes, according to Ingarden, also the truth of the following statement: (2) 9

IN (F+, a) . IN (F+, b);

Cf. Künne, Ch. 1. Viz., abstract moments in Husserl’s sense, Cf. Smith/Mulligan (1); (2).

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(3) IN (F+, a) ≡ EX (a, F+), where ‘EX (x, Φ+)’ can be defined as ‘a converse relation of IN (Φ+, x)’; (4) CO (F+, content of the idea i1); (5) CO (F+, content of the idea i1) ≡ CT (content of the idea i1, F+), where ‘CT (x, y)’ can be defined as ‘a converse relation of CO (y, x)’; (6) FU (a, the idea i1) . FU (b, the idea i1). If (1) is true, so is (2), namely the ideal quality of being red is instantiated both in a and in b.11 One can see that the ideal qualities are roughly what is called ‘universals’ in the philosophical tradition. In this way, the basic relation of INstantiation (ideal qualities in individual things) can be ‘explained’, according to (3), as the converse-relation of EXemplification (individual things exemplify ideal qualities). If (1) is true, then according to Ingarden (4) is also true, namely redness is concretized in the content of the idea of ‘a red thing’ (i.e. the idea i1).12 The basic relation of COncretisation (of ideal qualities in the contents of ideas) can be ‘explained’, according to (5), as the converse-relation of ConTainment (CT). The basic relations IN and CO are very different of course. Therefore, one can infer (1) from (2), while from (4) one can neither infer that the idea i1 is red, nor that the content of the idea i1 is red. If (1) is true, then according to Ingarden (6) is also true, namely both a and b fall under (FU) the idea i1. This fact, as well as the fact that ideas possess contents, that relations of lower or higher order respectively hold between ideas, and moreover that there are ideas of different levels,13 make it plausible that ideas should be best understood in the sense of traditional ‘concepts’. This statement shows that Ingarden, besides recognizing the three basic relations IN, CO, and FU, which relate elements from different domains of being, also recognizes basic relations among the elements of a single domain of being.14 However, we will not here discuss these ques11

Ingarden speaks about ‘actual concretization’. Ingarden speaks about ‘ideal concretization’ – ideas are ideal entities possessing a content structured with constants and variables. 13 Beside the idea ‘a red thing’ there is also for example the idea ‘the idea of a red thing’, ‘the idea of the idea of a red thing’, etc. 14 Among the elements of {Q}, i.e. among ideal qualities, for example the relations of inclusion and exclusion can hold; among the elements of {I}, i.e. among ideas, for 12

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tions nor the reasons why Ingarden distinguished between ideal qualities and ideas, or his conception of ontology as the analysis of the contents of ideas (comp. A 3).15 (ii) However, it is important to observe that many of Ingarden’s findings in ontology can also be formulated within the framework of the pure theory of individual objects. For statements about the contents of ideas of the first level can be reformulated into applied ontological statements, i.e. into statements of the form: (7) Necessarily: When x is an individual object of kind A (i.e. when Ax), it holds that Φx. This shows that the essential results of Ingarden’s ontology can also be interesting for those who find Ingarden’s ideas and ideal qualities implausible. Ingarden clearly distinguishes statements of the form (7) from statements of the form: (8) There exists an individual object x of kind A, which is such that necessarily Φx. While statements of the form (7) are ontological statements, statements of the form (8) – speaking in Ingarden’s language – are metaphysical statements. 16 It is not possible to derive the existence of individual objects from applied ontological statements.17 In this sense, Ingarden’s ontology can be

example the relations of being-of-lower or of-higher order can hold; and finally among the elements of {O}, i.e. among individual objects, for example the relations of existential dependence can hold. 15 Cf. Haefliger (1), Ch. 2. 16 Cf. Ingarden (1), 49. The details of Ingarden’s conception of metaphysics are in Küng (2). 17 Cf. above notes 6 and 7. – According to Ingarden this holds – programmatically! – even in relation to ideas and ideal qualities. Considering A2, some difficulties will naturally arise for Ingarden’s ontology. Cf. Haefliger (1), Ch.2 on this subject.

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described as ‘pure’ theory of objects i.e. free from existential assumptions.18 (iii) According to A 1, Ingarden distinguishes formal, material, and existential ontology. Therefore, applied ontological statements of the following form can be formulated: (7*) Necessarily: If x is an individual object of kind A, it holds that: Φfx and Φmx and Φex, where the properly indexed Φ can be substituted in each case by a formalontological, material-ontological or existential-ontological predicate (or a group of predicates). The above evidently assumes, among other things, clarification of what is meant by ‘the form of something’ and ‘the matter (quality) of something’. Basically, Ingarden is guided by the corresponding Husserlian distinctions, although according to Ingarden not only the matter but also the form of something are ontic ‘factors’ or ‘aspects’ of objects.19 Obviously, criteria for the classification of predicates as formal, material or existential predicates are required.20 All this raises extremely complex problems, which hardly find their solutions in Ingarden’s writings. But nor can these problems be further investigated here. Rather, in what follows we will consider only a few predicates by means of which Ingarden distinguishes among substances, their states, processes, and events.

18

Cf. Haefliger (5). Cf. Ingarden (2), Ch. VII; Haefliger (1), § 10. 20 The question of the criteria of classification of concepts into formal and material is the most difficult. Admittedly, sufficient conditions, on the one hand, and the necessary conditions, on the other, can be determined. But it is very problematic to provide both the sufficient and the necessary conditions. On this cf. Mulligan (1), (2). The situation is further complicated by the fact that we should distinguish between formal logical and formal ontological concepts. Cf. Smith (1). Moreover, we must be able to distinguish by means of clear criteria between formal ontological and existential ontological concepts (in specific Ingarden’s sense). Cf. on this (skeptical) Simons (2). 19

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1.2 Analytic Theory of Objects Quine’s slogan “No entity without identity” does not merely express the trivial claim that each entity is identical with itself.21 It is rather a shortened form of: “It is only legitimate to recognize entities of category A when, for all the entities of category A, a valid criterion is available to which one can refer when formulating identity statements for these entities.” Yet, on the ground of this explanation, Quine’s dictum is compatible with a purely epistemological criterion of identity22. However, within the framework of the analytic theory of objects, criteria of identity should be understood not epistemologically but ontologically.23 A criterion of identity will also not be a definition of identity,24 even not of a sort-relative identity in Geach’s sense25; nor is the principle of persistence of any relevance here.26 The identity criteria relevant for the theory of objects are of the following form27: (9)

N (∀x) (∀y) {Ax . Ay → [(x = y) ≡ R (x, y)]},

where ‘R (x, y)’ stands for the essential identity condition. The criterion of identity for classes is an example of (9): (10)

N (∀x) (∀y) {x is a class . y is a class → [(x = y) ≡ (∀z) (z ∈ x ≡ z ∈ y)]}.

A criterion of identity says about objects which are A that they are necessarily identical if and only if they share certain ‘properties’: e.g. ‘classes’ are necessarily identical if and only if they have exactly the same elements. 21

Such is for example the interpretation of Strawson. Cf. Lowe, 15 ff. For an epistemological interpretation of the dictum cf. Gottlieb. 23 I.e. they should be semantic principles in a broader sense (comp. Lowe, 15–27), by means of which object-theoretical questions should be answered. 24 Cf. Lowe, 15–27 (especially 19ff). 25 Cf. Griffin and Noonan. 26 Cf. Hirsch, 3 and Ingarden (3), §§ 62, 63. 27 We follow here Lombard, Ch. 2. 22

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But which A’s are interesting for the theory of objects? For an analytic object-theorist an identity criterion is relevant if the predicate A expresses an essential property.28 This can be made more precise in the following way29: (Df)

Φ is an essential property : ≡ (i) M (Ex) Φx . (ii) N (∀x) [Φx → N (E!x → Φx)].

According to clause (ii), we may mean by A in (9) a predicate like ‘is a class’, ‘is a substance’, ‘is an event’, but not, e.g. ‘is a bachelor’.30 And considering clause (i), it will be clear that Ingarden’s ontology as well as the analytic theory of objects can be taken as pure (free from existential assumptions) theories of the possible. In light of (10) we can also claim the following: (11)

N (∀x) (x is a class ≡ (Eu) (u ∈ x ∨ x = Ø).

On the basis of (11) we can say: To be a class means to be an entity which has at least one element or 0 elements. But why do we explain the notion of a class by means of the concept of having elements? Or in other words: Why is it that classes (if classes exist at all) are entities for which the property of having elements is ‘constitutive’? – Because according to the identity criterion (10) classes are necessarily identical when they have exactly the same elements. This means that: In statements such as (9), the identity

28

Cf. Lombard, 25 ff. Clause (i) will eliminate the ‘impossible’, i.e. analytically inconsistent properties (for example being a round square). Clause (ii) could also be expressed as: (ii’) N(∀x) (Φx → N Φx). But the formulation (ii’) has certain ‘strong’ consequences in relation to possible worlds semantics: (ii’) either commits one to the thesis that objects also possess essential properties in the possible worlds in which they do not exist, or to the thesis that each object exists in each possible world. Cf. Forbes, 96 ff and Simons (3), 255–262. Unfortunately, some unwanted predicates, like ‘is a class with 3 elements’ or ‘is a material substance’ will not be excluded by clause (ii). Concerning elimination of such predicates see Lombard, 18–22. 30 ‘Being-a-bachelor’ does not fulfill clause (ii) of Df. 29

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condition R (x, y) specifies such (general) properties which are ‘constitutive’ for each A-being qua A-being.31 As this example shows, it is possible to go from statements such as (10) – i.e. statements of the form (9) – to statements such as (11), i.e. to statements of the form (9*).32 (9*)

N (∀x) (Ax ≡ R*x)

Here the analyst employs particular identity criteria as semantic principles in a broader sense or as meaning postulates.33 Since in Ingarden’s ontology phenomenological intuitions of essence 34 come into play, according to axiom A 3, it is difficult to determine exactly what, for Ingarden (methodologically speaking) plays the role that identity criteria perform in the analytic theory of objects. Moreover, Ingarden distinguishes, on the basis of axiom A1, between objects according to their formal structure and according to their material makeup – a distinction not found in the analytic theory of objects, at least not explicitly. But Ingarden’s ontology does allow passing from statements of the form (7) or (7*) to statements expressing necessary equivalences, and therefore statements of the form (9*).

2. Substances, States, and Processes 2.1 A Simple Classification of Realia We use the expression ‘is real’ as meaning the same as ‘is temporally or spatio-temporally existent’, and we contrast it with expressions like ‘is abstract’ or ‘is ideal’, both of which should be taken to mean the same as 31

Cf. Lombard, 32. Between the ‘property’ R* and the identity condition R (x, y) appearing in the relevant identity criterion, there is a relation which it is very difficult to specify conceptually. Cf. Brand (3), 108 ff; Lombard, 32–45. 33 But meaning postulates should not be understood here in Carnap’s sense as purely conventional stipulations. 34 Cf. the criticism in Haefliger (1), Ch. 1, § 4. 32

GREGOR HAEFLIGER / GUIDO KÜNG

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‘is non-temporally existent’. In addition, the following characteristics are considered: having spatial parts (sPT), having temporal parts (tPT), having homogeneous temporal parts (htPT), being “in the moment” [punktuell] (p), being independent (indep). In this way we arrive at a simple classification of realia.35 Real Entities Substances [+ sPT] [– tPT] – [– p] [+ indep]

States [± sPT] [+ tPT] [+ htT] [– p] [– indep]

Processes [± sPT] [+ tPT] [– htPT] [– p] [– indep]

Events [± sPT] [– tPT] – [+ p] [– indep]

According to this classification we can say e.g. (12)

N (∀x) (x is a substance → x has spatial parts . x has no temporal parts . x is not momentary . x is independent)

(13)

N (∀x) (x is a process → x has spatial parts or x has no spatial parts . x has temporal parts . x has no homogeneous temporal parts . x is not momentary . x is not independent)

It belongs to the task of reconstructing Ingarden’s theory to specify the notions assumed, e.g. the notion of existential independence.36 In particular, since all realia are ‘temporal’ entities the distinction between ‘entities existing in time’ and ‘entities with temporal parts’ must be explained. According to Ingarden, we can say: substances are spatial 3-dimensional extended entities, i.e. they can be regarded as wholes with spatial parts. Apart from this, they are entities which ‘persist’ in time or ‘endure’.37 This 35

Cf. Smith/Mulligan (2), where the characteristics considered are also described more precisely. 36 Cf. Simons (3), Ch. 8. 37 Cf. Ingarden (1), § 30; (3), § 63.

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means that if a substance a exists in a period of time ∆t, then also the object designated by ‘a’ exists as a whole in each moment of ∆t. On the contrary, substances are not ‘temporally extended’. An entity is temporally extended when it has parts which could be distinguished from each other according to the period of their existence or occurrence. Parts which could be distinguished from each other according to their periods of existence or occurrence are called temporal parts. Substances have no such temporal parts. Thus substances persist in time, but they are not temporally extended. Therefore, in contemporary discussions they are frequently referred to as ‘continuants’. As continuants, substances are differentiated from ‘occurrents’, which ‘happen’, or from ‘processes’, which ‘last’ (but do not ‘persist’) and also have temporal parts.38 The foregoing schema hardly presents all of Ingarden’s object-theoretical distinctions concerning realia. Left out of account here are among other things, properties, relations, substantial (‘thing-like’) and non-substantial objects of higher order, aggregates, collections, and states of affairs.39 Nevertheless, our schema is sufficient to bring into view the basic nonreductionistic orientation of Ingarden’s ontology – one which occasions the first important confrontation with certain analytic theories of objects. 2.2 Reductionist Process Ontology A reductionist process ontology accepts the following thesis: (RP) N (∀x)(∀y){x and y are real entities → [(x = y) ≡ (∀r)(xOr = yOr)]} where ‘r’ is a variable defined over spatio-temporal points, and ‘O’ is a synonym of ‘... takes place at the spatio-temporal point ...’. The implication of (RP) is that the object-theoretical categories ‘substance’, ‘state’, ‘process’, and ‘event’ merge into a single category, ‘spatio-temporal individual’. E.g. Quine in Word and Object says: 38

Processes, but not substances, have temporal parts, and also the relevant predications which concern time reference are very different. Cf. Simons (3), 130 ff. 39 On Ingarden’s theory of states of affairs, cf. Haefliger (1), Ch. 4, §§ 14, 15.

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Physical objects ... are not to be distinguished from events ... Each comprises simply the content, however heterogeneous, of some portion of space-time, however disconnected and gerrymandered.40

A Quinean thinks therefore, that every real entity is identical with a welldefined something that occupies a portion of space-time. Every material substance corresponds to some such something. But although a man and his life-process are two different entities, both correspond, according to Quine, to only one four-dimensional something. This something has temporal parts and for this reason it is more like a process than like a substance. Therefore, we speak about process ontology. But Quine’s fourdimensional something does not behave like a process in ordinary sense, since time as the fourth dimension does not ‘flow’. In this regard, reductionistic theories will not be ‘tense logics’ with verbs in present, perfect, and future tense, but an omni-temporal discourse. Many today hold that an a priori rejection of this position is impossible, i.e., it cannot be proven to be internally inconsistent. However, Simons (3) observes emphatically, from a moderate, pragmatically justified point of view, that such theories always merely assume the possibility of a translation, without carrying it out in practice.41 And he stresses, as a special difficulty for reductionistic process ontologies, that reference to con40

Quine (2), 171, cf. also Quine (1), 65 ff. “To be successful, the suggestion must show how to eliminate all singular and general terms denoting continuants, and all predicates and other functor expressions for which singular and other terms denoting continuants are argument expressions ... All proponents of a process ontology ... indulge in a form of double-talk when it comes to giving concrete examples. So we have to talk of river-stages, or stages of Phillip that are drunk or sober, and so on. Quine talks happily of ‘conceiving’ or ‘construing’ continuants four-dimensionally. But this is not simply redescription, for when something is redescribed, it gets a new description. Reconstrual, taken seriously, is rejection. Continuants literally disappear from our ontology, leaving something else in their stead. To describe what is introduced we need a completely new language. So it is cheating to speak of river-stages, of stages of Phillip, of cat-processes. Even if we allow such talk – as a temporary measure – it is not just cheating but false to talk of bathing in a river-stage, of a Phillip-stage being drunk. It cannot be right to change the subject and leave the predicate unmodified and still think that one has a true sentence.” (Simons (3), 125). 41

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tinuants or substances seems indispensable not only in everyday language but also in (physicalistic) scientific language.42 2.3 Ingarden’s Criticism of Reductionist Process Ontologies Ingarden’s rejection of process ontology is even more decisive. He examines the subject mainly from three points of view. 2.31 Substances and States Changes in objects persisting in time usually leave room for a distinction between the object which has changed and … a state of this object. The overall state of the properties an object acquires in the course of a process and that belong to it at a certain point in time (or at a certain period of time) is contrasted namely with the object itself as its ‘state’. This state must more or less perdure. For whatever … reasons it will be removed at a certain moment and another will replace it. ... Thus the object remains selfsame through its changes, but during its existence it assumes different successive states.43

The notion of a state of a substance a can be easily broadened to include not only having those properties which are caused in a by certain processes, but all the properties (‘material makeup) which together belong to a at a certain period of time. It is possible, by means of this broader notion of a state, to understand a substance as “the obtaining of a diversity of states,

42

Cf. Simons (3), 126 ff. “Die Veränderung des in der Zeit verharrenden Gegenstandes lässt uns gewöhnlich die Unterscheidung zwischen dem sich verändernden Gegenstande und … [einem] Zustand desselben durchführen. Der Gesamtbestand der in dem Gegenstande durch einen Vorgang hervorgebrachten und in ihm in einer Gegenwart (oder in einem bestimmten Zeitabschnitt) zukommenden Eigenschaften wird nämlich dem Gegenstande selbst als dessen ‘Zustand’ gegenüberstellt. Dieser Zustand muss mehr oder weniger dauernd sein. Aus irgendwelchen … Gründen wird er in einem bestimmten Moment beseitigt und durch einen anderen ersetzt. … Der Gegenstand bleibt dann zwar in der Veränderung derselbe, er nimmt aber während seiner Existenz verschiedene Zustände nacheinander an.” (Ingarden (1), 224).

43

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or [as] ... the passage from one state to another”, and so to interpret it as a process.44 The first source of a fallacy resulting in a reductionist process ontology lies, according to Ingarden, in an excessively broad notion of a state. Instead of interpreting all properties belonging to a substance a at t as the ‘t-state’ of a, Ingarden distinguishes among (1) the substance a qualified so-and-so, (2) the changes which in one or another respect take place ‘in’ or ‘on’ the substance, and (3) the states of a caused by these changes and lasting for a certain time.45 These distinctions are evidently connected with Ingarden’s formal-ontological theory of substance – a theory in which the category of ‘the property of a substance’ is formally restricted in a way differing from contemporary philosophy. In addition, Ingarden provides a detailed taxonomy of different sorts of properties of substances.46 2.32 Substances and processes In his second objection against reductionist process ontology, Ingarden starts directly from formal differences between substances and processes. In every process (e.g. a certain movement), we distinguish, on one hand, the continuously growing totality of [temporal] phases and, on the other hand, the object constituting itself in them [namely the relevant process as an object] as the proper subject of the properties of the process. Both [i.e. the growing totality of temporal phases and the entire process as a subject of properties] constitute a single something, and they are to be distinguished in it as only two distinct ‘sides’.47 44

Cf.: “Dieses Über-Gehen ist dann aber nichts anderes als ein zusammengesetzter Vorgang, der sich aus den in dem Gegenstande (oder an ihm) sich vollziehenden Vorgängen ergibt. Dann geht aber der in der Zeit verharrende Gegenstand selbst vorüber: er löst sich gewissermaßen in eine Mannigfaltigkeit von Phasen auf … Führt man dann noch … eine Geometrisierung des Zeitkontinuums durch, bei welcher das Kontinuum für eine Punktmannigfaltigkeit gehalten wird, dann kommt man leicht zu der Auflösung des in der Zeit verharrenden Gegenstandes in eine Mannigfaltigkeit von ‘Schnitten’ (‘Momentzuständen’), die unter den gemachten Voraussetzungen für nichts anderes als gewisse Ereignisgruppen gehalten werden.” (Ingarden (1), 225). 45 Cf. Ingarden (1), 227 ff. 46 Cf. Haefliger (1), Ch. 3–5. 47 “An jedem Vorgang (z.B. an einer bestimmten Bewegung) ist einerseits das kontinuierlich wachsende Ganze der [zeitlichen] Phasen, andererseits der in ihnen sich im

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This ‘double-sidedness’ of the formal structure of processes means that a process ‘unfolds’ not only in the course of its temporal phases into a ‘whole’ made of phases,48 but it also needs time to constitute itself: a process is an entity which ‘emerges’ or ‘becomes’ ‘in’ or ‘through’ its temporal phases.49 Substances are different. A substance has no temporal parts and it does not ‘unfold’ or ‘continue’ into a whole made of phases. Substances, although they are real entities and therefore become and cease to be, and thus change, are not entities that ‘become’ during the course of their existence.50 These differences in formal structure of substances and processes are, according to Ingarden, sufficient to support the thesis that there are two types of temporal entities, which are not reducible to each other on formal-ontological grounds.51 2.33 Change and Persisting Substance Substances are entities which can change. Here everyday phenomena come into question e.g. a red rose wilting, a man aging, an animal growing. The concept of the change of a substance may be partly characterized as follows: Laufe der Zeit konstituierende Gegenstand [nämlich der betreffende Prozess als ein Gegenstand] als das eigentümliche Subjekt der Eigenschaften des Vorgangs zu unterscheiden. Beide [d.h. das wachsende Ganze der zeitlichen Phasen und der ganze Prozess als Subjekt von Eigenschaften] bilden aber ein einziges Etwas, an dem sie nur wie zwei verschiedenen ‘Seiten’ zu unterscheiden sind.” (Ingarden (1), 198). 48 Cf. Ingarden (1), 199–210. 49 Cf. Ingarden (1), 215 ff. 50 Cf. Ingarden (1), 216. 51 Ingarden formulates the corresponding argument as a reductio ad absurdum, as follows: “Die in der Zeit sich entwickelnden Phasen eines Phasenganzen bilden bei einem einfachen Vorgang potentielle Teile, aus denen sich das Phasenganze zusammensetzt. Bei dem in der Zeit verharrenden Gegenstande dagegen gibt es keine derartigen [zeitlichen] Teile, die auf verschiedene Zeitabschnitte seiner Existenz verteilt wären und aus denen er ‘zusammengesetzt’ wäre. Falls er überhaupt vom Standpunkt des Kategorienpaares Ganzes-Teil betrachtet werden darf …, so sind die Teile, aus denen er zusammengesetzt wäre jedenfalls alle jeweils in derselben Gegenwart enthalten (bzw. in demselben Zeitabschnitt). Was hätte es für einen Sinn zu sagen, dass das Ganze des Gegenstandes in einem bestimmten Zeitabschnitt seiner Existenz einen [sc. echten] Teil – von was denn? – bildet?” (Ingarden (1), 227).

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(A substance x changes in ∆tn+1–tn from being-F to being-G) → (x exists until tn . x exists until tn+1).

Although a substance can change in one respect or another, we speak about it always as the identical same ‘thing’. In agreement with Ingarden, we will describe this as the phenomenon of ‘identity of substances throughout change’ or ‘ontic self-sameness of changing substances’.52 Consider now processes. Imagine a football match with two periods as an intuitive example of a process. Thus tn is the starting point of the game, th1 is the final point of the first half, th2 is the starting point of the second half, and tm is the final point of the entire game. As the halves of the game are obviously its temporal parts, we can say:53 (15)

The process a is a whole for which it holds that: a takes place in the time ∆tm–tn . (Ex) (Ey) [x ≠ y . x is a temporal part of a . y is a temporal part of a . x takes place in ∆th1–tn . y takes place in ∆tm–th2].

Nevertheless, we cannot hold the following, as a result of a statement analogous to (14): (16)

The process a takes place at tn . the process a takes place at tm.

For this reason, we also cannot hold the following: (17)

The process a is a whole for which it holds that: a takes place in the time ∆tm–tn . (Ex) (Ey) [x ≠ y . x is a temporal part of a . y is a temporal part of a . x takes place in ∆th1–tn . y takes place in ∆tm–th2 . a changes in ∆tm–tn from being-identical-with-x to being-identicalwith-y].

For the italicized part of the statement in (17) says something absurd. Admittedly, we can say that process a develops from an x-containing to an

52 53

Cf. Ingarden (1), § 30; (3), § 63. In relation with what follows cf. the analysis in Haefliger (1), Ch. 6.

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(x and y)-containing; but the process as a whole does not change.54 Rather, a process consists of its temporal parts, or it is the sequence of its temporal parts. Accordingly, it follows that: Every temporal part of a process construed as a whole is essentially a temporal part of this individual process. For if the whole process actually takes place during a certain period of time, it cannot be the case that one of its temporal parts does not take place. Of course, a process can actually take place only partially, i.e., not the whole process (e.g. a football game), but only an incomplete, partial process takes place. After all, much to the regret of the Swiss national team, if it happens to score a goal in the first half, we have to remind them that the first half of a football match is not the entire game! Thus Ingarden’s analysis emphasizes: A reductionist ontology of processes must replace the notion of change rooted in everyday and scientific language with some other notion. Since a process cannot ‘change’, this position must ‘reject’ the ‘fact’ of the change of substances: Where one speaks ‘pre-philosophically’ about ‘the change of substances’, one should speak instead about ‘the sequence of (different) temporal parts (phases) of a process’. But: This is a sign ... of proper scientific instinct when we ... stress over and over again that every movement demands something that moves, every change something that changes, etc. And even if in a given change ‘everything’ should change, there still remains something which underlies the change, in which the change runs its course. Otherwise we would have to do not with a change, but only with a sequence of different states separated from one another. A mere continuity of successive phases does not suffice to constitute a change. It is the identity of the bearers in which the process runs its course that makes this unified course possible.55 54

Whoever does not accept this, has to accept at the same time the nonsensical thesis: When a body moves from space-point i to space-point k, then the movement of the body also moves from space-point i to space-point k! – The change of the spatial position of a body is, ontologically speaking, a process, while the body itself is not a process; moreover, the body involved is a substance which assumes a new spatial position, and so ‘changes’. What kind of change is at stake (i.e. relational versus nonrelational change; real versus Cambridge-change) is another problem. 55 “[Es] zeugt … für einen richtigen wissenschaftlichen Instinkt, wenn man … immer wieder betont, jede Bewegung fordere das, was sich gerade bewegt, jede Veränderung das, was sich verändert usw. Und wenn sich bei einer Veränderung auch ‘alles’ ändern sollte, so bleibt noch immer das, was der Veränderung unterliegt, woran sie sich voll-

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Therefore, there is a problem in explaining the expression ‘the substance a, persisting (surviving) in ∆t, undergoes change’ in such a way that the notion of an object persisting in ∆t would not be assumed. Ingarden, like Chisholm,56 is of the opinion that the proponents of a reductionist process ontology cannot provide the required explanation without falling into petitio principii. What is more, Ingarden sets forth the following theses: Without objects persisting in time there would be essentially no processes at all, whereas, on the contrary, processes which run their courses merely modify objects persisting in time as to their properties, just as they sometimes obviously destroy them or bring into existence new objects persisting in time, though they are not the necessary conditions for the objects persisting in the world.57

It requires a more substantive analysis to investigate whether this (one sided) foundational thesis, which is so controversial in contemporary ontology, viz., the thesis that there can be no ‘subjectless’ processes,58 is correct. But in any event, Ingarden’s aforementioned criticism already demonstrates the topicality of his analysis with respect to reductionist process ontology.

zieht, bestehen. Sonst hätten wir es mit keiner Veränderung, sondern nur mit einer Abfolge verschiedener, voneinander losgelöster Zustände zu tun. Die bloße Kontinuität der ineinander übergehenden Phasen reicht von selbst noch nicht aus, um eine Veränderung zu konstituieren. Es muss noch die Identität des Trägers, an dem der Vorgang sich vollzieht, dessen einheitlichen Vollzug ermöglichen.” (Ingarden (1), 218). 56 Cf. Chisholm (3), 142–144. 57 “Ohne die in der Zeit verharrenden Gegenstände gäbe es ihrem Wesen nach überhaupt keine Vorgänge, wohingegen die Vorgänge, wenn sie sich überhaupt vollziehen, die in der Zeit verharrenden Gegenstände lediglich in ihrem Beschaffensein modifizieren, manchmal freilich sie auch vernichten oder auch zum Hervorbringen neuer in der Zeit verharrender Gegenstände beitragen, aber selbst keine notwendigen Bedingungen der in der Welt verharrenden Gegenstände sind.” (Ingarden (1), 217). 58 Cf Brand (2), 191 (against) and Lombard, 197 ff. (for the foundational thesis). Cf. also Simons (3), 131.

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3. Processes and Events 3.1 Analytic Theories The logical-semantic distinction between three types of linguistic expressions: (i) singular terms (ii) predicates, i.e. general terms (iii) sentences corresponds to a distinction (much in need of explanation!) between three types of objects: (i’) individuals, or particulars (ii’) properties and relations (iii’) propositions (states of affairs) It is noteworthy that there are within analytic philosophy theories which, for purposes of ontology, subsume processes (mainly discussed under labels such as events, occurrents, processes) grosso modo under one of the categories (i’)–(iii’). Using criteria: “Does the theory require quantification over particulars, properties or propositions to express statements about processes?” and/or “Are processes, according to the theory, repeatable and spatio-temporally localizable entities?”, one can easily distinguish between three types of analytic theories of processes.59 Thus Chisholm,60 for example, advances a so-called ‘propositional’ theory: processes are for him multiply exemplifiable, like propositions (one and the same process can happen more then once), i.e., processes are not spatio-temporally localized, but abstract (ideal), entities. 59

Brand (1) speaks about ‘particularist theory’, ‘property theory’ and ‘propositional theory of events’. 60 Cf. Chisholm (1) and the summary of the theory in Chisholm (2), 180. A property theory of processes is presented for example by A. Goldman, Ch. 1 (“Processes are – multiply exemplifiable – properties of particulars”). For other references cf. Brand (1), 133 ff.

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According to Ingarden, however, only a particularistic theory of processes can be the ‘true’ theory. Prominent theories of this type have been worked out by D. Davidson,61 J. Kim,62 and M. Brand63 – on the whole 61

In ‘The Individuation of Events’ (in: Davidson, 163–180) Davidson proposes the following identity criterion (cf. Davidson, 179): (D) N (∀x) (∀y) {x is a process . y is a process → [(x = y) ≡ (∀g)(∀f) ((g causes x ≡ g causes y ) . (x causes f ≡ y causes f ))]}. Therefore, processes (‘events’) are identical when they enter the same causal relations. So the basic idea is that processes are particulars which enter causal relations and only on the basis of these relations are processes mutually distinguishable. Since Davidson maintains at the same time that only processes enter into causal relations (cf. ‘Causal Relations” in Davidson, 149–162, especially 158), the identity condition contained in D suggests that being-a-process essentially means being-a-cause and being-an-effect. For a discussion cf. Brand (2), 192 f and Lombard, 72 ff; 190 ff. 62 As a result of (cf. Kim (2), 160 f.): (*) For any x: if x is a process, then there is a physical object o, a property F and a period of time t such that: x = [o, F, t] Kim formulates an identity criterion: N(∀e)(∀f){( e = [o1, F, t1] . f = [o2, G, t2] . e is a process . f is a process) → [(e = f) ≡ (o1 = o2 . F = G . t1 = t2)]} According to (*) processes are regarded as the-having-of-properties-for-a-certainduration (‘property exemplification theory’). And according to K, two processes are identical if and only if the objects, properties, and periods of time which constitute them are identical (formula K concerns ‘monadic’ processes; for the extension of K to ‘n-adic’ processes cf. Kim (1)). For a discussion of the theory cf. Brand (2), 190 ff. And especially Lombard, 50–62 (who perfectly describes the scientific context of the theory and also critically remarks that this is perhaps a ‘propositional’ theory). For an independent development of the theory cf. Bennett. 63 He defends (cf. Brand (1), 146; (2), 193 ff.) the following criterion of identity (with ‘r’ as a variable defined over spatio-temporal positions; O : = ... happens in ... ): (B) N (∀x) (∀y) {x is a process . y is a process → [(x = y) ≡ N (∀r) (xOr ≡ yOr)]} Brand sets out from the ‘usual’ criterion of identity for substances, on which two different substances cannot occupy the same spatio-temporal position, i.e. they are identical if and only if they actually occupy the same spatio-temporal position: (B*) N (∀x) (∀y) {x is a physical object . y is a physical object → [(x = y) ≡ (∀r) (xOr ≡ yOr)]}. On the other hand, processes are identical according to Brand when they necessarily occupy the same spatio-temporal position. The drawback is that several processes can actually occupy one and the same spatio-temporal position. For a criticism of Brand’s

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within very different frameworks, falling mostly within action theory and philosophy of science. The first work in the analytic tradition which was devoted directly and in detail to ‘processes’ is Lombard’s Events. A Metaphysical Study (1986). But Lombard calls processes ‘events’ and, in contrast to Ingarden, he denies the existence of momentary ‘instantaneous events’. Lombard’s formulation of the identity criterion64 for processes (‘events’) suggests prima facie that his theory has a purely linguistic background; but in fact we find in his work an excellently elaborated ontological theory. The criterion of identity proposed: draws on the concept of a thing capable of (non-relationally) exemplifying dynamic properties , the concept of an interval of time, and the idea of a quality space in which things change. The concept of an event I have been pressing is the idea that events are changes; and that idea, I have been urging, is the idea of a movement by an object at an interval of time in a quality space.65

Actually, Lombard and Ingarden share important theses supported by the same or similar arguments, as e.g.: (i) processes (‘events’) are non-repeatable, spatio-temporally localizable particulars; (ii) processes (‘events’), but not substances (‘physical things’) are entities with temporal parts; theory cf. Simons (1) and Lombard, 63–72 (who shows that in Brand’s theory the determination ‘spatio-temporal position’ applied to physical objects and to processes means something else). 64 Cf.: “Thus, if e1 and e2 are atomic events, then e1 and e2 are the same atomic event just in case, for every canonical description, ‘[x, Φ, t]’ of e1, there is a canonical description, [x’, Φ’, t’], of e2, such that x = x’, Φ = Φ’, and t = t’ (and vice versa).” And especially the more general formulation: “Necessarily, for any entities, e and e’, if e and e’ are events, then e = e’ if and only if e and e’ have all the same canonical descriptions” (Lombard, 179 f.). 65 Lombard, 180. Also: “An event is a [non-relational] change in an object; and a change is a ‘movement’, from the having of one to the having of another property, by an object through some portion of a quality space during an interval of time” (Lombard, 166); and “I have been advocating a theory that takes events to be nonrepeatable occurences” (Lombard, 181).

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(iii) a process is an entity founded in substances: there are no ‘subjectless’ processes; (iv) a simple process (‘atomic event’) takes place when a substance changes with respect to certain (non-relational) properties; (v) every process ‘lasts’: there are no momentary processes (‘instantaneous events’); (vi) the properties of a process are not properties of the substance(-s) founding this process and vice versa. In light of our arguments so far, thesis (v) is particularly important. It leads us to a distinction which is strongly emphasized by Ingarden.

3.2 Events According to Ingarden, every process ‘lasts’, takes place in the course of a certain period of time and therefore has temporal parts. On the other hand, events in Ingarden’s sense are temporal objects which do not take time; an event does not take place in the course of a period but ‘occurs’ and so is ‘momentary’ or ‘instantaneous’66: Strictly speaking, short processes also last for a certain time, for which reason they are excluded from the class of events. It is characteristic of the latter that they are without duration. They just occur and cease to exist. They are, so to say, end-points or startingpoints (sometimes also crossing-points) of processes.67

On the basis of this position, several more theses about events suggest themselves: (vii) events are particulars, which occur but do not last; 66

Cf. Ingarden (1), 195; 93), 12. “Streng gesprochen, dauern aber sogar kurze Vorgänge eine gewisse Zeit, und eben deshalb scheiden sie aus der Klasse der Ereignisse aus. Denn das, was für die letzteren charakteristisch ist, ist gerade dies, dass sie keine Dauer haben. Sie treten ein und hören eben damit auf zu sein. Sie sind sozusagen Endpunkte oder Ausgangspunkte (manchmal auch Kreuzungen) von Vorgängen.” (Ingarden (1), 194). 67

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(viii) events are starting-points, end-points or crossing-points of processes; and it follows that: (ix) events are founded in processes, i.e., there can be no events without the existence of certain processes.68 Ingarden’s examples of events are, among others: two balls colliding, a train stopping at a station, the lamp lighting, a man’s death; 69 his examples of simple processes70 are, among others: a body’s change of position (movement), a body’s change of color, a body’s temperature change. Further, Ingarden brings his ontology of states of affairs into play and claims:71 (x)

An event is the coming-to-be of a state of affairs (Sachverhalt) or of a situation (Sachlage).

When, e.g., a substance a acquires determination F, then the state of affairs a is F obtains. According to Ingarden, every event is always the comingto-be of a new state of affairs or of a new situation, i.e., in an event the substance involved acquires a new determination (or the substances involved acquire new determinations). If the new state of affairs (or the new situation) obtains for some time, Ingarden speaks of a state. An event can be not only a starting-point of a process, but also a starting-point of a state. The fact that Ingarden regards processes as entities with temporal parts and events as the starting- , end-, and crossing-points of processes prompts the question about the extent to which the mathematical theory of continuum can be applied to the relevant time-lines and time-points. After all, the matter concerns, as Ingarden stresses, the concrete time72 of substances 68

On this expressis verbis Ingarden (1), 194; (3), 11. Cf. Ingarden (1), 193. 70 Concerning the distinction between simple and compound processes cf. for example Ingarden (1), 199. 71 Cf. Ingarden (1), 193. – Ingarden distinguishes between ‘propertial’ states of affairs, such as that a is red, and ‘procesual’ states of affairs, such as that a is in movement. On Ingarden’s ontology of states of affairs cf. Haefliger (1) Ch. 4, §§ 14, 15. 72 Ingarden (1), 191 ff. clearly distinguishes, among other things, among problems which concern subjective experience of time (‘phenomenology of time awareness’), 69

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(temporally persisting objects), processes (temporally extended objects), and events (momentary objects), not some empty time-form.73 Beginning with Zeno of Elea, Western philosophy has been acquainted with such problems. For example, can a flying arrow move to a certain time-point at all? In current philosophical discussions Lawrence B. Lombard, for instance, is of the opinion that there are absolutely no momentary events or processes (‘instantaneous events’).74 This point of view is in agreement with the intuitionist theory of the continuum for which there are no space points in the classical sense, but only endless sequences of smaller and smaller intervals enclosing each other.75 Chisholm, on the other hand, tries to develop a theory of time continuum on the basis of Brentano’s ontology.76 In this theory, temporal boundaries (i.e. time-points as temporal boundaries) have an important status. At the basis of his considerations are difficult questions concerning temporal processes. Let us assume, for instance, that a substance a starts to move: is there a last time-point t1 until which a remains unmoved, and a first time-point t2 at which a is in movement?77 This poses difficulties from the point of view of the mathematical theory of continuum which says that between any two points there is always a third. So the question arises with regard to the movement of a at time-point t* lying between t1 and t2: Is a at t* in movement or is it still? If, as we have assumed, t1 is actually the last time-point at which it is still and t2 is the first time-point at which it is in movement, then a can be neither still nor in movement at time t*. If we want to avoid this implausible consequence, then it seems that we need to choose whether to assume no last point of being still, or no first point of the movement, indeed neither a last point of being still nor a first point of movement. However, Chisholm epistemological problems concerning temporal reference (‘intersubjective time determinations’), and problems which concern the ‘concrete’ time of real objects. With respect to the latter, Ingarden – contra Chisholm (6) – is definitely an anti-Kantian. 73 With the nominal form ‘an object persisting in time’, we easily associate a representation of time in itself as an ‘empty’ container ‘in’ which objects abide or which is ‘filled up’ by objects. Against this idea cf. Ingarden (1), 179 f. 74 Cf. Lombard, 136–144. 75 Cf. Heyting. 76 Above all in connection with Brentano’s theory of relations, cf. its outline by Chisholm (5). 77 Cf. Chisholm (4), 18 f.; (6).

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resorts to the idea of defining the properties of being-still and being-inmovement with recourse to the notion of a boundary (a time-point as a temporal boundary) in such a way that it is possible to assume without contradiction that t1 and t2 are identical, i.e. that being-still ceases and movement begins in one and the same time-point, and that at this single time-point the substance in question is both still and in movement.78 Ingarden regards momentary events to be indispensable. But he looks for a solution in a direction slightly different than Chisholm’s. Prompted by the quantum theory in physics and also by Husserl’s considerations on the subject of ‘the living present’ (lebendige Gegenwart), he does not reduce the present to a mathematical point, but speaks instead of ‘temporal quanta’.79 But since we find no precise elaboration of Ingarden’s philosophy of time, it is not clear whether (and if so, in what sense) the smallest time-quantum is still extended, and how time-quanta belong to temporal lines or may even constitute them.80 The arguments against the applicability of the mathematical theory of continuum to questions of time are partly developed in Ingarden (1), but mostly in Ingarden (4), especially in connection with the analysis of causal relations.81 In other words: with regard to the question which is central for the distinction between processes and events – the question of what theory of time should be assumed – the complex problem of the causal relation comes to the fore.

78

Cf. Chisholm (4); (6). Cf. for example Ingarden (1), 195 ff.; 200 ff.; (3), 12 ff. 80 In case quanta, in opposition to the points of the classical continuum, do not constitute a dense multiplicity, then it does not hold that there must always be a third time-quantum between any two time-quanta, such that the problem concerning t* would not arise. But the question still remains what exactly Ingarden understands under the coming-to-be of a state of affairs: Is the coming-to-be of a state of affairs the first having of determination F, so that the change, i.e. the passage from not having to having F corresponds to passing from one time-quantum to the next time-quantum? Or does Ingarden mean by coming-to-be the change itself which would take place ‘in’ a single time-quantum (and ‘in’ a single event)? In the second case, an Ingardenian would have to provide a theory which would be similar to the aforementioned theory of Chisholm. But is such a theory plausible for determinations other than being still and being in movement? 81 Cf. especially Ingarden (4), § 88. 79

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4. A Look Ahead In current analytic discussions, we frequently meet the expression ‘supervenience of events’. Its meaning is not uniform. Certain variants of ontological reductionism82 make use of the expression as well as the position for which ‘events’ are analysed as ontologically dependent objects.83 If taken in the latter sense, the phrase applies also to Ingarden’s theory of ‘supervenience’ of processes or events. For, in as much as Ingarden criticizes reductionist theories, in his view both processes and events are existentially founded in substances, and thus are dependent objects. Nevertheless, according to Ingarden, an object which is existentially (one-sidedly) dependent may still be ‘formally independent’. And an object that is both existentially and formally independent (e.g. a simple substance), may still be ‘materially dependent’.84 In other words: Only a clarification of various dependence relations proposed by Ingarden, among events, processes, and substances, could show more precisely which theory of the ‘supervenience’ of processes or events Ingarden holds. But there is still a further question, which has not been considered so far: at the end of his formal-ontological analysis of the causal relation, Ingarden (4) gives a detailed theory of types of events and processes. His basic thesis is: “From the point of view of formal ontology the links of the causal relation are always either events or processes”.85 In this connection, it would be useful to investigate thoroughly how Ingarden’s theory is related to Davidson’s analyses of ‘events’.86 On the whole, this issue makes it clear that whoever wishes systematically to evaluate Ingarden’s considerations of processes and events, he or she must carefully examine his analyses of the causal relation. Translated by Anna Sierszulska translation reviewed and emended by Edward M. Swiderski 82

Cf. Bennett, 12 ff. Cf. Bennett, 15 ff. 84 Cf. Ingarden (1), Ch. 3. 85 Cf. Ingarden (4), § 86. 86 Cf. above note 61. 83

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References Bennett, J., Events and their Names, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1988. Brand, M., (1) ‘Particulars, Events, and Actions’, in: Brand / Walton (eds.), 133–157. Brand, M., (2) ‘A Particularist Theory of Events’, Grazer Philosophische Studien 12/13 (1981), 187–202. Brand, M., (3) ‘Physical Objects and Events’, in: Leinfellner, W. / Krämer, E. / Schank, J. (hrsg.), Sprache und Ontologie, Wien: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky 1982, 106–116. Brand, M. / Walton, D. (eds.), Action Theory, Dordrecht: Reidel 1976. Chisholm, R. M., (1) ‘Eventys and Propositions’, Nous 4 (1970), 15–24. Chisholm, R. M., (2) ‘States of Affairs Again’, Nous 5 (1971), 179–189. Chisholm, R. M., (3) Person and Object. A Metaphysical Study, London: Allen & Unwin 1976. Chisholm, R. M., (4) ‘Beginnings and Endings’, in: P. van Inwagen (ed.), Time and Cause, Dordrecht: Reidel 1980, 17–25. Chisholm, R. M., (5) ‘Einleitung’, in: F. Brentano, Philosophische Untersuchungen zu Raum, Zeit und Kontinuum, mit Anmerkungen von A. Kastil hrsg. von Stephan Körner und Roderick M. Chisholm, Hamburg: Meiner 1976, viii–xxxiv. Chisholm, R. M., (6) ‘Ingarden on Events and Change’, Ms 1989, 17 pp. Davidson, D., Essay on Action and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1982. Forbes, G., The Metaphysics of Modality, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985. Geach, P. T., Reference and Generality, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 31980. Goldman, A., A Theory of Human Action, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall 1970. Gottlieb, D., ‘No Entity Without Identity’, in: Shahan and Swayer (eds.), Essays on the Philosophy of W. V. O. Quine, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1979, 79– 96. Griffin, N., Relative Identity, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1977. Haefliger, G., (1) Über Existenz: Die Ontologie Roman Ingardens, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1994. Haefliger, G., (2) ‘Ingarden und Husserls transzendentaler Idealismus’, Husserl Studies, 7 (1991), 103–121. Haefliger, G., (3) ‘Einleitung’, in: Ingarden (5). Haefliger, G., (4) ‘Die These der Äquivozität von “sein”’, Freiburger Zeitschrift fürPhilosophie und Theologie, 1991. Haefliger, G., (5) ‘Roman Ingarden’, in: J. Nida-Rümelin (hrsg.), Zeitgenössische Philosophen in Einzeldarstellungen, Stuttgart: Kröner 1991. Haefliger, G., (6) ‘Ingardens existentialontologische Grundbegriffe. Versuch einer reduktiven Analyse’, MS 1990, 45 pp. Heyting, A., Intuitionism: An Introduction, Amsterdam: North-Holland 31971.

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Hirsch, E., The Concept of Identity, New York: Oxford University Press 1982. Ingarden, R., (1) Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, Bd.I, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1964. Ingarden, R., (2) Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, Bd.II, Teil 1, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1965. Ingarden, R., (3) Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, Bd.II, Teil 2, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1965. Ingarden, R., (4) Über die kausale Struktur der realen Welt. Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, Bd. 3, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1974. Ingarden, R., (5) Einführung in Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie. Osloer Vorlesungen (1967) (Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 4), hrsg. von G. Haefliger, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1992. Kim, J., (1) ‘Causation, Nomic Subsumption, and the Concept of Event’, The Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973) 1, 217–236. Kim, J., (2) ‘Events and Property Exemplifications’, in: Brand / Walton (eds.), 159– 177. Küng, G., (1) ‘Ingarden on Language and Ontology: A Comparison with some Trends in Analytic Philosophy’, Analecta Husserliana 2 (1972), 204–217. Küng, G., (2) ‘Zum Lebenswerk von Roman Ingarden. Ontologie, Erkenntnistheorie und Metaphysik’, in: H. Kuhn et al. (hrsg.), Die Münchener Phänomenologie (Phaenomenologica, Vol. 65), Den Haag: Nijhoff 1975, 158–173. Küng, G., (3) ‘Roman Ingarden (1893–1970): Ontological Phenomenology’, in: H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, third revised and enlarged edition (Phaenomenologica Vol. 5/6), The Hague: Nijhoff 1982, 223–233. Küng, G., (4) ‘Brentano, Husserl und Ingarden über wertende Akte und das Erkennen von Werten’, in: W. L. Gombocz, H. Rutte, W. Sauer (Hrsg.) Traditionen und Perspektiven der analytischen Philosophie, Wien: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky 1989, 106–117. Künne, W., Abstrakte Gegenstände, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1983. Lombard, L. B., Events. A Metaphysical Study, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1986. Lowe, E. J., Kinds of Being, Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1989. Mulligan, K., (1) ‘Moments and Species. Formal Logic and Formal Ontology’, Ms. 18 pp. Mulligan, K., (2) ‘Operations, Form, and Sense’, Ms. 23 pp. Nooan, H. W., Objects and Identity, The Hague: Nijhoff 1980. Quine, W. V. O., (1) ‘Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis’, in: W. V. O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View, New York: Harper and Row 1963, 65–79. Quine, W. V. O., (2) Word and Object, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press 1960. Simons, P. M., (1) ‘Brand on Event Identity’, Analysis 41 (1981), 195–198.

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Simons, P. M., (2) ‘Categories and Ways of Being’, Reports on Philosophy, 10 (1986), 89–104. Simons, P. M., (3) Parts, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1987. Smith, B., (1) ‘Logic, Form and Matter’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 55 (1981), 47–63. Smith, B. / Mulligan, K., (1) ‘Pieces of a Theory’, in: B. Smith (ed.), Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology, München, Wien: Philosophia Verlag 1982, 15–109. Smith, B. / Mulligan, K., (2) ‘Mach and Ehrenfels: The Foundations of Gestalt Theory’, in: B. Smith (ed.), Foundations of Gestalt Theory, München, Wien: Philosophia Verlag 1988, 15–167.

Ingarden and the Ontology of Dependence* PETER SIMONS

Introduction: The Disagreement about the Existential Status of the Real World The major disagreement between Ingarden and his teacher Husserl was over the ontological status of the real world. Husserl, upon his turn to transcendental idealism, held that the world of trees, mountains, houses and people had an ontologically secondary status by comparison with the mental acts and their various components of conscious, thinking subjects. At least, this was how Ingarden, in common with Husserl’s other Göttingen students, understood Husserl’s transcendental turn, and since this essay is about Ingarden rather than Husserl we do not need to inquire whether Ingarden was right so to interpret Husserl.1 Ingarden took Husserl’s view to be a form of idealism, not dissimilar from the idealism of Fichte. According to this idealism, the so-called real world is in some way a construction or projection of the mind, whether of the mind of each individual, or in some more problematic way of “Mind” or Geist in some abstract or collective sense. The idealism was termed ‘transcendental’ to contrast it with the subjective idealism of Berkeley, according to which the world is in fact mental, part of the contents of the mind of an individual thinker. According to Husserl’s version of idealism, the world is not in itself mental or in or part of a mind, but it nevertheless depends on minds. Were there no minds, there would be no world. Ingarden by contrast was always a realist, holding that the real world exists on its own, independently of any thinking subject, so there could be a world without minds, and indeed before minds evolved, the world was just such a world. In order to argue his case against Husserl, which he was most concerned to do, Ingarden needed to analyse and clarify the notion of dependence. If the real world is independent of minds, we need to know what this means. In the course of *

My thanks to Arkadiusz Chrudzimski for assistance over Ingarden’s Polish terminology. 1 For the record, I happen to think Ingarden was right. Existence, Culture, and Persons: The Ontology of Roman Ingarden. Arkadiusz Chrudzimski (ed.), Frankfurt: ontos, 2005, 39–53.

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investigating this, Ingarden came to the opinion that there is more than one sense of the expression ‘independent’ and its opposite ‘dependent’. This essay is about Ingarden’s account of these various senses.

Modes of Being and Existential Moments According to Ingarden (§§ 10–11)2 the term ‘be’ and its various cognates is used with a number of different meanings. This view, which has been upheld by many philosophers following Aristotle, entails that when for example we talk about there being a tree in the garden, and there being a fight between two squirrels in the garden, and the tree in the garden being green, the term ‘be’ or its frequent near-synonym ‘exist’ have three different meanings. It is a commonplace of lexicology that the term ‘be’ means different things, not least because it has different syntactic roles, being sometimes a copula, sometimes an intransitive verb, and sometimes a transitive verb. However, it does not follow from this that the ‘be’ of existence, or ‘exist’, necessarily mean different things when said of objects from different categories. This was Aristotle’s view, and Ingarden subscribed to it, but I think it is both wrong in itself and not central to Ingarden’s theory of dependence. I shall accordingly not stress it. For Ingarden, talk about the various ways in which something can exist, or modes of being (Seinsmodi) as he calls them, belongs to ontology, which is the study of the content of ideas concerned with being and objects in general. Ontology is an a priori discipline and considers only what is essential. By saying it is the analysis of ideas rather than meanings Ingarden presumably wishes to lift it above any relativity which would attach to it as the analysis of meanings, which would make it part of a form of linguistic analysis. However it is clear that in so doing Ingarden is fully prepared to subscribe to a form of Platonism according to which there are ideas and 2

Unadorned section numbers refer to the sections in Ingarden’s magnum opus, The Controversy over the Existence of the World (Ingarden 1947, 1964a, 1964b). I have throughout consulted the German edition, Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, which in this topic closely follows the text and terminology of Ingarden’s earlier essay ‘Bemerkungen zum Problem “Idealismus-Realismus”’ (Ingarden 1929). The German terminology thus has published priority over the Polish of the later work.

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they have a certain content irrespective of whether or how we use words which have anything to do with them. By contrast, metaphysics has to do with what actually, as a matter of fact, exists, and not with what could in principle exist. This is one way of distinguishing meanings of these two closely related words. It is not one to which I adhere but for present purposes I shall acquiesce in Ingarden’s usage. The study of Seinsmodi is part of a branch of ontology that Ingarden calls existential ontology. By this he means those aspects of ontology having to do with being (existence) and its variants. Unlike Husserl, who distinguishes between formal ontology on the one hand and material or regional ontology on the other, Ingarden makes a threefold distinction between existential, formal and material ontology. I think Husserl’s twofold distinction is better, because the concept of existence is in my view formal, and also for a reason to be given below, that Ingarden does not make a clean distinction between formal and existential ontology. The demarcation and terminology are in any case less important than the matter in hand. Taking his cue from the history of metaphysics, Ingarden notes that being real, being ideal, being possible all constitute distinct modes of being, and that when we have a case of being it is always the being of something, and the object that exists always exists in a particular way or mode (§ 11). Ingarden is however not content just to let matters rest there with intuitively understood distinctions, perhaps because he feels this is insufficiently systematic, and also because he thinks one can go further and analyse the different modes of being. The analysis involves discerning a number of existential moments (§ 12). Existential moments are repeatable features that occur across different modes of being: they are moments because they are not themselves independent modes of being, and they are existential because they determine modes of being. Existential moments come in families of two or more contrary members, such that no mode of being has more than one member from such a family determining it, and each mode of being is determined by a unique combination of existential moments from various of these families. Among the families are four that Ingarden places at the very beginning of his investigation, all of which concern different oppositions between independent and dependent things. Ingarden thinks that there are in ontology four different precise senses of

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the rough and ready independent/dependent distinction, and it is these that I shall consider.

Autonomy versus Heteronomy The first and most fundamental (in)dependence opposition is that between objects which are existential autonomous (seinsautonom, autonomiczny, samoistny) and those which are existentially heteronomous (seinsheteronom, heteronomiczny, niesamoistny). This is the most radical and fundamental division in being. Taking a cue from the second of the Polish words in each case we could call an autonomous object self-existing or a se, and a heteronomous object non-self-existing or per alio. An autonomous object is one which can be said to exist in itself, be something in itself, have its existential fundament in itself, be determined immanently. By contrast a heteronomous object has its fundament determined by something outside itself, is nothing in itself, has its being in and only thanks to something outside itself (§ 12). Most objects we can think of are autonomous, but those that are not include purely intentional objects, objects of thought, which have their being grounded in the acts that intend them, and, a quite different kind, future empirically possible objects, which have their being grounded in the past and present objects from which their possibility springs. A heteronomous object is not nothing, but it is the weakest form of something, since what and how it is are due wholly to something else. Ingarden’s characterizations of heteronomous objects are always a little difficult to understand. A perhaps slightly more modern way to get the idea would be to say that heteronomous objects are wholly relative in nature: all the ways they are they are because of how they stand to something else. In this way it makes some sense to say that the house I dreamed of last night (assuming I did not dream about some actual house) is nothing in itself, but all its properties it derives from my nocturnal intentional activity. In theory it appears possible to envisage an object that is partly autonomous and partly heteronomous, in that its fundament lies partly within itself and partly without. Andrzej Półtawski has suggested to me3 3

Personal communication, 1985.

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that Ingarden would certainly not have accepted such a possibility, since for him even a jot of heteronomy means an object is not autonomous. To which I reply: not wholly autonomous, for sure, but why could not an object have a toehold on autonomy and yet not be wholly autonomous? For example, take Sherlock Holmes’s London. This is certainly not the real London, since there are places and people there that never existed, including the famous flat at 221b Baker Street, but there is a large slice of it which coincides with the real London of the 1880s and 1890s, the differences being made up by the heteronomous features added in by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. Why not? Why should Holmes’s London be wholly fictional and heteronomous or wholly real and autonomous? Freedom from ontological prejudice is something Ingarden tries to teach us, so we are following in his footsteps here. It is extremely tempting in most cases to take heteronomous objects either to be nothing at all, a mere illusion cast by thought and language, or else to have a more substantial and less ethereal existence. Ingarden attributes to the latter impulse the tendency of late nineteenth century philosophers to indulge in psychologism, to take otherwise wispy and ethereal things like fictional characters or meanings to be in fact mental entities. That meanings and the propositions and theories made out of them are not mental was argued by Frege and Husserl, as Ingarden points out, while he claims for himself the office of having shown the same anti-psychologistic thesis for works of fiction and their characters and scenarios. Similarly however, attempts to treat as ideal or Platonic entities ones which are not, just because they are not obviously evident in the causal world, is also a form of ontological misclassification, the hypostatization of things that are less removed from spatiotemporal reality than the objects of dreams or the products of authors. Heteronomous intentional objects offer a third way (to coin a phrase) between hypostatizing Platonism on the one hand and subjectivizing psychologism on the other hand, while maintaining (against an Ockhamist or anti-realist) that the objects in question are not nothing at all, but do genuinely exist. Similar remarks apply to future possibilities. Future things are not nothing, but they are not fully and in themselves something either. In this case it must be noted that Ingarden accepts the standard tensed or A-view of existence associated with Aristotle, the Scholastics and common sense,

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and not the alternative untensed or B-view which many modern philosophers, myself included, think is correct. Obviously the untensed view applies only to those things that in fact come later to exist, and not to unrealized possibilities. There is a problem here. Ingarden accepts that one and the same object can change its ontological status, because he thinks that a present object (process, state of affairs or substance) has the existential moment of actuality, which it trades in for the existential moment of postactuality when it becomes past (§ 33). This is not particularly disturbing since the items in question remain autonomous throughout. On the other hand it is massively more problematic to suppose that a future process, state of affairs or substance can suddenly acquire not only actuality but autonomy when it becomes present. If the morrow’s sea battle was heteronomous yesterday but autonomous today and henceforth, because it actually took place, then it seems as though the basis of its being can be transferred from something else to itself. This is surely impossible. The conclusion is then that no future event or other item ever becomes actual, so no event which is at some time future ever becomes present and actual or past and post-actual. This is indeed a tempting position if we just look at the ontological distinction between past and present on the one hand and future on the other. On the other hand it means we are forever forbidden to say of any event that actually comes about that it was once future. Not it but some empirical counterpart, was future, and the coming about consists in a counterpart of a future event coming into existence. I think Ingarden would agree with this radical conclusion because he holds that there is an utter and ultimately surd distinction between existence and non-existence, such that it is literally unthinkable that the same things should somehow make a transition from non-existent to existent or vice versa. So the true becoming of an object is what happens when it comes into existence, after it ceases to exist it does not recede into utter non-existence but lingers post-actually. I am sure Ingarden is wrong: the very same event etc. is now future, now present, now past, and does not change its identity or the fact of its existence by the mere passage of time. So the correct view of existence is that it is as such untensed: the difference between past, present and future is not an existential-ontological one. Heteronomy is very important in Ingarden’s ontology, because it informs two crucial areas of his universe, the intentional and the future. Nev-

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ertheless the idea of an object which derives its nature wholly from something outside it is one which has gathered and will continue to gather few adherents: if an object’s nature is external to it then why consider it an object at all? The things from which the nature derives will be autonomous, and there is fair reason to suppose a so-called heteronomous object is nothing but a chimera projected by language, a result of our having certain names and predications applying to these, but itself nothing in or of the world.

Originality versus Derivation An object is existentially original (seinsursprünglich, pierwotny) if it essentially cannot be created by any other object, while it is existentially derivative (seinsabgeleitet, pochodny) if it essentially so can be created (§ 13). Alternative terminology for ‘original’ could be ‘primary’ or ‘primitive’. Ingarden considers that an original object cannot fail to exist and cannot be destroyed by anything else. In expanding on the notion of a derivative object he goes on to say that such an object essentially must be produced or created by something else (§ 13). This is a stronger condition than at first stated and allows a third possibility, that of an object which might have been created but as a matter of contingent fact was not. An atheist might hold that it is a matter of contingent fact that the world was not created but came into existence spontaneously, but that its being created is metaphysically possible. So in reality we have not two but four cases: (i) objects which cannot be created or produced by something else so if they exist cannot fail to have done so, (ii) objects which could have been created but were in fact not created; (iii) objects which were in fact created but did not need to be created; and (iv) objects which cannot but have been created by something else. The first case is easily confused with the idea of an object which necessarily exists, but they are theoretically distinct notions. A necessarily existing object might be one necessarily created by another necessarily existing object, e.g. suppose God created the numbers or the Platonic forms. Such objects would fall into subcategory (iii) or category (iv). Also an original object which is not necessarily existing is one which might have failed to exist but could still be such that

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no other object could have produced it. Some conceptions of the material universe take this view of it. So Ingarden’s pair of opposed concepts is actually part of a richer modal classification of objects according to their origin. Symmetrically one might consider a classification of objects according not to their beginning or origin but according to their end or extinction. An object might be such that it cannot be destroyed by anything else (Ingarden takes original objects to be like this) or such that it might or might not be destroyed by something else, or be such that if it goes out of existence it has to be destroyed by something else. Standard substances appear to be in this last category, but some fundamental particles may be such that they become spontaneously extinct (as individuals, not as types). Ingarden notes a temptation to identify original objects with the Scholastic esse a se or natura naturans and derivative objects with esse ab alio or natura naturata (§ 13), but rather wisely refrains from engaging in detailed historical comparisons. On the other hand the notion of originating or conditioning something else is obviously suggestive of the concept of causation. But Ingarden notes that causation is a much more specific concept of conditioning, according to which U causes W if and only if 1. U and W are distinct 2. U conditions W but not vice versa in the same way 3. U and W are either processes or instantaneous events or phases of processes 4. W comes about simultaneously with U 5. U and W are essentially real (in time and space, and contingent). Obviously on this account there can be no question of God causing anything, let alone timeless entities like numbers, to exist, but God could be the origin or source of other things, some temporal (creatures), others not temporal (angels, forms). With the exception of the fourth condition, which is not as clearly necessary as the others, and indeed is probably wrong, these conditions are fairly commonly cited in the modern literature on causation. Of course the nature of the “conditioning” or “bringing about” in condition 2 is much debated.

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Given the two pairs of oppositions, autonomous/heteronomous and original/derivative it would seem that we could have four classes of object by combining the two. But no original object could be heteronomous, so there are only three possibilities.

Self-Sufficiency and Non-Self-Sufficiency An object is existentially self-sufficient (seinsselbständig, samodzielny) if it is essentially such that it can exist on its own without being part of a larger whole containing something else, and it is existentially non-selfsufficient (seinsunselbständig, niesamodzielny) if this is not the case, i.e. if it cannot exist independently, but only in a whole with something else (§ 14). This is the concept of independence and dependence that Husserl introduced in the third of his Logical Investigations,4 when distinguishing between dependent parts (moments) and independent parts (pieces) of a whole. The distinction in this form goes back directly to Carl Stumpf’s investigations of the psychology of the perception of space. The concept of a self-sufficient object is very similar to that of an Aristotelian substance: it is something which can exist on its own without having to be embedded in a larger whole with other things. The concept of independence or self-sufficiency is however ambiguous in this case. An individual may be self-sufficient in that there are no particular individuals that it has to form a whole with, but at the same time it may be dependent or non-self-sufficient in a generic way in that it must co-exist with some things of a certain kind, though which ones they are is not predetermined. For example a human being requires a certain amount of warmth, oxygen, water and other nutriments in order to exist, but there is no fixed portion of these necessary materials with which it has to combine. It is generically dependent on water but not individually dependent on this or that portion. By contrast a human hand (to take another Aristotelian example) cannot exist except as sometime part of a whole human being, and not just any human being, but the one it actually is attached to. Even if a hand were transplanted it would not lose this dependent status: while attached to its 4

As Ingarden acknowledges at footnote 40 in § 14.

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original owner it depends on that person, which is its essentially original owner, but after the transplant it depends on its new owner. That it can transfer dependence like this is due to the fact that its status as a hand is also ambiguous. As a material thing which when attached to the rest of the body carries out hand-type functions, and as a hand-shaped and handequipped piece of a human body which as such can become detached, thereby losing its “handy” function but retaining the potential to regain such a function if transplanted. In this sense being a hand is a secondary, functional role by comparison with the self-sufficiency of the whole organism but also by comparison with the brute materiality of the stuff of which it is constituted. Mere flesh and blood can survive a transplant, the hand qua hand ceases to exist when detached. Whether numerically the very same (functional) hand returns to life and existence when grafted back onto its original owner or onto a new one is a moot point, but not I think a deep metaphysical one, rather it is more a matter of terminological choice. In fact we could take it either way and so arrive at a further pair of meanings for the apparently so simple term ‘hand’. Such refinements are not mentioned by Ingarden however. The most obvious and abundant source of examples of non-self-sufficient objects which are relatively uncontroversial in that role are however instances of qualities and other properties, such as individual instances of whiteness, or squareness. These are what Husserl and Ingarden call moments and which modern analytic philosophy knows under the name of tropes. Not every philosopher who accepts properties and relations accepts instances thereof as dependent individuals: many philosophers regard properties and relations as universals only. Nor do all who accept tropes see them as dependent on their bearers, in that they need to exist together with them. Some adherents of tropes regard them as transferable, that is, such that they could have been together with other tropes in a different substance, or indeed such that they could in fact wander from one substance to another. In my view this is at the very least unlikely and unlovely and at worst a metaphysical howler. The idea of transferability of tropes is only attractive to those who, like Hume, prefer to see all objects as somehow metaphysically detachable and independent of others, and cannot accept any relationships of dependence (necessary connections) between distinct objects. This separatist Humean hankering appears to me to be meta-

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physical prejudice and little more, ignoring the richness of the forms of dependence among individuals to which Ingarden, following Aristotle, the Scholastics and Husserl, rightly draws attention. Another kind of object which cannot exist except along with other things in a larger whole are boundaries. A border between two countries such as the border between Austria and Switzerland is not nothing, but it is not a substance either: without the two countries either side it would be nothing. A boundary, like a trope, is an individual, a spatio-temporal particular. It has a certain location and extent. The national border in the example is fixed, or relatively so, but boundaries can move, as does for example a cold weather front crossing the Atlantic. Boundaries are somewhat elusive items metaphysically: they are not bulky objects with mass, unlike the surface layer of a fluid or the transitional layer of air at the tropopause. They have at least one dimension less than the items they bound. But they are not mathematical abstracta either, which have no location and are not individuals and cannot move or change. Also a boundary is not dependent on its surrounding or bounding objects as a whole, but only on there being sufficient of them on the relevant sides to form a boundary. For example a point (or near-point) which is the tip of a needle can remain a point despite the needle ceasing to exist, providing enough of the needle remains so the tip is still the tip of something. The boundary between Austria and Switzerland could continue to exist even though Austria and Switzerland were (heaven forfend!) reduced to narrow strips of territory on either side of the boundary.5

Independence and Dependence Among existentially self-sufficient objects there are those which nevertheless require a distinct and likewise self-sufficient object to exist. In this case Ingarden calls the objects existentially dependent (seinsabhängig, zależny). An object lacking such dependence is called existentially independent (seinsunabhängig, niezależny). The difference between dependent 5

Smith 1997. Incidentally the aqueous boundary between Austria and Switzerland in Lake Constance is not so obviously determinate: cf. Smith 2001, § 9. Empirical facts have this annoying tendency to mess up neat metaphysical examples.

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and non-self-sufficient objects consists in whether they essentially have to form a whole or not. As examples of dependent objects Ingarden gives all those which are constitutively relational in nature (§ 15), such as father, son, husband, wife. A son is a son only because he has a father (this was written in the days before cloning): even though the human being continues to exist when his father dies, the son as such does not.6 Likewise when a man’s wife dies, he is no longer a husband but becomes a widower. I think the two cases are as it happens linguistically distinct: I am still my father’s son though he is dead. One could imagine a variant of English in which the term ‘son’ were only used for males one or both of whose parents were still alive: one would need new words or expressions to express the relationship between a male child and his deceased parents. But as the examples show, the dependence in this case is not really ontological, but merely notional. Someone is called a son because he has a parent or two, but he does not depend on them except in so far as one or both of them form his necessary genetic and material origin. In practice as well as theory, a father can be dead before his child even comes into existence: earlier by misfortune, now through sperm banks and artificial insemination. Similarly, someone can cease to be a husband in one of three ways; by ceasing to exist himself, by the death of his (sole, or last remaining) wife and finally by divorce (again: from his sole wife). This variety shows that what makes a man a husband is not another object (here a woman) alone, but the existence of a contemporaneous relationship of marriage between them: ‘husband’ and so on are not, as we would now say, sortal terms: they describe a social or biological role, not a kind of thing. The ontological distinction between a man and a husband is not one between two things which are someone intimately related, Jack the man and Jack the husband, but consists in there being a marriage relationship between Jack and some woman. It is the same for all other terms which describe an object via its standing in some relation or other, except for those where the relationship 6

Like so many male philosophers using this example, Ingarden gets his elementary genealogical facts wrong: ‘father’ and ‘son’ are not correlative terms: a man remains a son even in Ingarden’s strict sense when his father dies, provided his mother still lives. A son is a male child; only ‘child’ has a correlative, namely ‘parent’. (NB This is a matter of real, not political correctness.)

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is one of the other cases of dependence that Ingarden previously deals with, namely heteronomy, derivation or non-self-sufficiency. The other example that Ingarden gives of dependence is one we mentioned before, namely the generic dependence of something on things or materials of a certain kind, such as the dependence of a human being on oxygen. Here it is indeed reasonable to talk of a special kind of dependence of an object that is in other respects independent, though the dependence may well be causal or empirical rather than metaphysical or essential. It is not clear that the question belongs to existential rather than to material ontology.

Possible Cases Putting these four oppositions together and eliminating those combinations that are a priori excluded, we get the following admissible combinations giving distinct modes of being, where in each case we employ the positive name to identify the pair and then add a sign for whether it is the positive or negative case: A B C D E F G H

+[autonomous] +[original] +[self-sufficient] +[independent] +[autonomous] +[original] +[self-sufficient] –[independent] +[autonomous] +[original] –[self-sufficient] +[autonomous] –[original] +[self-sufficient] +[independent] +[autonomous] –[original] +[self-sufficient] –[independent] +[autonomous] –[original] –[self-sufficient] –[autonomous] –[original] +[self-sufficient] –[independent] –[autonomous] –[original] –[self-sufficient]

These eight modes of being range from that of the very very independent A, which Ingarden regards as characterizing absolute being, such as may apply to God and Platonic forms, to the very very dependent H, such as may apply to intentional objects and future events. Ingarden adds several other families of existential moments to yield the fifteen consistent modes of possible being he eventually lists in § 33 at the end of the first volume of the Streit.

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Some Concluding Remarks Ingarden’s use of existential moments is I believe an insightful advance in fundamental ontology, because it takes some force of imagination to move beyond the Aristotelian conception of categores as classes of thing to analysing those factors, not themselves things but still not nothing, whereby things falls into just those categories, and trying to answer the question why there are these and no others. Modern philosophers tend to relativise such investigations to human psychology or language, whereas Ingarden in my view quite rightly refuses to play that game, but aims, however tentatively and fallibly, at absolute categories standing apart from human foibles and feeblenesses. Nevertheless in the actual execution of the task, Ingarden makes a number of material errors, as I have indicated in each case, leaves out some cases and finds differences where there are none in reality, either because one side of an opposition is illusory, or because the distinction does actually turn on contingent cognitive or linguistic rather than ontological differences. Ingarden is in fact a rather Scholastic and conservative ontologist: despite the radical basis of existential moments, the modes of being he ends up with are very familiar from traditional philosophy and later also from ordinary language philosophy. For all the step backwards to existential moments, the resulting ontology is descriptive rather than revisionary, with the partial exception of purely intentional objects. It is not clear that such a neo-Aristotelian outcome is adequate for a world encompassing the objects investigated by modern physics, or for the complexities of selfapplication required in logic and language themselves. More formally, it seems to be at least an aesthetic if not a methodological defect that the modes of being are not so defined as to avoid redundancies, such as that whereby non-self-sufficiency rules out both dependence and independence. It would be preferable if all combinations of moments were legal, so the space of possibilities is full. However, if for some reason we are unable, whether because the world is so or because we are too unimaginative, to come up with such an orthogonal set of moments, Ingarden’s evident goal of descriptive and systematic adequacy is to be preferred over a more economical and perhaps more elegant basis (for example, one consisting of just sets), which risks missing out or misclassifying some categories of

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entity. In this regard, ontologists have yet to surpass Ingarden’s effort to capture systematically the most fundamental features of being. He is a giant on whose shoulders we are privileged to stand.

References Ingarden, R. 1929. “Bemerkungen zum Problem ‘Idealismus-Realismus’”. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, Bd. X Ergänzungsband: Festschrift für Edmund Husserl zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet 159–190. 21974 Tübingen: Niemeyer. Ingarden, R. 1947. Spór o istnienie świata. Vol. 1, Kraków: PAU. Ingarden, R. 1964a. Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt. Bd. I: Existentialontologie. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Ingarden, R. 1964b. Time and Modes of Being. Springfield: Thomas. Smith, B. 1997. “Boundaries: An Essay in Mereotopology”. In: L. Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Roderick Chisholm (Library of Living Philosophers). LaSalle: Open Court, 534–561. Smith, B. 2001. “Fiat Objects”. Topoi 20, 131–148.

Roman Ingarden’s Ontology: Existential Dependence, Substances, Ideas, and Other Things Empiricists Do Not Like* DANIEL VON WACHTER

Roman Ingarden’s mammoth treatise on ontology bears the name The Controversy over the Existence of the World (first published in 1947, in Polish, Spór o istnienie świata, later in German, Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt; I will refer to this work in the following as ‘Streit’). Why? Ingarden’s teacher Edmund Husserl turned towards transcendental idealism in his Ideas (1913). Ingarden rejects this and develops, in his Streit, an ontology on the background of which he can answer the question whether and in which sense the world exists. Amongst the categories of entities Ingarden investigates there are particular, real, concrete things, ideas, states of affairs, and also fictional objects, such as Antonie Buddenbrook (from Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks). Characteristic about fictional objects is that they are in a certain way mind-dependent. Ingarden reconstructs Husserl’s idealist view as the view that all things are mind-dependent, quite like fictional objects. Ingarden produces an ontology of the various kinds of things in order to be able to answer the question whether, as Husserl assumes, the world is mind-dependent like fictional objects, or whether only some things in the world are mind-dependent, as Ingarden believes. This is the plot of the Streit. Ingarden’s ontology is an impressive biotope. It takes Ingarden 1840 pages to set it up. His style is not cryptic, but he writes down not only how he thinks things are and his arguments for his views, but all his thoughts about the matter, in good phenomenological tradition. The editors of this book have asked me to move on a bit more swiftly. As life is short, let us take a Europe-in-seven-days tour through Ingarden’s ontology. Preparing the travel we need to clarify what ontology is for Ingarden, how it relates to semantics, and how it relates to metaphysics. Then we shall turn to different kinds of existential dependence and to the distinction between form and matter. Having considered these preliminaries we shall consider Ingarden’s *

I wish to express my gratitude to the Free State of Bavaria for making this work possible through the Bayerischer Habilitationsförderpreis. Existence, Culture, and Persons: The Ontology of Roman Ingarden. Arkadiusz Chrudzimski (ed.), Frankfurt: ontos, 2005, 55–81.

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conception of a substance and, more briefly, his other categories. While my main aim is to guide you through Ingarden’s ontology I shall also indicate where I think the actual world is not as Ingarden describes it.

Ontology, not Semantics For Ingarden ontology has less to do with language than for most contemporary philosophers who call their work ontology or metaphysics (David Armstrong being the most notable exception). They work by analysing concepts, by ‘providing truth-conditions’, by developing semantics, or by discovering ontological commitments. They want to investigate only language or concepts, or they believe that by investigating language they find out something also about things in themselves. The clearest statement of the approach to ontology that wants to discover the structure of reality by investigating language I found in Uwe Meixner’s (2004, 11) introduction to ontology, where he writes explicitly that, according to the realist view, the basic structures of reality are reflected in the structures of reality so that we can read them off from language. Ingarden wants to discover the structures of things as they are independently of how (and whether) we refer to them, describe them, or think of them (Streit II/1, 62). He does not want to investigate our thought, he wants to investigate things in themselves. All epistemological questions he puts aside. When he investigates concrete particulars, which he calls ‘seinsautonome individuelle Gegenstände’, he emphasises that he wants to find out how they are independently from anything mental, not how they are represented. Let me clarify this by relating it to Peter Strawson’s distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics. Sometimes Ingardian and Armstrongian metaphysics, which tries to investigate not our conceptual scheme but things as they are, is called revisionary metaphysics. This is not how Strawson uses the term. We have to distinguish Strawsonian metaphysics, descriptive and revisionary, from metaphysics as Ingarden (or, e.g., David Armstrong) pursues it. Strawson writes: ‘Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure.’

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(Strawson 1959, 9) Both Strawsonian kinds of metaphysics are concerned with the structure of our thought, with concepts, with conceptual schemes. Ingarden is not, he is concerned with things in themselves. Let me call Ingarden’s project of describing not concepts but things in themselves ‘metaphysical metaphysics’ (or ‘metaphysical ontology’). Strawsonian descriptive metaphysics I call also ‘conceptualist metaphysics’. (Had Strawson not already introduced the terms differently I would have called metaphysical metaphysics ‘descriptive metaphysics’, or just ‘metaphysics’.) Having said that, Ingarden’s ontology does look like something a conceptualist metaphysician could have proposed. It is very Aristotelian, and it is debatable whether Aristotle’s ontology is metaphysical or conceptualist. My own view is that Ingarden’s ontology does not capture how the world really is and that Ingarden was deceived by the structures of our thought,1 but nevertheless Ingarden’s aim is to describe, not the structure of our thought about reality, but the structure of reality itself. For Ingarden ontology is distinct from metaphysics. It is concerned, not with what actually exists, but with ‘pure possibilities and necessities’ (Streit I, 29). One part of ontology, ‘formal ontology’, investigates what it would be to be an idea, a substance, a property, a state of affairs, etc. It seeks to discover the structure of these things. In Ingarden’s words, it seeks to analyse the form of an idea, the form of a substance, etc. The method of ontology is a priori analysis of the content of ideas (Streit I, 33), where ideas are mind-independent, non-temporal entities (they are neither meanings nor concepts). So Ingarden assumes that we can by intuition or by thinking hard in a certain way discover the things ontology seeks to discover. Note that this does not entail that we can discover truths about the world without experience. In the phenomenological tradition a priori knowledge was sometimes assumed to be, not entirely independent from experience (as the logical empiricists interpreted ‘a priori’), but based on a 1

Peter Simons has similar worries about David Armstrong’s ontology: ‘This is a general worry about how close the parallels are between linguistic and ontological categories, irrespective of whether there are one-to-one correspondences at the instance level, which Armstrong quite rightly rejects. Personally I think Armstrong’s parallels are suspiciously cosy and that there is every chance the basic ontological categories are quite skew to linguistic ones.’ (Simons 1999) For my own ontology, a ‘field ontology’ with ontological categories skew to linguistic ones, see (Wachter 2000c).

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certain kind of experience, namely a priori, or phenomenological, experience (Streit I, 39; Scheler 1916, 68–71). Metaphysics, on the other hand, seeks to find out what actually exists: whether there are substances, whether there are simple substances, whether chairs are themselves substances or whether only the elementary particles of which the chair consists are basic substances, whether there is a God, etc. (Streit I, 30ff, 47ff) Further, it seeks to find out whether a certain property of a thing is part of its (individual) essence. Whilst ontology is concerned with the content of ideas, metaphysics is concerned with certain objects, like you or like my desk. Metaphysics uses results from ontology as well as from natural sciences. Ingarden suggests that we need the natural sciences to find out whether something is itself a basic substance or whether it is a higher-order object, i.e. one constituted by a plurality of things (Streit II/1, 61f). And we need results from ontology in metaphysics in order to find out, for example, whether you could be immortal. To find out this we have to find out what kind of object you are, and then we have to look at the corresponding idea whether things of that kind can be immortal. This latter task of inspecting an idea is part of ontology.2

Terminology Ingarden uses the term ‘Gegenstand’, which corresponds to the English term ‘object’, usually for substances. He does not use the term ‘substance’. The term ‘Gegenständlichkeit’ he uses for anything that exists (‘irgend etwas überhaupt’, Streit I, 79; Streit II/1, 102), as we use the term ‘entity’ in English. I call a substance, as opposed to an ontologically incomplete entity like an individual property, a concrete entity or sometimes just a thing. Ingarden’s term is ‘self-sufficient’. An abstract entity, a trope for example, is one that is ontologically incomplete, dependent, non-self-sufficient. So I do not use ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ in the Quinean sense for being temporal and being non-temporal. 2

For how metaphysics uses results from ontology, see Streit I, 50–53. For a discussion of the relationship between ontology, epistemology, and metaphysics, see (Ingarden 1925), referred to by (Küng 1975, 159).

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(Armstrong (1978a, 78) calls the Quinean use of the terms ‘perverse’ because it ignores the tradition.) To call something temporal or non-temporal I use, like Ingarden, the traditional terms ‘real’ and ‘ideal’. Ingarden calls universals (to be precise, transcendent universals, as Armstrong (1989b, 76) calls them) ‘ideal qualities’ (‘ideale Qualitäten’ or ‘reine Wesenheiten’). Particulars Ingarden calls ‘individuelle Gegenständlichkeiten’. I use the adjectives ‘particular’ and ‘individual’ and the nouns ‘particulars’ and ‘individuals’. Note that, with this terminology (‘individual’ in the title of Strawson’s book Individuals is used differently), an individual can be concrete (e.g. you) or abstract (e.g. your mass trope). Properties, according to Ingarden, are individuals; like Husserl, he calls them ‘moments’ (‘Momente’). We can also use the modern term ‘trope’, or ‘abstract particular’, or ‘property instance’. Ingarden uses the term ‘moments’ to refer not only to a thing’s properties but to all its ontological constituents, or even to anything that can be distinguished at a thing. The individual property bearer, the ‘subject’ of the properties, is an ontological constituent of the thing. (Ingarden uses neither the term ‘substance’ nor the term ‘substratum’.) The term ‘ontological constituents’ (as used by Armstrong 1997, 2, 28; and Smith 1997) is not used by Ingarden, but I use it. This is justified by the fact that Ingarden, following Husserl (as explained below), takes the properties (and other ontological constituents) of a thing to be parts of the thing; not ‘concrete parts’ but ‘abstract parts’. Ingarden’s term ‘Wesen’ is translated as essence. An essence is something individual, it is the essence of a thing. You have one and I have one. They are both essences of a man, but they are numerically distinct.

Survey over all there is According to Ingarden, in the realm of what there is there are three types of things (Streit I, 39; Streit II,1, 60): individual entities (‘individuelle Gegenständlichkeiten’), ideas, and ideal qualities (‘ideale Qualitäten’ or ‘reine Wesenheiten’). Individual entities are things like a certain chair, a certain rabbit, a certain planet, a certain electron, but also the properties of such things (tropes, as we call them today), for example the mass of the Moon. Amongst indi-

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vidual entities, Ingarden distinguishes, as I shall explain in more detail below, independent individual objects (which many philosophers call ‘substances’), like a certain planet, from dependent individual objects, like a certain planet’s mass (a particular property, a trope) or a certain man’s being a man (a particular kind). Amongst independent, individual objects, Ingarden distinguishes basic objects from higher-order objects, which are constituted by a plurality of things (often called ‘parts’ of the thing), e.g. my car, which is constituted by many smaller things. Ideas are ideal, i.e. non-temporal, entities. An example may be the idea of a man. An idea has a content (‘Gehalt’). In the content of the idea of a man it is determined, for example, that a man has a body, and also that a man has some weight. Each man falls under the idea of a man. Ideas determine what is possible in the realm of individual things, e.g. that I could have a different weight than the one I have. By ‘ideal qualities’ Ingarden means what today is called transcendent universals. They are ideal, i.e. non-temporal entities, whose exemplifications are individual properties (property instances, tropes, Ingarden, like Husserl, calls them ‘moments’), such as my mass, which is numerically distinct from your mass, even if we both have a mass of 81 kilograms. So Ingarden believes that there are tropes as well as universals.

Existential dependence Volume I of the Streit bears the title ‘Existential Ontology’, Volume II ‘Formal Ontology’, and another volume, which Ingarden never came to write, would have been called ‘Material Ontology’ (instead Ingarden wrote a volume about ‘The Causal Structure of the World’). Before we turn to Ingarden’s account of individual objects and of ideas, let me explain his concepts of existential dependence, which he discusses in Streit I, and then his concepts of form and matter. For Ingarden, ontological dependence is linked to being in the following way. He distinguishes various kinds of being (‘Seinsweisen’) which an entity can have. Examples are being real (‘Realsein’), being ideal (‘Idealsein’), and being possible (‘Möglichsein’) (Streit I, 66). (He does not say whether this list is complete.) Unlike, for example, Thomas Aquinas, he

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does not assume that the being of an entity is an ontological constituent of the entity (Streit I, 71–74). It is not like the rose’s being red, which Ingarden does assume to be an ontological constituent (or you may even call it a part) of the rose. The existence of a thing is not an addition to the rest of the thing. If the Moon dropped out of existence, there would be nothing left. That the Moon exists is made true not by an ontological constituent of the Moon which we could call its being but by the Moon, which consists of its mass, its density, its property bearer, etc. Ingarden assumes that one may be able to make distinctions about a kind of being. Being real is a kind of being. Considering what it is to be real, to be a real entity, one may be able to make further distinctions about being real. That which is distinguished then Ingarden calls existential moments (‘existentiale Momente’). The different kinds of existential dependence are existential moments of being real. Ingarden discusses four kinds of existential dependence, four pairs of existential moments of being real. We need to familiarise ourselves with them in order to be able to understand Ingarden’s ontology. They are four reasons why it may be true that some thing x cannot exist unless some thing y exists.3 That is, it is impossible that x but not y exists. Note that ‘It is impossible that x but not y exists’ does not imply that the sentence ‘x exists and y does not exist’ is, or entails, a self-contradiction. The idea that something is impossible if, and only if, it is self-contradictory is an idea of the logical empiricists and is opposed to what phenomenologists like Ingarden assume about modality. When Ingarden says that it is impossible that x but not y exists he presupposes that ‘x exists and y does not exist’ is consistent. I call this kind of modality ‘synthetic modality’ (see Wachter 2000b). 1. Existential autonomy / heteronomy First, Ingarden tries to capture the way in which the figures in a novel are dependent on the author of the novel. (Streit I, §12) He calls this heteronomy of being (‘Seinsheteronomie’). His generalised definition is: 3

For the names of the existential moments I use Peter Simons’ translation (in Smith 1982, 263, in the preface to Ginsberg 1931). An English translation of the relevant parts of Streit I is (Ingarden 1964b).

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An entity is existentially heteronomous if, and only if, it has the fundament of its being in itself, i.e. if its attributes (‘Bestimmungen’) are immanent to it. What does Ingarden mean by ‘x has the fundament of its being in y’? He does not mean that x is caused by y. A shoe has the fundament of its being in itself, not in the shoemaker. The forest fire has the fundament of its being in itself, not in the cigarette that caused it. The Moon that was caused by God and is sustained by him has the fundament of its being in itself, not in God. An example of a heteronomous entity is Amy Dorrit, also called ‘Little Dorrit’, daughter of William Dorrit, from Charles Dickens’s novel ‘Little Dorrit’. Little Dorrit has soft hazel eyes. She really does. Well, perhaps not really ‘really’. Ingarden’s account of it is as follows. Little Dorrit exists. But unlike you, Little Dorrit is a heteronomous entity. ‘Little Dorrit has soft hazel eyes’ is true. But there is a difference between your and Little Dorrit’s having soft hazel eyes. According to Ingarden, the difference is that to Little Dorrit this attribute is not immanent, because ‘Little Dorrit has soft hazel eyes’ is true not because there are somewhere eyes that reflect such and such light. A heteronomous entity is one whose attributes are not immanent to it but are for some other reason its attributes. Why does Ingarden not give more rigorous or formal definitions? I have tried to clarify the meaning of ‘x has the fundament of its being in y’ not by giving an elaborate definition but by pointing to an example and by indicating what aspect of it the phrase aims to capture. The phrase applies to all cases that resemble the examples in the relevant respect. This is how Ingarden does it. His aim is not to construe or explicate or analyse concepts but to grasp how things are in themselves. The key terms in Ingarden’s definitions and investigations do not have definitions from which you can read off whether it applies to a certain case; he does not give a set of necessary or sufficient conditions. Ingarden tries to describe what he investigates and to introduce terms that capture aspects of what he investigates. Little Dorrit belongs to the kind of heteronomous entities Ingarden is most concerned with: ‘purely intentional objects’ (Streit II/1, 82–86, Kap. 9). A purely intentional object is one that has its fundament of being in intentional mental events (‘intentionale Bewußtseinserlebnisse’). Most philosophers today would call such objects fictional objects. Ingarden empha-

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sises that they exist but that they differ in their ontological structure from autonomous objects. Little Dorrit is a purely intentional object because it has its fundament of being in mental events of Charles Dickens, the author of the novel. Let me draw your attention to two features of purely intentional objects (Streit II/1, §47). First, intentional objects have two sides (‘Doppelseitigkeit’). On the one side they have a content (‘Gehalt’). The content of a purely intentional object is the sum of its attributes. For example, it is part of the content of Little Dorrit that she has soft hazel eyes. In the content there is all that which the object’s fundament of being bestows upon the object. On the other side a purely intentional object has properties in itself. Ingarden calls this the object’s intentional structure. For example, it belongs to Little Dorrit’s intentional structure that it was created by Charles Dickens. Second, purely intentional objects have places of indeterminacy (‘Unbestimmtheitsstellen’). For autonomous objects like you for every property there is a fact of the matter whether you have it. For example, I do not know whether George W. Bush has a liver spot on his left shoulder. But he knows, or somebody can find out; it is something to be discovered. Not so for purely intentional objects. There is no fact of the matter whether Little Dorrit has a liver spot on her left shoulder because the book does not say anything about it. This is what Ingarden calls a purely intentional object having a place of indeterminacy. What Ingarden calls a purely intentional object here is different from what is sometimes called an intentional object: object that is the object of an intentional mental event, for example of your desiring its possession or your imagining it. Ingarden’s teacher Edmund Husserl uses ‘intentional object’ in this sense, especially in his Fifth Logical Investigation. He says that there are intentional mental events (‘acts’) that have an object, which is the called its intentional object, as well as intentional acts whose object does not exist, for example my imagining the god Jupiter. For Husserl, to say that a mental act has such and such an object does not entail that there is, i.e. exists, such an object but only that the act is of a certain kind: it has a certain directedness so that if there exists a corresponding object that object is meant in the act. In the case where the object does not exist but only

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the act with its being directed in a certain way4 (for example, towards the god Jupiter), Husserl says that the act’s object is a ‘merely intentional object’ (‘bloß intentionaler Gegenstand’ (Husserl 1913c, 425)). Now, this concept of a merely intentional object is the same as Ingarden’s concept of a purely intentional object, instead of which he often says only ‘intentional object’. The aim of Ingarden’s book The Controversy about the Existence of the World is to answer the question whether the world is a purely intentional object. Husserl, after his turn to transcendental idealism in his book Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (1913a), held that the spatio-temporal world has ‘merely intentional being’ (Husserl 1913a, 93), i.e., in Ingarden’s terminology, that it is a purely intentional object.5 2. Existential originality / derivation The second pair of existential moments that Ingarden discusses is about whether the entity could be created (Streit I, § 13). It is similar to the scholastic distinction between ‘esse a se’ and ‘esse ab alio’. An existentially original [‘seinsursprünglich’] entity is one that because of its essence cannot be created by another entity. An existentially derived [‘seinsabgeleitet’] entity is one that can be created by another entity. Ingarden takes this to entail that an existentially original entity is one that because of its essence cannot not exist. Its own essence or nature forces it to exist. An existentially original entity cannot be destroyed by another entity, it is imperishable. It exists eternally, i.e. at all times. It exists necessarily. Ingarden does not take a view in his ontology whether there are existentially original entities. To determine this is a task of metaphysics. God would be a existentially original entity. Atheist materialism may hold that there is matter that is existentially original (Streit I, 112).

4

‘Die Intention, das einen so beschaffenen Gegenstand “Meinen” existiert, aber nicht der Gegenstand.’ (Husserl, V. Logische Untersuchung, 425) 5 For more on this see (Wachter 2000a, 71–74).

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3. Existential self-sufficiency / non-self-sufficiency Ingarden assumes that the properties of a thing are individual, like the thing of which they are properties. Even if we both are 81 kg in weight, your mass of 81 kg is numerically distinct from my mass of 81 kg. However, the properties of a thing are existentially dependent upon each other. Your mass could not exist without your density, etc. This kind of dependence Ingarden captures with his concept of existential non-self-sufficiency (Streit I, §14). An existentially non-self-sufficient entity is one that can exist only together with certain other entities in the unity of a whole. An existentially sufficient entity is one that is not existentially non-self-sufficient.6 Ingarden writes, instead of ‘unity of a whole thing’, ‘unity of a whole’ (‘Einheit eines Ganzen’). What does he mean by the unity of a whole? Also the spring and the balance in a watch exist in the unity of a whole, and one can even say that there is the whole consisting of the table and the book on the table, but they could exist without any unity of a whole. One could say that the foundation-stone of a house could not exist without there ever being a house of which it was the foundation-stone, but that is also not what Ingarden means because a foundation-stone can be removed from a house in a way which Ingarden wants to exclude for existentially non-selfsufficient entities. The point is not that if the entity were removed from the things on which it depends, then it would not be that very entity any more, or then it could not be referred to with the same name. The point is that there is no removing from the whole at all possible and that no entity of that kind could exist except as a part of a. The kind of unity he means is clearly that in which, for example, the mass, the density, and the temperature of the Moon exist; that is, the unity that the properties (and other ontological constituents) of a thing have. We need to understand the definition so that it refers to a certain kind of a unity of a whole for which we have examples, and then states that an entity is non-self-sufficient if it cannot exist but within such a whole. 6

Ingarden’s wording is: ‘An entitiy is existentially self-sufficient if it requires for its existence the existence of no other entity with which it would have to exist in the unity of one whole; in other words, if its existence is not a necessary co-existence with another entity in the unity of a whole.’ (Streit I, 75, my transl.)

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Ingarden’s notion of a non-self-sufficient entity corresponds to Husserl’s notion of an ‘abstract part’ (III. Logical Investigation, § 17). Whilst Aristotle (Categories, II) insisted that the properties of a thing are not parts of it, Husserl, in his Third Logical Investigation, distinguishes between ‘concrete parts’, which can be removed from the whole, and ‘abstract parts’, which can only exist when they are in the unity of the whole. The properties (or ‘moments’, as Husserl and Ingarden also call them) of a thing are abstract parts of the thing. The reason why Ingarden, like Husserl, takes properties to be individuals is that an individual thing cannot have universals as constituents. Everything that can be distinguished at an object (e.g. the object’s mass from the object’s temperature) has to have the same mode of being. (Streit I, 74f; Streit II/1, 236) Ingarden draws further distinctions, about relative to what and about in virtue of what (matter or form) something is non-self-sufficient. Relevant for us here are the following distinctions: x is unambiguously existentially non-self-sufficient relative to y if, and only if, x can exist only if it is together with y within the unity of a whole. x is ambiguously existentially non-self-sufficient relative to y if, and only if, x can exist only if it is together with y or some other entity within the unity of a whole. (For example, the mass of the Moon is ambiguously existentially non-self-sufficient relative to the Moon’s temperature, because the Moon could have a different temperature whilst having the same mass.) x is reflexively non-self-sufficient relative to y if, and only if, x is unambiguously non-self-sufficient relative to y and y is unambiguously non-selfsufficient relative to x. x is existentially non-self-sufficient (or ‘abstract’) if, and only if, there is an entity relative to which it is (ambiguously or unambiguously) non-selfsufficient.

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4. Existential dependence / independence Fourthly, Ingarden makes a distinction amongst self-sufficient entities (Streit I, §15): An existentially dependent (‘seinsabhängig’) entity is one that is selfsufficient and requires for its continued existence the existence of a certain other self-sufficient entity. One example Ingarden mentions is a human organism, which requires for its continued existence the existence of a source of heat that produces the temperature that the organism needs (Streit I, 121). Another example would be a thing created by God which can only continue to exist if God sustains it. Having done this part of existential ontology, which is the topic of the first volume of the Streit, we can move on to the topic of the second volume: formal ontology. But first let me explain what Ingarden means by ‘form’.

Form and matter The idea underlying Aristotle’s distinction between form and matter (‘Form und Materie’) is that if something comes to be, there must be something out of which it comes to be, and if something changes there must be something underlying the change. His favourite example is a statue coming to be out of bronze. The shape of the statue is then the form and the bronze is the matter. Ingarden’s distinction is different. His concept of matter is broader, it would include the shape of the statue too, because it is something qualitative. With the concept of matter he wants to capture everything qualitative, with the concept of form he wants to capture how and where it stands in the ontological structure of that to which it belongs. Consider the Moon’s density of 3.34 grams per cubic centimetre, which is an individual, a moment, a trope. It has a form: the form of a property. That which makes it different from, for example, my mass, is its matter. An entity’s matter is that which is purely qualitative in it. The entity’s form is that ‘in which the matter stands’; it is that which gives the matter its place in the ontological structure of the entity. Ingarden calls it the how of

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the object’s attributes, implying that it gives the matter its form.7 Other examples of forms are: the form of an autonomous individual object, the form of a purely intentional object, the form of an idea, the form of a state of affairs, the form of a relation. These forms are the subject of chapters of Streit II/1. Ingarden’s concept of form reminds us of what other philosophers call ‘categories’. That which makes an entity belong to a certain category Ingarden calls its form. That in respect of which it resembles, or differs from, other entities in the same category, Ingarden calls matter. Each entity has the ‘trinity’ of a matter, a form, and a mode of being (Streit II/1, 96, 100f). The task of ‘formal ontology’8 is to analyse forms. Results of Ingarden’s research in formal ontology are, for example, that a property is an individual, that heteronomous objects have places of indeterminacy, that ideas exist non-temporally, etc. Let us now have a closer look at the form of a substance, or ‘autonomous, individual object’, as Ingarden calls it.

Substance The things we see with our eyes are all individual. Some portions of them, as well as perhaps some portions of other stuff, are substances. Something is special about them. They are what Ingarden calls original (‘ursprunglich’), individual (‘individuell’), self-sufficient (‘seinsselbständig’), auto7

For Ingarden’s distinction between form and matter see Streit II/1, 12f, 33f. For an analysis of Ingarden’s discussion of different concepts of form and matter (Streit II/1, §§ 34–35), see (Wachter 2000a, 82–87). Ingarden’s concepts of form and matter are based on Husserl’s disinction between the sphere of the formal and the sphere of the material (III. Logical Investigation, § 11). 8 Today, there is a discipline in information technology that is called ‘formal ontology’ or ‘ontological engineering’. The aim there is to develop formal theories with definitions of categories like substance, state, property, etc., and with underpinning axioms for the design of date- and knowledge-base systems. Such theories can be improved by taking results from philosophical ontology into account. Philosophical ontology may help to make the theories fit reality. For a discussion of the relationship between philosophical ontology and ontological engineering, see (Smith 2003). Further, see http://formalontology.it and http://ifomis.org.

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nomous (‘seinsautonom’), temporal (‘zeitbestimmt’) objects; often he calls them simply ‘individual objects’. Independence is one of the traditional distinguishing features of substances (which also plays a role in many contemporary accounts, e.g. (Lowe 1998, ch. 6); (Smith 1997, 112)). On the background of his existential ontology, Ingarden is able to spell out with much ontological detail what this should mean. Individual objects are seinsselbständig, existentially self-sufficient. All its ontological constituents, its abstract parts, could not exist on their own, as described above when we discussed selfsufficiency. He distinguishes their material from their formal self-sufficiency (Streit II/1, 91). It is in virtue of their matter that none of a thing’s properties can be taken away without being replaced by another property of a certain kind. Not only is it impossible for a single property to exist, also that which remained if one property were taken away could not exist, it would not be self-sufficient. You may lose your weight of 81 kg, but only if you acquire another weight instead, e.g. 83 kg. That a thing is materially self-sufficient means that it requires no further properties in this way. This we can distinguish from a thing’s formal self-sufficiency, which Ingarden also calls ‘formale Abgeschlossenheit’, formal completeness (Streit II/1, 62, 67, 91). A property is formally incomplete because its form ‘property of’ requires the form ‘subject of properties’. That is, something that stands in the former form can only exist if properly united with something of the latter form. Summarising both, the formal and the material aspect of self-sufficiency, Ingarden says that an individual object is self-sufficient because all moments’ need for complementation is saturated (Streit II/1, 91). The form ‘subject of properties’ and ‘property of something’ complement each other and together constitute the ‘basic form’ of the individual object (Streit II/1, 64).

The property bearer What is the bearer of a thing’s properties? There are two main options: it is a bare substratum, i.e. a substratum that itself has no quality at all, or it is a kinded substratum, i.e. a substratum that itself has a quality (what Thomas

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Aquinas called ‘forma substantialis’) and belongs to a kind (a defender of the first view is LaBossiere (1994), defenders of the second view are Lowe (1989) and Loux (1974)). Ingarden chooses the latter option. A property is borne by a property bearer, a subject. Like the property, this property bearer is itself qualitative. It has a matter (‘eine Materie’). The matter of a property stands in the form ‘property of something’; the matter of a subject stands in the form ‘subject of properties’. However, the matter of a property and the matter of a subject never resemble each other, they can never be of the same kind. An ‘83-kgs in mass’-matter cannot stand in the form ‘subject of properties’, only in the form ‘property of something’. A ‘is a man’-matter cannot stand in the form ‘property of something’, only in the form ‘subject of properties’. The way in which a subject is not bare becomes clearer when we consider the role of universals in Ingarden’s ontology. It is a ‘tropes plus universals’ ontology (Armstrong 1989b, 18). A property is an exemplification of a universal. There is the universal, and there are its exemplifications, which are individuals and constituents of things: of all those things that resemble each other (exactly) in this respect. Now, there are two kinds of universals: besides those universals whose exemplifications are properties (tropes), there are universals whose exemplifications are property bearers. They are not bare substrata but belong to a kind; or, more precisely, the thing of which it is the property bearer belongs to a kind in virtue of having this property bearer in it. Ingarden calls the bearer of the properties the ‘subject’, and the kind to which the thing belongs the thing’s constitutive nature (‘konstitutive Natur’) (Streit II/1, 64). The subject is ‘immediately qualified’. That it is qualified means that it is not a bare substratum but a substratum with an intrinsic quality. That it is ‘immediately’ qualified means that it has this quality not because it bears a quality but because it is itself an exemplification of a universal, a kind universal. This provokes the following objection. That the subject is qualified must mean it bears a certain quality. You can distinguish the bearer of the quality from the quality. Ingarden’s idea of an ‘immediately qualified subject’ is incoherent. He should either assume that there are no property bearers (and that things are bundles of properties), or that properties are borne by bare substrata, or that the property bearer itself consists of a kindquality and it’s bare bearer.

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Ingarden’s reply would be that this is a confusion between the ‘ontic formal structure’ and the ‘merely intentional formal structure’ of the thought about the thing (Streit II/1, 105); in other words, between the ontic structure of the thing in itself and the semantics of the description of the thing. The claim ‘subject x is of kind y’ has the subject-predicate structure, but this does not show that there is the kind and the kind’s bearer. The qualified subject is ontologically simple, despite the fact that we can truly say of it that it is the property bearer as well as that it is of kind y. The objector assumes that whenever we can say something of something, i.e. make a claim of the form ‘this is so-and-so’, there is an ontological distinction between that which is predicated and that to which it is predicated. Ingarden disagrees. Further, he criticises the view that everything that is predicated is a property. He has a narrower concept of a property and calls it a misleading automatism of thinking (‘Denkautomatismus’) to take everything that can be distinguished at a thing as a property of the thing (Streit II/1, 96, 100; Streit I, 60).9 Not every predicate corresponds to a property and not everything that can be distinguished at a thing is a property of the thing. For example, the constitutive nature of a thing is not a property. Neither is its form nor its mode of being (‘Seinsweise’). Ingarden’s ontology is a constituent ontology: he tells us what a thing consists of. Do not approach Ingarden’s ontology by looking at the propositions about the thing. So each thing has a property bearer, which is an exemplification of a kind universal. So each thing belongs to one kind (Streit II/1, 82). But consider this apple here. Isn’t it a fruit, an apple, and a Braeburne? But Ingarden insists that the thing is of only one kind, one ‘constitutive nature’. What the other sortal concepts under which the thing falls refer to Ingarden calls quasi-natures (‘Quasi-Naturen’). For example, being a fruit is a quasinature of this apple. But what distinguishes the constitutive nature of a thing from its quasinatures? Being a fruit is a quasi-nature of this apple here because there are different kinds of fruit. Ingarden postulates that in the hierarchy of kinds to which a thing belongs, there is one that is the lowest, most specific kind. 9

Ingarden’s writings had no influence on the contemporary debate in ontology, but Armstrong (1978b, ch. 13) later made the similar point that there is no one-one correlation between predicates and universals.

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There is one kind of which there are no further sub-kinds. That is the constitutive nature of the thing. The medieval philosophers called this the ‘infima species’. I would object that we have no reason to believe that of the many kinds to which a thing belongs there is one that is the lowest kind. For every kind you can form a concept of a lower kind by making it more specific. We are free to decide what we take to be a variation of a kind and what we take to be a different kind. In zoology, for example, we have decided to say of all those animals that can cross-breed that they belong to the same species, although we could form more specific concepts of species. But Ingarden says, there just is one lowest kind to which a thing belongs, even if we cannot discover it. We can always form a concept of a lower kind, but there comes a point when we can only form a concept of a lower kind by referring not to a lower kind but to a property. You can form the concepts ‘fruit’, ‘apple’, ‘Braeburne’, ‘red apple’ but ‘red apple’ presumably does not refer to the constitutive nature because ‘red’ refers to a property. He just assumes that there is a lowest kind of each thing because phenomenological insight reveals that such is the ontological structure of things. The nature of a thing cannot be reduced to a set of properties. Amongst the qualitative constituents of a thing there are its properties as well as a constitutive nature. But can we not define one kind in terms of another kind and distinguishing properties? Can we not define a man as a rational animal? Ingarden answers that we may be able to pick out in this way all the individuals belonging to a certain kind, but a thing’s nature is distinct from it’s properties. However, there is an explanation why we are able to form definitions as described. There are existential dependencies not only between the properties of a thing but also between the constitutive nature and the properties. A thing’s nature is existentially non-self-sufficient upon certain properties. This may be an ambiguous or an unambiguous dependency. If it is ambiguously non-self-sufficient upon its properties P, then that thing can only exist if it has one property from a certain set of properties of which P is one. If it is unambiguously non-self-sufficient upon its property P then it cannot exist without P and it would cease to exist if P were destroyed. Thus there is a net of existential dependencies between the ontological constituents of a thing that glues them together ontologically (Streit II/1,

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§ 41). There are ontological dependencies between the properties, between the properties and the constitutive nature (instead we can say between the properties and the thing), between each matter and the form in which it stands, between the forms, and between the matters. The dependencies can be ambiguous or unambiguous, reflexive or non-reflexive. This view is opposed to the kind of empiricism to which many contemporary ontologists are committed. In Keith Campbell’s trope theory, for example, ‘individual, isolated tropes, compresent with nothing, are admitted as possibilities’ (Campbell 1990, 59). There are no necessary links between the ontological constituents of a thing: ‘It is a matter of fact, and not of metaphysical necessity, that tropes commonly occur in compresent groups.’ (Campbell 1990, 21) Campbell wants to avoid the assumption that one entity could not exist without a certain other, distinct entity. Empiricists (of the Humean type) hold that all knowledge comes through sense experience, and they try to avoid to assume that there is something one cannot know. The existential dependencies that Ingarden assumes are something one cannot know through the senses. Therefore many contemporary ontologists assume, like Campbell, that the ontological constituents of a thing are independent from each other. David Armstrong finds dependencies between distinct ontological constituents of a thing ‘a rather mysterious necessity in the world’ (Armstrong 1989b, 118) and proposes therefore a ‘combinatorial theory of possibility’ where all distinct entities are independent from each other (Armstrong 1989a). An empiricist typically holds that ‘the source of necessity must be located in the words, or concepts, in which the propositions are expressed.’ (Armstrong 1978b, 168) Ingarden has no worries of this kind, he rejects the ‘radical empiricists’’ (Streit II/1, 278) assumption of the independence of distinct entities and assumes the sort of necessities empiricists find mysterious, i.e. synthetic necessities (cf. Wachter 2000b). For him all the constituents of a thing are in some way ontologically dependent upon each other. Each existing thing requires for its existence each of its ontological constituents or a suitable replacement thereof.

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Essence and identity By the essence of a thing Ingarden means that in virtue of which it is the thing it is. That means that a thing ceases to exist if and only if its essence or a part of it is annihilated or taken away from the thing. That something belongs to the essence of a thing means that if it is taken away from the thing the thing thereby ceases to exist. Ingarden puts it as follows: ‘The essence of the object is that without which the object would not be in itself and would not be that which it really is.’ (Streit II/1, 401) The essence of a thing is individual (Streit II/1, 387). All the ontological constituents of a thing have the same mode of being as the thing (Streit I, 74). One mode of being is being real, which Ingarden seems to equate with being individual. So in an individual object, a substance, there are only real, individual entities. Also its properties are individual (Streit II/ 236, footnote 4). The essence of a thing is a subclass of the ontological constituents of a thing. Therefore the essence of a thing is individual. So Ingarden does not mean by the essence of a thing the thing’s kind, which it may have in common with other things. Rather, a thing’s essence is its ontological core. The centre piece of a thing and the thing’s essence is the constitutive nature (which, although Ingarden calls it ‘nature’, is individual), the kinded property bearer. Whenever you face a question of the form ‘Is this thing the same as that thing’ (‘this’ and ‘that’ referring to things at one time or at different times), the answer depends on whether ‘this’ and ‘that’ refer to the very same individual nature. However, a thing’s essence consists not only of its individual nature but also that relative to which the nature is unambiguously non-self-sufficient.10 This may include some of its properties, the essential properties, and its mode of being. A thing’s essence includes everything that is necessary for the thing (Streit II/1, 402), in the sense that it is impossible that that very thing exists 10

This is the result of my attempt to distil one clear account of essence from Ingarden’s discussion of the essence of a thing (Streit II/1, ch. 13). It is most clearly stated on p. 393 of Streit II/1. Ingarden fluctuates between various conceptions of essence, but this is what I suggest makes most sense and fits best with the rest of his ontology. I shall not discuss the exegesis of Ingarden’s text here.

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without it. A thing’s essence is not indestructible. It is possible to take away an essential property from a thing (Streit II/1, 234), but if it happens the thing’s constitutive nature, and hence the thing, ceases to exist. A thing can persist in time so that it remains the very same thing. Ingarden takes this to be a basic phenomenon which cannot be defined in terms of something else, it can only be described and characterised (Streit II/2, 32). A thing that persists in time moves with all that belongs to its region of being (‘Seinsbereich’) into a new present. It may or may not change, i.e. lose and gain non-essential properties, while it persists in time. A thing’s ceasing to exist consists in its constitutive nature ceasing to exist. A thing persists during a certain period of time if and only if its constitutive nature persists during that period. As the constitutive nature and the other parts of the essence are linked by necessity, this amounts to the claim that a thing persists during a certain period of time if and only if all parts of its essence persist during that period. Ingarden distinguishes between criteria of identity and conditions of identity (Streit II/2, 33). Criteria of identity are evidence that the two things are in fact identical. To state the conditions (necessary or sufficient) of identity is to describe what has to be the case for the two things to be identical, regardless of whether or how we can recognise this. The briefest way to state the identity conditions of concrete individual objects is this: A and B are identical (are the very same thing) if, and only if, A’s constitutive nature is identical with B’s constitutive nature. The diachronic identity of a constitutive nature is something primitive, we cannot give conditions for it in terms of something else. That means that for Ingarden it is always something to be discovered whether some two things, A and B, are identical. Whether the ship of Theseus is identical with the ship with all the renewed planks does not depend on how we use the term ‘ship’ or ‘the same ship’ but it is a fact about things in themselves. For Ingarden there is no problem of individuation because properties and natures are themselves individual. There can be two things that are exactly similar; similar in its nature as well as in all its properties. In my view, the problem of individuation arises only in a bundle-of-universals ontology. Anyway, for Ingarden the problem does not arise because the kind universals as well as the property universals have exemplifications that are individuals.

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Ideas and ideal qualities According to Ingarden there are in the realm of being three regions: individuals, ideas, and ideal qualities (universals) (Streit I, 39). What are ideas and ideal qualities? (Ingarden discusses this in Streit II/1, Kap. X, und Streit I, 39–47.) Ideas and ideal qualities are ideal entities, that is, they exist non-temporally. Individual concrete objects fall under ideas. You, for example, fall under the idea of a man. Everything in the realm of the individual has a correlate in the realm of ideas. However, ideas and ideal qualities are not concepts (although they look a bit like concepts) and not meanings. They are independent of any act of referring and of thinking, independent of anything mental. They are also not immanent to the things that fall under them. They are transcendent with respect to anything mental and anything physical (Streit II/1, 253). An idea exists independently of whether there exists something that falls under it (Streit II/1, 204). An idea has a content. Every property of a thing has a correlate in the content of the idea under which the thing falls. For example, in the content of the idea of a man there is as an element ‘being alive’, which is an ideal correlate to your property of being alive. In order to understand what sort of thing this ideal correlate is we need to introduce the third region in Ingarden’s ontology: ideal qualities. Ideal qualities (‘ideale Qualitäten’, ‘reine Wesenheiten’) are roughly what other authors have called transcendent universals. As examples Ingarden mentions redness, colouredness, sadness (Streit II/1, 60). Every property (trope) is an exemplification of an ideal quality. But ideal qualities have not only exemplifications (or ‘concretisations’, as Ingarden calls it) in the realm of the real but also in the realm of the ideal. They have two kinds of exemplifications: ‘real exemplifications’, which are properties of concrete, real things, and ‘ideal exemplifications’, which are elements of the contents of ideas. So your property of being alive is a real exemplification of the ideal quality of being alive. Your property of being alive also corresponds to an element in the content of the idea of a man which is an ideal exemplification of the ideal quality of being alive. There are not only ideal qualities whose real exemplifications are properties, but also ones whose real exemplifications are constitutive natures, i.e. property bearers, ones whose real exemplifications are existential mo-

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ments, etc. Ingarden calls anything that we can distinguish at something one of its moments, and, at least in some places, he assumes that every moment is an exemplification of an ideal quality. For every ontological constituent of a thing there is an ideal correlate in the content of the idea under which the thing falls. There are two kinds of elements of the content of an idea. Every man has the property of being alive. But not every man has the property of being 81 kg in mass. Some have ‘79 kg’ instead, others ‘72 kg’. But every man has to have some mass. So some properties are necessary for falling under a certain idea, for other properties there is a range of properties one of which a thing needs to have in order to fall under the idea. This is determined through the content of the idea. There are constants and variables in the content of an idea (Streit II/1, 238). A constant is an ideal exemplification of an ideal quality of which a thing needs to have a real exemplification as one of its properties (or as one of its other moments) in order to fall under the idea. A variable is an ideal exemplification of the necessity11 of the things’ having one real exemplification of an ideal quality from a certain range of ideal qualities as one of its properties. Possibilities about which moments a thing of a certain kind can and cannot have are thus grounded in the content of ideas. All facts about what is possible and what is impossible are grounded in facts in the realm of ideas. That there cannot be something that is green and red all over is grounded in the fact that in the idea of being coloured there is a variable which ranges over being green as well as over being red (Streit II/1, 246). Ingarden’s main reason for believing in the existence of ideas is that there are modal facts, e.g. the fact that nothing can be green and red all over and the fact that a tone necessarily has a pitch. (Streit II/1, 278) These facts Ingarden explains by postulating that there are ideas with constants and variables in their content. Ingarden could have simplified his ontology by saying that the content of ideas consists, not of ideal exemplifications of ideal qualities, but of the ideal qualities themselves. One could hold that modal facts are grounded in certain relations between ideal qualities. These relations could be called 11

Ingarden writes ‘possibility’ here (Streit II/1, 238) but the context makes clear that he is getting at what I have written here.

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existential dependence grounding relations and exclusion grounding relations. Nothing can be green and red all over because there is an exclusion grounding relation between greenness and redness. A tone needs to have a pitch because some of the other qualities of a tone are ambiguously existentially non-self-sufficient relative to the pitches, which is grounded in relations between the corresponding ideal qualities. Likewise a man’s body needs to have a mass, e.g. 83 kg or 79 kg, because some of its other properties, e.g. its shape or its density are ambiguously existentially non-selfsufficient relative to the masses. Ingarden would have replied that although that may be simpler it is not true, because ‘being alive’ in the content of the idea of a man is numerically distinct from ‘being alive’ in the content of the idea of a snake. However modal facts are grounded, the most remarkable feature of Ingarden’s ontology is the net of various kinds of ontological dependencies that connects the ontological constituents of a thing. Contra Humean empiricism, distinct entities may be dependent upon each other, and there are true synthetic modal statements. No property of a thing is independent from the other properties of the thing.

Is it true? Is this world as Ingarden’s ontology describes it? Let me give one reason why there is reason to doubt this. An Ingardian world consists of autonomous, concrete (i.e. independent) individual objects; substances. It is made up of single things. Not every portion of stuff is a substance. The left half of my body is not a substance, and an H2O-molecule probably is not either. For any portion of stuff it is something to be discovered whether it is a substance. The alternative view would be that all portions of stuff are ontologically equal and there is hence no ontologically privileged way of carving up reality.12 Ingarden’s ontology (as I think every ontology with universals) excludes this view for the following reason. 12

The ontology I have proposed in (Wachter 2000c), a ‘field ontology’, entails such a view. It claims that the material world is a certain amount of stuff. At every spatiotemporal position there is stuff, there is no empty space. No portions of stuff are ontologically privileged over others.

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Consider an egg that has everywhere a density of 1.5 cm³. Consider a certain part of the egg yolk of size 1 mm³ (at a certain time) and call it A. A has a density of 1.5 g/cm³. There is the universal ‘1.5 g/cm³’, and there is an exemplification of it. Now the question arises whether A’s density is a part of an exemplification of the universal or whether parts of A’s density are exemplifications of the universal. One cannot assume that both is true because then one would have to assume that the density of 1.5 g/cm³ would be present twice at the same position. As there cannot be two densities piled up at one position there is a fact of the matter where one density trope ends and another one begins. There is therefore only one true way of carving up reality. The same becomes clear if we consider property bearers. A has density 1.5 g/cm³ because there is a property bearer that bears an exemplification of the universal ‘1.5 g/cm³’. Either something of which A is a part is a property bearer that bears an exemplification of that universal, or several parts of A are property bearers that bear exemplifications of that universal. It is impossible that both is true because otherwise there would be several individual densities piled up at one position. Only something that is an exemplification of a kind universal is a property bearer. There cannot be property bearers that overlap each other, and there cannot be parts of substances that are substances.13 Ingarden assumes that there are composed things (‘individuelle Gegenstände höherer Stufe’ or ‘fundierte individuelle Gegenstände’) but they have a different ontological status than the substances of which they are composed, the basic things (‘ursprünglich individuelle Gegenstände’). Composed things have properties only in virtue of the basic things of which they are composed having certain properties. A complex of material substances can be truly said to have a certain mass M, but that is not true because it itself bears an exemplification of the mass universal ‘M’ but because the basic material things of which it is composed bear exemplifications of certain mass universals. The world is made of basic things, and there is only one true way of carving up reality into basic things.

13

This is explicitly stated e.g. by Smith (1997, 108) in his substance ontology: ‘A substance has no proper parts which are themselves substances.’

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Ingarden assumed that our world consists of substances, even if we philosophers do not know which things in our world are these substances. It is the task of physics to find out (Streit II/1, 62, 144). If our material world consists of little bits with empty space between them, then these bits may well be Ingardian substances. But as far as I understand, modern physics points in a different direction, to a world of fields, or at any rate not to a world with little atomic things. If there are smallest constituents of the material world at all (perhaps ‘strings’), they are not like classical substances because they lack determinate conditions of identity. At any rate, if physics discovers that not everything is made of substances then Ingarden’s ontology is false.

References Armstrong, David M. 1978a. Universals and Scientific Realism I: Nominalism and Realism. Cambridge UP. ———. 1978b. Universals and Scientific Realism II: A Theory of Universals. Cambridge UP. ———. 1989a. A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility. Cambridge UP. ———. 1989b. Universals: An Opinionated Introduction. Boulder: Westerview Press. ———. 1997. A World of States of Affairs. Cambridge UP. Campbell, Keith. 1990. Abstract Particulars. Oxford: Blackwell. Ginsberg, Eugenie. 1931. ‘On the Concepts of Existential Dependence and Independence’. In Parts and Moments: Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology, ed. by B. Smith. München & Wien: Philosophia Verlag, 265–287. Husserl, Edmund. 1913a. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie. Hamburg: Meiner. ———. 1913b. Logical Investigations (German original: Logische Untersuchungen). Translated by J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge, 1970. ———. 1913c. Logische Untersuchungen II/1. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1980. Ingarden, Roman. 1925. Über die Stellung der Erkenntnistheorie im System der Philosophie (Habilitationsvortrag). Halle: Karras, Kröber & Nietschmann. ———. 1964a. Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt I: Existentialontologie. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———. 1964b. Time and Modes of Being. Translated by H. R. Michejda. Springfield, Ill.: Charles Thomas. ———. 1965a. Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt II/1: Formalontologie. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

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———. 1965b. Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt II/2: Formalontologie 2. Teil. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———. 1974. Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt III: Über die kausale Struktur der realen Welt. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Küng, Guido. 1975. ‘Zum Lebenswerk von Roman Ingarden’. In Die Münchener Phänomenologie, edited by G. Huhn, E. Avé-Lallemant and R. Gladiator. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 159–173. LaBossiere, Michael C. 1994. ‘Substances and Substrata’. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 72: 360–370. Loux, Michael J. 1974. ‘Kinds and the Dilemma of Individuation’. Review of Metaphysics 27: 773–784. Lowe, E. J. 1989. Kinds of Being: A Study of Individuation, Identity and the Logic of Sortal Terms. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1998. The Possiblity of Metaphysics: Substance, Identity, and Time. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Meixner, Uwe. 2004. Einführung in die Ontologie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Scheler, Max. 1916. Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. 6. ed. Bern, München: Francke Verlag, 1980. Simons, Peter. 1994. ‘Particulars in Particular Clothing: Three Trope Theories of Substance’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54: 553–575. ———. 1999. ‘Review of D. M. Armstrong, A World of States of Affairs’. European Journal of Philosophy 7: 119–124. Smith, Barry. 1997. ‘On Substances, Accidents and Universals: In Defence of a Constituent Ontology’. Philosophical Papers 26: 105–127. ———. 2003. ‘Ontology’. In Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, edited by L. Floridi. Oxford: Blackwell, 155–166. ———, ed. 1982. Parts and Moments: Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology. München & Wien: Philosophia Verlag. Strawson, Peter F. 1959. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. London: Methuen. Wachter, Daniel von. 2000a. Dinge und Eigenschaften: Versuch zur Ontologie. Dettelbach: Verlag J.H. Röll. ———. 2000b. ‘Synthetische Notwendigkeit’. Metaphysica, Sonderheft 1: 155–177. ———. 2000c. ‘A World of Fields’. In Things, Facts and Events (Poznań Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 76), edited by J. Faye, U. Scheffler and M. Urchs. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 305–325.

Brentano, Husserl und Ingarden über die intentionalen Gegenstände ARKADIUSZ CHRUDZIMSKI

In der Geschichte der Philosophie finden wir viele Intentionalitätstheorien, die spezielle Gegenstände zur Erklärung des Intentionalitätsphänomens einführen. Solche Theorien wurden in erster Linie von Philosophen eingeführt, die durch Franz Brentano beeinflusst waren. Gegenstände, um die es hier geht, werden üblicherweise intentionale Gegenstände genannt. Eine Theorie der intentionalen Gegenstände, die vom ontologischen Standpunkt aus betrachtet besonders detailliert ausgearbeitet ist, hat Roman Ingarden formuliert. Auch Ingardens Theorie ist daher Gegenstand einer oft geäußerten Kritik. Man behauptet, dass alles, was intentionale Gegenstände leisten, auch in einer ontologisch sparsameren Weise zu erreichen ist. Wir werden allerdings zeigen, dass diese Behauptung unbegründet ist. Die Einführung intentionaler Gegenstände hat ihre guten Gründe und es ist unklar, ob eine ontologisch sparsamere Variante überhaupt funktionieren kann. Die adverbiale Theorie, die oft als ein Gegenkandidat vorgeschlagen wird, stößt jedenfalls auf große Schwierigkeiten. Was die Ingardensche Version der Theorie betrifft, so erweist sie sich als eine etwas kuriose Mischform der Theorie der intentionalen Gegenstände und der adverbialen Theorie. Wir werden sehen, dass der adverbiale Teil aus dieser Theorie am besten entfernt werden soll.

1. Brentanos immanente Gegenstände Für die Entwicklung der Theorie der intentionalen Gegenstände war, wie gesagt, der Einfluss von Franz Brentano von entscheidender Bedeutung. Die Stelle, auf die man sich bei jeder Diskussion der intentionalen Gegenstände fast automatisch bezieht, ist jene Stelle aus Brentanos Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874), wo er das Phänomen der Intentionalität für die zeitgenössische Philosophie „neu entdeckt“ hat:

Existence, Culture, and Persons: The Ontology of Roman Ingarden. Arkadiusz Chrudzimski (ed.), Frankfurt: ontos, 2005, 83–114.

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Jedes psychische Phänomen ist durch das charakterisiert, was die Scholastiker des Mittelalters die intentionale (auch wohl mentale) Inexistenz eines Gegenstandes genannt haben, und was wir, obwohl mit nicht ganz unzweideutigen Ausdrücken, die Beziehung auf einen Inhalt, die Richtung auf ein Objekt (worunter hier nicht eine Realität zu verstehen ist), oder die immanente Gegenständlichkeit nennen würden. Jedes enthält etwas als Objekt in sich, obwohl nicht jedes in gleicher Weise. In der Vorstellung ist etwas vorgestellt, in dem Urteile ist etwas anerkannt oder verworfen, in der Liebe geliebt, in dem Hasse gehaßt, in dem Begehren begehrt usw. [...] Und somit können wir die psychischen Phänomene definieren, indem wir sagen, sie seien solche Phänomene, welche intentional einen Gegenstand in sich enthalten. (Brentano 1874/1924, S. 124 f.)

Brentano spricht hier klar von einem Gegenstand, der jedem intentionalen Akt „immanent inexistiert“, das ontologische Gewicht dieser Aussage ist jedoch umstritten. Die Idee der intentionalen Beziehung, die in der Psychologie diese zentrale Stellung genießt, hat nämlich ganz bestimmte aristotelisch-scholastische Wurzeln und wurde bereits in Brentanos Dissertation Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (1862) sowie in seiner Habilitationsschrift Die Psychologie von Aristoteles (1867) als ein ontologisch unproblematisches Werkzeug der Analyse verwendet. Brentano bedient sich dort der mittelalterlichen Lehre vom ens obiektivum. Er sagt, dass des gemeinte Objekt eine „objektive Existenz im Geiste” des Subjekts genießt, wobei diese Redeweise zunächst eine gewisse Suspendierung der ontologischen Verpflichtungen bedeutet. Immer, wenn sich ein Subjekt intentional bezieht, existiert das Objekt seiner Beziehung objektiv in seinem Geist. Alles, was nur diese Seinsweise hat, wird aber von Brentano aus dem Bereich der Ontologie ausgeschlossen. (Vgl. Brentano 1862, S. 37–39) Auch in seinen Vorlesungen zur Metaphysik, die er seit 1867 in Würzburg gehalten hat (Manuskript M 96), betrachtet er die Seinsweise, die den gedachten Objekten als solchen zukommt, als ontologisch belanglos.1 Es scheint aber relativ klar zu sein, dass in der Periode nach der Psychologie die intentionale Inexistenz von Brentano doch „ontologisiert“ wurde. Die ontologischen Implikationen der Rede von der intentionalen Inexistenz werden zu dieser Zeit immer deutlicher und die Seinsweise der 1

Zur mittelalterlichen Lehre vom ens objectivum vgl. Perler 2002, S. 228. Zur Version dieser Lehre, die beim jungen Brentano zu finden ist, vgl. Chrudzimski 2004, Kap. 3.

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immanenten Objekte ontologisch immer verpflichtender. Schließlich entwickelt Brentano eine höchst komplizierte Ontologie der intentionalen Beziehung. Sehr deutlich kann man das in den Vorlesungen zur Deskriptiven Psychologie (1890/91) sehen. Brentano schreibt dort explizit, dass jede intentionale Beziehung eine echte Relation ist, wobei nur ein Glied dieser Relation – nämlich das Subjekt – etwas Reales ist. Das zweite Glied – das Objekt der intentionalen Beziehung – sei dagegen eine spezielle, vom Bewusstseinsakt ontologisch abhängige Entität. Es begleitet wie ein Schattenbild den psychischen Akt, hat kein selbständiges Entstehen und Vergehen und kann in keine kausalen Beziehungen eingehen.2 Dass der Begriff des immanenten Gegenstandes in der Deskriptiven Psychologie ontologisch ernst genommen wird, sieht man auch aus den interessanten Bemerkungen, die Brentano seiner Form widmet. Ein immanenter Gegenstand ist eine Entität, die dem Subjekt der intentionalen Beziehung gewissermaßen „vor Augen“ steht. Wir würden deshalb erwarten, dass er genau die Eigenschaften hat, die das Subjekt seinem Zielobjekt „intentional zuschreibt“. Denkt also jemand an ein rotes Dreieck, soll sein immanenter Gegenstand die Eigenschaften Rotsein und Dreieckigkeit besitzen. In einem gewissen Sinne ist dem auch so. Der immanente Gegenstand wird in diesem Fall tatsächlich rot und dreieckig sein. Der Sinn, in dem er so ist, ist jedoch grundverschieden von dem Sinn, in dem die äußeren physischen Gegenstände rot und dreieckig sind. Brentano schreibt, dass 2

Vgl. „1. Vor allem also ist es eine Eigenheit, welche für das Bewusstsein charakteristisch ist, dass es immer und überall [...] eine gewisse Art von Relation zeigt, welche ein Subjekt zu einem Objekt in Beziehung setzt. Man nennt sie auch ‘intentionale Beziehung’. Zu jedem Bewusstsein gehört wesentlich eine Beziehung. 2. Wie bei jeder Beziehung finden sich daher auch hier zwei Korrelate. Das eine Korrelat ist der Bewusstseinsakt, das andere das, worauf er gerichtet ist. Sehen und Gesehenes, Vorstellen und Vorgestelltes, Wollen und Gewolltes, Lieben und Geliebtes, Leugnen und Geleugnetes usw. Bei diesen Korrelaten zeigt sich [...], dass das eine allein real, das andere dagegen nichts Reales ist. [...] Der gedachte Mensch hat darum auch keine eigentliche Ursache und kann nicht eigentlich eine Wirkung üben, sondern, indem der Bewusstseinsakt das Denken des Menschen gewirkt wird, ist der gedachte Mensch, sein nichtreales Korrelat, mit da. Trennbar sind die Korrelate nicht von einander, außer [wenn sie] distinktionell [sind].“, Brentano 1982, S. 21.

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immanente Gegenstände solche Eigenschaften lediglich in einem uneigentlichen, modifizierten Sinne haben. (Brentano 1982, S. 26 f.) Solange man von einem immanenten Gegenstand in ontologisch unverpflichtender Weise spricht, kann er die Eigenschaften, die dem Subjekt „vor Augen stehen“ in einem ganz normalen Sinne haben. Sobald man ihn jedoch als eine besondere ontologische Kategorie stipuliert, wird klar, dass er auf keinen Fall im normalen Sinne rot oder dreieckig sein kann. In diesem Fall müsste er nämlich eine reale physische Entität sein, während er eine irreale, vom psychischen Akt seinsabhängige Entität ist. Eine zweite wichtige Neuerung, die man in Brentanos Manuskripten aus den achtziger und neunziger Jahren findet, ist die Tatsache, dass er jetzt dem immanenten Gegenstand explizit ein (eventuelles) transzendentes Zielobjekt gegenüberstellt. Wir finden diese Lehre ganz deutlich in Brentanos Logik-Vorlesung aus den späten achtziger Jahren. Er sagt dort, dass man bei jedem Namen eine zweifache Bezeichnungsrelation unterscheiden kann. Einerseits bezeichnet ein Name den immanenten Gegenstand des dazugehörigen Aktes. Andererseits bezeichnet er im günstigen Fall auch den entsprechenden äußeren Gegenstand. „Das Erste ist die Bedeutung des Namens. Das Zweite ist das, was der Name nennt.“3 Eine solche ontologisierte Interpretation des immanenten Gegenstandes, die neben dem immanenten Gegenstand noch eine (eventuelle) transzendente Zielentität einführt, wurde dann in der Brentano-Schule zu einer Art „Standardtheorie“.4

3

Vgl. „Nochmals also: Was bezeichnen die Namen? Der Name bezeichnet [i] in gewisser Weise den Inhalt einer Vorstellung als solche[n], den immanenten Gegenstand; [ii] in gewisser Weise das, was durch [den] Inhalt einer Vorstellung vorgestellt wird. Das Erste ist die Bedeutung des Namens. Das Zweite ist das, was der Name nennt. Von dem sagen wir, es komme der Name ihm zu. Es ist das, was, wenn es existiert, äußerer Gegenstand der Vorstellung ist. Man nennt unter Vermittlung der Bedeutung. Die alten Logiker sprachen [deswegen] von einer dreifachen Supposition der Namen: [1] suppositio materialis: vide oben; [2] suppositio simplex: Bedeutung: Mensch ist eine Spezies, d.i. die Bedeutung des Wortes ‘Mensch’ ist eine Spezies, d.i. der Inhalt der Vorstellung eines Menschen ist eine Spezies; [3] suppositio realis: das Genannte: Ein Mensch ist lebendig, ist gelehrt etc.“, Brentano EL 80, S. 34 f. 4 In einer besonders deutlichen Form findet sie sich beim jungen Marty und beim jungen Meinong. Vgl. dazu Chrudzimski 2001b und Chrudzimski 2005.

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Wenn man alle Elemente dieser Auffassung zusammenfügt, bekommt man das folgende Bild der intentionalen Beziehung:

Eigenschaften

φ

"modifizierte" Exemplifikation "Kodieren" immanenter Gegenstand

IMM

a

x

"normale" Exemplifikation

REPR

INT

b

intentionale Beziehung

Subjekt

Objekt

Subjekt a bezieht sich intentional auf Objekt b, indem es einen entsprechenden immanenten Gegenstand x „benutzt“. In unserem Schema wird dies durch die Relation IMM symbolisiert, die zwischen dem Subjekt und seinem immanenten Objekt besteht. Die Aufgabe des immanenten Objekts besteht darin, dass er dem Subjekt gewisse Eigenschaften vor Augen stellt. Wir werden diese Eigenschaften die identifizierenden Eigenschaften (des Referenzgegenstandes) nennen. Denkt jemand z.B. an ein Pferd, wird ihm in dieser Weise die Eigenschaft Pferdsein kognitiv zugänglich gemacht. Der ontologische Mechanismus dieses „vor Augen Stellens“ besteht darin, dass der immanente Gegenstand die relevanten Eigenschaften in einem uneigentlichen bzw. modifizierten Sinne hat. Im Folgenden werden wir die Terminologie Zaltas verwenden und sagen, dass der intentionale Gegenstand die identifizierenden Eigenschaften „kodiert“. (Zalta 1988, s. 16) Die Konjunktion aller Eigenschaften, die diese Rolle spielen, bezeichnen wir in unserem Schema als φ. Der immanente Gegenstand ist also etwas, das dem Subjekt immer vor Augen steht, unabhängig davon, ob es in der transzendenten Welt noch

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eine passende Referenzentität gibt der nicht. Deswegen wurde der Referenzgegenstand im unserem Schema mit gestrichelten Linien gezeichnet. Dasselbe betrifft alle Relationen, die entfallen, wenn es keine passende Referenzentität gibt. Wenn es in der transzendenten Welt eine Referenzentität (b) gibt, dann gibt es auch eine Relation der „Repräsentation“ zwischen x und b. Sie kommt dadurch zustande, dass Eigenschaft φ, die von x in einem modifizierten Sinne exemplifiziert war, von b in einem normalen Sinne exemplifiziert wird. Ein wichtiges Merkmal der Theorie Brentanos ist die These, dass die immanenten Gegenstände von ihren Subjekten ontologisch abhängig sind. Das unterscheidet sie von der Theorie Meinongs. Brentano behauptet also, dass es einen immanenten Gegenstand nur dann geben kann, wenn es ein Subjekt gibt, das zu diesem Gegenstand in Relation IMM steht. Wir können das in der Form eines Prinzips der ontologischen Abhängigkeit festhalten: (ABH)

Einen Gegenstand x, der eine Eigenschaft φ kodiert, gibt es genau dann, wenn es einen Gegenstand gibt, der keine Eigenschaft kodiert und der zu x in der IMM-Relation steht.

Um Missverständnissen vorzubeugen, müssen wir noch eine wichtige Bemerkung machen. Unser Schema suggeriert nämlich, dass ein und dieselbe Eigenschaft φ mehrfach exemplifiziert wird. Das entspricht nicht Brentanos Auffassung würde. Wie ontologisch permissiv er in manchen Perioden seines Schaffens auch war, platonische Universalien waren für ihn immer verpönt. Wenn man also dem „wahren“ Brentano Rechnung tragen wollte, müsste man sich verschiedene Vorkommnisse von φ als numerisch verschiedene individuellen Eigenschaften (Tropen) vorstellen. Husserl und Ingarden, von denen wir später sprechen werden, akzeptieren hingegen neben den individuellen Eigenschaften auch echte Universalien. Für die Probleme, die uns in diesem Aufsatz beschäftigen, ist übrigens die Frage, ob wir die Eigenschaften als Universalien oder als Tropen interpretieren, irrelevant.

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2. Die Kritik der Theorie des immanenten Gegenstandes Brentanos Theorie des immanenten Gegenstandes hatte kein gutes Schicksal. Praktisch alle, die sie einmal akzeptierten, haben sie später scharf kritisiert und alternative Vorschläge gemacht. Das betrifft sowohl den späten Brentano als auch Marty, Meinong und Husserl. In diesem Abschnitt werden wir uns auf den Husserlschen Alternativvorschlag konzentrieren. Schon im Aufsatz Intentionale Gegenstände (1894) kritisiert Husserl die Auffassung Brentanos (vgl. Husserl 1894, S. 317, 332 ff., 336 ff.) und in den Logischen Untersuchungen lesen wir, dass es streng genommen keine bloß intentionalen Gegenstände gibt. Existiert kein eigentlicher Referenzgegenstand, dann brauchen wir keinen Stellvertreter. Das einzige, was wir brauchen, ist eine bestimmte Intention – ein „Meinen“.5 Die Intentionalität eines Aktes wird also bei Husserl nicht durch die Einführung eines speziellen Gegenstandes, sondern durch den immanenten Charakter des Aktes erklärt. Einen solchen Charakter, der die intentionale Richtung des Aktes bestimmt, bezeichnet man seit Twardowski als Inhalt (vgl. Twardowski 1894) und auch Husserl benutzt diese Terminologie. Das Geheimnis der Intentionalität eines psychischen Aktes liegt somit in seinem Inhalt: einer Eigenschaft des psychischen Aktes, die darüber entscheidet, auf welchen Gegenstand er sich bezieht. Da der Zustand des Vollziehens eines psychischen Aktes selbst eine Eigenschaft des psychischen Subjekts ist, nimmt die Husserlsche Theorie letztlich die Form einer so genannten adverbialen Intentionalitätstheorie an. Nach dieser Theorie sind die Entitäten, die für die Intentionalität verantwortlich sind, im Grunde psychische Eigenschaften des betreffenden Subjekts. Sich intentional zu beziehen, heißt eine gewisse psychische Eigenschaft zu haben. 5

„[J]edermann muss es anerkennen: dass der intentionale Gegenstand der Vorstellung derselbe ist wie ihr wirklicher und gegebenenfalls ihr äußerer Gegenstand und dass es widersinnig ist, zwischen beiden zu unterscheiden. [...] Der Gegenstand ist ein ‚bloß intentionaler’, heißt natürlich nicht: er existiert, jedoch nur in der intentio (somit als ihr reelles Bestandstück), oder es existiert darin irgendein Schatten von ihm; sondern es heißt: die Intention, das einen so beschaffenen Gegenstand ‚Meinen’ existiert, aber nicht der Gegenstand.“, Husserl 1901, S. 439.

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Die relevanten Eigenschaften sind aber in einer bestimmten Weise strukturiert und diese innere Struktur erklärt uns den Mechanismus der intentionalen Beziehung. Ein Subjekt, das sich auf einen φ-Gegenstand intentional bezieht, muss – so beginnt ein Adverbialist – einen psychischen Zustand der entsprechenden allgemeinen Art haben. Solche Zustände können wir „Vorstellungen“ nennen. Das ist aber nicht das Ende der Geschichte. Eine Vorstellung zu haben, heißt zwar, sich auf etwas intentional zu beziehen, dieses etwas wurde aber dadurch noch überhaupt nicht (und insbesondere nicht als ein φ-Gegenstand) bestimmt. Was aus einer Vorstellung eine Vorstellung von einem so-und-so bestimmten Gegenstand macht, ist eine Modifizierung, die die psychische Eigenschaft der Vorstellung näher bestimmt. Um zu wissen, worauf sich das Subjekt bezieht, müssen wir nicht nur wissen, dass es vorstellt. Wir müssen auch wissen. wie es vorstellt. Da die Modifizierung, von der wir sprechen, auf die Frage „wie?“ antwortet, wird sie gewöhnlich als adverbiale Modifizierung bezeichnet. Ein Adverbialist sagt also, dass ein Subjekt, das sich an einen φ-Gegenstand intentional bezieht zum ersten (i) vorstellt und zum zweiten (ii) sein Vorstellen entsprechend adverbial modifiziert ist. Die Adverbialisten sagen oft, dass die Vorstellung eines φ-Gegenstandes selbst φ-lich ist, wobei die Bezeichnung „φ-lich“ ein zum Prädikat „φ“ korrelatives Adverb repräsentieren soll. Im Englischen lassen sich die entsprechenden Adverbien einfach durch das Suffix „-ly“ bilden, im Deutschen ist es hingegen typischerweise genau dasselbe Wort.6 Die adverbiale Theorie der intentionalen Beziehung lässt sich durch folgendes Bild darstellen:

6

Die Idee der adverbialen Theorie verdanken wir C. J. Ducasse. Vgl. „The hypothesis [...] is that ‘blue’, ‘bitter’, ‘sweet’, etc., are names not of objects of experience, nor of species of objects of experience, but of species of experience itself. What it means is perhaps made clearest by saying that to sense blue is then to sense bluely, just as to dance waltz is to dance ‘waltzily’ (i.e., in the manner called ‘to waltz’) [...].”, Ducasse 1951, S. 259.

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Eigenschaften

ψ φ

Instantiierung

Implikation VOR

REPR* Instantiierung

Instantiierung a

REF

b

erfolgreiche Referenz

Subjekt

Objekt

Subjekt a bezieht sich intentional auf Objekt b. Es stellt Objekt b vor. Das kommt dadurch zustande, dass das Subjekt eine komplizierte psychische Eigenschaft hat. Erstens vollzieht es eine Vorstellung (es instantiiert Eigenschaft VOR) und zweitens ist diese Vorstellung als Vorstellung von b bestimmt (VOR instantiiert Eigenschaft ψ). Wenn es in der transzendenten Welt Entität b gibt, die Eigenschaft φ instantiiert, besteht zwischen VOR und b die Repräsentationsrelation REPR* und Subjekt a steht zu b in der Relation der erfolgreichen Referenz (REF). Eigenschaft ψ ist also genau die „adverbiale“ Eigenschaft, die man üblicherweise als „φ-lich“ (bzw. „φly“) bezeichnet. Was die Implikationspfeile zwischen dem Eigenschaftspaar ψ und φ und den Relationen REPR* und REF zu bedeuten haben, werden wir im Folgenden noch enthüllen. Das Bild, das uns Husserl hier vorschlägt, scheint tatsächlich ontologisch einfacher zu sein als das, was wir beim mittleren Brentano vorfinden. Der springende Punkt ist, dass wir hier keine Akt-abhängigen Entitäten haben, die ihre Eigenschaften in irgendeiner nicht-standardmäßigen Weise exemplifizieren. Es gibt nur normale Eigenschaften und normale Exemplifizierungen.

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3. Die Rückkehr des intentionalen Gegenstandes Die Theorie der Logischen Untersuchungen sieht in der Tat sehr elegant und attraktiv aus. Trotzdem hielt sein Erfinder nicht lange daran fest. Schon 1908 fühlte sich Husserl in seinen Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre gezwungen, die Entitäten, die sehr an Brentanos immanente Gegenstände erinnern, zurück ins Boot zu holen. Seine offizielle Begründung für diesen Schritt lautet, dass uns die phänomenologische Beschreibung der Sachlage unmissverständlich sagt, dass man in jeder intentionalen Beziehung eine Entität hat, die dem betreffenden Subjekt in einer besonders direkten Weise quasi „vor Augen“ steht. (Vgl. Husserl 1908, S. 36) Die adverbialen Modifikationen der psychischen Eigenschaften werden aber in einer direkten intentionalen Beziehung überhaupt nicht thematisiert. Man braucht dafür eine auf die eigenen psychischen Akte gerichtete Reflexion, um sie kognitiv zu erfassen. Das alles scheint dafür zu sprechen, dass ein adverbialer Ausweg nicht das leisten kann, was er verspricht. Husserl führt also wieder spezielle Gegenstände ein. In den Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre heißen sie „ontische Bedeutungen“ und später, in Ideen I (Husserl 1913), treten sie unter dem Namen „Noemata“ auf. Husserl definiert sie als Gegenstände der intentionalen Beziehung genau so genommen, wie sie in einem psychischen Akt gemeint werden. Husserl betrachtet es als eine „rein deskriptive“ These, dass man in jeder intentionalen Beziehung eine Entität braucht, die als Quasi-Ziel der Intention dem betreffenden Subjekt vor Augen steht. Es scheint aber, dass sie sich auch auf eine andre Weise theoretisch begründen lässt, was deshalb wichtig sein könnte, weil viele am privilegierten Status „rein deskriptiver“ Feststellungen zweifeln.

4. Ein Vergleich Die angesprochene Begründung beginnt mit dem Vergleich jener beiden Bilder der intentionalen Beziehung, die wir skizziert haben. Wenn wir die Brentanosche Theorie des immanenten Objekts mit der adverbialen Theorie vergleichen, bemerken wir, dass sich die grundlegenden Elemente in beiden Bildern zum großen Teil wiederholen. In beiden Fällen haben wir

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(i) eine repräsentierende Entität, die bei jeder intentionalen Beziehung vorhanden sein muss; (ii) eine Relation zwischen dem Subjekt und der repräsentierenden Entität (die wir hier die Immanenzrelation nennen); (iii) eine Repräsentationsrelation, die gegebenenfalls zwischen der repräsentierenden Entität und einem transzendenten Referenzgegenstand besteht; (iv) die repräsentierende Eigenschaft, d.h. die Eigenschaft der repräsentierenden Entität, die vorschreibt, welche Eigenschaft der eventuelle Referenzgegenstand haben muss; (v) die repräsentierte Eigenschaft, d.h. die Eigenschaft des eventuellen Referenzgegenstandes, die in dieser Weise vorgeschrieben wurde; und (vi) die Relation des „Habens“ zwischen der repräsentierenden Entität und der repräsentierenden Eigenschaft. Die wesentlichen Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschiede zwischen beiden Theorien haben wir in folgender Tabelle zusammengefasst:

Repräsentierende Entität Immannezrelation Repräsentationstrelation Repräsentierende Eigenschaft Repräsentierte Eigenschaft Die Relation zwischen der repräsentierenden Entität und der repräsentierenden Eigenschaft

Brentano Immanenter Gegenstand IMM REPR

Adverbialisten Eigenschaft VOR Exemplifizierung REPR*

φ

ψ

φ

φ

Eine modifizierte Exemplifizierung

Normale Exemplifizierung

Bemerkenswert ist hier zunächst, dass die Rolle, die in Brentanos Theorie von dem immanenten Gegenstand gespielt wird, im Rahmen der adverbialen Theorie durch die mentale Eigenschaft des Vorstellens übernommen wird. Das sind also die Entitäten, die in beiden Theorien die repräsentierenden Eigenschaften tragen. Hier finden wir auch den ersten zentralen Unterschied: bei Brentano ist die repräsentierende Eigenschaft genau dieselbe Eigenschaft wie die, die sie repräsentiert. In beiden Fällen handelt sich um φ, so dass man sagen kann, dass der immanente Gegenstand durch die Identität repräsentiert. Bei den Adverbialisten hingegen sind die zwei Eigenschaften verschieden und sie müssen es auch sein, denn auf einer Seite handelt es sich um die Eigenschaft eines psychischen Aktes und auf

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der anderen um die Eigenschaft eines transzendenten (meistens physischen) Gegenstandes. Weiter ist zu bemerken, dass ein Brentanist auf der Identität der repräsentierenden und repräsentierten Eigenschaften nur um Preis der Einführung einer ungewöhnlichen (modifizierten) Exemplifizierungsweise bestehen kann. So entgeht er dem Einwand, dass ein immanenter Gegenstand, der ein Pferd repräsentiert, nicht selbst ein Pferd sein kann. Wir sehen hier schon ziemlich genau, wo die Vorteile und Nachteile der beiden Theorien liegen: Die Theorie des immanenten Gegenstandes bietet uns einen sehr einfachen Mechanismus der Repräsentation, allerdings um den Preis einer ziemlich extravaganten Ontologie. Die adverbiale Theorie erkauft sich das Gefühl ontologischer Sparsamkeit mit einem etwas komplizierteren Bild der intentionalen Repräsentation.

5. Das Elend des Adverbialismus Glücklicherweise brauchen wir, die Vor- und Nachteile der beiden Theorien nicht pedantisch abzuwägen um festzustellen, welcher der beiden der Vorrang gebührt. Denn man kann zeigen, dass eine adverbiale Intentionalitätstheorie aus prinzipiellen Gründen versagt. Wir versuchen jetzt, diese Argumentation zu skizzieren. Dass die intentionale Beziehung zu einem philosophischen Problem wird, liegt daran, dass sie keine extensionale Relation ist. Das Kennzeichen der Nichtextensionalität ist das Scheitern von zwei wichtigen logischen Regeln: der Regel der existentiellen Generalisierung und der Regel der wechselseitigen Substituierbarkeit der Glieder einer wahren Identitätsaussage. Weder ist es logisch berechtigt, von dem Satz: „Peter stellt einen Zentauren vor“ auf die Existenz von etwas, was Peter vorstellt, zu schließen, noch darf man aus dem Satz „Peter denkt an den Morgenstern“ den Satz „Peter denkt an den Abendstern“ ableiten, obwohl die Identitätsaussage „Morgenstern = Abendstern“ wahr ist. Die Theorien der Intentionalität, die wir besprochen haben, versuchen, diese logischen Anomalien mit Hilfe ihrer repräsentierenden Entitäten zu lösen. Was die Regel der existentiellen Generalisierung betrifft, so wird sie insofern wieder hergestellt, als es berechtigt ist, bei jeder intentionalen

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Beziehung auf die Existenz einer repräsentierenden Entität zu schließen. Im Fall der Regel der Substituierbarkeit versucht man zu zeigen, dass die betreffenden Termini erst dann füreinander substituierbar sind, wenn die entsprechenden repräsentierenden Entitäten identisch (bzw. in einem gewissen Sinne äquivalent) sind. Die Sache mit der existentiellen Generalisierung ist relativ einfach. Bei der Erklärung des Scheiterns und dem Wiederherstellen der Regel der Substituierbarkeit tauchen hingegen wichtige epistemische Fragen auf, bei denen sich die Schwäche der adverbialen Theorie offenbart. Deswegen werden wir uns im Folgenden auf die Substituierbarkeitsregel konzentrieren. Der erste Schritt bei der Erklärung, warum die Substituierbarkeitsregel in ihrer ursprünglichen Form in intentionalen Kontexten scheitert, ist die Beobachtung, dass man hier nicht bloß die Identitätsrelationen zwischen den Referenzgegenständen berücksichtigen muss, sondern vielmehr das, was das betreffende Subjekt über diese Identitäten denkt. Man darf aus dem Satz „Peter denkt an den Morgenstern“ deshalb nicht auf den Satz „Peter denkt an den Abendstern“ schließen, weil es nicht klar ist, ob Peter weiß, dass die Identitätsaussage „Morgenstern = Abendstern“ wahr ist. Für die Substituierbarkeit ist hier die kognitive Situation des Subjekts, nicht der objektive Zustand der Welt entscheidend. Das war aber erst der Anfang der Erklärung. Die weitere Erklärung macht darauf aufmerksam, dass man in einer intentionalen Beziehung mit repräsentierenden Entitäten operiert, die die (eventuellen) Referenzentitäten nur sehr fragmentarisch spezifizieren. In unseren Schemata sehen wir, dass die einzige Eigenschaft des Referenzgegenstandes, die spezifiziert wird, die Eigenschaft φ ist. Dies kann eine sehr komplizierte konjunktive Eigenschaft sein, es kann aber auch bloß eine Eigenschaft wie Mogenstern oder Sieger von Jena sein. Die immanenten (repräsentierenden) Entitäten sind also im Vergleich zu den transzendenten Referenzgegenständen in diesem Sinne unvollständig und diese Unvollständigkeit hat mit den kognitiven Aspekten der intentionalen Beziehung zu tun. Eine repräsentierende Entität repräsentiert in unvollständiger Weise, so dass zwei Termini „a“ und „b“ in intentionalen Kontexten erst dann füreinander substituierbar sind, wenn die repräsentierenden Entitäten, die bei der Verwendung von „a“ und „b“ „tätig sind“,

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genau in derselben Weise repräsentieren, was soviel heißt wie, dass sie genau dieselbe repräsentierte Eigenschaft φ spezifizieren. Der Kürze halber werden wir sagen, dass zwei repräsentierende Entitäten in einem solchen Fall intentional äquivalent sind. Wenn man das logisch anomale Verhalten der Substituierbarkeitsregel in dieser Weise erklärt, setzt man voraus, dass die entsprechenden repräsentierenden Entitäten für das relevante Subjekt im folgenden Sinne epistemisch transparent sind: das betreffende Subjekt kann sich bezüglich ihrer intentionalen Äquivalenz nicht irren. Wäre dies nämlich möglich, würden sich alle Probleme, die wir bei den transzendenten Referenzgegenständen haben, auch in Bezug auf die immanenten repräsentierenden Entitäten wiederholen. Wie stehen nun die beiden zu vergleichenden Theorien zu diesem Postulat der epistemischen Transparenz? Die Theorie der immanenten Gegenstände trägt dem direkt Rechnung. Was dem Subjekt „vor Augen“ steht, ist ja in erster Linie die repräsentierte Eigenschaft φ. Die Ontologie immanenter Gegenstände erlaubt es zu sagen, dass sie jetzt „direkt da“ ist. Es wird damit auch deutlich, dass die Brentanosche Immanenzrelation (IMM) sowohl eine ontologische als auch eine epistemische Immanenz bedeutet. Ein immanenter Gegenstand ist ontologisch immanent, weil er ein ontologisch unselbständiges Korrelat des psychischen Aktes ist. Einen psychischen Akt zu vollziehen heißt definitorisch, in Relation IMM zu einem immanenten Gegenstand zu stehen. Es heißt aber auch, dass diese Gegenstände für das betreffende Subjekt epistemisch transparent sind in dem Sinne, dass es sich bezüglich der intentionalen Äquivalenz solcher immanenter Entitäten nicht irren kann.7 Für einen Adverbialisten ist die Sache viel komplizierter. Einen direkten Zugang zur Eigenschaft φ gibt es bei ihm nicht, denn er will die Einführung gerade dieser Eigenschaft vermeiden. Der Hauptgedanke der adverbialen Theorie besteht ja darin, dass wir keine speziellen immanenten Gegenstände brauchen, die die Eigenschaft φ in irgendeiner speziellen

7

Bei dem historischen Brentano ist es überraschend nicht so. Er nimmt explizit kognitiv unzugängliche Aspekte des immanenten Objekts an. Vgl. dazu Chrudzimski 2001a, S. 128–134. Wir sind allerdings der Meinung, dass er das nicht tun sollte.

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Weise haben sollen. Alles was wir brauchen, so die Theorie, ist ein psychischer Akt (die Eigenschaft VOR) mit einer adverbialen Modifizierung ψ. Das genügt aber nicht. Denn wir brauchen auch eine Garantie, dass die repräsentierende Entität (d.h. die Eigenschaft VOR mit der Modifizierung ψ) für das Subjekt im geforderten Sinne kognitiv transparent ist. Die Ontologie der intentionalen Beziehung, die uns ein Adverbialist bietet, unterstützt diese Annahme nicht. Das Subjekt und die repräsentierende Entität stehen hier in der Relation einer normalen Exemplifizierung, und das verrät uns noch nichts über einen privilegierten epistemischen Zugang. Das ist einer der Punkte, an dem deutlich wird, dass die ontologische Sparsamkeit der adverbialen Theorie nur vorgegaukelt ist, indem die geheimnisvolle, epistemisch aufgeladene Relation IMM durch eine angeblich normale Exemplifizierung ersetzt wird. Denn die ganze epistemische Aufgeladenheit wandert auf diese Weise aus der Relation IMM in die Eigenschaft VOR. Wenn VOR wirklich eine Eigenschaft des Subjekts ist, dann muss sie komplex genug sein, um zu garantieren, dass die Repräsentationsweise durch die adverbiale Modifikation im gewünschten Sinne epistemisch transparent ist. Es gibt einen Weg, wie ein Adverbialist eine solche Erklärung ganz leicht geben kann. Er müsste nur behaupten, dass eine ψ-modifizierte VOR zu haben, nichts anders heißt, als in einer IMM-Relation zu einer Entität zu stehen, die die Eigenschaft φ kodiert. Die ursprüngliche Formulierung der adverbialen Theorie ist so allgemein, dass sie sich ohne Probleme in jede beliebige Intentionalitätstheorie umwandeln lässt. Damit verzichtet ein Adverbialist jedoch auf die Eliminierung der intentionalen Gegenstände, die das Ziel seiner Theorie sein sollte, wie wir angenommen haben. Unter dieser Voraussetzung kann ein Adverbialist keine modifizierte Exemplifizierungsweise annehmen, die es ihm erlauben würde zu sagen, dass die Eigenschaft φ dem betreffenden Subjekt direkt „vor Augen“ steht. Kann er dann dem Postulat der epistemischen Transparenz überhaupt noch Rechnung tragen? Unsere Antwort lautet: „Nein“. Der Grund dafür wird klar, wenn wir die Relation zwischen den Eigenschaften ψ und φ etwas genauer unter die Lupe nehmen. Eine ψ-modifizierte VORstellung zu haben, soll eine hinreichende Bedingung dafür sein, dass die intentionale Beziehung zu einem φ-Gegen-

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stand besteht. Das bedeutet, dass, wenn in einer Welt ein Subjekt mit einer ψ-modifizierten VORstellung und ein φ-Gegenstand existieren, die relevanten Repräsentationsrelationen (REF und REPR*) automatisch entstehen. Das ist der Sinn der Implikationspfeile, die in unserem Schema von dem Eigenschaftspaar ψ und φ zu den Relationen REF und REPR* verlaufen. Relationen, die in ihrem Bestehen bzw. Nicht-Bestehen völlig von den monadischen Eigenschaften ihrer Glieder abhängen, werden seit Russell als interne Relationen bezeichnet. Man sagt auch, dass sie auf den monadischen Eigenschaften ihrer Glieder supervenieren. Dass derartige Repräsentationsrelationen in diesem Sinne intern (bzw. supervenient) sein müssen, ist klar. Auch die Relation REPR in Brentanos Schema ist intern, nur dass in diesem Fall die Supervenienzbasis besonders „einfach“ ist. Sie besteht in der Identität der repräsentierenden und repräsentierten Eigenschaft. Was dem Subjekt der adverbialen Theorie zur Verfügung steht, ist eine ψ-modifizierte VORstellung. Ist Eigenschaft VOR epistemisch ausreichend aufgeladen, könnte man behaupten, dass das Subjekt einen kognitiv privilegierten Zugang zur repräsentierenden Eigenschaft ψ hat. Da die Relation REPR* eine interne Relation ist, ist das vielleicht alles, was das Subjekt braucht. Dieser Schein trügt aber. Die adverbialen Eigenschaften höherer Ordnung repräsentieren nach der adverbialistischen Auffassung die identifizierenden Eigenschaften der Referenzentitäten. In unserem Fall repräsentiert die Eigenschaft ψ die Eigenschaft φ. Einen derartigen „Repräsentationsmechanismus“ gibt es aber nur, wenn zwischen den repräsentierenden und repräsentierten Eigenschaften eine systematische Zuordnung besteht. Genau das legen Adverbialisten nahe, wenn sie eine adverbiale Eigenschaft, die φ repräsentieren als „φ-lich“ bezeichnen. Wie diese Zuordnung zwischen den repräsentierenden und repräsentierten Eigenschaften in Einzelheiten aussieht, davon haben wir aber keine Ahnung. Dass man die relevanten Eigenschaftspaaren als „φ-lich“ und „φ“ bezeichnet, suggeriert, dass diese Zuordnung etwas Selbstverständliches ist. Es ist aber nur ein nächster dialektischer Schachzug, der eine ontologische Einfachheit dort vortäuscht, wo sich in Wahrheit die Hauptprobleme verbergen. Wir erfahren dadurch nur, dass der Eigenschaft φ des

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Referenzgegenstandes eine Eigenschaft des psychischen Aktes in systematischer Weise zugeordnet wird, so dass jeder psychische Akt, der diese Eigenschaft exemplifiziert, sich auf ein φ-Gegenstand bezieht. Wir erfahren aber weder etwas über die Natur dieser Eigenschaft, noch über die Natur dieser Zuordnung. Was uns dabei sonderbar erscheinen sollte, ist die Tatsache, dass wir nur die Eigenschaft φ kennen. Nur sie „steht uns vor Augen“, wenn wir uns intentional auf etwas beziehen. Eigenschaft ψ und die systematische Zuordnung zwischen den repräsentierenden und den repräsentierten Eigenschaften sind Teile eines versteckten Mechanismus, der zwar die intentionale Beziehung ermöglicht, selbst aber unsichtbar „im Hintergrund läuft“. Damit hängen die Hauptprobleme der adverbialen Theorie zusammen. Dass der ganze Mechanismus der intentionalen Beziehung für das Subjekt verborgen bleibt, sollte uns angesichts des Postulats der epistemischen Transparenz äußerst misstrauisch machen. Eigentlich will ein Adverbialist behaupten können, dass die Eigenschaft φ nur dann gibt, wenn sie in der Welt exemplifiziert wird. In diesem Sinne kann man sagen, dass er sich von der Eigenschaft φ „verabschiedet“. Um die intentionale Beziehung auf ein φ-Objekt zu erklären, reicht es nach ihm, von Eigenschaft φ-lich (d.h. ψ) zu sprechen. Was also dem Subjekt zur Verfügung steht, ist nur die Eigenschaft ψ und die Relation der Zuordnung zwischen den repräsentierenden und repräsentierten Eigenschaften. All dies bleibt aber für das relevante Subjekt im Verborgenen! Wir glauben, dass die adverbiale Theorie damit ausreichend diskreditiert ist. Wenn aber jemand meint, das Postulat der epistemischen Transparenz außer Kraft setzen zu können und behauptet, dass die adverbiale Theorie trotzdem „irgendwie“ funktioniert, gibt es noch ein anderes Argument, das gegen sie spricht. Dieses Argument ist unabhängig vom Postulat der epistemischen Transparenz. Es zeigt, dass man im Rahmen der adverbialen Auffassung schon aus rein ontologischen Gründen letztlich dazu gezwungen wird, neben der Eigenschaft φ-lich (d.h. ψ) auch die (in vielen Fällen nicht-exemplifizierte) Eigenschaft φ einzuführen. Dies legt nahe, dass das ganze adverbiale Mechanismus eigentlich überflüssig ist. Der springende Punkt bei dieser Argumentation ist, dass die Eigenschaft φ-lich (ψ) nur dann etwas repräsentieren kann, wenn die entspre-

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chende systematische Zuordnung auch „da ist“. Im Folgenden nennen wir sie „KOR“. Allein für sich ist ψ einfach nur ψ und nichts mehr. Ein Adverbialist muss also in seiner Ontologie nicht nur ψ, sondern auch KOR haben. Dazu kommt, dass KOR manchmal durch das Paar nicht exemplifiziert wird und zwar in allen Fällen, in denen φ nicht exemplifiziert ist. Der Adverbialist muss also annehmen, dass es nicht-exemplifizierte Relationen gibt. Wenn er aber so weit gekommen ist, welcher Unterschied bleibt dann noch zwischen der Relation KOR und einer xbeliebigen monadischen Eigenschaft? Mit anderen Worten: Warum soll man nicht gleich die Eigenschaft φ einführen? Dafür gibt es keine guten Gründe, wie wir glauben. Ein Adverbialist landet also bei einer Ontologie, in der er nicht nur ψ sondern sowohl KOR als auch φ hat. Es ist klar, dass in diesem Fall ψ und KOR einfach überflüssig sind. Wenn in unserer Ontologie sowieso jede nicht-exemplifizierte Eigenschaft enthalten ist, dann steht uns eine viel einfachere Intentionalitätstheorie zur Verfügung, die zusätzlich das Postulat der epistemischen Transparenz erfüllt. Diese Theorie, die Chisholm (1976) formuliert hat, definiert die intentionale Beziehung zu einem φ-Gegenstand als ein direktes mentales Erfassen der Eigenschaft φ. Wir erhalten damit das folgende Bild der intentionalen Beziehung:

φ ERF direktes mentales Erfassen a INT intentionale Beziehung

Subjekt

Eigenschaften

"normale" Exemplifikation

b

Objekt

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Dieses Bild ist tatsächlich viel einfacher als das ursprüngliche Bild der adverbialen Theorie. Wir behaupten, dass ein Adverbialist alle Gründe hat, zu dieser Auffassung überzugehen. Das Chisholmsche Bild ist natürlich auch im Vergleich zur Theorie der intentionalen Gegenstände viel einfacher, und so stellt sich die Frage, ob es auch diese Theorie überbietet. Was die Theorie der intentionalen Gegenstände im Vergleich zur Chisholmschen Theorie attraktiv machen kann, ist die Tatsache, dass man in ihrem Rahmen keine „schlicht“ nicht-exemplifizierten Eigenschaften einführt. Jede Eigenschaft, mit der man dort hantiert, ist entweder „normal“ oder „modifiziert“ exemplifiziert (kodiert). In diesem Sinne kann man sagen, dass die Theorie der intentionalen Gegenstände mit einem weit verstandenen Aristotelismus zu vereinbaren ist, während die Theorie Chisholms (und, wie wir gesehen haben, auch die adverbiale Theorie) unausweichlich einen Platonismus in Kauf nimmt.

6. Ingardens Version der Theorie der intentionalen Gegenstände Ingardens Theorie der intentionalen Gegenstände, die vor allem in Ingarden 1931 und Ingarden 1964/65 zu finden ist, war ein Versuch, die Husserlsche Theorie der Noemata ontologisch zu präzisieren. In diesem Versuch gelangt Ingarden zu einer Auffassung, die in vielen Aspekten sehr an Brentanos Lehre von den immanenten Gegenständen erinnert. Ingarden betrachtet intentionale Gegenstände als ontologisch abhängige Entitäten. Sie sind seinsheteronom8 in Bezug auf die entsprechenden psychischen Akte. In einem intentionalen Gegenstand kann man außerdem zwei Reihen von Eigenschaften unterscheiden. Jeder intentionale Gegenstand hat zum einen seinen „Gehalt“, der diejenigen Eigenschaften umfasst, die dem Subjekt „vor Augen“ stehen (unsere Eigenschaft φ). Er hat aber zum anderen auch seine „eigenen“ Eigenschaften, wie z.B. die Eigenschaft, in Bezug auf einen psychischen Akt seinsheteronom zu sein, oder die Eigenschaft, einen derartigen Gehalt zu haben.

8

Vgl. Peter Simons „Ingarden and the Ontology of Dependence“, Kapitel 2 in diesem Band.

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Ingarden sagt, dass die reinen Qualitäten (Ingardens Terminus für die platonisch verstandenen Universalien) im Gehalt eines rein intentionalen Gegenstandes „aktualisiert“ sind, während das Verhältnis der normalen Exemplifizierung bei ihm „Vereinzelung“ heißt. Wenn einem solchen rein intentionalen Gegenstand ein reales Zielobjekt in der Welt entspricht, dann muss dieses Zielobjekt dieselben idealen Qualitäten, die im Gehalt des rein intentionalen Gegenstandes aktualisiert sind, als seine Eigenschaften exemplifizieren. (Ingarden 1964/65, Bd. II, Teil 1, S. 206) Wir finden hier alle wesentlichen Elemente der Brentanoschen Auffassung: (i) die These der ontologischen Abhängigkeit des intentionalen Gegenstandes, (ii) die Unterscheidung zwischen einer normalen und modifizierten Exemplifizierung und (iii) die Identitätstheorie der intentionalen Repräsentation. Ingarden trägt übrigens auch dem Postulat der epistemischen Transparenz explizit die Rechnung. Er definiert zunächst eine Art der epistemischen Transzendenz, die für die Dinge der Außenwelt charakteristisch ist: Transzendenz der Seinsfülle [...] zeichnet einen seinsautonomen Gegenstand dem ihn vermeinenden Bewusstseinsakt gegenüber aus, weil die Fülle seines Seinsbereiches, die in der unendlichen Mannigfaltigkeit seiner Eigenschaften und Momente liegt, in keinem Erkennen seiner einzelnen Eigenschaften, das sich in einem einzelnen Akt oder in einer endlichen Mannigfaltigkeit solcher Akte vollzieht, erschöpft werden kann. (Ingarden 1964/65, Bd. II, Teil 1, S. 226)

Anschließend sagt er, dass die Gehalte der intentionalen Gegenstände keine derartige Transzendenz besitzen: Es scheint indessen, dass der rein intentionale Gegenstand sich hinsichtlich der bestimmten Momente seines Gehaltes durch keine Transzendenz der Seinsfülle dem ihn vermeinenden und ihn konstituierenden Akte gegenüber auszeichnet. Hier findet eine Adäquation zwischen dem Inhalt des Aktes und der Mannigfaltigkeit der bestimmten Eigenschaften und Momente, die in dem Gehalte des zugehörigen intentionalen Gegenstands auftreten, statt. (Ingarden 1964/65, Bd. II, Teil 1, S. 226)

Es gibt aber einen Aspekt der Ingardenschen Lehre, in dem er von der Theorie Brentanos deutlich abweicht. Er nimmt nämlich an, dass in einer

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intentionalen Beziehung sowohl ein intentionaler Gegenstand als auch ein mentaler Inhalt im Sinne Twardowskis involviert sind. Diese Art der Intentionalitätstheorie ist aus der Kritik der Brentanoschen Lehre vom immanenten Objekt entstanden. Die Bezeichnung „immanenter Gegenstand“, die Brentano oft verwendete, legt nach seinen Kritikern nahe, dass es sich dabei um etwas genuin Psychisches handelt – um etwas, das als ein Quasi-Bestandteil zum Strom des Bewusstseins des jeweiligen Subjekts gehört. Auf der anderen Seite soll aber das immanente Objekt für das Subjekt die Referenzgegenstände gewissermaßen „vertreten“. Es kodiert ihre identifizierenden Eigenschaften, so dass sie „vor dem geistigen Auge“ des Subjekts auch dann erscheinen können, wenn sie in der transzendenten Welt fehlen. Könnte diese Funktion von etwas, was dem Bewusstseinstrom als ein immanenter Teil innewohnt, erfüllt werden? Aufgrund dieser Überlegung haben manche Schüler Brentanos entschieden, dass sein Begriff des immanenten Objekts zweideutig ist.9 Anstatt undifferenziert von einem immanenten Objekt zu sprechen, muss man zwei Dinge unterscheiden: (i) einen mentalen Inhalt, der im relativ klaren Sinne als „immanent“ zu bezeichnen wäre, und (ii) einen Gegenstand, der normalerweise als dem Bewusstsein transzendent vermeint wird.10 Aus dieser Überlegung kann man, wie wir gesehen haben, auch den Schluss ziehen, dass die intentionalen Gegenstände überhaupt überflüssig sind. Das führt aber zur adverbialen Theorie, die mit fundamentalen Schwierigkeiten behaftet ist. Es gibt aber auch Philosophen, die beide vermittelnde Strukturen einführen, und dies nicht „verschwenderisch“ finden. Sie behaupten, dass wir sowohl den mentalen Inhalt als auch die speziellen intentionalen Gegenstände unbedingt brauchen. Die Argumentation, die zu dieser Position führt, lässt sich in zwei Sätzen zusammenfassen: Wir brauchen spezielle intentionale Gegenstände, um zu erklären, was vor dem geistigen Auge eines Subjekts steht, wenn eine Referenzentität in der Welt fehlt. Um zu erklären, wie sich überhaupt etwas vor seinem geistigen Auge befinden kann, brauchen wir aber einen genuin mentalen Mechanismus und das bekommen wir in der Gestalt des psychischen Inhalts. 9

Vgl. vor allem Twardowski 1894. Außer wenn wir uns auf unsere eigenen Erlebnisse beziehen.

10

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Unter den Philosophen, die sich durch diese Argumentation überzeugen ließen, befanden sich neben Twardowski und Meinong auch der spätere Husserl und Ingarden. Ingarden schreibt deutlich, dass der intentionale Gegenstand durch den mentalen Inhalt der Intention vollständig bestimmt wird. (Ingarden 1964/65, Bd. II, S. 211) Im Folgenden werden wir zeigen, dass all diese Philosophen schließlich doch im Unrecht waren. Durch die Einführung eines psychischen Inhalts neben dem intentionalen Gegenstand können wir keine zusätzliche Erklärungskraft gewinnen.

7. Psychischer Inhalt in der repräsentativen Rolle In der Theorie, die sowohl intentionale Gegenstände als auch einen zusätzlichen mentalen Inhalt annimmt, werden zwei Probleme systematisch vermischt. Der psychische Inhalt soll derjenige Aspekt eines mentalen Aktes (d.h. eines mentalen Zustands) sein, der bestimmt, auf welchen intentionalen Gegenstand er sich bezieht. Da aber die intentionalen Gegenstände in den hier für uns interessanten Theorien11 als ontologisch abhängige Entitäten interpretiert werden, kann das sowohl eine repräsentative als auch eine quasi-kausale Rolle bedeuten. In diesem Abschnitt besprechen wir den repräsentativen Aspekt der Inhaltstheorien. Im nächsten werden wir uns dem quasi-kausalen Aspekt zuwenden. Wenn der in einem psychischen Zustand involvierte mentale Inhalt den intentionalen Gegenstand dieses Zustands in diesem Sinne bestimmt, dann bestimmt er in erster Linie die Eigenschaften, die dieser Gegenstand kodiert, denn es sind die kodierten Eigenschaften, die die für die Intentionalität des psychischen Zustands relevante Seite des intentionalen Gegenstandes konstituieren. Nach dieser Auffassung involviert also jeder psychische Zustand weiterhin eine Beziehung auf einen intentionalen Gegenstand, die wir IMM genannt haben. Diese Beziehung verliert aber ihren bisherigen Status eines primitiven, weiter unerklärbaren Nexus. Denn durch die Einführung des psychischen Inhalts versuchen wir nichts anderes 11

D.h. beim späten Husserl und Ingarden. Bei Twardowski und Meinong sind die Gegenstände von den psychischen Akten ontologisch unabhängig.

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als IMM philosophisch zu analysieren. Wir versuchen zu erklären, wie die Relation IMM zustande kommt. Was den ontologischen Charakter des Inhalts selbst betrifft, so ist er, wie wir gesehen haben, als eine adverbiale Modifikation des entsprechenden psychischen Zustandes zu verstehen. Das führt uns zu folgendem Bild: Eigenschaften Instantiierung

ψ φ

Implikation VOR Instantiierung a

REPR* IMM REF

Instantiierung Kodierung intentionaler Gegenstand x REPR

b

erfolgreiche Referenz

Subjekt

Objekt

Die Relation REPR zwischen dem intentionalen Gegenstand und der (eventuellen) Referenzentität, beruht hier, wie bei Brentano, auf der Identität der identifizierenden Eigenschaft φ, die durch den intentionalen Gegenstand kodiert ist, mit einer Eigenschaft, die durch die Referenzentität instantiiert wird. Was noch hinzukommt, ist der komplette Mechanismus der adverbialen Theorie, die jetzt den Zugang zum intentionalen Gegenstand (und somit die Relation IMM) vermitteln sollte. Wir sehen, dass das Eigenschaftspaar jetzt nicht nur die Relationen REF und REPR* (wie im Rahmen der adverbialen Theorie), sondern auch die Relation IMM impliziert. Auch die Relation IMM wird also zu einer internen Relation. Auch sie wird notwendig durch bestimmte monadische Eigenschaften ihrer Glieder impliziert und superveniert in diesem Sinne auf diesen Eigenschaften. Der

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einzige wichtige Unterschied besteht darin, dass im Fall der Relation IMM eine der relevanten Eigenschaften nicht instantiiert sondern kodiert ist. Was bedeutet das für die Interpretation der Relation IMM im Rahmen dieser Theorie? Nichts weniger als dass sie ihre zentrale Rolle endgültig verliert. Sie ist jetzt eine Relation, die automatisch generiert wird, wenn das Subjekt eine bestimmte Vorstellung hat. Wenn wir uns an die Besprechung der adverbialen Theorie erinnern, wird klar, dass die Rolle, die die Relation IMM dort gespielt hat, jetzt komplett im Begriff der Vorstellung steckt. Unglücklicherweise vererbt aber die so „verbesserte“ Theorie auch alle Schwierigkeiten der adverbialen Theorie. Wie wir gesehen haben, kann diese Theorie erst dann funktionieren, wenn man annimmt, dass die Eigenschaft φ für das Subjekt „sowieso“ zugänglich ist. Die „Vermittlung“ zwischen dem Subjekt und dem intentionalen Gegenstand, die man durch den adverbialen Zusatz gewinnt, ist somit völlig überflüssig.

8. Psychischer Inhalt in der quasi-kausalen Rolle Von der Idee, dass man durch die Einführung des psychischen Inhalts in der repräsentativen Funktion irgendetwas gewinnen kann, muss man sich also endgültig verabschieden. Es gibt aber auch eine andere Funktion, die man dem Inhalt zugebilligt hat, die mit der Idee der ontologischen Abhängigkeit des intentionalen Gegenstandes zusammenhängt. Intentionale Gegenstände sind, wie gesagt, ontologisch abhängige Entitäten. Es gibt keine frei schwebenden immanenten Gegenstände. Jeder solche Gegenstand braucht ein Subjekt, das zu ihm in der Relation IMM steht. Es liegt somit der Gedanke nahe, dass ein intentionaler Gegenstand in der jeweiligen intentionalen Beziehung irgendwie „erzeugt” wird. Wenn man das einmal so formuliert, dann wird man vielleicht auch auf die Idee kommen, den Mechanismus dieser Erzeugung erklären zu wollen. Es steht außer Zweifel, dass die Rede vom „Bestimmen“ des intentionalen Gegenstandes durch den mentalen Inhalt bei Ingarden auch (und vielleicht sogar vor allem) diesen quasi-kausalen Beigeschmack hat. Es ist klar, dass dieser quasi-kausale Aspekt des mentalen Inhalts mit seiner repräsentativen Funktion prima facie nichts zu tun hat, und da wir

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die Zweckmäßigkeit der Einführung eines repräsentativen Inhalts bereits abgehakt haben, können wir uns im Folgenden ausschließlich auf diese quasi-kausale Funktion konzentrieren. Wenn wir den mentalen Inhalt als denjenigen Faktor sehen wollen, der für die Entstehung des intentionalen Gegenstandes verantwortlich ist, dann muss man ihn wahrscheinlich als eine Eigenschaft des Subjekts interpretieren, die diese quasi-kausale Rolle hat. Es ist für die gegenwärtige Diskussion unwesentlich, ob wir in dieser Eigenschaft noch nach dem adverbialen Muster zwei Stufen (d.h. eine Eigenschaft des Vorstellens und eine höherstufige adverbiale Modifikation, die bestimmt, was man vorstellt) unterscheiden. Denn wir wollen zunächst untersuchen, ob uns eine solche quasi-kausale Stütze überhaupt eine zusätzliche Erklärung liefern kann. Die Theorie des quasi-kausalen Inhalts schlägt uns das folgende Bild der intentionalen Beziehung vor: Eigenschaften

ω

ρ

[?]

φ

Instantiierung Instantiierung Kodierung quasi-kausale Implikation intentionaler quasi-kausale x Gegenstand Beziehung REPR

Instantiierung

IMM a

REF

b

erfolgreiche Referenz

Subjekt

Objekt

Der Teil, der der Brentanoschen Theorie entspricht, ist uns schon vertraut. Er befindet sich vorwiegend auf der rechten Seite des Schemas. Wir haben dort den intentionalen Gegenstand, der die identifizierende Eigenschaft φ kodiert, die, falls es zu einer erfolgreichen intentionalen Beziehung kommen sollte, auch von einem Gegenstand in der transzendenten Welt

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instantiiert werden muss. Das Subjekt der intentionalen Beziehung steht zu diesem intentionalen Gegenstand in der Relation IMM. Was noch hinzukommt, soll erklären, wie der intentionale Gegenstand überhaupt ins Leben gerufen wird. Die Inhaltstheoretiker behaupten, dass es eine besondere Eigenschaft des Subjekts geben muss, die die Existenz dieses bestimmten intentionalen Gegenstandes verursacht. Dieses Verursachen darf freilich nicht als eine physische Kausalität verstanden werden, denn die intentionalen Gegenstände sind ja keine physischen Entitäten. Nichtsdestoweniger muss man, soll die Idee des quasikausalen Inhalts ernst genommen werden, darauf bestehen, dass es für die Tatsache, dass ein Subjekt a in Relation IMM zu einem bestimmten intentionalen Gegenstand x steht, immer einen „Grund” in den monadischen Eigenschaften des Subjekts a geben muss. In unserem Schema finden wir deshalb die Eigenschaft ω, die dem Subjekt zukommt. Es ist eben diese Eigenschaft, die als der mentale Inhalt interpretiert werden soll. (Wie gesagt, ist es unwesentlich, ob wir diese Eigenschaft noch nach dem adverbialen Muster in zwei Stufen zerlegen.) Die Tatsache, dass Subjekt a die Eigenschaft ω instantiiert, soll der Grund für die Tatsache sein, dass dieses Subjekt einen bestimmten Gegenstand vor seinem geistigen Augen hat. Der entsprechende Gegenstand soll dadurch buchstäblich erzeugt werden. In unserem Schema finden wir deshalb eine quasi-kausale Beziehung, die vom Subjekt zum intentionalen Gegenstand verläuft. Sie wurde mit einer besonders dicken Linie gekennzeichnet. Die „normalen” kausalen Beziehungen sind keine internen Relationen im Sinne Russells. Sie sind aus den monadischen Eigenschaften ihrer Glieder nicht zu folgern. Eben deswegen brauchen wir ja empirische Untersuchungen, um die Kausalrelationen festzustellen. Der Begriff der logischen Folgerung ist aber ein relativer Begriff. Was man aus einem gegebenen Tatbestand folgern kann, hängt davon ab, was wir dabei als Axiome und Folgerungsregeln verwenden dürfen; und es ist eine Trivialität, dass, wenn wir die physischen Gesetze zu Axiomen machen, auch alle Kausalverhältnisse zu den im Sinne Russells internen Relationen werden. Eine analoge Situation muss auch im Rahmen der quasi-kausalen Theorie des Inhalts vorliegen. Wenn man die quasi-kausalen Gesetze, die das Erzeugen der intentionalen Gegenstände regieren, als Axiome akzeptiert,

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wird die quasi-kausale Beziehung zwischen dem Subjekt und dem intentionalen Gegenstand einer intentionalen Beziehung zu einer internen Relation. Wir haben angenommen, dass diese Beziehung auf den Eigenschaften superveniert, die sowohl auf der Seite des Subjekts als auch auf der Seite des intentionalen Gegenstandes instantiiert (und nicht kodiert) sind. Deswegen finden wir bei dem immanenten Gegenstand neben der kodierten Eigenschaft φ auch die instantiierte Eigenschaft ρ. Die quasi-kausale Relation soll nun (unter der Voraussetzung der quasi-kausalen Gesetze) auf dem Eigenschaftspaar supervenieren. Die Annahme, dass die quasi-kausale Beziehung ausschließlich auf den instantiierten Eigenschaften supervenieren darf, finden wir plausibel. Die kodierten Eigenschaften scheinen von der kausalen Struktur der Welt ziemlich eindeutig abgekoppelt zu sein. Den Nexus der Kodierung hat man doch gerade deswegen erfunden, um Eigenschaften einführen zu können, die vom Kausalnetz der Welt ausgeschlossen bleiben. Es ist gerade der Hauptgewinn der Theorie der intentionalen Gegenstände, dass man sich nicht darum kümmern muss, dass eine (bloß kodierte) Schwere eines vorgestellten Elefanten vielleicht den Boden strapaziert oder dass die (bloß kodierte) Laute eines vorgestellten Klavierspiels die Nachbarn weckt. Dass die bloß kodierten Eigenschaften keine kausalen Kräfte haben, scheint so gut wie definitorisch festgelegt. Und dennoch muss man im Rahmen einer quasi-kausalen Inhaltstheorie um einen Zusammenhang zwischen der kodierten Eigenschaft φ und der instantiierten Eigenschaft ρ sorgen. Der Grund dafür besteht darin, dass es uns im Grunde wie immer um die identifizierende Eigenschaft φ geht. Die Einführung des quasi-kausalen psychischen Inhalts soll uns nicht nur erklären, warum das Subjekt irgendeinen intentionalen Gegenstand vor seinem geistigen Auge hat. Sie soll uns vielmehr erklären, warum er vor seinem geistigen Auge eben diesen bestimmten intentionalen Gegenstand hat; und „diesen bestimmten“ bedeutet hier: den Gegenstand, der diese bestimmten Eigenschaften kodiert. In unserem Schema finden wir deswegen die Relation [?], die zwischen φ und ρ verläuft. Sie wurde mit dem Fragezeichen versehen, weil ihr ontologischer Charakter rätselhaft bleibt. Es ist aber klar, dass das Kodieren

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von φ das Instantiieren von ρ implizieren soll. Die einfachste Lösung dafür wäre, wenn man die Eigenschaft ρ einfach als die Eigenschaft φ-zu-kodieren betrachten würde. In diesem Fall hätten wir es mit einer logischen Implikation zu tun. Wie es auch sein mag, eines steht fest: Letztlich wird auch die identifizierende Eigenschaft φ durch die Eigenschaft ω plus die quasi-kausalen Gesetze bestimmt. Das heißt aber, dass die Relation IMM, ähnlich wie in der adverbialen Variante der Inhaltstheorie, im Grunde wegerklärt wird. Sie wird diesmal durch die quasi-kausale Beziehung ersetzt und es fragt sich, ob eine solche Beziehung das leisten kann, was man von der Relation IMM erwartet. Das erklärt auch, warum in den meisten Theorien, die mentale Inhalte neben den intentionalen Gegenständen einführen, die quasi-kausalen und repräsentativen Aspekte des Inhalts systematisch vermisch werden. Wenn nämlich die Relation IMM ohnehin schon durch die quasi-kausalen Verhältnisse ersetzt zu werden scheint, ist es ein sehr natürlicher Schritt, auch die repräsentative Funktion in dieses quasi-kausale Verhältnis zu verlegen. Wir haben aber gesehen, dass das Wegerklären von IMM nicht funktionieren kann. Die Schwierigkeiten, die für diese quasi-kausale Version der Repräsentationstheorie sofort ins Auge springen, betreffen das Postulat der epistemischen Transparenz. Eine quasi-kausale Beziehung kann uns vielleicht erklären, wie ein intentionaler Gegenstand entsteht, sie garantiert aber als solche keine epistemisch ausgezeichnete Zugangsweise. Soviel steht also fest, dass man neben der quasi-kausalen Entstehungsgeschichte des intentionalen Gegenstandes unbedingt noch die epistemisch aufgeladene Relation IMM beibehalten muss, durch die das Subjekt den intentionalen Gegenstand direkt erreicht. Das scheint schon das erste Warnsignal zu sein, dass man hier vielleicht zu großzügig Entitäten multipliziert. Um diesen Eindruck zu entkräften, müsste man zeigen, dass uns diese zusätzliche quasi-kausale Beziehung tatsächlich etwas erklärt. Das scheint nun aber mehr als fraglich. Oben haben wir bereits das Prinzip der ontologischen Abhängigkeit der intentionalen Gegenstände (ABH) formuliert. Es besagt, dass es einen Gegenstand x, der eine Eigenschaft φ kodiert, genau dann gibt, wenn es einen Gegenstand gibt, der keine Eigenschaft kodiert und der zu x in der IMM-Relation steht. Liefert eine

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Theorie irgendwelche zusätzliche Erklärung, die außerdem eine besondere Eigenschaft postuliert, die für das Entstehen von x quasi-kausal verantwortlich ist? Wir werden diese Frage verneinen müssen. Das Abhängigkeitsverhältnis zwischen einem intentionalen Gegenstand und seinem Subjekt gehört zu den primitivsten ontologischen Verhältnissen in Bezug auf die die quasi-kausalen Metaphern höchstens Verwirrung stiften. Betrachten wir zunächst die Fälle, in denen uns eine kausale Theorie wirklich eine Erklärung liefert. In diesen Fällen haben wir Entitäten (normalerweise Ereignisse) vor uns, die auch isoliert verstanden werden können. Die Erkenntnis, dass der Rauch seine Ursache im Feuer hat, ist deswegen eine genuine Erklärung, weil man sich einen Rauch auch ohne Feuer vorstellen kann. Es macht deshalb in diesem Fall auch Sinn, nach einem bestimmten Aspekt des Feuers zu suchen, der für den Rauch verantwortlich ist. Im Fall von Entitäten, die voneinander ontologisch abhängig sind, verliert aber eine solche Erklärung ihren ganzen Sinn. Welche Aspekte eines Ganzen a sollen nun dafür verantwortlich sein, dass es von seinem mereologischen Teil b ontologisch abhängig ist? Wohl nur der Teil b selbst. Und welche Aspekte einer Substanz bewirken, dass sie weiß ist? Wohl nur ihre weiße Farbe. Es macht auch keinen Sinn, nach einem „Mechanismus” zu suchen, der diese Abhängigkeiten erklären sollte, denn man „sieht sie” ja direkt. Ähnlich scheint es mit dem intentionalen Gegenstand zu sein. Zu fragen, welcher Aspekt des Subjekts a bewirkt, dass es zu einem intentionalen Gegenstand x, der die Eigenschaft φ kodiert, in der IMM-Beziehung steht, ist eine dumme Frage. Denn die einzige Antwort muss lauten: „Die Tatsache, dass das Subjekt gerade das tut, was es tut”. Das Subjekt a befindet sich dann in einem mentalen Zustand des Denkens auf einen φ-Gegenstand. Es wäre aber ein Irrtum zu glauben, dass dieser Zustand das Stehen in der IMM-Relation zu x verursacht. Dieser Zustand ist nämlich als das Stehen in der IMM-Relation zu x definiert. Was wir hier als „das Stehen in der IMM-Relation zu einem Gegenstand, der die Eigenschaft φ kodiert” beschreiben, hat also einen ähnlichen ontologischen Status wie das Haben einer Eigenschaft oder eines Teils. Es handelt sich um ontologisch primitive Sachverhalte die durch den Rekurs

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auf quasi-kausale Verhältnisse zu anderen solchen Sachverhalten kaum erklärt werden können. Es gib eben keinen Grund, das Stehen in der IMMRelation zu einem Gegenstand, der Eigenschaft φ kodiert als weniger fundamental zu betrachten als das Haben der Eigenschaft ω, welche die von der Inhaltstheorie postulierte komplizierte quasi-kausale Rolle hat. Der Fehler der Inhaltstheoretiker scheint hier also darin zu bestehen, dass die ontologische Abhängigkeit des intentionalen Gegenstandes zu sehr nach dem Muster der physischen Kausalität verstanden wird. Es spricht vieles dafür, dass bei einer intentionalen Beziehung eine andere Situation vorliegt. Die These, dass in jedem psychischen Zustand ein intentionaler Gegenstand involviert ist, ist, wie gesagt, das Ergebnis einer philosophischen Analyse. Der Status dieser These erinnert eher an „konzeptuelle“ Wahrheiten, als an die empirischen Entdeckungen, die für die kausalen Zusammenhänge charakteristisch sind. Ein wichtiger Punkt hier scheint zu sein, dass kausale Zusammenhänge stets Entitäten betreffen, die denselben kategorialen Status genießen. Es geht dabei immer darum, dass ein Ereignis ein anderes Ereignis verursacht. Bei der Verursachung, die im Fall eines intentionalen Gegenstandes am Werk sein müsste, ist dem aber anders. Der intentionale Gegenstand ist eine Entität, die im Gegensatz zu dem Subjekt der intentionalen Beziehung einige Eigenschaften kodiert. Wenn man in diesem Fall von Verursachung spricht, hat das mit der physischen Kausalität wirklich nicht viel zu tun. Unsere These lautet, dass diese Art der Verursachung nicht viel mehr enthalten kann als das, was bereits in unserem Prinzip der ontologischen Abhängigkeit (ABH) steckt.

9. Schluss Wir können jetzt die Ergebnisse unserer Analyse für die Ingardensche Theorie der intentionalen Gegenstände zusammenfassen. Das erste Resümee ist positiv: Die Einführung von intentionalen Gegenständen ist keine ontologische Extravaganz. Es spricht vieles dafür, dass eine Intentionalitätstheorie erst dann überzeugend funktionieren kann, wenn man zur identifizierenden Eigenschaft, die wir als φ bezeichnet haben, einen Zugang gewährleistet, der dem Postulat der epistemischen Transparenz Rech-

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nung trägt, und die Einführung intentionaler Gegenstände kann uns hier vor einem extremen Platonismus bewahren.12 Das zweite Resümee ist weniger erfreulich. Der mentale Inhalt, den Ingarden zusätzlich einführt, erweist sich als keine gute Idee. Klug wäre es gewesen, bei der Brentanoschen Version ohne den mentalen Inhalt und mit der eindeutig externen Relation IMM zu bleiben.

Literatur Brentano, Franz 1862. Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles, Freiburg i. Br.: Herder [Dissertation]; unveränderter Nachdruck: Hildesheim / Zürich / New York: Georg Olms Verlag 1984. Brentano, Franz 1867. Die Psychologie von Aristoteles, insbesondere seine Lehre vom nous poietikos, Kirchheim Verlag: Mainz am Rhein [Habilitationsschrift]; unveränderter Nachdruck: Darmstad: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1967. Brentano, Franz 1874/1924. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, Bd. I, hrsg. von O. Kraus, Leipzig: Meiner [1. Aufl. 1874]. Brentano, Franz 1982. Deskriptive Psychologie, hrsg. von R. M. Chisholm und W. Baumgartner, Hamburg: Meiner. Brentano, Franz [M 96]. Metaphysik (Ontologie). Das Manuskript der MetaphysikVorlesung aus dem Jahre 1867. Brentano, Franz [EL 80]. Logik. Das Manuskript der Logik-Vorlesung aus der zweiten Hälfte der achtziger Jahre. Chisholm, Roderick M. 1976. Person and Object. A Metaphysical Study, London: Allen & Unwin. Chrudzimski, Arkadiusz 2001a. Intentionalitätstheorie beim frühen Brentano, Dordrecht / Boston / London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Chrudzimski, Arkadiusz 2001b. „Die Intentionalitätstheorie Anton Martys“, Grazer Philosophische Studien 62, 175–214. Chrudzimski, Arkadiusz 2004. Die Ontologie Franz Brentanos, Dordrecht / Boston / London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Chrudzimski, Arkadiusz 2005. „Abstraktion und Relationen beim jungen Meinong“, Meinong Studien 1. Ducasse, C. J. 1951. Nature, Mind, and Death, LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court. Husserl, Edmund 1894. „Intentionale Gegenstände”, in: Husserl 1979, 303–348.

12

Für Ingarden ist dieser Vorteil ohne Bedeutung, denn er huldigt sowieso einem extremen Platonismus.

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Husserl, Edmund 1901. Logische Untersuchungen, Bd. II., Teil 1/2, Halle 1901 (Husserliana XIX/1, XIX/2, hrsg. von U. Panzer), Den Haag 1984. Husserl, Edmund 1908. Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre. Sommersemester 1908 (Husserliana XXVI, hrsg. von U. Panzer), Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster 1987. Husserl, Edmund 1913. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch, Halle 1913 (Husserliana III/1, hrsg. von K. Schuhmann), Den Haag 1976. Zitiert nach der Paginierung der Ausgabe 1913. Husserl, Edmund 1979. Aufsätze und Rezensionen (1890–1910) (Husserliana XXII, hrsg. von B. Rang), The Hague/Boston/London. Ingarden, Roman 1931. Das literarische Kunstwerk, Halle: Niemeyer; (zitiert nach 4. Aufl.: Tübingen: Niemeyer 1972). Ingarden, Roman 1964/65. Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, Bd.I/II, Tübingen. Perler, Dominik 2002. Theorien der Intentionalität im Mittelalter, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Twardowski, Kazimierz 1894. Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen, Wien: Hölder. Zalta, Edward N. 1988. Intensional Logic and the Metaphysics of Intentionality, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Ingarden and the Ontology of Cultural Objects AMIE L. THOMASSON

While Roman Ingarden is well known for his work in aesthetics and studies in ontology, one of his most important and lasting contributions has been largely overlooked: his approach to a general ontology of social and cultural objects. Ingarden himself discusses cultural objects other than works of art directly in the first section of “The Architectural Work”1, where he develops a particularly penetrating view of the ontology of buildings, flags, and churches. This text provides the core insight into how his more lengthy studies of the ontology of works of art in The Literary Work of Art and the rest of The Ontology of the Work of Art, combined with the ontological distinctions of Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, may be used to understand social and cultural objects. The view that results, I will argue, is based in foreseeing problems with the reductivist and projectivist views that remain popular, and is capable of resolving central problems still thought to plague those who would offer a theory of cultural objects. Social and cultural objects such as money, churches, and flags present a puzzle since they seem, on the one hand, to be entities that clearly – in some sense – depend on minds, and yet, on the other hand, seem to be objective parts of our world, things of which we may acquire knowledge (both in daily life and in the social sciences), and which we cannot merely modify at will. But it is hard to see how any entity could exhibit both of those characteristics – if, on the one hand, we take their objectivity and mind-externality seriously, and consider them to be identifiable with physical objects, we find ourselves saddled with absurd conclusions about the conditions under which such entities would exist and persist, and neglect their symbolic and normative features. If, on the other hand, we treat them as mere creations of the mind, they seem either reduced to phantasms that could not have the recalcitrance and impact on our lives cultural ob1

Written in 1928 as part of a planned appendix to The Literary Work of Art, but first published only in 1946 in Polish as a separate article. In 1989 the paper was finally translated into English as part of the volume The Ontology of the Work of Art. Existence, Culture, and Persons: The Ontology of Roman Ingarden. Arkadiusz Chrudzimski (ed.), Frankfurt: ontos, 2005, 115–136.

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jects apparently exhibit, or we seem to be positing ‘magical’ modes of creation whereby the mind can generate real, mind-external objects. Ingarden, I will argue, foresees the problems with each of these alternatives and diagnoses of the root of the problem as lying in too narrow an understanding of the senses in which an entity may be mind-dependent, and too narrow a set of ontological categories for entities there may be. Once we can make evident the different senses in which something may be mind-dependent, and the different kinds of object there may be, we can find room for cultural objects considered as entities that are neither mere physical objects nor projections of the mind, but instead depend in complex ways on both foundations. Such a moderate realist view, I will argue, can provide the means to overcome the problems thought to plague social ontology and show the way to a more comprehensive ontology.

1. Arguments against Reductive Physicalism In the contemporary context, where metaphysics is dominated by commitments to physicalism and naturalism, cultural objects are often ignored on the assumption that if they exist at all, they must be identical with mere physical objects, so that we need no special theory of them. But Ingarden argues repeatedly against attempts to identify cultural objects such as churches, flags, and works of architecture, with mere physical objects. Consider the real, mind-independent physical thing that stands before us. We might want to begin by calling it a ‘building’, but (as Ingarden notes (1989, 258)) this is already a cultural term, so we should speak of it rather as an ordered ‘heap of stones’, or ultimately, rather, as a collection of particles in certain physical relations to one another (1989, 263). Such a real thing possesses its physical properties independently of us, and is subject to laws independent of our will (1989, 258). Ingarden argues that cultural objects such as churches, architectural works, and flags cannot be considered identical to these physical objects, although the latter form their physical foundation, are that of which they ‘consist’, and determine many of the properties of these cultural objects. Against the physical reductivist, he argues that the cultural object cannot be identified with the physical thing since the former has different exis-

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tence conditions, persistence conditions, and essential properties from the latter – forms of argument that by now have become staples of the debate between reductive and anti-reductive views of artefacts. The cultural object, as Ingarden makes clear, has different existence conditions from the mere real thing insofar as its very existence and survival depend on human intentions and attitudes. For a church to come into existence, for example, it is not enough that some building materials (or, ultimately, particles) be arranged in certain ways – instead, there must also be a consecration ceremony that in a sense ‘transforms’ a mere physical thing into a church, a mere copse into a sacred grove, and the like: As long as it is only meant ‘seriously’ and carried out in the appropriate attitude (by the ‘priest’ and the ‘believers’), the ceremony is performed in acts of consciousness which, to be sure, of themselves do not and cannot bring about a real change in the real world, but which do call into being a certain object that belongs to the environment surrounding the ‘believers,’ namely what we call a ‘church,’ or a ‘temple,’ and so forth. A determinately ordered heap of building materials is precisely what a ‘church’ is not, although this heap serves as its real basis (its bearer) and forms the point of departure of the act of consecration. (1989, 259).

Moreover, Ingarden argues, the persistence of such cultural objects – unlike the physical objects that form their basis – requires the continued acceptance of them, through the relevant members of the community continuing to accept them: What has originated owes not merely its origination, but also its continued existence to certain acts of consciousness and construals by mental subjects, usually by a mental community (religious, artistic, or that of a class), for which alone the given objectivity exists. (1989, 260).

Thus in sum the existence conditions for such cultural objects go beyond those for mere physical objects, since the former appeal (in ways to be spelled out further) to certain forms of intentionality for their creation and persistence, while the latter do not. But the reverse is also true: there are also conditions for the persistence of the physical object that go beyond those needed for the cultural object. Most famously, the church or work of architecture may survive restoration

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– we would readily accept that the same church or architectural work stands in a given location after at least certain forms of restoration that replace some of its physical parts. But the same cannot be said for the heap of building materials or the collection of particles: The cathedral of Reims, as a work of art, is today identically the same cathedral as the one that existed before 1914. In contrast, the building which is the basis of the cathedral was heavily damaged in the year 1914 and then rebuilt. That destroyed building no longer exists today and can never be resurrected. (1989, 262).

And so again, the surviving cathedral cannot be identified with the destroyed building. Ingarden’s other important line of argument against identifying works of architecture, churches, flags, and the like with mere physical objects lies in noting that the former have properties – indeed essential properties – that the latter lack. This becomes particularly evident if we think of the ‘real thing’ as the collection of particles, as physics would describe it, for: It is very probable that the physical, material object that forms the building is not endowed with ‘sensible’ qualities; that it is neither colored, nor hard, nor bounded by smooth or rough surfaces; that therefore in itself it also does not have the spatial shape which we encounter in concrete perception and also ascribe to it in daily life. But … it is beyond all doubt that every architectural work of art is endowed with such qualities. (1989, 263).

Indeed, possession of the sensible qualities that form the basis for the work’s aesthetic properties and the aesthetic experience of the viewer are essential qualities of the work of art, though one may without contradiction suppose that the purely physical object lacks them. The case is even more obvious for such entities as churches and flags. For these have as essential features the performance of certain functions (what it is for something to be a church is for it to be a site for undertaking various religious ceremonies; what it is for something to be a flag is for it to serve as a symbol of a nation or cause) that cannot be thought to be essential functions of the mere physical stuff. Perhaps most interestingly, Ingarden notes that among the essential features of such cultural objects are their connections to certain norms of behavior and interaction: a church is

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the sort of thing that, as such, requires that we comport ourselves in certain ways towards it (that are not required for behavior regarding the mere building, such as a mason working on the stonework): This manner of comportment conforms to the views dominant in the pertinent religious community, and under different circumstances and in different cultural buildings, such as a theater or a club, would be inappropriate and even ridiculous. (1989, 260).

When this behavior is no longer required (e.g. when the building has been deconsecrated), the church is no more; and insofar as such behavior is not required (e.g. of the stonemason engaged in repairs), the proper object of the individual’s attention is not the church but the mere building. The differences in appropriate forms of behavior are also part of what marks the essential difference between, e.g., a flag and a mere piece of cloth: With a piece of cloth, for example, we clean pots. To the flag we render military honors; we preserve it, often for centuries, as a remembrance, even though the cloth of the flag is badly damaged and without any value. (1989, 260).

So it is interesting to note that Ingarden not only argues against the reduction of cultural objects to mere physical objects by noting the dependence of such objects on individual acts of consciousness to come into existence and remain in existence. He also, with Heidegger (1962), notes the crucial conceptual connections between the very idea of a cultural object of a certain kind (church, flag, etc.) and certain societal norms of comportment, just as Heidegger took norms of use to be essential to what it is for an object to be a ready-to-hand piece of equipment rather than a mere spatiotemporal present-at-hand thing.

2. Purely Intentional Objects But if, in virtue of their different existence and persistence conditions and different essential properties, cultural objects such as flags, churches and buildings are not to be identified with mere physical things, what are they?

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Ingarden’s brief answer is that they, like works of art, are “purely intentional objects”. Purely intentional objects are: … objects which derive their existence and their entire endowment from an intending experience of consciousness (an “act”) that is laden with a determinate, uniformly structured content. They would not exist at all but for the performance of acts of this kind; yet, because such acts are performed, these objects do exist, but not autonomously. (1964b, 47; cf. 1973, 117)

In labelling them ‘purely intentional objects’, Ingarden is first of all classifying them as mind-dependent objects of a certain kind: “The creation of a purely intentional object depends … on an intentional attribution, on its being ‘thought of’” (1964b, 80–81). But we must immediately note that in saying that they are mind-dependent objects, he is not advocating identifying such objects with psychological states about them. Following Brentano’s and Twardowski’s insistence on distinguishing the act from object intended, Ingarden, too, argues vehemently against psychologism: “Purely intentional objects are ‘transcendent’ with respect to the corresponding, and, in general, to all conscious acts in the sense that no real element (or moment) of the act is an element of the purely intentional object, and vice versa” (1973, 118). In every case, the purely intentional object must be distinguished from the act intending it, since many different acts may be of or about the same purely intentional object (1973, 123). Ingarden indeed extends the classic arguments against psychologism to argue against psychologising such cultural objects as “individual literary works, musical compositions, objects in societal or governmental structures, positive law, etc.” (1964b, 48). Nonetheless, it might seem that (in avoiding physicalist reductionism) we have slid too far in the other direction in classifying such cultural objects as flags, churches, and works of architecture as ‘purely intentional’ objects. For the paradigm of the purely intentional, mind-created, mind-dependent object is surely the imaginary object. Even Ingarden twice introduces the notion of the purely intentional object this way, using a merely imagined table (1973, 119), or a “poetically conceived” youth whom we merely “fancy” to have certain properties (1964b, 49) as the examples by means of which to introduce the idea of the purely intentional object.

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But the idea that the social and cultural objects that surround us, the flags we fold or fly, churches we may worship or seek shelter in, and even architectural works that require city planning approval, occupy large tracts of land, and cast shadows over the river, are in some sense just imaginary objects seems outrageous, indeed worse than views that would reduce them to physical objects and little better than denying their existence altogether. In opening “The Architectural Work” Ingarden himself notes the superficial counterintuitiveness of the suggestion that works of architecture (and ultimately other cultural objects) are ‘purely intentional’: … does it not seem to be particularly objectionable to assert that a work of architecture, for example, Notre Dame in Paris or St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, is a ‘purely intentional’ formation? … After all, the Notre Dame of Paris appears to be no less real than the many residential buildings that stand in its vicinity, than the island upon which it was built, the river that flows nearby, and so on. (1989, 255).

Treating such things as mere projections or imaginary objects seems to completely ignore the recalcitrance of the social and cultural world – whereas I may imagine a ‘fancied youth’ to have whatever features I choose, I cannot simply imagine my way to having a mended flag, a glorious church in my neighbourhood, or a great fortune. Moreover, it seems to collapse the crucial difference between merely imagined flags, churches, and fortunes, and their real counterparts that can make a genuine difference to our flagpoles, communities, and lives. But although Ingarden uses the term ‘purely intentional object’ to cover a wide range of entities, from imaginary objects to works of literature, music, and architecture, to cultural objects such as flags and churches, it would be a complete misunderstanding to think of Ingarden’s view as treating social and cultural objects as mere imagined or projected entities. As he writes of the musical work “speaking of ‘purely intentional objectivities’ does not introduce a mere philosophical fiction into our discussion” (1989, 94). For purely intentional objects form a wide and disparate class, with distinctions based on the different ways in which each depends on minds and on mind-external entities. Purely intentional objects “are objects which derive their existence and entire endowment from an intending experience of consciousness (an ‘act’)

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that is laden with a determinate, uniformly structured content. They would not exist at all but for the performance of acts of this kind” (1964b, 47). But mind-dependence speaks to only one side of purely intentional objects. In a sense it is a shame that Ingarden uses the term “purely intentional object” to refer to entities of all these sorts, since it wrongly suggests that these are all the sole products of human intentionality. He speaks of them as purely intentional to distinguish those entities that depend on human intentionality, and so have an essential relationship to it, from those independent objects of nature that may be merely chanced on by our intentional acts, without having any essential connection to them (1973, 117). Nonetheless, most purely intentional objects are certainly not purely intentional insofar as intentionality is far from providing their sole foundation; in fact it is far more common that so-called purely intentional objects depend not only on forms of human intentionality, but also on external ‘world-features’ such as sound waves, painted canvasses and the like. One of Ingarden’s crucial innovations was to note that an entity may depend jointly on many other entities – and thus may depend jointly both on human intentionality and on mind-independent features of the world – and that there are many different ways in which an entity may be said to be dependent. It is these distinctions within the realm of so-called ‘purely intentional objects’ that are the key to providing a view of social and cultural objects that acknowledges their mind-dependence without treating them as merely imagined or projected entities. Indeed the subtlety and philosophical innovativeness of Ingarden’s view lies precisely in denying that simple divisions into categories such as the mental, the physical, and the ideal are exhaustive (cf. 1973, 19, 363). Ingarden delineates several different senses in which one entity may depend on another, providing the basis for outlining a wide range of possible cases of purely intentional objects according to the ways in which they depend on minds and other entities. First, we can distinguish between an object’s depending on conscious acts merely to come into existence (Ingarden calls this ‘derivation’ (1964b, 52)) from dependence for being maintained in existence (Ingarden calls this ‘contingency’). Second, we can distinguish contingency – ongoing dependence for existence (i.e. for being)

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– from dependence for being the way that it is (i.e. dependence for its sobeing), the latter of which Ingarden calls ‘heteronomy’.2 All purely intentional objects, as Ingarden describes them, are minddependent in at least three senses: they are derivative, in the sense that they can come into existence only by being produced by some act of consciousness, they are contingent in the sense that they remain founded on certain forms of consciousness (e.g. that attitudes of certain kinds be adopted towards them), and they are heteronomous insofar as their determinate features or ‘qualitative endowment’ likewise depends on certain conscious acts (1964b, 47). But even with these dependencies on conscious acts established, there are crucial differences among purely intentional objects. First the dependence on consciousness may be direct, or it may be mediated. It is clear why Ingarden typically begins his exposition of purely intentional objects by discussing imaginary objects, since these are the simplest cases, insofar as they depend directly on (and only on) intentional acts,3 and thus are what he calls “originally purely intentional objects” or “primary purely intentional objects”. But these originally purely intentional objects are distinct from those he calls “derived purely intentional objects”, whose mind-dependence is mediated by mind-external entities that are, in turn, mind-dependent. Wherever the mind-dependence is mediated – as indeed it is with the case of most purely intentional objects, including works of art and cultural objects – the purely intentional objects in question depend not merely or exclusively on acts of consciousness, but also on other, non-mental entities such as physical objects or ideal concepts. In fact, although he typically introduces the idea of purely intentional objects by discussing originally purely intentional objects, Ingarden’s best known and best developed examples of purely intentional objects are the characters of works of literary fiction which, he is quick to point out, are derived purely intentional objects. They depend directly not on conscious acts, but rather on the meaning units expressed by sentences in the relevant 2

Actually, there are very complicated issues about how to interpret Ingarden’s notion of ‘heteronomy’. For discussion and defense of the above interpretation, see my (2003a). 3 That is, excluding for the moment the dependencies they may transitively bear on the physical world insofar as intentional states turn out to be so dependent.

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works of literature (which themselves ‘refer back to the original intentionality of acts of consciousness’ (1973, 118)).

3. Avoiding Projectivism Where mind-dependence is mediated by a public object, the object typically need not rely for its continued existence on a particular act of consciousness, but more generically on conscious acts of a particular kind. For example, while meaning units (sentences and words), according to Ingarden, do depend on conscious acts that endow phonetic and typographical units with meaning (1973, 100), it seems that such meaning-bestowal is normally the collective product of a whole range of public intentions and practices rather than of an individual private act of consciousness. So as long as these meaning units may continue in existence regardless of the maintenance of any particular act of consciousness, the purely intentional objects depending on them may as well. As a result, the mediating dependence on meaning units: … allows the purely intentional objects to free themselves, so to speak, from immediate contact with the acts of consciousness in the process of execution and thus to acquire a relative independence from the latter … Through this shift in their ontic relativity these objects gain a certain advantage over primary purely intentional objects. For while the latter are ‘subjective’ formations, in the sense that in their primariness they are directly accessible only to the one conscious subject who effected the act that created them, and while in their necessary belonging to concrete acts they cannot free themselves from these acts, the derived purely intentional objects, as correlates of meaning units, are ‘intersubjective’: they can be intended or apprehended by various conscious subjects as identically the same. (1973, 126).

To put this in terms I have used elsewhere, it is easy to see how derived purely intentional objects may merely generically depend on the existence of some acts of consciousness of a certain type, rather than rigidly depending on a particular act of consciousness.4 4

I am not, however, claiming that this is the only condition under which mere generic dependence on consciousness is possible – it also seems possible, e.g., for universals of types of conscious states. Ingarden uses the terms “multivocal” and “univocal” de-

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This mere generic dependence on consciousness, mediated by a public object, enables us to see at least one way in which purely intentional objects may be intersubjective, public objects, accessible – in this case – to all who understand the language. It also enables us to explain how a purely intentional object may be recalcitrant in the sense that it is not subject to our individual will or desires in the way that our own imaginary creations seem to be (my wishing that the novel’s heroine would not marry that cad does not make it so). Finally, the idea that mind-dependence may be mediated and generic enables us to see how some purely intentional objects may be legitimate objects of inquiry, regarding which genuine discoveries and objective knowledge are possible. For as long as their persistence and the way that they are depends only generically on some conscious acts (that, e.g., establish the meanings of the terms used in the text), any individual may potentially be wrong in her beliefs about a literary work, or ignorant of its existence altogether, and the existence and features of the work remain open to discovery.5 Thus far we have seen two important variations among purely intentional objects in terms of their dependencies on conscious acts: the dependence (in any of the three forms) may be direct, or it may be mediated by some other entity; and it may be rigid dependence on particular acts of consciousness, or generic dependence on some or other conscious acts of a certain kind. It is equally important to note that, where the dependence is mediated, the purely intentional object depends not only on acts of consciousness, but also on entities of other sorts. Normally, these are physical objects, though (e.g. in the case of linguistic meaning units) ideal entities may also be inpendence in a similar way to the way I use “generic” and “rigid” dependence, but given some interpretive difficulties, I will stick with the latter terms. For Ingarden sometimes treats univocal dependence as dependence on a qualitatively unique entity (of which there could in principle be many tokens) (Der Streit, Volume 1, 117), while elsewhere he treats it as dependence on a particular individual (Der Streit, Volume 1, 114). For discussion of this and other interpretive issues about Ingarden’s distinctions in types of dependence, see my (2003a). For discussion of rigid versus generic dependence, see my (1999, Chapter 2). 5 For further discussion of how jointly dependent social entities may be open to discovery, see my (2003b).

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volved. Here, I will focus on cases in which purely intentional objects depend on physical objects as well as on conscious acts. It is here that perhaps the most important differences among purely intentional objects come to the surface, for the dependencies on physical objects may also take a number of different forms, with different consequences. Those jointly dependent purely intentional objects Ingarden discusses at greatest length are works of art of different types: literature, music, pictures, and works of architecture. Each is created by the psychophysical acts of the author, composer, or artist, and so derived from these. In each case, also, Ingarden insists, the work’s ongoing existence relies on the viewer, reader, or listener’s competent apprehension (1989, 200). But beyond these dependencies on consciousness, each also is contingent upon mediating, mind-external entities. In the case of different arts, these are of different sorts: works of literature depend on meaning units (which in turn depend on conscious acts of meaning-bestowal, ideal concepts, and phonetic and typographic formations). Musical works are based in “real processes in the world which found realiter each individual performance of the work” or real objects that found copies of the score (1989, 93). The picture, similarly, is founded on the painting (the real paint covered canvas) (1989, 200). In each case, the external foundation of the work of art makes these objects publicly accessible, despite their being ‘purely intentional objects’. Yet in each case, Ingarden argues, the work of art itself remains only generically dependent on some or other external foundation of the right type, and so is tied to no particular physical object. The musical work, for example “is a qualitative entity that is determined in very diverse ways, and what is qualitative is in every case supraindividual … that which is qualitative is the constitutive factor of the work and in its essence transcends every concrete individual that might be regarded as real” (1989, 93). The work of literature, similarly, is tied to no particular copy or recitation of it. This all seems perfectly natural for literature and music; it is more surprising, however, that Ingarden takes the same view with respect to pictures and works of architecture. The picture, on Ingarden’s view, depends on the physical paint-covered canvas only generically: “If we destroy the painting, we destroy access to the ‘original’ of the picture, and if we have no copies or ‘reproductions’ of the painting, then we also destroy the picture itself” (1989, 198, italics mine). While he notes that perfect re-

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productions of a painting are generally not available, so that we rightly privilege the original, he seems to take this as a contingent consequence of current technological limitations, not a necessity based in the ontological status of the picture (1989, 201). Similarly, “one and the same architectural work of art could in principle be embodied in several different real buildings” (1989, 271), made of different internal materials; and indeed “if the plans are precise, many buildings that are exactly similar can be built so that the same architectural work of art can be ‘performed’ repeatedly” (1989, 274). Ingarden’s conception of works of art of all kinds as merely generically tied to a physical foundation seems to come from his conception of the work of art as (in any case) a qualitatively distinguished entity, allowing in principle that these qualities be founded on or realized in more than one real object. Nonetheless, it is no part of his view of purely intentional objects generally that these may, at most, be generically founded on physical objects. In fact, one particularly interesting feature of his treatment of such cultural objects as flags and churches is that these seem to provide clear examples of purely intentional objects that are the most directly tied to the physical world. For a particular flag, for example, seems (at least at any given time) to be rigidly tied to the piece of cloth that materially constitutes it; much the same could be said about dollar bills, passports, and Olympic medals. If the underlying material is destroyed, so is that flag, bill, passport, or medal. This helps explain the impulse to say that such things are physical objects, that they may be discovered (with the discovery of the long-lost piece of cloth in the attic), and in general that they are far too robust a part of our world to be mere imaginary objects or projections. Nonetheless, Ingarden argues that even in such cases, where the relationship between the purely intentional object and a physical object is at its most intimate, the former cannot be identified with the latter, given their different existence conditions (flags and churches depend for their existence on certain intentional acts; the purely physical arrangements of molecules making up cloth and buildings do not) and different essential properties (e.g. flags and churches have essential functional and normative properties governing their role in our cultural lives that their physical bases need not have) (1989, 259).

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So as we have seen, there is a wide range of types of purely intentional object. At one end of the scale are imaginary or ‘fancied’ objects, which depend directly on, and only on, acts of consciousness, from which they ‘derive their existence and entire endowment’, as they are simply ascribed whatever properties the fancier imagines them to have. But while these are an obvious starting point for explaining the idea of the purely intentional object, they are at one extreme end of a range of cases. Much more common among purely intentional objects are those that also depend on mindexternal objects and only generically on certain kinds of conscious act, making them publicly accessible and unresponsive to the individual’s beliefs and desires. At the extreme end of those cases lie such cultural objects as flags and churches, which (for their persistence) depend only generically on some community maintaining the proper understanding of, and attitude towards, them, but depend rigidly on a particular physical object, thus enabling them to be discovered via the discovery of their physical base, destroyed by destroying it, and so on. We are now in a position to describe more specifically what the ontological status of cultural objects is, according to Ingarden. There may, of course, be cultural objects of very many kinds; for simplicity I will here focus on concrete cultural objects such as flags and churches, since it is those on which Ingarden focuses.6 The preliminary answer was: they are purely intentional objects. While that raised the specter of treating them as mere imaginary objects or projections, we have seen that these are only one, extreme case within the varied class of purely intentional objects. A church, for example, is contingent on an organized arrangement of materials of a certain kind (we would say a ‘building’ were it not that this, too, is a cultural object (1989, 258)). But while this may form its necessary foundation, it is not sufficient for the existence of a church. For a church to come into existence at all, the physical foundation must be consecrated (1989, 259). The success of the consecration, and the maintenance of the building as a church, also requires the maintenance of the relevant attitudes on the part of a community of ‘believers’, and endows the building (now a church) with certain characteristic functions (e.g. of serving as a house of 6

It is easy to see, however, especially given his work on works of art, how his ontology could handle abstract cultural objects such as corporations, universities, and laws.

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worship) and establishes certain norms of behavior regarding it (1989, 259). A flag, similarly, is founded on the one hand on a piece of cloth (still more basically, on the arrangement of molecules that make it up), but also on the attitudes of a community that counts such cloth, created for this purpose, exhibiting this pattern, as a symbol of their nation, and as to be treated in certain ways. Thus the flag: … has a real object as its bearer (its ontic foundation), but goes beyond that real object in the properties constitutive of, and essential to it. The real thing that serves as the ontic foundation of such an objectivity is not, however, the sole foundation of its being, for the subjective attitude and the appropriate acts of consciousness which create something like a ‘church’ or ‘flag’ form its second and perhaps far more important ontic foundation (1989, 260).

Thus in short, concrete cultural objects such as churches and flags are neither mere physical objects, nor are they mere human projections. As long as we stick with the standard bifurcation of categories into the physical and the mental, we cannot hope to solve the problem of the status of cultural objects. For they are entities that depend jointly on both foundations – they might seem like physical objects since indeed they have precise spatiotemporal locations, and are destructible with the destruction of their physical basis. These features are consequences of the fact that these doubly dependent entities, unlike works of literature or music (which are more frequently classed with ideal than real objects), are rigidly dependent on their physical basis. Nonetheless, they also depend generically on the attitudes of members of a relevant community, to create them as churches or flags, establish the norms for their appropriate treatment, and maintain their cultural status. Recognizing the variety of ways in which entities may depend both on consciousness and on the physical world (and perhaps also on ideal entities) yields a whole range of categories between the physical and the mental, and between either of these and platonic ideal objects. Thus one important result of Ingarden’s work on social and cultural objects is that it demonstrates how vastly inadequate our standard category bifurcations are, and how we may proceed to develop a much finer-grained system of

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ontological categories acknowledging all the in-between cases in which most of the common-sense objects of daily life may be found.7

4. Avoiding Magical Modes of Creation While the robustness of concrete social and cultural objects helps to avoid the sense that these are just being treated as projections of the mind, it raises, in turn, another problem: how can such robust objects, that may be constructed and bulldozed, burned or discovered hidden in an attic, be mind-created? Indeed this is just an instance of the standard skeptical question: how can mere attitudes, acts of consciousness “call into being” new objects? Philosophy, at least of the analytic tradition, has a long history of suspicion of mind-created or mind-dependent objects, and a tendency to reject the idea that there could be any such things. For a long realist tradition has it that while we may think and speak about objects in the world, report on them, and acquire knowledge of them, those objects on which we report must be mind-independent, and our thought and language can play a mere reporting role, not a constructive role, for “our thinking does not make it so”.8 The idea that thought, language, or convention can play a role in creating objects is thus often ridiculed as claiming that we can “define things into existence”, or as treating thought as if it were endowed with a mysterious metaphysical power akin to psychokinesis enabling it to (shazam!) create its objects of thought. Thus, e.g., those who hold (as I do, and Ingarden does) the view that fictional characters are themselves (abstract) cultural entities created by the conscious acts of authors are often accused of positing mysterious modes of creation. Takashi Yagisawa, for example, criticizes Searle’s argument for fictional creationism on grounds that “It does nothing to explain how the author can possibly create the character ‘out of thin air’” (2001, 155). 7

In my Fiction and Metaphysics (1999, chapter 8) I attempt (in Ingardenian spirit) to develop a more comprehensive system of ontological categories by distinguishing the different ways in which an entity may depend on the real versus the mental, and argue that this enables us to better account for the ontological status of many objects including artifacts and other social and cultural objects. 8 To quote Barry Smith (2001, 147n6).

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Robert Howell similarly asks how, on my view, “George Eliot, by imagining (or otherwise mentally engendering) a concrete and seemingly notreally-existent man, thereby creates the existent abstract non-man whom she baptizes ‘Silas Marner’” (2002, 283). If the idea that fictional characters may be created through consciousness is unpalatable to some, the idea that conscious acts and attitudes may lead to creating such robust entities as churches and flags would surely be considered worse. Even John Searle, who accepts the creation of fictional characters and offers what is arguably the most detailed recent treatment of social ontology, expresses suspicion of talk of social objects (1995, 36), and even of the idea that new social facts could be created through human intentionality: we have “a sense that there is an element of magic, a conjuring trick, a sleight of hand in the creation of institutional facts out of brute facts”, so that “In our toughest metaphysical moods we want to ask … are these bits of paper really money? Is this piece of land really somebody’s private property?” (1995, 45). Ingarden is always aware of this sort of objection. His reply is based on noting that the apt source of this objection is in the observation that real, physical, spatio-temporal objects (trees, rocks, and lumps of matter) certainly cannot be created merely by human consciousness; nor can physical, spatio-temporal properties be altered through thought alone. Nonetheless, the changes relevant to the creation of purely intentional objects are of an entirely different sort, which can be effected by consciousness. While this might at first seem an ad hoc reply, I think that deeper examination will show that it is not at all ad hoc, but well justified and tenable. Ingarden often acknowledges that “acts of consciousness …, to be sure, of themselves do not and cannot bring about a real change in the world” (1989, 259, italics mine). But what does it mean to say that these acts of consciousness do not bring about any real change when, at the same time, they are supposed to be initiating the existence of a new object? What he seems to mean is that these acts of consciousness do not make a difference to any objects, properties or features of the merely physical, spatio-temporal world. Instead, what they do is to add intentional features to independent, real objects:

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… acts such as ‘consecrating’ a church, decreeing what a flag is to look like, or creating an honorary ‘order’ effect no real changes at all in the physical world, although they can indirectly effect changes in the mental life of human beings. On the other hand, as a consequence of such acts of consciousness there arises [a] certain intentional property of appropriate real objects that results from their becoming the ontic foundation of a new object – a church, a flag, an order, etc. (1989, 261).

What are intentional properties? Ingarden is not very explicit about this, at least in this context, but clearly the most fundamental intentional properties are properties like thinking of Spain now, wishing for a snowstorm, or wondering whether it will rain. In these basic cases, it is very easy to see how it is that – even if thought can’t make it the case that I am in Spain, or that it is snowing, intentional states can very easily make it the case that I am thinking of Spain or wishing for snow; indeed it is hard to see what else could. So however firmly one wants to hold that – mostly – thinking can’t make it so, clearly thinking can make various intentional facts so. Facts about what I am thinking, wishing, etc., are one obvious basic kind of intentional fact, but are intuitively quite different from such facts as that there is a church on 12th and Elm or that this piece of cloth constitutes a flag. But Ingarden’s insight here is that the sorts of features beyond the physical that are involved in making these facts the case just are, at bottom, intentional features, such as that Bishop McLeod consecrated this building in the name of the Catholic Church on January 14th, 1964 (i.e. intentionally and sincerely declared it such in accord with the accepted procedures); that the building has been continuously used and regarded as a church since then and has not been deconsecrated (where this is also a matter of intentionally enacting a certain accepted procedure); that according to accepted standards one ought to behave respectfully on the premises, and so on. But even if the objector allows that that much may be accepted for properties or facts, still, she might dig in her heels at the idea that any new objects may be created by intentionality. We could then, perhaps, allow that through conscious acts this building (more aptly: organized heap of stones) acquires new intentional properties such as being consecrated, or indeed being a church, provided that these may be cashed out intentionally as suggested above. But that doesn’t mean (the objector might say) that any new objects are created – all we have here is an independent physical

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object (the organized heap of stones) endowed with new, intentional properties. This clearly won’t do for Ingarden, however, or for anyone who accepts a constitution-without-identity view of churches and other artifacts. For, as we saw in §1 above, Ingarden argues against identifying cultural objects – even concrete ones like churches and flags – with the merely physical things that constitute them. The heap of stones’ being a church we must then interpret as the heap’s constituting or (in Ingarden’s terms) forming the ontic foundation of a church, but not as its being strictly identical to a church. So we can’t merely accept that intentionality may make certain facts the case; we must also accept that it may create objects that are not identical with their physical bases and that wouldn’t otherwise exist. But this, again, might seem to require positing a ‘magical’ sort of object-creation by means of thought alone. Here again, however, Ingarden is careful to draw out the difference between this kind of ontological creation and that which would be involved in making a rabbit appear in a hat: “In a certain sense, though this creating is powerless; it cannot effect the origination from itself of any ontically autonomous object” (1989, 260). A rabbit would be a prime candidate for an autonomous object.9 Its foundation is ‘in itself’ in the sense that it may exist and possess a great many properties (its furriness, body temperature, DNA, etc.) independently of anyone’s beliefs, intentions or ascriptions. It is not the sort of thing that can be created by consciousness. Purely intentional objects, however, such as works of art, flags, and churches, however, do admit of creation by consciousness. So the start of an answer seems to be that consciousness cannot create any ontically autonomous objects – this apt observation is the basis for claims that ‘thinking doesn’t make it so’ and for the general idea that there can’t be mind-created objects. But, Ingarden seems to be suggesting, in the case of purely intentional objects matters are different; these can be created by consciousness. Yet the question remains: why should we accept that consciousness can create any objects at all, even if we limit it to creating purely intentional objects? This may not have been a question that Ingarden even considered, 9

I say only ‘a prime candidate’ here since Ingarden’s discussions of purely intentional objects are in the context of a larger interest in the realism/idealism problem, and he is always careful not to presuppose an answer to this question.

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given his starting place and approach to ontology, but by considering the latter, we can, I think, at least approach an answer. Ingarden considered the study of ontology and metaphysics to be distinct: metaphysics might offer answers to the question “what is there?”, while ontology is a purely a priori study based in “analysing the contents of ideas, disclosing and investigating pure possibilities and necessary connections among the possible moments of these contents” (Mitscherling 1997, 83). Thus while metaphysics might address the question of whether or not there really are flags or churches, ontology tells us what, according to the contents of the very ideas of flags or churches, it would take for there to be such things. Ontology in Ingarden’s hands is thus undertaken by way of a kind of conceptual analysis, and his studies of cultural objects may be read as ways of unpacking the concept of ‘church’, for example, revealing that the very idea of a church involves the idea of a building that has been appropriately consecrated, that is regarded in a certain attitude by believers, that demands a certain kind of comportment, etc. Why then, should we accept that, given the fulfillment of the necessary physical factors – presence of an appropriately shaped building, real physical motions and noises made by homo sapiens – acts of consciousness may bring into existence a new object, a church, where before there was only a building? For Ingarden, I think, this would be a rather bizarre question: according to the very content of the idea, if all of those conditions are fulfilled, that is simply all it takes for there to be a church; and according to the content of the relevant ideas, no church may be strictly identical with any building (for the reasons rehearsed in §1 above). The very idea of purely intentional objects of different sorts involves the idea of certain acts of consciousness, and so provided the other necessary conditions for their existence (if any) are fulfilled (of course in some cases these can be quite substantial), the conscious acts guarantee the existence of the object in question. This of course distinguishes purely intentional objects from real objects, which do not involve acts of consciousness as any necessary condition for their existence, and so cannot be ‘created’ by consciousness. This reply, of course, relies on the legitimacy of conceptual analysis as a means of establishing the ontological conditions under which things of various kinds exist. While that cannot be defended here, it is clearly a reply

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that would have been natural to Ingarden given his use of the method of conceptual analysis in approaching ontology. Given that approach, it is easy to see how we can accept that cultural objects are – in a sense – objects dependent on consciousness, without either reducing them to mere projections or positing magical modes of creation. They are distinct from projections in being transcendent with respect to any given act of consciousness, and moreover in being spatio-temporal objects also rigidly founded on an external, physical object. But to say that these are – in a sense – brought into existence by the performance of conscious acts is not to posit a ‘shazam’ view of creation. While it would be incredible to think that we could make it the case that it is raining just by thinking, it is not at all incredible to think that we can make it the case that there is thought just by thinking; so similarly, while it would be magical to think that thought or incantations alone could produce a rabbit out of thin air, there is nothing magical in the idea that incantations of the right sort, in the right cultural context, can make a church ‘out of’ a building.

5. Conclusion The problem of the ontological status of cultural objects, as Ingarden would analyze it, is born of an impoverished set of ontological categories, that relegates everything to the categories of the real – psychological or physical – and the ideal. The solution to the problem is to note not just one category beyond those (the purely intentional), but indeed a wide range of categories based in the different ways in which an object may depend on conscious acts, physical objects, and even ideal entities, without being identical to any of these. This gives room to understand concrete cultural objects such as flags and churches as entities rigidly dependent on their physical bases without being identifiable with them, and as dependent on consciousness without being mere phantasms. It also provides the tools for understanding other kinds of social and cultural objects (including abstract social and cultural objects like universities and laws) in terms of their own distinctive dependencies on physical, mental, and perhaps even ideal enti-

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ties.10 The consequences of such a view then lie not only in a solution to the problem of the ontology of concrete cultural objects, but also in the tools to understand a wide range of other sorts of object, and, perhaps most importantly, in a finer-grained set of distinctions that may be used in generating a more comprehensive set of ontological categories better able to do justice to the variety of entities in the world surrounding us.

References Heidegger, Martin (1962) Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper. Howell, Robert (2002) Review of Amie L. Thomasson Fiction and Metaphysics. In Philosophical Quarterly 52, No. 207: 282–284. Ingarden, Roman (1964a) Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt. Bd. I, II/I, II/2. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Ingarden, Roman (1964b) Time and Modes of Being. Translated (from parts of Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt) by Helen R. Michejda. Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas. Ingarden, Roman (1973) The Literary Work of Art. Translated by George G. Grabowicz. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Ingarden, Roman (1989) The Ontology of the Work of Art. Translated by Raymond Meyer with John T. Goldthwait. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. Mitscherling, Jeff (1997) Roman Ingarden's Ontology and Aesthetics. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Searle, John (1995) The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press. Smith, Barry (2001) “Fiat Objects”. Topoi Vol. 20, No. 2: 131–148. Thomasson, Amie L. (1999) Fiction and Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomasson, Amie L. (2003a) “Ingarden and the Theory of Dependence”, published in Polish as “Ingarden i teoria zależności bytowej” (translated by Artur Mordka). ΣΟΦΙΑ Nr. 3: 243–262. Thomasson, Amie L. (2003b) “Foundations for a Social Ontology”, Protosociology, “Understanding the Social II: Philosophy of Sociality” Vol. 18-19: 269–290. Yagisawa, Takashi (2001) “Against Creationism in Fiction”, Philosophical Perspectives, 15: Metaphysics, J. E. Tomberlin (ed.), (Oxford: Blackwell), 153–72.

10

I discuss how abstract social objects such as laws may be handled in this way in my (1999, Chapter 8).

Concretization, Literary Criticism, and the Life of the Literary Work of Art JEFF MITSCHERLING

Introduction No author writing before or after Ingarden has even approached the depth and rigor that we find in his analyses of the ontology of the work of art, and the immense scope of his ontological project remains similarly unique. It is in Ingarden’s first major excursion into ontology, The Literary Work of Art (LWA), that he first stated the overall goals of his research and laid out his general area of investigation, which he then proceeded to explore, with sometimes quite startling results. Ingarden’s overall goal is well known: Calling into question the subjectivism that he saw threatening the Husserlian enterprise of an epistemologically oriented idealist phenomenology, Ingarden wanted to convince its practitioners – including Husserl himself – that phenomenology is most profitably to be conceived along realist lines and pursued with an ontological focus as its starting point.1 Indeed, Ingarden’s entire life’s work began with his desire to steer phenomenology away from the transcendental idealism that he perceived to underlie Husserl’s development of phenomenology as presented in Ideas. He saw this idealist commitment in Husserl’s claim that all of the objects of the so-called “real world” owe their existence solely to the constitutive activity of the intentionality of consciousness. In order to counter this claim, Ingarden thought it would be most convincing were he to present an ontological analysis of a sort of object that would indisputably be regarded as an “intentional”, and to demonstrate that even such an intentional object 1

Ingarden had already communicated to Husserl many of his reservations regarding the latter’s position. The first such communication took place at the end of July 1918, when Ingarden wrote to Husserl from Końskie, Poland, detailing at length several criticisms of Husserl’s idealism. (The letter has been published under the title, “The Letter to Husserl about the VI [Logical] Investigation and ‘Idealism’,” in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ed., Ingardeniana: A Spectrum of Specialised Studies Establishing a Field of Research, Analecta Husserliana, vol. IV, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976.) Existence, Culture, and Persons: The Ontology of Roman Ingarden. Arkadiusz Chrudzimski (ed.), Frankfurt: ontos, 2005, 137–158.

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enjoyed an ontological foundation that was not constituted solely by the activity of consciousness. As the clearest example of such an intentional object, he chose the work of art. And his first exploration of this ontology was directed toward the literary work of art. A written literary work, according to Ingarden, finds its immediate ontological foundation in its material substrate – i.e., the physical book, with cloth, paper, and ink. But the physical book is not to be identified with the literary work of art (for reasons that Ingarden makes obvious at the outset of LWA). The literary work of art is essentially a schematic formation (Gebilde) consisting of four heterogeneous strata. These strata are comprised of: (1) linguistic sound-formations (individual word-sounds and higher-order word-sound formations); (2) meaning units of various orders (e.g., word-meanings, sentence-meanings); (3) schematized aspects;2 and (4) represented objectivities (including characters, situations, activities, and so on). (These represented objectivities invariably contain “spots of in2

Some basic phenomenology is necessary for the clarification of the nature of this stratum. When consciousness attends to (or ‘intends’) a particular object, it is usually the case that only some of the ‘aspects’ of that object are presented immediately to consciousness, and these aspects are said to be either fulfilled or unfulfilled. For example, when we look at a table from above, the table presents us with the aspect of ‘table-top’ and ‘table-bottom’, and the former is fulfilled while the latter remains unfulfilled. When we look at the table from beneath, the former (table-top) aspect is unfulfilled and the latter (table-bottom) is fulfilled. A similar situation obtains in the case of the literary work of art, but here the reader is often forced to fulfil for herself many of those aspects that are presented by the author as unfulfilled, and she does so with regard to those aspects that are presented more fully, i.e. as fulfilled. The latter provide the reader with a direction to follow in her intentional activity of fulfilling these unfulfilled aspects, which are said to have been presented as ‘schematized’. This intentional activity of the fulfilment of schematized aspects is a central component of the general activity of ‘concretization’. As no character, for example, can ever be exhaustively presented by an author – no character, that is to say, can ever be portrayed as fully and completely determined – the manner in which this concretization is to proceed can be only schematically determined by the literary work through its stratum of these schematized aspects.

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determinacy” – i.e., features or characteristics that are not fully fleshed out by the author.) These strata together function as a set of guidelines, as it were, following which the reader is enabled to concretize the literary work of art as the object of an aesthetic experience. This act of concretization Ingarden also occasionally refers to as an act of “cocreation”, for the reader is, in a sense, collaborating with the author in the creation of the aesthetic object of this experience. (I shall return to this in what follows.) This concretization, or cocreation, Ingarden occasionally describes as the process of the actualization of the potentiality of the literary work of art. That is, as a schematic structure, the literary work is a pure potentiality that first achieves its actualization as an aesthetic object in the course of its reading, which consists in the ongoing process of its concretization. This process of concretization is, in other words, the means whereby the work of art as aesthetic object is constituted. There are two extremely important ontological distinctions to be noted at this point. First, there is a distinction between the physical ontic foundation – the physical book, for instance – and the literary work of art. The latter, again, is the non-physical schematic structure that is constructed employing various ideal entities – e.g., concepts and word-meanings, which are said to possess ideal being. This structure (Gebilde) is the product of the creative intentional activity of the artist, and its continuing existence as such a structure is itself intentional – that is to say, the structure enjoys ‘intentional being’ as distinct from the physical being of the book and the ideal being of the word-meanings.3 Secondly, there is also a distinction between the work of art and the aesthetic object. The literary 3

It may be helpful here to note that ideal entities, such as meanings of words, are atemporal – they do not come into being nor cease to be at any point in time (although they may or may not be conceived or employed by us throughout time). Intentional entities, on the other hand, such as works of art and discursively articulated relations among word-meanings, do come into being at a certain point in time – precisely through intentional (i.e. ‘directional’, ‘structuring’, ‘relating’) activity on the part of some intending agent – and they may also cease to be at some point in time. Indeed, it seems likely that most if not all particular intentional entities must at some point cease to exist.

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work of art is, again, the general ‘schema’ in accordance with which the reader proceeds in her ongoing intentional activity of concretization, which may also be referred to as the activity of the actualization or the constitution of the aesthetic object per se – that is, the object of the intentional aesthetic activity. Ingarden has a good deal to say about the activity of concretization – it’s the central activity under analysis in The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art – but the following passage will prove especially helpful for what I’ll be saying below. In Chapter 7 of The Literary Work of Art, ‘The Stratum of Represented Objects’, Ingarden tells us this: … the literary work itself is to be distinguished from its respective concretizations, and not everything that is valid for the concretization of the work is equally valid for the work itself. But the very possibility that one and the same literary work can allow any number of concretizations, which frequently differ from the work itself and also, in their content, differ significantly among themselves, has its basis, among other things, in the schematic structure of the object stratum of a literary work, a structure which allows spots of indeterminacy. (LWA 252)

Even limiting the scope of The Literary Work of Art to the treatment of that particular sort of artwork, and postponing his treatment of other sorts of artworks, Ingarden found the undertaking to be simply immense. He in fact had to abandon earlier sketches and outlines of LWA, and the final form of the book retains only shortened versions of his treatments of some of the “borderline cases”, which he presents in chapter 12, the opening chapter of “Part III: Supplementation and Conclusions”.4 In the following, final three chapters (13, 14 & 15) of LWA, Ingarden attempts to pull together the most important results of his previous analyses in the formulation of a general conclusion regarding the ontology and identity of the literary work. In chapter 13, “The ‘Life’ of a Literary Work”, Ingarden begins to approach this conclusion by way of recalling his previous distinction between the 4

See “Part III: Supplementation and Conclusions”, chapter 12, “Borderline Cases”. Ingarden here includes brief examinations of the stage play, the film, the pantomime, and the scientific report. See also the “Appendix: The Functions of Language in the Theater.” I shall be using the English translation by George Grabowicz: The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

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literary work of art and the various concretizations of the work arising out of its apprehension by the reader. The analyses Ingarden offers in “The ‘Life’ of a Literary Work” have received little attention from the commentators.5 This is especially unfortunate, for some of these analyses are unusually condensed and difficult to follow, and they sometimes lead to remarkable yet puzzling conclusions that Ingarden never clarifies in LWA or elsewhere. The purpose of this paper is to unpack this chapter by outlining its central arguments and suggesting one way in which its most provocative claims might be further developed. As I shall demonstrate, one of this chapter’s most valuable contributions, and one that the commentators have curiously failed to attend to, is to be found in what it has to offer to both literary and philosophical hermeneutics. It is not uncommon for critics and commentators to speak of the ‘life’ of a literary work. In doing so, they are generally referring to the period of time during which the work receives critical or popular attention. When Ingarden spoke of the life of the work, however, he had something entirely different in mind. He was speaking not of a time period but of two separate yet related processes in which the work both (i) ‘comes to life’ through the individual reader’s activities of apprehension and concretization and (ii) exerts an ongoing influence in the creation and preservation of the cultural life-world of its readers. I examine the former process in the first part of this paper, describing the basic features of these activities in which the reader engages. When discussing the danger of “false concretizations”, Ingarden offers in passing one of his relatively few remarks concerning literary criticism, mentioning the ‘great role’ it can play in helping us avoid such inappropriate concretizations misinterpretations of literary works. In the second part of this paper I expand on that remark, explaining how his analyses of the literary work provide helpful criteria for literary criticism. In the third part of the paper I turn to Ingarden’s brief but extremely important discussion of the influence of the literary work in the creation of our life-world. While it has been commonplace for critics and commenta5

The only study with which I am familiar that deals with this chapter at any length at all is Yushiro Takei’s “The Literary Work and Its Concretization in Roman Ingarden’s Aesthetics”, in Anna-Teresa Tymienicka, ed., Phenomenology of Life in a Dialogue between Chinese and Occidental Philosophy, Analecta Husserliana, vol. XVII, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984, pp. 285–307.

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tors over the past few decades to speak of the ‘artworld’, and of the literary work as inhabiting a literary ‘artworld’, this concept suddenly seems impoverished and sterile when compared with Ingarden’s conception of the vital function performed by the literary work of art in the creation of the cultural world that these critics and commentators themselves inhabit. It is here that we find this chapter’s most important contribution to contemporary hermeneutics.

I: Apprehension and Concretization of the Literary Work of Art Ingarden pointedly refused to immerse himself in detailed investigation of the epistemological elements of the aesthetic experience in LWA. He subsequently pursued such investigation at length in The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art and numerous shorter works written throughout his career, but in LWA any detailed analysis of the epistemological elements involved in the aesthetic experience of the literary work of art could only have diverted the reader’s attention from the ontological task at hand. Yet already in LWA Ingarden had found it necessary to offer provisional analyses of some of these epistemological elements, for they prove to be essential to the constitution, and thereby to the ontology, of the literary work of art. In these analyses the simple distinction between the objective and the subjective quite rightly begins to blur, for it becomes evident that the reader’s subjective cognitive operations are guided by the structure of the objectively existing work of art while they at the same time serve to actualize the potential of that work. It is precisely in passages that offer such brief analyses of the nature of the reader’s cognitive activity in relation to the text and the literary work of art that we find the most potentially troublesome spots of lack of clarity in Ingarden’s arguments, and we find some of the most worrying of all in the chapter on “The ‘Life’ of a Literary Work”. Ingarden opens his chapter on “The ‘Life’ of a Literary Work” as follows: In our analyses up to now we have treated the literary work as an objectivity in itself, and we have attempted to see it in its characteristic structure. . . . Only in those places

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where the literary work itself indicated subjective operations were we compelled to fall back on subjective elements. Now is the time to bring the literary work back, so to speak, into contact with the reader and introduce it into concrete spiritual and cultural life in order to see what new situations and problems arise as a result. (LWA 331)

As it turned out, Ingarden found it impossible to do justice to the many problems that arose when he attempted this return to the subjective elements involved in the reader’s encounter with the literary work. After the publication of LWA in 1931, Ingarden had hoped to concentrate on problems of ontology, and in 1935 he in fact began work on his magnum opus, Controversy over the Existence of the World, in which he explored these problems in excruciating detail. Yet he found himself compelled to return to a more detailed examination of those subjective operations he had only provisionally discussed in LWA, and in 1936 he published The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (in Polish). One of the central concepts of CLWA is that of concretization, which is by no means surprising given the fundamental importance of concretization in the reader’s apprehension of the literary work. Ingarden had already employed the concept of concretization in many of his preceding analyses – most notably in his analyses of schematized aspects, spots of indeterminacy and aspects held in readiness, for in all of these “the literary work itself indicated subjective operations”. Yet it is here, in the three brief sections comprising the bulk of one of his concluding chapters, that Ingarden first attempted to analyze at any length at all the activity of concretization as such. As he tells us: “The next task before us is to describe the properties of the concretization of a literary work and to point out the relationships, on the one hand between the concretizations and the literary work, and on the other between the concretizations and the subjective experiences in which they are constituted.”(LWA 332) Before turning to the distinction between the literary work and its concretizations, Ingarden discusses the distinction between the literary work and the subjective operations and psychic experiences of the reader.6 The

6

He discusses this distinction in § 62: “The concretizations of a literary work and the experiences of its apprehension”.

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arguments are similar to those he marshals elsewhere,7 and the distinction is firmly restated. In the course of his discussion, however, he inserts the following “note of some importance”: … the wealth and complexity of subjective operations and experiences that are to be effected in the apprehension of a literary work require – if the reading and the apprehension of the work are to be at all successful – the apprehending subject to shield himself from all disturbing influences. Thus, there is usually an involuntary thrustingaside and suppression of all those experiences and psychic states belonging to the rest of the given reader’s real world; there is as if a blindness and deafness to acts and events of the real world. During our reading we even try to push away, as possible distractions, events and concerns that in themselves are quite negligible (hence we look for a comfortable position, a quiet setting, etc.). This aloofness from our real surroundings leads, on the one hand, to the situation that the represented objectivities that are depicted constitute a separate world for us, one that is distant from actual reality; on the other hand, it enables us to assume an attitude of pure beholding with respect to the represented objectivities and to enjoy fully the aesthetic value qualities that appear in the work. It is because of this, among other things, that we achieve the specifically “aesthetic” (“beholding”) attitude that is absolutely necessary for the apprehension of, and vital communion with, works of art. (LWA 334–5)

This passage has a decidedly Husserlian ring to it. We can easily recognize how deftly Ingarden has incorporated Husserl’s required epoché into his description of the aesthetic attitude: the reader must bracket all claims of the real world if the apprehension of the world represented in the literary work of art is to be successful. Yet this description of the aesthetic attitude is problematic. Ingarden here appears simply to have gone too far in asserting the ontological independence of the literary work from its reader, who is now in the position of merely “beholding” the work. This passage suggests that the reader is not at all engaged in the (co-)creation of the object being apprehended, and this would appear to be inconsistent with much of what we have read earlier in LWA. Perhaps more importantly, it is clearly inconsistent with the results of the more probing analyses of this 7

See, for example, LWA, chapter 1, “Initial Problems”, § 3: “The problem of the mode of existence of the literary work”, and The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity, tr. Adam Czerniawski, Jean G. Harrell, ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), esp. chapter 2, “The Musical Work and Conscious Experiences”.

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experience that he subsequently presents in CLWA, where he tells us, for example, that “the aesthetic experience is to a large extent creative, or at least cocreative, insofar as it leads to the constitution of the aesthetic concretization of the literary work of art”.8 Ingarden’s description of the aesthetic attitude as a “pure beholding” certainly seems inconsistent with his many descriptions of the cognitive activity involved in the reading subject’s (co-)creation of the aesthetic object. While this chapter of LWA might in fact be read as a partial outline for much of CLWA, it would be incorrect to suggest that, despite the rigor of his preceding ontological analyses, he hadn’t yet explored the epistemological elements of the aesthetic experience in sufficient depth, and that he simply fell back into the traditional view of the aesthetic attitude as passive and receptive. It is certainly the case that in the far more detailed analyses that he presents in CLWA he explicitly links the aesthetic attitude, which he describes as “cocreative”, to “active” as opposed to “passive” reading.9 Yet the analyses in LWA are sufficiently rigorous, to say the least, and the epistemological excursions he presents are not at all provisional. The problem behind the apparent inconsistency in Ingarden’s description lies elsewhere. It lies, I suggest, in the nature of the literary work of art itself – or more precisely, in the peculiar sort of ‘life’ that the literary work of art may be said to possess. The work of art lives in and through its concretizations, from which it is ontologically distinct. As Ingarden explains: We have already had occasion to indicate that a distinction should be drawn between the work itself and its concretizations, which differ from it in various respects. These concretizations are precisely what is constituted during the reading and what, in a manner of speaking, forms the appearance of a work, the concrete form in which the work itself is apprehended.10 8

CLWA 329; § 29: “The difference between the aesthetic experience of the literary work of art and the reflective cognition of its aesthetic concretization”. 9 He writes, for example: “The reading of a literary work of art can thus be accomplished ‘actively,’ in the sense that we think with a peculiar originality and activity the meaning of the sentences we have read; we project ourselves in a cocreative attitude into the realm of the objects determined by the sentence meanings.” (CWLA 40, § 9: “Passive and active reading”) 10 LWA 332, § 61: “Introduction” to chapter 13, “The ‘Life’ of a Literary Work”.

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In § 63, “The literary work and its concretizations”, Ingarden examines several properties of concretizations that distinguish them from literary works. These properties range across all of the strata of the work. The literary work’s schematic presentations of linguistic sound formations, word meanings, and sentence meanings are apprehended in a particular manner, the work’s schematized aspects are fulfilled, the represented objectivities become more fully determined, and the parts of the work take on the character of a developing whole. It is only in its concretization that the potentiality of the literary work is actualized. “Thus it is only in a concretization that those aesthetic values that are conditioned by the dynamics of the work or carried by them can be fully constituted.”(LWA 343) Yet while it is the reader’s activity of apprehension and concretization that brings the work to life,11 this same activity often jeopardizes its well being. As Ingarden observes, “The concretization not only contains various elements that are not really part of the work, though allowed by it, but it also frequently shows elements that are foreign to it and which more or less obscure it.”(LWA 337) The obscuration resulting from such inappropriate concretization can be quite extensive: A literary work can be expressed for centuries in such a masked, falsifying concretization until finally someone is found who understands it correctly, who sees it adequately, and who in one way or another shows its true form to others. Herein lies the great role of literary criticism (or literary history) or – if we are dealing with the theater – of stage-directing: through it the true form of the work can again be expressed. Conversely, interpretation, resulting from false concretizations, may obscure it. (LWA 340-41) 11

I am here subsuming the specific activity of concretization under the more general activity of apprehension, as did Ingarden himself. For Ingarden – and for phenomenology in general – “apprehension” is a term that is properly employed in reference to a comprehensive activity of consciousness that combines not only the various operations of intentionality but also quite distinct features of cognition (depending on what particular sort of conscious activity is under examination – e.g., external perception, memory, desire, and so on). “Concretization”, on the other hand, is the term used by Ingarden in reference to the more specific operation revolving around the imaginative fulfilling of aspects characteristic of the work of art. In the case of the literary work of art, as its apprehension consists largely in such concretization, the two terms can often be used interchangeably.

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This is one of the relatively few passages in which Ingarden makes explicit mention of the valuable task performed by literary criticism. This topic has been largely ignored by Ingarden’s commentators, and as it is especially relevant to our present discussion, it warrants our attention.

II: The “Great Role” of Literary Criticism The distinction between literary criticism and literary theory has become blurred in the works of contemporary theorists and critics, as has the distinction between literary theory and philosophical theory. In writing about the literary work of art, Ingarden never intended his strictly philosophical investigations to enter the arena of “literary criticism” per se. In A Glossary of Literary Terms, the standard lexicon for English departments throughout North America, M. H. Abrams writes: “Criticism is the overall term for studies concerned with defining, classifying, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating works of literature.”12 Given this definition, Ingarden’s extensive analyses of the ontology of the literary work of art, as well as his epistemological investigations into our cognition of the literary work, would appear to have little or no immediate bearing on literary criticism. Yet this is by no means the case. His various analyses yield a model of the literary work of art that is especially well suited to application in literary criticism proper. Two features of this model are of particular value in this regard: (i) its distinction between the work of art and the aesthetic object and (ii) its view of the role played by authorial intention. The task of literary criticism, especially when analyzing, comparing and evaluating a literary work, must deal with two central questions, the first regarding the skill and technique of the artist, and the second regarding the aesthetic merit of the literary work itself. The former question focuses primarily on the relation of the artist to his or her work as a work of art, while the latter question focuses on the work itself as an aesthetic object. When dealing with the question of an author’s skill, Ingarden’s conception of the literary work of art as a stratified formation is of particular 12

M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, sixth edition (Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1993), p. 39.

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use, for the individual strata provide distinct and specific points of reference that may be employed in systematically assessing the author’s technical ability. The stratum of word sounds, for example, might be singled out and analyzed in the critical evaluation of the author’s facility with the purely phonic features of language, while the stratum of meaning units might be focused on in order to determine the value and success of the author’s use of such varieties of figurative language as synecdoche, metonymy and personification. In considering the stratum of schematized aspects, the critic might examine, for example, the extent to which the author adequately prepares the reader for the addition of an unexpected personality trait to an already somewhat familiar character in the story – that is, the critic could investigate the success of the author’s construction of aspects of that character’s personality that remain ‘held in readiness’ until the appropriate moment in the narrative. And similarly, with regard to the stratum of represented objectivities, the critic might attend to the manner in which the author has introduced into the setting various features in such a way that they successfully complement or contrast with one another. The final “critical test” of the literary work is the extent to which the four strata have been individually constructed in such a way as to interact with one another and give rise to a complex whole characterized by polyphonic harmony. In the successful literary work of art the strata are interwoven with one another so as to enable elements of each of the strata to complement and be complemented by elements of all the other strata in the creation of a complex, harmonious whole. In determining the extent to which a literary work achieves this goal, the critic must look not only at the technical skill of the artist as it is reflected in the finished work of art, but also at the aesthetic object – that is, at the objective correlate of the aesthetic experience itself (which is “cocreated” by the reader). While the individual strata of the work of art ‘carry’ their respective artistic value qualities, when these strata are successfully combined in a harmonious whole, the qualities, remaining diverse and distinct from one another, complement one another and increase in artistic value as qualities that now

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belong not merely to the work of art but to that complex harmonious structure that is the aesthetic object itself.13 Here we must call attention to a distinction that has been too often overlooked not only by Ingarden commentators but also, and not at all uncommonly, by literary critics. An artistic value quality is not the same thing as an aesthetic value quality: an artistic value quality belongs to the work of art, and an aesthetic value quality belongs to the aesthetic object. This distinction is not particularly subtle, but it tends to become easily obscured by the ontological difference between the work of art and the aesthetic object. While each of these is an intentional object – to state this point more boldly we may say that each of them possesses intentional being – the peculiar mode of being of the work of art is different from that of the aesthetic object. To recall the Aristotelian distinction that Ingarden is here employing, the work of art is a potential aesthetic object; the aesthetic object is the actualized work of art. More precisely, the work of art is potentially any number of possible aesthetic objects, this number being that of the readers of the work and their individual and several acts of concretization. And any one product of such an act (or series of individual acts of concretion achieved by one reader and taken as a coherent whole) is but one actualization of the work of art. The extent to which the work of art makes possible and facilitates its actualization as an aesthetic object is the most general measure of its artistic value. The extent to which the aesthetic object exhibits its own peculiar sort of features in its concretizations is the most general measure of its aesthetic value. We can also approach this distinction between the artistic and the aesthetic from Ingarden’s own initial set of ontological distinctions. To begin 13

Ingarden’s view has been criticized for demanding the impossible. If the aesthetic object is present to the reader only while he or she is in the aesthetic attitude, and the reader adopts a different, ‘critical’ attitude when engaged as a literary critic, then the aesthetic object must always lie beyond the grasp of the critic, who must therefore remain incapable of passing judgment on the aesthetic value of the work in question. (See, for example, William Ray, Literary Meaning [Oxford: Blackwell, 1984], p.44.) This criticism falls short on two counts: First, it assumes the inability of consciousness to adopt more than one complementary attitude at any one moment. And second, it fails to note that the value qualities are already manifest (albeit perhaps not fully) at the level of the work of art, ‘prior to’ their consideration as elements belonging to the aesthetic object.

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with, we have to bear in mind that the work of art is not identical with its material ontic foundation. In the case of the literary work of art, this means, quite simply, that the work of art is not identical with the physical text – the novel that we read, for example, is not the same “thing” as the book that we hold in our hands, and the poem is not the same as the page. The novel is the work of art, the physical book is its material ontic foundation. As we read (apprehend) this novel, however, we concretize it – or more precisely, we engage in an ongoing series of acts of concretization of the particular schematized features of the work – as an aesthetic object. There is just one aesthetic object here, but it grows during the course of our ongoing concretization. As this concretization proceeds, various elements of the individual strata are continuously developed, and different aspects of the aesthetic object are realized. The manner in which this realization is achieved on each of the strata taken separately is one measure of the aesthetic value of the object that is being concretized. In the case of a literary work of art of high artistic value, the aesthetic object grows in a manner that exhibits a quite unique organic unity.14 This organic unity is characterized by what Ingarden refers to as “polyphonic harmony”, the harmonious interplay of elements belonging to two or more of the four strata. This harmony belongs not to the work of art, but to the aesthetic object; it comes into being only with the reader’s act of concretization. The extent to which this polyphonic harmony is realized in the aesthetic object is another measure of that object’s aesthetic value. This distinction between work of art and aesthetic object, and the corollary distinction between artistic and aesthetic value, has always been at work in literary criticism, although it has rarely been acknowledged. To assert that an author failed to achieve her goal, or that her work fell short of her reader’s expectations, is to make a claim regarding the artistic value of the work. In some respect or another, the work possesses insufficient or defective aesthetic potential; it does not allow itself to be concretized as an aesthetic object exhibiting aesthetic value. In his Poetics, Aristotle detailed many of the essential features of the dramatic work of art with respect to which it may be evaluated – for example, the complexity of the plot, the 14

To say that the aesthetic object “grows” anticipates a point I’ll be making in what follows when I turn to the “life” of the literary work of art.

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consistency of character development, the maintenance of an illusion of reality. His discussion of all of these features rests always upon the potentiality of the work to be translated in its performance into an emotionally and intellectually stimulating aesthetic experience on the part of the audience. This is precisely the actualization of potentiality, and this process of concretization proceeds, according to Aristotle, in accordance with what the poet is to aim at – in accordance, that is to say, with the author’s intention. In its consideration of the nature of authorial intention and its relevance to interpretation and criticism, the more recent and contemporary critical literature has raised questions concerning this issue that Ingarden never explicitly addressed in his works. Two salient features of his position are, however, quite clear, and each of them proves of some value to literary criticism: First, Ingarden clearly asserts the significance of the author’s intention in the creation of the work of art; and second, Ingarden emphatically denies that the author’s “psychological states” have any bearing whatsoever on the reader’s own cognition of the literary work of art. The first feature is relevant in that it appears to speak of a necessary condition of the possibility of undertaking such literary criticism as that described above – that is, a literary critic can assess an author’s skill or ability only when she also assumes that the author has “intended” to achieve a particular result or effect.15 The second feature is perhaps the more significant in the context of the current debate on this issue, for it has some bearing on the so-called “death of the author”. A common feature of twentieth-century literary criticism has been the denial of the relevance of authorial intention for the critical evaluation of literary works. The expression “authorial intention” has been understood in different senses in the recent literature. When the New Critics spoke of it in the early 1920s, they had in mind the author’s independent statement of what he or she had intended to achieve in a particular work. It is not clear that Ingarden would have agreed with the New Critics, for such a statement would certainly provide a standard against which to 15

As K. K. Ruthven observes: “For as long as we can go saying that certain meanings are ‘unintentional’, it will not possible for us to dispense entirely with purposeful intentions, however troublesome they may prove to formalist critics.” (Critical Assumptions [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979], p.139.)

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measure the author’s success. But Ingarden was vehemently opposed to psychologism of any form, and his position most certainly does stand in agreement with those more recent critics – from camps as diverse as poststructuralism (e.g., Derrida, Foucault, de Man), semiotics (e.g., Eco) and philosophical hermeneutics (e.g., Gadamer) – who have maintained that the literary work does not serve the function of provoking in the reader the same “psychic experiences” as those enjoyed by the author during the writing of the work. Ingarden’s analyses of the literary work might seem greatly to restrict the significance of authorial intention in the reader’s unique aesthetic experience of the work as aesthetic object, for Ingarden stresses the role played by the individual reader at every stage of the concretization of the work. Nevertheless, Ingarden’s final position in this regard remains unclear, for he never underestimated the importance of the artist’s “creative idea”, which he seems to have regarded as somehow guiding both the writer’s creation and the reader’s cocreation of the literary work of art. Indeed, it is this “creative idea” that the literary critic is supposed to recognize and acknowledge, helping to ensure that the reader is able to follow its lead in his or her own activities of apprehension and concretization, thereby avoiding false concretizations as far as possible. Such “false concretizations” are most likely to arise from the misapprehension of ideal meaning structures – e.g., sentences and sentence-complexes – and these false concretizations will prove most tenacious in cases where the meaning structures were formulated in ambiguous language. One might expect that the worst result of such misapprehension and false concretization would be that the literary work continues to be “masked”, or misunderstood. And usually, such misunderstanding would not prove all that serious. As Ingarden himself remarks, Our daily praxis already convinces us that in a given work some sentences (and hence states of affairs) can be removed or replaced by other appropriately selected sentences without affecting what is essential for the represented objects and events or the polyphony of value qualities that is characteristic of the given work. (LWA 345–46)

The work of art itself, in other words, will remain unaffected throughout all of this history of misapprehension, misinterpretation, and false concretization.

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Regardless of how these matters stand in individual cases, it is clear, at any rate, that (1) all these changes can be brought about only on the condition that appropriate subjective operations are directed at them (so to speak “from outside”) and (2) these operations can be realized only in a concretization of the work. The work itself, once it has been created, cannot in any respect change by itself, cut off, so to speak, from its concretizations; it can only be changed. This is already implicit in the fact that none of its strata, nor it itself, taken as a whole, is an ontically autonomous object. It is created, changed, and destroyed by appropriate subjective operations. (LWA 346)16

III: The Life-World and the Literary Work of Art After repeating that we are speaking figuratively when we talk about the “life” of the literary work, Ingarden clarifies that it “lives” while it (i) is expressed in a manifold of concretizations and (ii) undergoes change as a result of being concretized differently by various readers. As Ingarden explains further: For long years the work may not “experience” any concretizations, and then comes a brief day of rapid popularity and the formation of diverse concretizations. It can last through a number of different spiritual eras and then undergo [a phase of] typically changing concretizations; it may “fade away” and then unexpectedly “experience” a period of revival, etc. What is important is that there really is a certain analogy to the life of a living being. (LWA 351)

Unlike other “living beings”, the concretization of the literary work is not ontically autonomous, so it cannot “react” to its environment. Historical and cultural influences bear relentlessly down upon it, and the concretizations undergo change accordingly. Sometimes these influences may give rise to such a radical misapprehension that the work itself comes to be entirely left behind, and the reader’s subjective operations concretize “an entirely new work”. (LWA 352) Yet throughout all of this, the literary work of art endures. It may be misunderstood, misinterpreted, misapprehended, falsely concretized, and thoroughly abused in every way possible, but it 16

Ingarden continues: “For a literary work can even be destroyed when the author undoes the already created work by means of special intentional acts and simultaneously also destroys the physical conditions whose conditions would enable other psychic subjects to concretize the work already condemned by its author to nonexistence.”

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always retains its identity. And it does so precisely because it is distinct from its concretizations, by virtue of which it is said, figuratively, to “live”. But the literary work also lives another life, and this one is not figurative. This is a cultural life. Ironically, it wins this life when the reader ceases to distinguish between it and its concretization. As Ingarden puts it: There is, however – as we have already indicated – still another “life” to a literary work. We say the work “lives” when it itself (and not merely its concretization . . .) undergoes various changes as a result of variously formed concretizations. Obviously, this is possible only on the further condition that, as he reads, the reader (or the spectator in a performance) take a certain attitude toward the work; but this, after all, is most frequently the case and is altogether natural. (LWA 352)

In a sense, this second life is built upon the first. The concretization of the literary work comes to be taken as the work itself. The reader “absolutizes the given concretization, identifies it with the work, and in a naïve way directs himself intentionally to the work thus intended.” (LWA 353) This happens to some extent at every reading, with every reader, but the life of the work undergoes significant change when the reading achieves the status of an influential interpretation. When this interpretation is able to proceed in accordance with the schematic structure of the work, it may experience “phases of magnificent development and perfection” (LWA 354). But if the concretization that is absolutized arises from a misapprehension of the ideal meaning structures, and if this concretization proves to be an influential interpretation, the life of the literary work is liable to take a catastrophic turn. The work might be censored, banned, or even burned, an eventuality that would obliterate even the material ontic foundation of the work, thereby bringing about the “death” of the work. More often, however, when a misapprehension results in a false concretization that proves to be an influential interpretation, and this interpretation gains credibility in the literary world, it is not the case that the literary work is killed, supplanted or replaced. When this happens, the literary work continues to live, but it is compelled to masquerade as something it is not. Historical conditions and critical sensibilities dictate that only certain of its aspects be presented to the reader and that it does not reveal its true identity. This might continue for such a long time that the work will come to assume an entire tradition of misrepresentation. But the work will endure, and as cultural

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tastes alter and the concretizations continue to change, it will appear to take on a new identity, and it will suddenly find itself presenting an entirely different message to a new generation of readers. In this way, the literary work is quite capable of living through any number of lives. We might call this second life of the literary work the persona of its predominant manifold of concretizations. In this incarnation, the literary work is most clearly an expression of the identity of the culture in which it is being interpreted. Clearly, this second life is therefore especially precarious. “It is also possible for the language in which the work is written to lose its manifestation qualities for us because it is no longer a ‘living’ language.” (LWA 354) When this happens, Ingarden tells us, the work dies “a natural death”. Perhaps long after that death, scholars might be able to learn the dead language, decipher the text, and resuscitate the work, but in the absence of the culture that provided it with its original context, its new “life” would doubtless prove tragically meaningless and mercifully short. These observations regarding the “second life” of the literary work of art point to a central feature of Ingarden’s analyses that has much to contribute to both literary and philosophical hermeneutics. This feature consists in the acknowledgment of the reader’s contribution in her cocreation of the aesthetic object. As we have seen, this cocreation consists largely in the activity of concretization, and we have noted that concretizations continue to change throughout the course of the work’s “second life”, often in accordance with changes in cultural tastes. This concretization, which proceeds in part in accordance with the prejudices of the reader,17 serves in fact to establish these prejudices in an intersubjectively available manner when one interpretation of the work becomes commonly accepted, thereby 17

This is most clearly the case in the reader’s encounter with “spots of indeterminacy” in the work. The manner in which the reader “fills in” these spots is largely up to the reader herself, but the reader will often perform this act simply by employing, without even thinking about it, certain prejudices that have been inculcated in her by her culture. If, for example, an author were to describe the wedding dress of a character without explicitly identifying its color, leaving the determination of its color up to the concretizing reader, a reader in North America would probably imagine it to be white, whereas a reader in China might naturally imagine it to be red. Moreover, each of these colours is associated in each culture with a number of evaluative prejudices that differ from those at work in the other culture.

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serving in fact to assist in the intersubjective constitution of some of those values that determine the identity of the culture itself. In other words, while the literary work of art is concretized by the reader, or readers, in terms of shared cultural values that operate as hermeneutic prejudices, the incorporation of these values in the concretization of the work leads – most obviously in the case of widely disseminated literary criticism – to the preservation and continued transmission of these cultural values. In this way, while the work of art “comes to life” through the cognitive activity of the reader, it at the same time makes possible similar acts of concretization on the part of other readers, who – following the lead, as it were, of that “first” reader or literary critic – will adopt in their reading the same values and prejudices, thereby engaging in the intersubjective constitution of cultural values. This sort of constitution and transmission of values is just the opposite of the sort of “aesthetic cultivation” that Gadamer calls into question in Truth and Method. In Part I, I, 3, (A), “The dubiousness of the concept of aesthetic cultivation (Bildung)”, Gadamer describes how, following Kant’s radical subjectivization of aesthetics, this concept came to entail an alienation from reality: For just as the art of “beautiful appearance” is opposed to reality, so aesthetic consciousness includes an alienation from reality – it is a form of the “alienated spirit,” which is how Hegel understood culture (Bildung). The ability to adopt an aesthetic stance is part of cultured (gebildete) consciousness. For in aesthetic consciousness we find the features that distinguish cultured consciousness: rising to the universal, distancing from the particularity of immediate acceptance or rejection, respecting what does not correspond to one’s own expectation or preference. 18

In his attempt to retrieve the question of the truth of art, Gadamer returns aesthetic cultivation, and Bildung in general, to the particularity of immediate experience. His own analyses of the aesthetic experience, in Truth and Method and elsewhere,19 are directed largely against the elements of 18

See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald. G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 84. 19 See, for example, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, tr. Nicholas Walker, ed. Robert Bernasconi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); see esp. “The Play of Art” in this collection.

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transcendentalism and subjectivism that came to characterize analyses of the aesthetic experience after Kant. Given this, it is not at all surprising that Gadamer’s analyses downplay the contribution of the subject. According to Gadamer, the aesthetically experiencing subject first comes to be what she is in the event of that experience – in fact, for Gadamer, both the subject and the object first come into being as the two poles of this experience. But we might ask whether Gadamer has not gone too far here, and in two respects – or rather, in both directions. In order to reject the radical subjectivization of the aesthetic experience, Gadamer finds it necessary to deny the pre-existence of any subject whatsoever – and also of any object! In claiming that the work of art first comes into existence, along with the experiencing subject, in the course of the aesthetic experience, Gadamer has also denied the pre-existence of the object, ironically opening the door for the readmission of another variety of radical subjectivism in the form of relativism. While Gadamer himself always spoke against the claim of radical relativism – and Gadamer’s best commentators have repeatedly demonstrated that his hermeneutics does indeed avoid the pitfalls of such relativism – it remains the case that it is simply impossible to speak of the work of art apart from the aesthetic object within the context of his hermeneutics. So we cannot consistently speak, in his hermeneutics, of the independently existing objectivity, but only of the subjectively apprehended objectivity, and our ontological analyses must always be directed toward the aesthetic experience itself. Here, too, Ingarden’s analyses have something to offer hermeneutics, and this will perhaps prove to be their most important contribution to this field. The activity of concretization as Ingarden describes it – and he describes it always with an eye to the particularity of the immediate experience of the reader – leads to precisely the sort of cultural Bildung and continuation of tradition that play so central a role in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Yet in failing to distinguish between the work of art and the aesthetic object, hermeneutics remains incapable of identifying and analyzing the elements that the reader and the work of art individually contribute to the cocreation of the aesthetic object. Consequently, hermeneutics deprives itself of access to precisely that level of analysis that would provide it with a solid phenomenological foundation for its claims regarding the intersubjective constitution of value. Ingarden’s life’s work was di-

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rected largely against idealism and subjectivism, yet the possible contributions this work might have to make to the similarly motivated philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer have so far, inexplicably, been entirely neglected. I hope that the present paper might encourage further research into this hermeneutic dimension of Ingarden’s investigations into the ontology of the work of art, for it remains a rich and uncommonly promising area of study.

Ingarden: From Phenomenological Realism to Moral Realism EDWARD SWIDERSKI

Outside Poland few have paid attention to Ingarden’s avowal that the human being, or in his terms the “person,” occupied a central place in his philosophical concerns. In the second edition of Streit, published in Polish in 1960, Ingarden writes: I occupied myself with questions concerning the human person in my youth already, as early as 1913. At that time I had been studying a number of writers (Dilthey, Simmel, et al.) with the intention of writing a doctoral dissertation on the subject. For strictly circumstantial reasons, however, I reached an agreement with Husserl, in the autumn of 1913, to write on intuition in Bergson. All the same, the question of the human person never left me.1

The concluding sentence in the cited passage turned out not to be an idle remark: Ingarden’s last published work, in 1970, Über die Verantwortung. Ihre ontischen Fundamente, is in fact a compact but complex essay on the nature of the human person and her place in the world.2 And the shadow of the “arrangement” concluded many years earlier with Husserl falls across the pages of the essay. I wish to sketch how, in this final text, Ingarden gave form to his long-standing interest in “the question of the human person” (1) and why, in so doing, he pulled away from the kinds of commitments he had nurtured in his long-running “controversy” with Husserl as 1

Spór o istnienie świata, tom 1, PWN: Warszawa, 1960, pp. 256–57 (footnote). Polish philosophers who have addressed the question include first of all Ingarden’s direct students and disciples, in particular W. Stróżewski, A. Półtawski, A. Węgrzecki, J. Makota, as well as Ingarden’s long-time assistant and editorial collaborator, Danuta Gierulanka. None, however, has treated the matter systematically, that is, by taking Ingarden’s avowal as a key to a plausible interpretation of his work as a whole. A book that goes in this direction, and beyond, is by Jacek Filek, Ontologizacja odpowiedzialności, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Baran i Suszczyński, 1996. 2 Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1970. The Polish text appeared later, translated as O odpowiedzialności, in Książeczka o człowieku, Kraków: Wydawnictwo literackie, 1972. The English text is in Roman Ingarden: Man and Value, Washinton-Berlin-Münich: Philosophia Verlag, 1983. Here below I cite the German original. Existence, Culture, and Persons: The Ontology of Roman Ingarden. Arkadiusz Chrudzimski (ed.), Frankfurt: ontos, 2005, 159–189.

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regards the idealism-realism problematic (2). I will set out several theses regarding these two points and develop each in turn. In the main, my interpretation is that, in Verantwortung, Ingarden stepped outside the perimeters of his favored ‘realist’ phenomenology. Well worn caveats apply – what follows is neither an exacting textual analysis nor an exhaustive discussion of the main points; I restrict myself to a survey of the central issues in Ingarden’s shift in light of his ontology of responsibility. I do indulge in a degree of ‘interpretation’ that borders at times on the speculative, though I hope that it will be clear that Ingarden’s text itself invites such wide ranging interpretation.

1. Ingarden’s ‘moral realism’ In Verantwortung Ingarden adopted a position that can in many respects be put on a par with moral realism, in particular an ontology consistent with moral realism. I will expand on this claim straightaway, as it provides an opportunity to indicate in summary fashion the themes which Ingarden covers in his essay and prepares the ground for the two points of interpretation mooted above. A. Moral realism characterized While opinion is divided as to core definition of moral realism, the key components are more or less identifiable, however much, from writer to writer, they are weighted and characterized differently.3 A minimal list of components includes:

3

The ‘classic’ sources for the discussion of the pros and cons of moral realism are (1) the volume edited and introduced by Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Essays on Moral Realism, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988; (2) David O. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundation of Ethics, Cambridge, CUP, 1989. In addition, I have profited considerably from Ruwien Ogien’s book-length essay in his presentation and partial French translation of the Sayre-McCord volume entitled simply Le réalisme moral, Paris: Puf, 1999.

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• moral/ethical statements (moral claims) are taken as ‘objective’, that is, they are about something (they are not merely expressive; nor disguised imperatives) and, as such, have truth-values; moral realists typically hold that there are ‘moral-facts-of-the-matter’ that in principle resolve disputes in these regards; • an ontology that countenances ‘values’; ‘goods’; in some positions negative values; moral properties; … which are said, roughly, to be what the pertinent arguments are addressed to and that make up ‘moralfacts-of-the-matter’; • the kind of ontology defended by moral realists typically entertains both emergence (or supervenience) in regard to the occurrence conditions of the items in question, as well as to dispositions (powers) on the part of humans (agents) who perceive/respond to them under determinate conditions; • today, moral realists are typically sympathetic to naturalism, for instance of the kind associated with non-reductionist scientific realisms (Platonistic objectivisms of yesteryear, in the manner of Scheler, on one hand, Nicolai Hartmann, on the other, have been out of favor for some time). An overall take on the position advanced by an ideal-typical moral realist could then be as follows. That human beings engage with ‘moral facts’ is not simply a fact about them alone but a ‘complex fact’ about how the ‘world’ is, that is, not a fact merely about certain seemingly pertinent perceivings, feelings, understandings, articulatings (with an eye to experiential qualia as labeled in the public discourse), but about the way these human phenomena fit into the ‘world’ at large. In other words, the fact that we humans experience/conceive ourselves as moral beings is not simply something peculiar to us, it is – I take it that the the moral realist would argue: “it is in the first place” – a fact about a world that comprises moral agents. The moral realist proceeds from considerations of objectivity – moral discourse moves within a public domain where claims and counter-claims about moral issues are raised and debated – to claims for realism – that is, realism about the properties that in fact ground public moral discourse. In

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this connection defenders of moral realism may, on one hand, relativize the apparently indicative force of experiential givens – e.g. Erlebnisse taken to be indicative of morally relevant qualities – as well as the going, current semantics (labels) of moral discourse while, on the other hand, considering that their import is such as to legitimize claims in behalf of ontic foundations. One example of an argument in this vein consists in arguing for an analogy between the way ‘moral facts’ make their marks in experience (as well as via the discourse which articulates, well or badly, the quality and import of the experience) and the argument (by Locke, among others) for a connection between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities.4 The moral realist would have it (perhaps) that the predicates that ultimately capture underlying moral facts do not stand in a one-to-one, i.e., type-type correlation, with the descriptive terms of our ‘ordinary’ moral discourse. This ‘legitimation’ function ascribed to whatever it finally may be ‘in the world’ inclines moral realists today to naturalism, and in this regard there are weaker and more robust positions, depending on how the matter mooted in the last sentence of the preceding paragraph is handled. A robust naturalist moral realism typically adopts a supervenience view of moral properties. To be sure, one main challenge to the moral realist in this regard, and by the same token one main reason why anti-realists persist in their scepticism, is to show in what way ‘worldly’ grounds possibly help us better adjudicate going moral concerns as they happen to affect us within the communities in which we build our lives. B. Ingarden’s version Turning now to Verantwortung, elements of moral realism are either quite explicit or alluded to, or entailed by the overall thrust of Ingarden’s reasoning. How true this is can be evoked from the start by noting that Ingarden simply elides ‘objectivity’ and ‘realism’, that is, he is “indifferent” to the issue so persistently debated among moral realists and anti-realists – 4

John McDowell is perhaps the most noted exponent of this approach. Cf. “Values and secondary qualities,” in Sayre-McCord, op.cit., pp. 166–180; “Aesthetic value, objectivity, and the fabric of the world,” in E. Schaper (ed.), Pleasure, Preference, and Value, Cambridge: CUP, 1983, pp. 1–16.

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that moral claims are/are not truth claims and can/cannot be demonstrated as such. From the beginning, Ingarden works in medias res. I suggest that this elision is part and parcel of his choice of theme – the ontic foundations of responsibility. Anglo-American debates among proponents and opponents of moral realism typically revolve around such questions as whether the alleged intrinsic rightness of some action plays an ‘objective’, i.e., causal, role in shaping the pro-attitudes that bring someone to act this way. Ingarden changes the nature of the game, so to speak, by concerning himself with the ontic conditions of responsibility.5 This choice has interesting implications. Early in his study Ingarden narrows the focus to one of the several ways in which he says ‘responsibility’ can be understood [pp. 5–7]. Agents act responsibly (our intentions are then to the fore; we are typically said to be rational, therefore responsible); agents can also be said to assume responsibility (even for deeds other than our own, in case we are in a better position to expiate responsibility), and this too places intentional behavior to the fore; responsibility can also be imputed to an agent by an outside party. Ingarden will concentrate his attention on this latter kind of case, one which he will finesse, however, by his final distinction: persons (can and do) ‘bear responsibility’ [the long chapter “Das Tragen der Verantwortung,” pp. 7–30]. The point about the move from ‘imputing responsibility’ to ‘bearing responsibility’ is that the two meanings suggest a common moment that the second brings clearly into view. Prima facie neither imputing responsibility to an agent by a third party nor bearing responsibility involves, as a satisfaction condition, prior acknowledgement on the part of the given agent/subject to whom responsibility is imputed and/or who bears respon5

It would be useful to juxtapose Ingarden’s investigations with those gathered in the volume edited by Ton van den Beld, Moral Responsibility and Ontology, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000. Ontology is here understood in a manner that is entirely in the line of Ingarden’s concerns, though the impetus comes in this case from J. L. Mackie, a critic of moral realism. The editor reports that Mackie wished to escape the stranglehold of linguistic analysis narrowly conceived in order to ask about the ‘fabric of the world’ and whether there are such entities as values, etc within its texture. McDowell, cited in the preceding note, develops his case explicitly in answer to Mackie’s scepticisms in the regard to ‘objective values’.

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sibility. Acknowledgment, accompanied perhaps by an experiential datum, is at best a contingent circumstance so far as the ‘facts’ are concerned. It seems that we do sometimes come to bear responsibility for something – typically the consequences of some action of ours – unawares, for which reason recognizing and/or imputing responsibility amount to a cognitive discovery about an ‘objective’ state of affairs comprising a given person (precisely how ‘comprising’ is to be understood is among the questions Ingarden set out to examine). Indeed, in the latter case there is risk of error: I may be mistaken in imputing responsibility to you for the given state of affairs. Moreover, we sometimes try to bring persons to ‘see’ that and how they are responsible, we bring them to understand that they do bear responsibility. The third party may be perhaps ‘more aware’ that and how responsibility is at stake than the actual ‘bearer’, though our intuitions, never mind the law, tell us that ‘ignorance is no excuse’. So represented at least, the import of responsibility talk is ‘objectivist, it signals a clear distinction between our thinking about what we take to be – and acknowledge as – the facts, and the facts as they happen to be ‘in themselves’, including facts true of us, in our engagement with the ‘world’.6 Reflections of this kind may explain why, in a cryptic remark at the very start of his essay, Ingarden declares that considerations of ethical (sittliche) responsibility hardly exhaust the breadth of the analysis he is about to undertake. Unfortunately, he does not explicate, in the passage in question or elsewhere in the essay, in what an ‘ethical’ consideration thereof would consist. Let us assume that he had in mind behavior governed by prescriptions recognized in a given community as binding, normative for the given kinds of behavior. On this reading, ethical responsibility would be a matter of respecting/failing to respect norms and prescriptions, whether or not the latter have passed the meta-ethical test of ‘ontic’ import grounded in underlying ‘moral facts of the matter’. Thus, imputation of responsibility might remain quite shallow, conventional we could say, with 6

It is perhaps ironic that Ingarden, whose studies in formal ontology are so descriptively rich and meticulous, does little in Verantwortung to clarify ‘bearing responsibility’ as a ‘form’. Is it a ‘property’, ‘a relation’, a ‘state of affairs’ … and so on? Such questions are left dangling, though part of the reason, I conjecture, turns on Ingarden’s declared difficulties with the status of values. Cf. Footnote 11.

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the ‘deeper’ (meta-ethical, ontic) issue about the meaning and very possibility of bearing responsibility left unnoticed or dangling.7 It is in this meta- or extra-ethical sense, I claim, that Ingarden’s concern with responsibility falls in line with the moral realist’s agenda as sketched above. In fact, however, his extra-ethical, altogether ontic perspective reinforces the latter’s agenda. Ingarden's probings into the ontology required for this strong reading of responsibility make up the bulk of the essay. He distinguishes and examines, more or less extensively, six ontic conditions of responsibility. They are (1) the existence of values; (2) the self-identity of the agent; (3) the reality of personhood; (4) the (effective) reality of freedom grounded in the nature of personal agency; (5) the causal structure of the world in which relative systemic closure occurs; (6) the reality of time and thus the perdurance of the foregoing five ontic conditions of responsibility.8 The axis is clearly the agent qua person, precisely the category Ingarden had wished to explore in his youth already.9 Characterized first of all as a deliberating, self-monitoring, purposive agent, the person’s being and maintenance in the world arise on the basis of a broad range of physical (biological) and psycho-physical ‘systems’ operating interconnectedly on and within her organism and psyche. Together, they make up the conditions necessary to ensure the ‘substantial identity’ of the person and insofar, then, her continuity across time. The elaborate model of the systemic structure of personhood that Ingarden envisages (in the guise of a research program that is to involve empirical science) can be characterized as a naturalist, decidedly anti-reductionist, but emergentist, program. The model recalls, on one hand, the currently unfashionable categorically plu7

For completeness sake it ought to be noted here that throughout his career Ingarden occasionally held lectures on ethics. An representative selection of his lectures has appeared in Polish under the title Wykłady z etyki, Warszawa: PWN, 1989. In English a small extract has appeared as “Remarks on moral values,” in Man and Value, Berlin/Wien/München/Washington: Philosophia Verlag, 1983. 8 The six conditions are discussed consecutively in chapters 6–11 of Verantwortung, pp. 35–124. 9 The category ‘person’ is discussed in relation to Geist and Seele, as well as Psyche, all of these being embodied in the human individual. In effect, ‘person’ is the ensouled I (Ich), or simply the ‘self’ directing its affairs from the innermost core of its being.

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ralist stratum picture of the world (e.g. Nicolai Hartmann10); it is in line, too, with currently favored scientific realisms11; and explicitly with regard to moral realism, the position taken by Richard Boyd12. However, structure, substantial continuity, and purposive agency are jointly necessary, but not yet sufficient conditions for bearing responsibility. For that ‘values’ are required. It needs to be said here that just as Ingarden remained resolutely convinced that ‘there are’ values and that they are of different kinds, he also maintained, as resolutely, that there is precious little that we can say for sure about ‘what’ and ‘how’ values are.13 There is an air of ‘mystery’ in the account offered in Verantwortung and in virtually every other text Ingarden wrote regarding values (the exception being the texts devoted to aesthetic and artistic values in which Ingarden seems to have been on more secure ground). About all we learn in Verantwortung is that, were there no values, responsibility in the strong ontic meaning Ingarden ascribes to it, would go by the boards. The argument for values in regard to responsibility resembles a ‘transcendental’, or counterfactual, argument, that is, an argument from ‘conditions of possibility’ for something taken as central to our sense of ourselves, in particular in relation to agency, but requiring a warrant, the nature of which may be, for instance, causal mechanisms or structural conditions of inherence and dependency in some ‘whole’. Ingarden thinks this warrant has to do first of all with values within the fabric of the world. He appears to be thinking along lines like the following: 1. Unless we take responsibility seriously, our sense of ourselves as free, purposive agents in the world will lose much of the substance we typically ascribe to it; responsibility is bound up with ‘valencies’ (norma-

10

E.g., Neue Wege der Ontologie, Darmstadt: Neue Buchgesellschaft, 1964 For a comprenhensive discussion cf. Ilkka Niiniluoto, Critical Scientific Realism, Oxford: OUP, 1999. 12 Richard Boyd, “How to be a moral realist,” in Sayre-McCord, op. cit., pp. 181–228. 13 The text is “Was wir über Werte nicht wissen”, published in Erlebnis, Kunstwerk und Wert. Vorträge zur Aesthetik 1937–1967. There exists a Polish version as well as an English translation of the latter, “What we do not know about values,” in Man and Value, op. cit. 11

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tivities)14 spread across the components of behavior and beyond (the acts, the decisions, the consequences, etc.). 2. Therefore, accepting the wager, we will assume that, in addition to factors pertaining to ‘mere’ agency in the world, something quite objective accounts for the valencies pervading our actions, indeed can even come to steer our actions to the degree that we grow aware of and assume our responsibility in acting. 3. To clarify and buttress “our” case, competing positions regarding our sense of valency – the various subjectivisms, sociologisms, cultural relativisms, and the like – will be shown to be deficient in view of the real conditions underpinning the bearing of responsibility, in particular values. 4. In this way, the basis will be laid for a joint philosophical-scientific investigation – what Ingarden will characterize as metaphysics – into the nature of value, personhood … and thus responsibility. The flow of the ‘argument’ locates the import of values at the level of action, as suggested, for instance, by the phrase “the realization of values,” i.e., something that occurs (either entirely or partly) as result of our actions. Here I would like to point to parallels between the rudimentary action theory Ingarden sketches in Verantwortung and, on one hand, Georg Henrik von Wright’s analysis of action as ‘intervention’ and ‘bringing about change’15 as well as, on the other hand, conceptions of agency which defend ‘agent causation’ (also named ‘immanent causality’ by Chisholm16 or

14

If typically values are thought of as ‘goods’ and are therefore registered as ‘positive’, Ingarden believes that there are negative values as well. Where responsibility is at stake, for instance where someone is accountable for bringing about a ‘negative’ value, a countervailing ‘positive’ value is indicated. Its realization rights the situation. For this reason, a term like ‘valency’ is more apt to characterize the intended sense, which entails a kind of combinatorial logic of Wertzusammenhänge. 15 G. H. von Wright, An Essay in Deontic Logic and the General Theory of Action, Amsterdam, 1968; Explanation and Understanding, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971. 16 R. Chisholm, “Human Freedom and the Self” (1964), reprinted in G. Watson (ed.), Free Will, Oxford: OUP, 1982.

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‘purposive causality’ by Tuomela17). The underlying age-old issue here is of course the ‘freedom-determinism’ debate, which has to play a role in the ontology of moral realism. For the same reasons, the conception of action in question is ‘realist’, that is, it is rooted in an ontology of events rather than in a conception of action as interpretative constructs. The picture that these parallels thus brings into view depicts persons setting about acting by the ‘force’ of their intentions (generated within what Ingarden labels the ‘Ich-Zentrum’), thus ‘breaking into’ the ongoing course of the ‘world’ and ‘bringing about changes’ that would not have otherwise occurred (von Wright’s counterfactual criterion of action: given the causal structure of the world, had the agent not ‘intervened’, then (ceteris paribus) the change would not have occurred; inversely, should the change not have occurred, the agent cannot be said to have acted). Of these changes, some fall among the satisfaction conditions of the intention (the aim or goal of the action as the agent undertook it); others, arising out of the events set in train at the point of the agent’s point of entry (intervention) in the causal history of the world, are so-called ‘consequences’ of the action (i.e., of the intended result). One question as regards the latter might be, “how far do they extend?”, a question which expresses the nagging worry – “how much can I be responsible for?” – so soon as imputing responsibility (ethical or otherwise) is at stake. What Ingarden has to say about bearing responsibility and its ontic foundations suggests that he would answer as follows. Ontically, the being values have is part and parcel of what they ‘do’, that is, the function they have in the context of agency. The ‘being’ of a value appears to reside in its effectiveness (‘Geltung’); values are effective by virtue (sic) of demarcating and closing off that part of the chain of ‘consequences’ following from the agent’s ‘intervention’ in the world for which the agent can be said to bear responsibility, leaving any that remain (that may go on to infinity, for all one knows) as ‘neutral’ occurrences (at least with regard to ordinary human affairs). Ingarden writes in this regard of ‘value situations’, understanding thereby a complex of heterogeneous factors brought into being starting 17

R. Tuomela, Human Action and its Explanation. A Study in the Philosophical Foundations of Psychology. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977.

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with an action – in fact, starting with the decision to undertake the given action – and ‘stamped with value’ (metaphors abound in Ingarden’s text). As to its formal structure, it seems plausible that a ‘situation’ has the form of a state of affairs in case the latter category is compatible with a complex that would include agents and occurrences in the world, demarcated and set off from the surroundings by an emergent valency / value(s). Be that as it may, on Ingarden’s understanding values are not ‘simple’ properties of this or that individual object, just as they appear not to be mere relational properties (in particular the kind that involves a subject ‘valuating’ something, holding something as valent in relation to herself). We are thus meant to understand that values have ‘conditions of realization’ that include, but do not entirely coincide with, the satisfaction conditions of intentional actions. With this step we come back to the strong ‘objectivist’ and ‘realist’ meaning Ingarden reads into bearing responsibility. Acting, I may, by dint of what I set loose in the world, contribute to the ‘realization of a value’ that is orthogonal to the ‘meaning’ I ascribe to my action. I might therefore bring about, unawares, ‘negatively valent’ consequences, for which responsibility might be imputed to me and for which I in any case bear responsibility. In keeping with our ordinary intuitions about responsibility Ingarden is ready to acknowledge that, in cases of negative valency as characterized, the ‘burden of responsibility’ can be lifted from my shoulders (Entlastung) in case either I recognize my responsibility and succeed in bringing about a compensatory, positively valent ‘state of affairs’ (situation), or a third party assumes the responsibility, bears it, and sets about repairing (making amends for, expiating) the situation. Here, too, in regard to value situations so characterized, the ‘substantial identity’ of the person ensures, at least for the sake of this picture, the persistence over time of the person’s responsibility: I continue to be responsible for something I have wrought (the reality of time is among the conditions that ground responsibility; it is a subject that deserves independent consideration). Ingarden reinforces his realism on this basis by claiming that the ‘pushpull’ of value-situations (he speaks of their mutual ‘reactions’ on one another), where a value of one type impacts the conditions of realization of another, with the one eventually abrogating the realization of the other, is grounded in essential connections among values, in accordance with their

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qualitative natures. The last expression provides the key to understanding “realization.”18 There are, contends the realist Ingarden, ‘qualities of value’ which are potentially in actu, hence can be ‘verwirklicht’ so long as other (‘situational’) conditions are fulfilled. Thus, the ontology of responsibility cannot be complete, Ingarden holds, until investigations into Wertzusammenhänge and their conditions of realization have been carried out. So far I have been concerned to show that and how Ingarden’s perspective in Verantwortung cleaves to a realist line. His is a case for a realist ontology underpinning claims in behalf of objective moral facts. I have noted how, in relation to Ingarden’s salient theme, bearing responsibility and its ontic foundations, ‘awareness’ or experience thereof is no salient constitutive factor of what he wishes us to understand. More to the point: bearing responsibility does not depend on awareness, less still on acknowledgment thereof; neither the one nor the other is an ontic condition of responsibility. Is this apparent disregard of experience noteworthy? Ingarden, by reason of the phenomenology with which he is associated, might have been keen to discern and isolate ‘noetic-noematic’ correlations constitutive of a putative ‘responsibility-stream’ of intentional acts and their correlates. One may indeed wonder whether Ingarden’s degree of realism may be more than some contemporary moral realists would like to live with. Not a little of their work revolves around such questions as whether we have ‘moral experiences’ and in what their mark consists. While in his investigations of aesthetic value Ingarden underscores the import of emotional components, nothing analogous is mooted in Verantwortung. Pangs of conscience, whatever they amount to as indicators of moral facts, form no part of Ingarden’s concerns in Verantwortung. While I would hardly want to affirm that Ingarden is ‘blind’ to such experiences,19 his decidedly ontological, 18

W. Stróżewski has examined the locution ‘realization of values’ in historical and systematic detail, with Ingarden at the center of his investigation. Cf. W. Stróżewski, “O urzeczywistnianiu wartości” (1991), in W. Stróżewski, W kręgu wartości, Kraków: Znak, 1992, 57–75. 19 Talk of ‘blindness to value’ has sometimes come into discussions about value realism. In Ingarden’s case, the issue is present in his aesthetics, in regard to his conception of the ‘aesthetic object’ the emergence and constitution of which supposes an emotional response (‘perception’) to a value-quality that is then mounted in a context

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‘foundational’ penchant, takes the upper hand. Be that as it may, I stated at the outset that there is more to the story, that Ingarden’s study has another, indeed a polemical as well as a metaphysical, dimension and purpose. I turn to these at present.

2. Responsibility, Idealism … and Phenomenology Ingarden’s position in Verantwortung is an intricate affair in which a polemical purpose plays an essential role. Verantwortung contains a sub-text which reinforces, and gives much of the point to, the main text about persons and their makeup, values, etc.20 The sub-text shows us an Ingarden confronting his earlier incarnation as a steadfast, analytically meticulous opponent of (transcendental) idealism who sought an unassailable argument for realism. Remarkably, his return toward the end of his life to a full-fledged concentration on the question of the human person was tantamount, I maintain, to a repudiation of his original project to get to the bottom of the idealism-realism controversy. The key to understanding this claim, as I will develop in more detail, is Ingarden’s affirmation in Verantwortung that an idealist of Husserl’s stripe cannot even begin to generate a plausible, coherent ontic account of responsibility. In turn, a ‘world’ in which there is no ‘real’ responsibility is a world in which ‘personhood’ will have no ‘real’ purchase. In which case, something like a Husserlian ego might be all that we need to account for our sense of ourselves, precisely as a sense (meaning) within consciousness. But in the opposite case, where we embrace a ‘realism of responsibility’, personhood and its ontic foundations outstrip Egohood; in which case the philosophical framework built around the realist-idealist quarrel proves otiose. of other suitably intense qualities in order to let the recipient of the artwork delectate in the value. In this setting, being ‘blind’ to the quality/value is tantamount to aesthetic ignorance and the, as Ingarden writes, existential impoverishment this entails. Cf. Roman Ingarden, Cf. “Artistic and Aesthetics Values” and “Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Object” in Roman Ingarden, Selected Papers in Aesthetics, München/Wien: Philosophia Verlag, 1985. 20 The ‘subtext’ is the core of the discussion in chapter 8, “Die substantielle Struktur der Person and die Verantwortung.”

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I will first review that framework and rehearse Ingarden’s suggestions as to how a philosopher aspiring to settle the issues it was meant to stake out was expected to move around within it (A). This will help in understanding why and how the matter of responsibility showed up deficiencies in the framework. An innovative strategy is required. In what the latter consists belongs to the theme under (B). But the dangler in all of this is value; I will close with a few remarks about Ingarden’s value realism (C). A. The idealism-realism framework Taking as an initial textual reference the 1929 Husserl Festschrift to which Ingarden contributed “Bemerkungen zum Problem Idealismus-Realismus,” we note that therein he works out both a conception of philosophical analysis – rooted in the distinction between ontology and metaphysics, jointly set off from epistemology as an autonomous field of endeavor – and a project for the examination of issues on which idealists and realists had classically been divided (since Descartes, on his account). As for the project, it is based on the strategic claim that realist and idealist alike may to all extents and purposes admit the same (existential, formal, and material) ontology … with one critical difference separating them. The idealist affirms, the realist denies that among the properties of the individual things, states of affairs, events, processes, systems, etc. that they may otherwise be willing to admit into the world-picture, there is a characteristic mind-dependence running through them all, and that the latter is what is primary, indeed constitutively so, in regard to all the others. Husserl’s ‘transcendental idealism’ is the prime example of this kind of allegedly critical, and all-determining difference brought to the table by an idealist. Ingarden does not countenance this standpoint as a benign claim about ‘things-as-they-are-for-the-mind’; mind-dependence is hardly coeval with ‘ordinary’ constitutive qualitative properties of the things, etc. that idealists and realists alike might agree make up the ‘furniture’ of the world. It is not, in another words, just ‘another’ move in ontology, nor is transcendental phenomenology in this format merely a shift from ontology to meaning (noetic-noematic) analysis. On the contrary, Ingarden declares, far from being a claim falling in line with eidetic, structural analysis as Husserl

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originarily proposed it, it is much rather a claim about how things are essentially in fact. It is, Ingarden contends, a metaphysical claim of overarching import that writes mind into the substance of reality.21 By the same token, therefore, Ingarden effectively discounts a realist’s ‘merely’ ontological rebuttal of the position, while insisting at the same time that an ontological preparation of any such rebuttal is indeed required. He cleaves to a position that is not without recalling Kant’s remark that Existenz ist kein reales Prädikat. Predicates (categories) are the sorts of things ontologists will analyze; Existenz falls outside categorial analysis so construed, just as it seems not to be, according to Kant, within the range of cognitional syntheses. Ingarden framed these issues within a set of assumptions rolled out at the beginning of the opening volume of Controversy.22 For the sake of argument, they should be initially acceptable to a realist who is alive to the arguments Husserl advances from his transcendentalist perspective (in fact, these assumptions are taken over in large measure from Husserl’s Ideas I): 1. There are at least two regions of individual objects: that of ‘pure consciousness’ and that of the ‘real (material) world’; 21

Husserl, as Ingarden, was already ready to acknowledge, simply considered all this a misunderstanding of his aims on Ingarden’s part. That Ingarden persisted in thinking otherwise explains no some part of the energy he invested in the course of many years to dispute Husserl’s views. The following extract from Einführung in die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls: Osloer Vorlesungen 1967, hrsg. von Gregor Haefliger, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer 1992, p. 212, gives a good example of the spirit of the exchange between them. Describing how he had come to the conviction that Husserl’s move to transcendental idealism relied on any number of assumptions and presuppositions that had to be dug out and clarified, in the first place ‘formal-ontological’ issues, he continues: “Ich begann somit formal-ontologisch zu arbeiten. Und da sagte mir Husserl: Das ist eben falsch! Sie sind Ontologe geworden, aber Sie sollten doch die Reduktion vollziehen, sich sogleich ins Wasser stürzen, un im Fluss der konstitutiven Probleme die Leistung der Konstitution zu erfassen. Da werden Sie sehen, dass die Ontologie doch ein gesperrter Weg ist, dass alles schliesslich doch reduziert werden muss. Erst dann zeigt es sich, dass die ganze ontologische Betrachtung eine verlorene Mühe ist.” 22 Bd. 1. Existentialontologie, § 2. “Die Voraussetzungen der Streitfrage und ihre vorläufige Formulierung,” Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1964, p. 7 ff.

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2. Pure consciousness is the stream of consciousness, the locus of which is wherever the philosophizing ego happens to be; 3. Real objects are structurally transcendent in relation to experiences; 4. Real objects can in principle be given in an originary manner to the experiencing/philosophizing subject; 5. The existence of pure consciousness is beyond any possible doubt; 6. The world and its components can be placed in doubt; this possibility does not infringe on assumption 4, however; 7. The question of the existence of the world has to be handled from within a transcendental perspective, that is, from the perspective of doubt-free pure consciousness; any other approach is to be considered as ‘dogmatic’ (including the danger of the petitio principii). The assumptions are weighted heavily in favor the mind-dependence thesis by dint of the last assumption combined with assumption 4, which pertains to evidence, originary givenness. However, Ingarden tempers the immediate impact of these assumptions with the proviso that they pertain only to the ontological, not to the metaphysical, side of the problematic. The claim regarding pure consciousness, while metaphysical in tenor (it is an ‘absolute’), is in fact weaker in force: Ingarden cannot possibly build into the assumptions that which he identified as the crux of the ‘controversy’ in the first place. According to Husserl (e.g. in paragraph 44 of Ideas I), nothing else need exist, no world of any kind, for consciousness to be what it is – said to be indubitable on the evidence of immanent perception – and therefore to exist absolutely, whereas, as the world can be put into doubt – the motivating factor here is the supposed fallibility of ‘external’ perception (assumption 5) – its ontic credentials have to be demonstrated, for which reason it cannot be taken dogmatically from the outset as existentially autonomous and self-sufficient in relation to ‘consciousness’. At the same, Ingarden sees this thesis as the source and basis for Husserl’s strong metaphysical assertion that the world is in essential fact (not simply possibily, less yet merely contingently) mind-dependent. His counterclaim, the one that motivated the investigation he wishes to undertake, is that Husserl oversteps the boundaries of what the evidence is alleged to show, viz., that the indubitability of pure consciousness is metaphysically freighted in the maximalist sense as characterized.

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So by casting the assumptions in this way, Ingarden both leaves room for the mind-dependency solution even as he makes it problematic on its own terms, thus leaving open the alternative solution – the world’s mindindependency. The chief, and as it turns out with hindsight Ingarden’s insurmountable, difficulty is reserved for the metaphysician’s task as delineated by the conditions fixed by the framework. The metaphysician will be at pains to show in what the distinctive evidential basis could consist upon which to rest the judgment for or against the mind-dependence of the world once the requisite ontological tooling has been put in place. Ontologists on Ingarden’s view pursue eidetic analyses of ‘pure essences’ for which reason their work is neutral in regard to a final decision for or against either the realist or the idealist vision. Already early in his career he spoke of eidetic analysis as “apriori cognition” – a form of cognition mandated to discern universally valid ‘synthetic apriori truths’. Whether the idealist prefers to think of the pure essence as ‘nothing else’ than a correlate of consciousness, whereas the realist might entertain a Platonist preference, ‘pure redness’, ‘the ‘Idea’ of intentional acts’, etc. remain unaffected in their intrinsic qualitative essentiality, prior to any ‘facts’. In modal terms, ‘pure red’, for instance, is necessarily what it is independently of any possible world, one of which might be the idealist’s in case it turns out that this world does obtain in (metaphysical) fact. It would be one in which any factual instance of red would be essentially connected to factual instances of other qualities (‘properties’) to constitute ‘objects’ thanks to the good offices of occurrent, sustaining acts of mind which, at every instant of the ‘object’s’ being, provide the glue which binds the whole and for that very reason the ‘object’s’ ‘being-for-consciousness’.23 This, by the way, is the basic reason why, de23

See my “Individual essence in Ingarden’s ontology,” in W. Galewicz, E. Ströker, W. Stróżewski (Hrsg.), Kunst und Ontologie. Für Roman Ingarden zum 100. Geburtstag, Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994. My characterization in this sentence hardly does justice to the breadth of Ingarden’s examination of the issue. In point of fact, his analysis of the idealist’s ‘individual object’, ontologically, is the far-reaching analysis of the ‘pure intentional object’, a main example of which is the artwork. Ingarden does not attribute to Husserl the view that, at every instant the object is sustained in its being for consciousness by occurrent acts of mind. To this effect, he distinguishes, for the category of pure intentional objects, their ontic source (acts of mind, precisely),

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spite the crucial question of mind (in-)dependency, Ingarden was sanguine about the ontology common to the idealist and the realist, in the absence of which their controversy could not even get off the ground. But as things turned out, he could do no more than pin a promissory note to the matter; one that remained unrequited, at least under these terms. There is an undertone in this ‘metaphysical predicament’ of both Kantian noumenalism and/or Cartesian disquiet about an overarching meta-deception concerning our sense of how things really are. Can we really exclude that eidetic analysis is not telling a tall story after all, with the things ‘out there’ perhaps altogether askew to our synthetic apriori truths? As for the mind (in-)dependency issue, the trouble was to know whether we can effectively discriminate the difference, and the mark we might expect it to make “in consciousness,” between some given thing, say a table, as the ongoing intentional correlate of the open manifold of tablepercepts or table-imaginings, and the putative table “as such,” as it is “in the world,” extra-intentional, constituted from within itself, so to speak, mind playing no role in its constitution. However, with intentionality, meaning, and constitutive analysis to the fore for the sake of the debate with the idealist, and despite the efforts to play the devil’s advocate in Husserl’s behalf by construing a framework that accords the initial benefit of the doubt to the idealist, Ingarden could not find a way out of the aporiae and into the light.24 and ontic foundations such as artefacts and, at one stage in his literary investigations, ideal meanings (analogous to ‘ideal qualities’). The latter persist in time, indeed in the case of what is ideal, ‘out of time’, whereas ‘occurrent’ acts come and go. But the latter, in the absence of contact with minds, remain in a potential state, are, shall I say, ‘virtual’. A reader brings them to actualization, by way of concretization. In this way, it does appear that the tie that binds and sustains the ‘intended’ intentional object (i.e., the artist’s work; the reader’s ‘reading’) is in the final reckoning ‘consciousness’. Ingarden’s question was, “is it plausible and defensible to say the same kind of thing for amino acids, the snow and ice on the summit of Everest, the hand I perceive when I raise it before my eyes? 24 Following the initial publication of Controversy, Ingarden returned repeatedly to the question concerning Husserl’s conflation – in his opinion – of meaning and being. Two texts in particular are representative in this regard: On the Motives which led Edmund Husserl to Transcendental Idealism, Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976, and Einführung in die Phänomenologie Edmond Husserls: Osloer Vorlesungen 1967, op. cit.

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B. Responsibility is the key? The difficulty dangled for Ingarden until, in Verantwortung, he shifted to other ground altogether. Speaking loosely, questions about mind-dependence or -independence, as regards the very being of the world, now fell into the background. The ontology-metaphysics distinction took on another import, the former retaining its function as an essentialist conceptual analytic delving into ‘ontic foundations’, while the latter became an ally of natural science, that is, the ‘last word’, so to speak, over and beyond what ‘science’ is ready to say about particular domains or causal structures in the world. Ingarden wrote Verantwortung having earlier completed Über die kausale Struktur der realen Welt, the closest he came, in terms of his original project, to a “material ontology,” that is, that form of ‘eidetic’ investigation he regarded as the ultimate propadeutic to metaphysics (by dint of concentration on the concrete ‘qualitative’ endowment of objects within causal nexi), and for which the findings of natural science are germane. Against this background and in comparison with the metaphysically ‘indeterminate’ pre-Verantwortung framework, Verantwortung is decidedly metaphysically realist in its sweep and detailed implementation. The basis for the claim is by now obvious – the conditions of possibility of responsibility are such that no other account of the nature of the world is plausible.25 Metaphysical realism by default, so to speak, so long as we trust that Gregor Haefliger’s introduction to the volume merits a close reading, as does his own book in which the question is examined in considerable detail; Über Existenz: die Ontologie Roman Ingardens, Phaenomenologica 130, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994. More recently, Arkadiusz Chrudzimski has worked the question very systematically in several publications, first of all Die Erkenntnistheorie von Roman Ingarden, Phaenomenologica 151, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1999. 25 An earlier Polish version of this paper, translated by Janina Makota, brought some critical reactions, on the part of the translator herself, to my claim that in Verantwortung Ingarden embraces a ‘metaphysical realism’. In her view, on the contrary, Ingarden remains very much the ontologist, that is, he is concerned to dig out the, in his terminology, ‘content of the Idea of responsibility’ and is thus occupied with no more than the ‘necessary connections’ among purely ideal moments proper to the Idea and entertain no more than purely possible ‘concretizations’ (i.e., in possible concrete worlds). Metaphysics has to do with facts, that is, essential facts, and these are not what Verantwortung is about.

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our sense of what we are is intrinsically tied to our being responsible beings. There is little in these comments, that is not contained in the following passage from Ingarden’s text. [M]an [kann] sich bei der Betrachtung sowohl des Tragens als auch der Übernahme der Verantwortung nicht auf das reine Ich und die reinen Erlebnisse beschränken […]. Denn erstens muss die Tat, für die der Täter verantwortlich sein soll, eine reale Handlung in der realen Welt sein; sie muss auch von einem realen Menschen mit einem bestimmten Charakter vollzogen werden. Ein bloßes Erleben dieser Handlung, die sich in Wahrheit realiter nicht vollzöge, würde für das Tragen der Verantwortung gar nicht ausreichen. Erst aus der Realität der Tat entspringt für den Täter die Verantwortung dafür. Und ein merkmalloses reines Ich, wie es Husserl zuerst aufgedeckt hat, könnte weder die Tat noch das Tragen der Verantwortung dafür auf eine aus dem Cha-

I continue to maintain my argument about Ingarden’s metaphysical realism in view of his shift of ground through the medium of the responsibility problematic. But I would add a clarification about the general theoretical tenor of Verantwortung in relation to the broader ontology-metaphysics question. A weaker, but still metaphysically laden version of my thesis can be sustained as soon as it is remarked how Ingarden’s designs for possible worlds (concretizations of pure ideal possibilities) supposed a kind of combinatorial analyses in order not only to ‘construct’ models of possible worlds but also, indeed perhaps primarily, to exclude, eliminate certain options. That the world cannot be a certain way, as a claim in the ontological mode, is ipso facto a constraint on any eventual wider ranging metaphysical solution (assuming that the latter does not simply outstrip the materials the former furnishes, as might be the case were we to defer to mystical intuitions; but the ontologist Ingarden knows nothing about such intuitions). Let us then grant a degree of constraint coming from the side of ontology that virtually precludes any other metaphysical solution but ‘S’. In such a case, while the decision for ‘S’ may remain in abeyance (for instance, in the absence of firm confirmation from the natural sciences), what would be the point of pursuing further research, as if the picture thrown up by ontology was after all inexact? The only point I can think of would be to invoke Cartesian demons, Kantian noumena, and the like. My argument here, in light of this weaker proto-metaphysical interpretation of ontology, is that for Ingarden the responsibility problematic was just such an overall constraining, and restraining, consideration, especially in light of the idealism-realism framework upheld previously. Additional remarks to the same effect are found in the text, in the passage in which I discuss Ingarden’s ‘methodology’ footnote on p. 73 of Verantwortung.

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rakter der Person fließende und durch ihn motivierte und bestimmte Weise realisieren.” (64–65; italics added)

The broader picture this text presents can no longer be accommodated in the framework of the idealism-realism controversy. In comparison with the division of regions in the latter – to reiterate, the region of intentional acts and their intrinsic parts in pure consciousness, and the region of worldy things taken nominally as ‘transcendent’ to consciousness – we are given to understand that the agent qua person fits into neither the one nor the other without remainder. Just as ‘personal agency’ involves more than mental activities (“reine Erlebnisse”), so too certain of the agent’s actions have a real impact in the world (“eine reale Handlung in der realen Welt”). In the contrary case, the effect would be to make talk of responsibility little more than a façon de parler, in fact it would be conceptual ‘nonsense’ on the assumption that ‘das Tragen der Verantwortung’ is at the heart of the matter. The noematic Ersatz of a ‘real’ action has no ‘real’ consequences for which one can come to bear responsibility – whether or not one is aware of its weight as well as the obligations that accrue in the circumstances. Ingarden is virtually formal: only a ‘realist’ reading of agency sustains our sense that it makes a difference in the order of things when we either bear responsibility, or impute it to someone, or assume the burden of responsibility in someone’s behalf. It is tempting, I suppose, to surmise that the philosophical trick can be nicely turned here by joining what was divided, by coalescing the regions sundered in the original framework. Stick ‘consciousness’ back into the ‘world’, and you have a ‘possible world’ in which ‘real’ responsibility would appear to be a bonified citizen. Thus, in this way we might readjust our sights and entertain the idea of the embodied self. Now, at the time he was composing the text, Ingarden could have appealed to several prominent ‘phenomenologizing’ philosophers for whom the ‘lived body’ was a central axis around which to organize an account of a ‘meaningful world’ (Lebenswelt) – Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, to some degree Scheler, as well as the Heidegger of the Daseinsanalytik, to name only the most prominent in this regard. But there is not a word about any of this in Ingarden’s text, the perspective is away from anything ‘meaningfully lived’ (Erlebnisse/qualia) and toward, in effect, theoretical explanations, in the manner of scientific

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models, of ‘emergent’ phenomena within a context of interacting causal systems. Embodiment for Ingarden, certainly a key component among the ontic foundations of personhood and in this way directly involved among the conditions of ‘real agency’,26 is not first of all, then, a phenomenological datum, not even of a kind construed by ‘exporting’ immanent consciousness to the interface that is the lived body (Leib) in touch with the Umwelt, the sphere of vitally significant things. Stepping back from the immediate context of discussion to take stock of our position, it can be said, I think, that Ingarden in Verantwortung is doing his utmost to move out of ‘consciousness’ and into the ‘world’. Moreover, the metaphysical realism I alluded to momentarily comes to the fore in the thesis that, for there to be responsibility in an ontic sense, the world has to be structured in such a way that persons are rooted in the world, in effect are part of the world’s furniture. On Ingarden’s reading of Husserlian idealism, this world-oriented perspective, as suggested by my remarks about embodiment, puts paid to ‘pure consciousness’ (as anything other than a device for certain philosophical techniques that are useful in epistemology). Are we to conclude in addition, then, that in stepping out of the close confines of the idealism-realism problematic Ingarden likewise walked away from phenomenological philosophy, on the supposition that, in its basic design, the latter is rife with the idealist metaphysics of universal mind-dependence Ingarden had initially contested on its own ground? C. How much phenomenology remains? Beginning as early as 1919, in an essay entitled, “The Aims of Phenomenologists,”27 and right through to his review of the history and systematics of phenomenology in the 1967 Oslo lectures, Einführung in die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls, Ingarden insisted that the cardinal principle of phenomenological philosophy, “the principle of principles” as Husserl had it, is ‘intuitive evidence’, i.e. the direct givenness to the mind of the ‘object’. 26

Relevant passages in the text are on pages 54 and 56 respectively. “Die Bestrebungen der Phänomenologen” [Polish: Dążenia fenomenologów], in R. Ingarden, Schriften zur frühen Phänomenologie, hrsg, von W. Galewicz, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1999. 27

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For his part, Ingarden had built this principle and ideal explicitly into his design for an ontology, viz., as the basis of in-sight into ‘pure ideal qualities’. Their natures are such that they are accessible to direct intuitional inspection, both in themselves and in their essential connections. Alone Ingarden’s language gives away his commitment to the evidence principle of phenomenology – ontology is the investigation of Ideas, this expression being Ingarden’s take on Husserl’s recovery of the Platonic eidos. Now beyond this context, Ingarden came to suspect that what Husserl meant by this evidence principle was that deference to intuitive evidence shifts attention away from the ‘things themselves’ to the quality of the living experience of evidence (‘fulfillment’), according to the sense or meaning the object has in relation to a given mode of intentionality (‘under the description’ by which something is entertained). Ingarden suspected Husserl to be saying that, with intentional directedness to the fore, there is simply no point or evidentially substantiated way in insisting on driving a wedge between the intentional object and a putative object ‘as such’ to which the former would stand in some relation of fulfillment or satisfaction. For Ingarden, this position conflated a phenomenology of intentional directedness and evidential givenness, an ontology of mind-(in)-dependence (e.g., the ontology of pure intentional objects as compared with the ontology of individual real objects, etc.), and a sweeping metaphysical reckoning about the status of the ‘world’ in relation to consciousness. And on all these counts crucial irreducible epistemological factors get lost in the shuffle as well. I noted earlier, how in building up his framework assumptions for the sake of the idealist-realist controversy, Ingarden had been careful to hold the metaphysical solution at bay while restricting the reach of the narrowly phenomenological component (the philosopher’s stream of intentional consciousness) to the ‘neutrality’ of eidetic (ontological) analysis, on one hand, and epistemology, on the other. In Verantwortung, though, Ingarden gives up any compromises as regards the import of the ‘principle of all principles’. In other words, if phenomenological philosophy requires, at any level, some version of the following equation: [being = being-for-consciousness = ‘meaning’], then in Verantwortung Ingarden steps outside the perimeters of phenomenological philosophizing. The most evident way to do so is to suspend or disregard

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the appeal to the ‘principle of all principles’, the appeal to intuition and therefore to ‘qualities’ before the mind. I have insisted from the start, in assaying Ingarden’s moral realism, that his salient claims about bearing responsibility and its ontic conditions represent this kind of disregard. In effect, as Ingarden employs the term ‘responsibility’, it is more in the character of a ‘theoretical’ than an ‘empirical’ term. There are turns of phrase and passages in the text which are quite suggestive in this regard, in particular an extensive ‘methodology’ footnote on p. 73. In construing a model of the embodied person as a free selfdirecting agent Ingarden observes: Ich bin natürlich kein Biologe, und ich berufe mich nur auf gewisse Ergebnisse der naturwissenschaftlichen Forschung. Ich glaube aber, dass ich mich auf sie als Philosoph berufen darf, ohne dem Vorwurf des sogennanten “Szientismus” zu unterliegen. Denn ich will hier lediglich als Philosoph zeigen, dass es zum Wesen der Verantwortung in ihren verschiedenen Abwandlungen gehört, gewisse Forderungen aufzustellen, deren Erfüllung die Bedingungen für ihre Möglichkeit bildet. Zu diesen Bedingungen gehört unter anderem ein bestimmter struktureller Aufbau des Menschen, der als Träger der Verantwortung frei sein muss. (…) Und ich frage nur die Naturwissenschaft ob diese Struktur von ihr aus nachgewiesen werden kann. Sie hilft mir auch diese Struktur genauer zu beschreiben. [my italics] Die Hauptzüge dieser Struktur werden aber von mir aus der Idee des lebenden Organismus abgeleitet [my italics] und die Naturwissenschaft erleichtert es mir, diese Idee zu analysieren. Wenn es sich zeigen sollte, dass die Ergebnisse der Naturwissenschaft wahr sind, dann wird für mich nur folgen, dass meine ontologische Versuche nicht bloße gedankliche Konstruktionen (wie man gewiss zu behaupten geneigt sein kann), sondern cum fundamento in re sind und mir dem Weg zur metaphysischen Betrachtungen eröffnen. [italics added]

The passage is not without some awkwardness; it shows an Ingarden clinging in part to his old ways, while at the same time eager to push beyond their confines. Ingarden does invoke Ideas and ontological analysis in the discrimination of “Hauptzüge” of the essential structure of the embodied person, even as, in the same breath, he appeals to the sciences to ‘help him’ describe that structure. Presumably, this is because the ontology that underpins embodied personhood can be none other than the ontology that informs biology in the first place, however more it will have to involve to accommodate the category of the person. One might well wonder whether, under these circumstances, the ‘purely’ philosophical ambit – Ideas and

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essences – is little more than a rhetorical redundancy. But Ingarden seems to want to have it both ways, insisting, on one hand, on the aura, as it were, of ‘essential connections’, or synthetic a priori truths, that appear to mark out for ‘philosophical ontology’ a special status alongside scientific ontology – which, on the other hand, Ingarden moots with: Sie hilft mir … diese Struktur genauer zu beschreiben / die Naturwissenschaft erleichtet es mir, diese Idee zu analysieren. It is implausible to suppose that this means that philosophy operates with a distinct categorial framework (descriptive concepts and their orderings), or that a ‘philosophical ontology’ could correct models elaborated by science. Talk, therefore, of ‘ontological constructs’ that are to be warranted by the sciences, on pain of being so much empty talk [gedankliche Konstruktionen], betrays either a personal conceit or, as I would prefer to say, an awkward way of giving notice that “I, Roman Ingarden, now incline to (some form of) scientific realism or naturalism.” In the latter case, the ‘scientific warrant’ for ontological constructs would then be little else but a mapping of the “manifest image of the world,” to borrow Sellars’ terms, onto scientific explanatory theories with the proviso that the “scientific image” (the underlying ontology) may still not be entirely fixed and that the current version is subject to revision. It follows that the reference in the last sentence of the quoted passage to ‘metaphysical considerations’ in the event of successful mappings of this sort can be read both as testimony to the virtues of parsimony – “there is still much work to do” – and as hopeful confirmation that we have discriminated the right ontic contexts for the sake of our common (science-cum-philosophy) heuristic. To prevent misunderstanding, an important caveat to this reading of Ingarden’s ‘methodology’ needs to be entered. My suggestion that Ingarden’s program in Verantwortung coincides with scientific realism (naturalism) should not be taken to mean that I take him to be espousing a reductionist strategy, that the matters to which he directs our attention – bearing responsibility, free agency, personhood, values, and so on – are to be recast in some final analysis as, for instance, epiphenomenal in relation to some physical material substratum and the laws governing occurrences therein. On the contrary, Ingarden’s design writ is for a non-reductionist, emergentist ontology adjusted to the concept of the human person able to act freely within the causal structure of the physical world. His parsimony

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as regards what he persists in calling metaphysical considerations is a cautionary note concerning all the issues that need clarification in advance of responsible (sic) certification. Above, in expanding on my claim that Ingarden’s position in Verantwortung falls together with moral realism, I stressed his choice of a strategy – to concentrate on bearing responsibility, a choice that highlights a constellation of factors, a ‘value-situation’. Certainly, the latter is the locus of the kinds of ‘facts’ that interest the moral realist. Although Ingarden’s emphasis on ontology is so pronounced that he does not in fact examine how particular claims concerning (imputing, assuming, discharging, etc.) responsibility are warranted, his position is perfectly consistent with a (moral) cognitivism that distinguishes between experiential givens, Erlebnisse or phenomenal qualia, and judgments pertaining either to the infra- or supra-phenomenal underpinnings of the latter. I suggested that his strategy is reminiscent of a transcendental argument; the links to science that Ingarden invokes appear to confirm this. We begin with stating the fact of bearing responsibility. Not to admit the fact would be to radically alter our sense of ourselves as agents. After all, we assume, impute, but, most of all, discover that we do bear responsibility, that our lives are constantly inscribed in value-situations, some of which can engage persons in severe, long-lasting, often definitive life changes. For a philosopher in the mould of Ingarden, the ‘explanation’ of this fact is made to coincide with the question about how the world ‘grounds’ the fact of lives marked by responsibility. And the ‘Idea’ of the world is not a speculative construct but an empirical-theoretical construction, the point of convergence of piecemeal natural scientific investigation. In this framework, therefore, ordinary talk of responsibility has to be cashed in worldly terms, those that science may yet have to supply regarding the makeup of purposive agency. A foundation for responsibility in pure consciousness fails to match our basic intuitions about the place and impact of responsibility in our lives. Erlebnisse are not what is really at issue. C. A parting word about ‘values’ In my review, in the first part above, of Ingarden’s moral realism presented in Verantwortung, I underscored the importance he attached to values.

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They are, according to him, the first among all the conditions of the possibility of responsibility. Ingarden is formal in this regard. Gäbe es keine Werte und Unwerte sowie die zwischen ihnen bestehenden Seins- und Bestimmungszusammenhänge, dann könnte es überhaupt keine echte Verantwortung und auch keine Erfüllung der durch sie gestellten Forderungen geben. (…) Die Existenz der Werte und der zwischen ihnen bestehenden Zusammenhang ist die erste Bedingung der Möglichkeit sowohl der Idee der Verantwortung als auch des Sinnvollseins des an den Täter gerichteten Postulats, die Verantwortung für seine Tat zu übernehmen und ihre Forderungen zu erfüllen. [38, italics added]

Filling out Ingarden’s sparse remarks, I suggested how values ‘work’ whenever, in contexts of intentional action, issues of responsibility come to the fore. They effect a ‘valency closure’ among the events (consequences) running from the state of affairs an agent set out to bring about, that is to say, between those consequences which are (positively or negatively) valent with regard to the action, on one hand, and those which could fairly be said to be ‘neutral’, mere accidental consequences, not ascribable to the agent’s responsibility, on the other. But the reconstruction is at best a hypothesis since, as I stressed, Ingarden remained unconvinced that we know a lot about values, about their ontology. Now, having examined the subtext of Verantwortung, the question arises, does it shed any light on Ingarden’s commitment to values, notwithstanding the persisting perplexity about their nature? On balance, it is difficult to suppress the feeling that, in the argument, values crop up like a deus ex machina. In the polemic with Husserl and in regard to the conditions of responsibility Ingarden counterposes the real agent to the Husserlian bloodless abstraction, the pure ego. He moves, in other words, to the concrete human agent, the individual, who is the proper bearer of responsibility, which in turn supposes the existence of values. However, Ingarden does not tell us whether and how values could be thought to matter in the airless realm inhabited by the bloodless ego he repudiates; though it is more than likely, given his claims in behalf of the real human agent who alone can be responsible, that the ‘valency effect’ is incompatible with the status of a ‘mere’ intentional correlate of (Husserlian) Erlebnisse. That much granted, however, Ingarden is at loss to characterize the putative mind-independence of values, other than by rendering

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them ‘situational’, that is, values emerge amidst complexes of heterogeneous factors (including the person and, broadly speaking, the context of her actions). The ‘situational’ status of values at least appears to exclude the often criticized supposition they are simply properties of individual objects. Now it is noteworthy that while holding values constant as the most fundamental of all the conditions underpinning responsibility Ingarden nowhere postulates, as he does for the category of the person – regarded as emergent on the substantial nature of the human being – that scientific investigations might well assist ‘us’ in getting the picture right as to what lies at their basis.28 Within certain limits, Ingarden remained content with line of thought traceable to Scheler, for whom values have a qualitative nature (‘material values’) and thus fall within the range of human perceptual possibilities, including the intentionality of emotions.29 The kind of ‘qualities’ that appear to come into play are, for instance, my sense of shame for a wrong done to you, which sense brings the onus of responsibility to repair the wrong. Or compassion in the face of suffering that brings with it a kind of responsibility to alleviate suffering, and the like. The point of such cases is that claims about them are referred, as to their evidential basis, to what anyone in similar circumstances and with even a modicum of ‘normal’ moral sensitivity will ‘see’ and ‘feel’. That said, however, in Verantwortung nothing of the sort is proposed, no recourse to ‘evidential intuition’, emotional response, etc. as tell-tale indicators of the presence and impact of values in the context of life-situations. The text of Verantwortung is not rich in the number and kind of examples provided, though it seems pretty clear that, far from taking the kind 28

This is the approach that Boyd (op. cit.) takes in his homeostatic theory of goods or values, where, in regard to the human condition the ordinary semantics of goods for us (values) is underpinned by subtler scientific research into factors whose interplay converges, or fails to converge, in our ‘ordinary’ sense of ourselves as moral beings. These ‘subtler factors’ are the basis of the moral facts that the realist is concerned to uphold. 29 Scheler remained an important inspiration for Ingarden, despite certain misgivings that Ingarden expressed concerning the less than transparent ontology of material values. An example is available in “An Analysis of Moral Values,” in Man and Value, op. cit.

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of examples cited in the previous paragraph as paradigmatic, Ingarden has cases in mind which we know to involve litigation, suggesting breaches of the ‘law’, and therefore require objective standards of some sort to be established at all. I argued that Ingarden’s choice of responsibility as a road to moral realism was calculated to raise the degree of objectivity of the relevant ‘facts’ to such an extent that experiential and cognitive encounter with values are neither a necessary, less yet a sufficient constitutive condition for coming to bear responsibility. Imputation as well as the assumption of responsibility, on the contrary, do entail cognitive contact with values, either on the part of a third party and/or the agent, though from the perspective of the realist standpoint these activities are subject to critical review in light of the ‘facts’ to which they are subordinate. Speaking of litigation and the law, however, we need to remark the total absence in Ingarden’s text of any mention of the public world, be it face-to-face contact where typically concerned parties jointly negotiate the identity and make up of value situations; or the variety of communal settings, including informal and formal institutions, their supporting conventions and the background of collective representations, which frame realworld ‘value-situations’, thereby reinforcing more or less local standards of value awareness as manifest in established communicational practices. And it is here precisely, in this kind of context, that Ingarden could have paid heed to longstanding debates in legal theory and the philosophy of law regarding the links between causation and responsibility, imputation, and conditions for discharging the onus of responsibility. Generally speaking, Verantwortung is not likely to attract anyone concerned with issues involving the sources and variations of normativity in the many contexts in which it impacts our behavior. In this and other texts he devoted to values, there are criticisms directed to the social and cultural relativisms that have been invoked to sustain a quasi-objectivity of values. These criticisms may have impelled Ingarden not to concede that values may well be part and parcel of the historically constituted socio-cultural realm. On the whole, with his emphasis on the situational embedding of value, Ingarden prefers to think that men create the conditions in which values (of the relevant types) come to be realized; he does not entertain the idea that the values themselves are ‘created’ as men constitute their ‘world’ and within it the life-practices that take on

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‘value’ for them.30 But then that is why responsibility assumes, on his account, such a markedly robust ontic guise. That is why, too, his position has to rank among the more pronounced and insistent of moral realisms. Let it be remarked parenthetically that Ingarden’s avowal, cited in the opening lines of the paper, that under the impress of Dilthey and Simmel his initial project for a dissertation concerned the ‘person’, is more revelatory than the lines make apparent. After all, Dilthey and Simmel, like other Kulturphilosophen of the period (and earlier), were quite at home with the vision, running at least from Vico and Herder, of a ‘human’ world, a world in which ‘values’ are, more or less, objectivations of the human spirit and personhood is a historical category, but no less ‘objective’ for all that. Borrowing an expression from John Searle, they were thinkers who could easily admit to the ‘ontological subjectivity’ of values while insisting on their ‘epistemological objectivity’, the mediating link being a common cultural order, the collective (societal) framework of practices. Little if any hint of any of this in Ingarden. Why? One reason that comes to mind is Ingarden’s rootedness in the phenomenological style, the initial impetus for which was polemical, viz., Husserl’s virulent attacks in the Prolegomena, later in the Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft, against psychologism, historicism (geneticism), relativism, and naturalism (Ingarden seconded these attacks in his 1919 ‘The aims of phenomenologists’). But I think that the major reason is to be sought in the interplay, in Verantwortung, between its main theme and the sub-text, that is, in the emphasis built into the responsibility problematic coming from the polemic with Husserl as regards the idealism-realism question. In other words, from ‘pure consciousness’ to the ‘real’ human agent via the medium that ‘responsibility’ appears to provide; responsibility, then, as the way out of the idealism-realism thicket; metaphysical realism by default, to repeat, through the offices of the conditions for bearing, assuming, and discharging responsibility. All of this ensures real purchase for the real human agent in real world conditions, in the absence of which responsibility comes down to a word game. 30

I have attempted to go deeper into Ingardens views on this and related matters in “Between meaning and value: the problematic unity of culture in Ingarden,” in A. Węgrzecki (ed.), Roman Ingarden a filosofia naszego czasu, Kraków: Polskie Towarzystwo Filozoficzne, 1995.

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That the less than transparent standing of values was the price to be paid for the trick responsibility appears to turn is of lesser consequence, in Ingarden’s eyes, than having to settle for the truncated world picture Husserl’s idealism obliges us to accept.

Roman Ingardens Ontologie und die Welt ANDRZEJ PÓŁTAWSKI

Die Hauptaufgabe, welche sich Roman Ingarden in seiner philosophischen Arbeit gestellt hatte, war, die Problematik des Idealismus-Realismus Streites in Ordnung zu bringen und, letzten Endes, die Existenz der realen Welt in einem grundlegenden Sinn des Wortes auszuweisen. Diese Aufgabe verstand der polnische Phänomenologe sehr weit, nämlich als eine systematische Ausarbeitung der Ontologie, der Erkenntnistheorie und eventuell, wenn sie sich als möglich erweisen würde, der Metaphysik. Es ging also um eine Ausarbeitung der Grunddisziplinen der Philosophie, wobei Ontologie der Ausgangspunkt und Unterbau der philosophischen Wissenschaft sein sollte. Die drei Bände des Streites um die Existenz der Welt sind das Hauptergebnis der Bemühungen Ingardens, dieses Ziel zu verwirklichen. Ungeachtet seines Einspruchs gegen Husserls Idealismus geht Ingarden von der husserlschen Formulierung der Problematik aus, weil er sie als „den tiefsten und ernstesten Versuch, eine Entscheidung in der Streitfrage Idealismus-Realismus herbeizuführen“1 ansieht. Auf diese Weise arbeitet er zu Beginn seiner Untersuchungen mit der Begriffsapparatur der transzendentalen Phänomenologie.

1. Ingardens Gliederung der für den „Streit um die Existenz der Welt“ wichtigen Probleme 1.1 Ontologie, Metaphysik, Erkenntnistheorie Die Scheidung der Fragen, die für die Problematik des Streites wesentlich sind, in ontologische, metaphysische und epistemologische und die Auseinanderhaltung der materialen, formalen und existenzialen Ontologie führt 1

Roman Ingarden, Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer 1964/1965, Bd. I, 7.

Existence, Culture, and Persons: The Ontology of Roman Ingarden. Arkadiusz Chrudzimski (ed.), Frankfurt: ontos, 2005, 191–220.

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Ingarden in den ersten Paragraphen des Werkes durch. Die ontologische Betrachtung besteht in der apriorischen Analyse der Ideengehalte. Ihre letzte Begründung hat sie in der reinen Erfassung der letzten idealen Qualitäten (der „reinen Wesenheiten“) und der zwischen ihnen bestehenden notwendigen Zusammenhänge, anderseits aber schreitet sie zur Analyse der reinen Möglichkeiten fort, die sich für das individuelle Sein aus den Ideengehalten festgestellten Beständen ergeben. 2

Den Unterschied und das Verhältnis von Ontologie und Metaphysik charakterisiert Ingarden folgendermaßen: Der Unterschied zwischen Ontologie und Metaphysik beruht vor allem darin, dass die erste Ideengehalte, die zweite dagegen individuelle Gegenstände bzw. auch Ideen, aber nur qua Idee genommen, untersucht. Damit hängt auch zusammen, dass die ontologischen Urteile […] von jeder Seinssetzung (und zwar auch des idealen Seins!) frei sind, während die metaphysischen Sätze entweder direkt Existentialsätze oder kategorische Sätze sind. […] So stellt die Metaphysik einerseits die notwendige Ergänzung der Ontologie dar, anderseits hat sie in dieser eine unentbehrliche Vorbereitung und in gewissem Sinne auch Voraussetzung. Und zwar ist die Ontologie vor allem dann eine echte Voraussetzung der Metaphysik, wenn sie negative Urteile aufstellt, welche auf Grund der Erfassung von in Frage kommenden Ideengehalten gewisse Tatbestände als unmöglich aus einem Bereich tatsächlichen Seins ausschließen. Ferner müssen alle diejenigen ontologischen Sätze als Voraussetzungen der Metaphysik gelten, welche über das notwendige Zusammensein von bestimmt gearteten Momenten aussagen. […] Die Ontologie ist aber auch eine Vorbereitung der Metaphysik, und zwar in dem Sinne, dass sie ihr strenge Begriffe der möglichen individuellen Gegenstände und Begriffe von deren individuellen und generellem Wesen liefert sowie endlich auch einen Bestand von apriorischen Gesetzen bezüglich der möglichen Beziehungen zwischen entsprechenden individuellen Gegenständen.3

Die Metaphysik soll also das Wesen der faktisch existierenden Gegenstände untersuchen.

2 3

Ibid., 33–34. Ibid., 50–51.

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1.2 Die ingardensche Gliederung der Ontologie Ingarden formuliert die existential-ontologische Frage nach der Seinsweise so: „Welche Seinsweise ist es, die […] [dem Gegenstande] eigen ist, die also durch sein Wesen vorbestimmt ist, unabhängig davon, ob er tatsächlich existiert oder nicht?“4 Formale Ontologie geht von der Unterscheidung verschiedener Arten der Gegenstände – z.B. Sachen, Prozessen oder Relationen – aus und soll klären, was in dem Gegenstande über den Unterschied dieser Arten entscheidet. Diesen Faktor nennt Ingarden Form im Sinne der formalen Ontologie, kategoriale oder „analytische“ Form des Gegenstandes. Formale Ontologie soll also zeigen, was eine gegenständliche Form überhaupt ist und sie soll auch verschiedene mögliche kategoriale Formen analysieren. Materiale Ontologie erforscht die „materialen“, das heißt qualitativen Momente der Gegenstände (die bei Husserl „sachhaltig“ heißen). An einer Stelle charakterisiert Ingarden die kategoriale Form als „das radikal Unqualitative, das aber als «Form» zu dem Qualitativen, wenn dieses im Konkreten auftritt, notwendig «hinzukommt» und es in sich fasst: das «Bestimmen», das «Zukommen» selbst – welcher Abwandlung auch immer“.5 Ein anderes Beispiel einer solchen Form ist das Subjekt der Eigenschaften. Ingarden meint, dass eine so verstandene Form erst bei Husserl zu einer relativ vollkommendsten Ausprägung gelangt ist. Er zweifelt aber, ob der Weg, auf dem Husserl diesen Begriff der Form gefunden hatte, richtig sei.6 Jedenfalls schreibt Ingarden zu Beginn des zweiten Bandes des Streites, dass in seinen eigenen bisherigen Bemühungen, die formale Ontologie von der materialen Ontologie zu scheiden, der Husserlsche Formbegriff maßgebend war.7

4

Ibid., 58. Op. cit., Bd. II, 5. 6 Roman Ingarden, Spór o istnienie świata, 2. Auflage, Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe 1960, Bd. I, 297, Fußnote. Im deutschen Text fehlt diese Fußnote. 7 Der Streit, op. cit., Bd. II/1, 1. 5

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1.3 Die existenziale Ontologie Ingardens Der Hauptunterschied der Ontologie Ingardens der Ontologie Husserls gegenüber war, dass Ingarden die existenziale Charakteristik der Gegenstände als ein besonderes Moment und als Thema einer besonderen Disziplin innerhalb der Ontologie ausschied. Nach einer Reihe von Husserls Äußerungen – jedenfalls ihrem Verständnis von Ingarden gemäß – wäre die Welt eine Art von Noema, eines intentionalen Gegenstandes, der sich in den Erlebnissen des reinen Bewusstseins konstituieren würde. Husserl war also nicht bereit, die Realität als eine besondere Existenzweise anzuerkennen. Er scheint die reale Existenz als eine bloße Bewusstseinssetzung anzusehen. Ingarden dagegen, an manche Analysen von Hedwig Conrad-Martius anknüpfend, diskutiert in der ersten Hälfte des Streites eine Reihe von Existenzweisen und existenzialen Momenten, die er durch die von ihm vorgeschlagenen existentialen Grundbegriffe charakterisiert. Er versucht zu zeigen, dass das reale Sein etwas positives und von dem intentionalen Sein, das z.B. den literarischen Werken zukommt, grundsätzlich verschieden ist. Es gibt nach Ingarden ein charakteristisches Phänomen der Seinsweise und die husserlsche Interpretation stellt keine Erklärung seines Sinnes, sondern eher eine Verneinung seiner Existenz dar. Die von Ingarden diskutierte existenziale Grundbegriffe sollen eine Explikation der grundlegenden Intuitionen sein, der Intuitionen, die den die Existenz betreffenden Betrachtungen vieler großer Denker der Tradition zugrunde lagen. Ingarden beschreibt sie als gegensätzliche Begriffspaare: Seinsautonomie und Seinsheteronomie, Seinsursprünglichkeit und Seinsabgeleitetheit, Seinsselbstständigkeit und Seinsunselbstständigkeit, Seinsunabhängigkeit und Seinsabhängigkeit. (1) Eine seinsursprüngliche Gegenständlichkeit würde in sich selbst die Quelle ihres Seins haben und könnte ihrem eigenen Wesen nach durch keinen anderen Gegenstand geschöpft werden. Ein seinabgeleiteter Gegenstand kann dagegen, seinem Wesen nach, nur als von einer anderen Gegenständlichkeit geschaffener existieren. (2) Eine seinsautonome Gegenständlichkeit hat ihre Bestimmtheiten in sich, sie sind ihr vollkommen immanent. Ein seinsheteronomer Gegenstand verdankt seine Bestimmtheiten einer Zuschreibung von außen, einer Meinung (Beispiel: die in einem lite-

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rarischen Werk dargestellten Gegenständlichkeiten). (3) Seinsselbstständig nennt Ingarden eine Gegenständlichkeit, die „zu ihrem Sein das Sein gar keiner anderen Gegenständlichkeit erfordert, welche mit ihr innerhalb der Einheit eines Ganzen zusammen sein müsste“.8 Das Unselbstständige braucht ein notwendiges Zusammensein mit einer anderen Gegenständlichkeit in der Einheit eines Ganzen. (4) Eine Gegenständigkeit ist seinsabhängig, wenn sie, als eine selbstständige, die Existenz einer anderen seinsselbstständigen Gegenständigkeit wesensmäßig erfordert, eine seinsunabhängige Gegenständlichkeit braucht die Existenz eines solchen anderen Gegenstandes nicht. Widerspruchsfreie Kombinationen der existentialen Momente stellen mögliche Seinsweisen, oder eher Schemata solcher Seinsweisen, dar. Eine Untersuchung der Existenz in der Zeit führt zu der Unterscheidung von weiteren existentialen Momenten: der Aktualität des „Jetzt“ und der Post-Aktualität (rückwärtiger Abgeleitetheit) des Vergangenen, der Spalthaftigkeit der aktuellen Existenz in der Zeit, d.h. der Enge des „Jetzt“, der Gebrechlichkeit der realen Gegenstände, der empirischen Möglichkeit. Ist aber diese Unterscheidung von Form und Seinsweise klar und trifft sie die entsprechenden Sachverhalte genau? Die meisten existentialen Hauptmomente Ingardens bezeichnen eine besondere Art von Relationen des betreffenden Gegenstandes zu anderen Gegenständen. Sie scheinen also formal zu sein, indem sie die Struktur – zwar nicht eines Gegenstandes, aber doch eines umfassenderen Ganzen, der Welt oder einer Seinsregion – charakterisieren. Sie scheinen auch nicht weniger unqualitativ zu sein als alles, was Ingarden Form nennt. Ihre Ausscheidung soll dem Verfasser vor allem dazu dienen, das Phänomen der Realität zu verdeutlichen und zu zeigen, dass und wie die Welt im Verhältnis zum reinen menschlichen Bewusstsein nicht seinsrelativ ist. Die Analysen Ingardens scheinen aber in eine Richtung zu gehen, welche, wenn konsequent nachgegangen, eine solche Relativität zu einem Scheinproblem reduzieren würde und welche die Existenz des reinen Bewusstseins eigentlich in Frage stellt.9 8

Der Streit, op. cit., Bd. I, 115. Diese Bemerkungen sollen nicht suggerieren, dass die von Ingarden unterschiedenen existentialen Momente die Seinsweise der Gegenstände nicht betreffen. Sie sind aber ihre abstraktesten, formalen Züge.

9

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Anderseits spielte für Ingardens Entscheidung, die Unterscheidung zwischen der Materie und Form zur Basis seiner Ontologie zu machen, sowie für die Art und Weise, auf die er diese Unterscheidung charakterisiert, die husserlsche Auffasung dieser Begriffe in den Logischen Untersuchungen eine entscheidende Rolle (obwohl er den Begriffspaar Materie-Form natürlich schon in den Aristotelischen Betrachtungen findet).10 Wir können wohl annehmen, dass seine Bedenken in Bezug auf den Weg, auf dem Husserl zu dieser Unterscheidung gekommen ist, davon fließen, dass sein Lehrer die betreffenden Begriffe aus der Analyse der sinnlichen Wahrnehmung, also aus einer epistemologischen Betrachtung geschöpft hatte, während Ingarden seine Ontologie auf einer gegenständlichen Basis aufbauen möchte. In diesem Zusammenhang stellen sich gleich mehrere Fragen: Genügt die Feststellung, dass man zwischen der Materie und der Form im Sinne Husserls unterscheiden kann, um sich vor der Gefahr zu behüten, die auf dieser Unterscheidung aufgebaute Ontologie auf eine epistemologische Analyse, oder gar auf eine epistemologische Theorie zu stützen? Entspricht die ingardensche Gliederung der ontologischen Problematik wirklich dem Bild, das sich Ingarden selbst von der Welt, in der wir Menschen leben, geschaffen hat? Endlich: In welche Richtung gingen Ingardens theoretische Bemühungen und welche Züge soll eine in seinem Geiste entwickelte Ontologie oder Metaphysik des Realen aufweisen? Dieser Aufsatz soll – an die Resultate der Forschungen einer Reihe von zeitgenössischen Denkern anknüpfend – eine Antwort auf diese Fragen skizzieren. Er soll also keine detaillierte Besprechung und Würdigung von Ingardens umfangreichen kategorialen Forschungen bieten. Ich will lediglich zeigen, dass eine so gegliederte und verstandene Ontologie nicht für die Aufgabe geeignet ist, die sie nach ihrem Verfasser realisieren sollte: möglichst adäquate Begriffe des Wesens der Welt, in der wir leben, und dessen, was in dieser Welt existiert, vorzubereiten.

10

Wobei er aber seine Anknüpfung an Aristoteles nur als „ein bequemes Hilfsmittel zur Einführung in unsere eigene Erwägungen“ ansieht. (Der Streit…, op. cit., Bd. II/1, Fußnote 3).

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2. Die sensualistische Herkunft der Ontologie Ingardens 2.1 Husserls Unterscheidung von Form und Materie Husserl hat die Unterscheidung der kategorialen Form und der Materie in seinen Logischen Untersuchungen eingeführt. Er entwickelt ihre Problematik im sechsten Kapitel der sechsten Untersuchung des zweiten Bandes dieses Werkes. Es geht dabei um „die kategorialen Formen, bzw. die «synthetischen» Funktionen in der Sphäre der objektivierenden Akte, durch welche sich diese objektiven Formen konstituieren, durch welche sie zur «Anschauung» und demgemäß sie zur «Erkenntnis» kommen sollen“.11 Von den einfachsten Wahrnehmungsaussagen ausgehend, überlegt dort Husserl das Verhältnis dieser Aussagen zu der ihnen entsprechenden Wahrnehmung und stellt fest, dass es eine gewisse Zuordnung, aber keinen strengen Parallelismus zwischen den Teilen und Formen der Bedeutung und den Teilen und Formen der Wahrnehmung gibt. Wenn ich weißes Papier sehe und „weißes Papier“ sage, drückt die Bedeutung der Aussage nicht ein bloßes Sehen aus. Husserl schlägt vor, anzunehmen, dass das erkenntnismäßige Wesen des Sehens, in dem sich die erscheinende Gegenständlichkeit als selbst gegebene bekundet, gewisse verknüpfende oder beziehende oder sonst wie formende Akte begründet, und dass diese es sind, denen sich der Ausdruck mit seinen wechselnden Formen anmisst, und in denen er, hinsichtlich dieser Formen, als auf Grund aktueller Wahrnehmung vollzogenen, seine Erfüllung findet. Nehmen wir diese fundierten Akte oder vielmehr Aktformen mit ihren fundierenden Akten zusammen, und befassen wir unter dem Titel fundierter Akt die ganzen komplexen Akte, die durch jene Fundierung erwachsen, so […] stellt sich der Parallelismus wieder her, nur ist es kein Parallelismus zwischen den Bedeutungsintentionen der Ausdrücke und ihnen entsprechenden bloßen Wahrnehmungen, sondern zwischen den Bedeutungsintentionen und jenen in Wahrnehmungen fundierten Akten.12

11

Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Teil, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, Erste Reihe, Halle a. d. Saale: Niemeyer 1901 [A], 600, Elemente einer phänomenologischen Aufklärung der Erkenntnis, 2. Teil, 2. Auflage, Halle a. d. Saale: Niemeyer 1921 [B], 128. 12 Ibid., A 603–604, B 131–132.

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Dabei ist es so, dass „jeweils nur gewissen, in der bloßen Urteilsform im voraus angebbaren Aussageteilen in der Anschauung etwas entspricht, während den anderen Aussageteilen in ihr überhaupt nichts entsprechen kann“.13 Husserl sagt, dass in den Sätzen „E ist P“, „Ein E ist P“ usw. „ausschließlich an den durch Buchstabensymbole angezeigten Stellen solcher «Urteilsformen» Bedeutungen stehen können, die sich in der Wahrnehmung selbst erfüllen, während es für die ergänzenden Bedeutungen aussichtslos, ja grundverkehrt wäre, in der Wahrnehmung direkt zu suchen, was ihnen Erfüllung zu geben vermag“.14 Die Buchstaben können zwar auch den Wert komplexer Gedanken annehmen, [a]ber schließlich kommen wir in jeder Wahrnehmungsaussage und dergleichen natürlich bei jeder anderen, Anschauung in einem gewissen Sinn gebenden Aussage, auf letzte in den Terminis vorhandene Elemente – welche in der Anschauung (Wahrnehmung, Einbildung u. dgl.) direkte Erfüllung finden, während die ergänzenden Formen, obschon sie als Bedeutungsformen gleichfalls Erfüllung heischen, in der Wahrnehmung und den gleichgeordneten Akten unmittelbar nichts finden, was ihnen je gemäß sein könnte. Diesen fundamentalen Unterschied bezeichnen wir, in der naturgemäßen Erweiterung über die ganze Sphäre des objektivierenden Vorstellens, als den kategorialen, und zwar absoluten Unterschied zwischen Form und Stoff des Vorstellens […]“.15

„Sein“, nicht nur im existenzialen, aber auch im prädikativen und attributiven Sinne „ist kein reales Prädikat“,16 ist „schlechterdings nichts Wahrnehmbares“ .17 2.2 „Qualität“ als Grundbegriff der Ontologie Ingardens Der Grundbegriff der Ontologie Ingardens ist die qualitative „Materie“. Die Form betrachtet er als sekundär, als abgeleitet von der Materie. Zugleich erweitet er den Begriff der Qualität über das sinnlich Wahrnehmbare hinaus und definiert die „«Materie» («Inhalt») im formal-ontologischen 13

Ibid., A 607, B 135. Loc. cit. 15 Ibid., A 608, B 136. 16 Ibid., A 609, B 137. 17 Ibid., A 610, B 136. 14

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Sinne“18 als „das qualitative im weitesten Sinne, die reine Qualität als Ausfüllung einer Form“.19 Seinen Begriff des Gegenstandes kann man also nicht als eine Konstruktion aus den „Sinnesdaten“ verstehen, wie es in der Tradition des britischen Empirismus üblich war. Aber, außer der Deklaration über eine solche Erweiterung, lernen wir von seinen Ausführungen über diese Materie eigentlich nichts, außer dass er verschiedene „Materien“ verschiedener Gegenstände zu beschreiben versucht. Eine systematische Bearbeitung der materialen Ontologie ist nicht realisiert worden. Von dem Qualitativen ausgehend, definiert Ingarden die Form negativ – als das, was keine Qualität ist. Da in der Anatomie des Wahrgenommenen, welche dieser Unterscheidung zugrunde liegt, die Qualitäten letzte Elemente sein sollen, ist die Form für die Struktur dessen, was im Wahrnehmungsakte gegeben ist, verantwortlich. Und Ingarden scheint sie in seinen Analysen der verschiedenen Formen tatsächlich so zu verstehen. Auf diese Weise steht die Ontologie Ingardens auf einer ganz ungeklärten Basis. Denn einerseits lasst uns die husserlsche, im Grunde empiristische Herkunft der „Qualitäten“ sich diese Qualitäten nach dem Muster der sinnlichen einfachen Qualitäten und Gestaltqualitäten (Husserls „figurale Momente“) vorzustellen, anderseits haben wir aber mit einer nicht näher präzisierten Erweiterung zu tun. Es drängt sich dabei die Frage auf, ob eine solche Teilung der Ontologie des Realen überhaupt möglich ist und einen Sinn macht; denn man kann wohl bezweifeln, ob die „Materien“, die uns die Eigenschaften der realen Gegenstände präsentieren, auf einfache Qualitäten und Gestaltqualitäten reduzierbar sind. Sie sollen aber in ihrem Gehalt keine „Formen“ im Sinne Ingardens enthalten. Wie gesagt, will Ingarden die so verstandenen Qualitäten nicht auf die Sinnlichkeit reduzieren. Vielleicht würde er auch sagen, dass eine Qualität immer etwas Einfaches ist, sei sie auch über einem höchstkomplizierten System anderer Qualitäten übergebaut (die doch wohl in verschiedenen Formen stehen würden!). Ist das aber nicht ein gewisser Sensualismus, obwohl er von dem Sensualismus des traditionellen Empirismus abweicht? Wir wissen doch, dass es ein ganz stabiles, unwandelbares System der 18 19

Der Streit, op. cit. Bd. II/1, 12. Ibid., 28.

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sinnlichen Qualitäten überhaupt nicht gibt, ein System, das man einfach stufenweise entdecken solle, um ein echtes Wissen über die Wirklichkeit – sei es auch nur eidetisch – zu erwerben. Qualitäten sind mit der biologischen Struktur der Lebewesen verbunden und sie entstehen im Laufe des Lebens und der Entwicklung dieser Lebewesen, um ihnen eine Orientierung in ihrer Umgebung und den Umgang mit dieser Umgebung zu ermöglichen. Sie sind also nicht nur von der Natur der erfahrenen Gegenstände, sondern auch in bedeutendem Maße von unserem – um mit Konrad Lorenz zu sprechen – Weltbildapparat abhängig, von dem Apparat, der in einer phänomenologischen Betrachtung programmmäßig eliminiert wird. Mit anderen Worten: eine Ontologie der Qualitäten gehört eigentlich überhaupt nicht zur Ontologie der realen Welt, sondern zu der Erscheinungslehre dieser Welt und sie kann nicht den Anspruch erheben, eine von Ingarden erwartete kategoriale Vorbereitung der Metaphysik des Realen zu liefern. Die Idee einer Konstruktion der Ontologie auf der Basis der Qualität scheint diese Analysen – wenigstens auf dem Gebiet des Realen – eher zu erschweren und zu verdunkeln. In seinen frühen Vorlesungen zur Erkenntnistheorie versuchte Ingarden sogar die Möglichkeit einer strikten Identität einer Empfindungsqualität und einer den Gegenstand selbst qualifizierenden Erfassungsqualität anzunehmen.20 Auf diese Weise versuchte er, eine Verbindung zwischen dem Bewusstsein und der Welt zu errichten und die Betrachtung des Weltproblems von dem Bewusstsein – als einer privilegierten Sphäre der zweifellosen Gegebenheit – aus möglich zu machen. 20

Roman Ingarden, Studia z teorii poznania, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN 1995, 92. (Eine Vorlesung über die Objektivität der äußeren Wahrnehmung in Lemberg aus dem Jahr 1926–27). Diese Feststellung befindet sich in einer aus dem Nachlass herausgegebener Vorlesung in Lemberg aus dem Jahr 1926–7. Später nimmt Ingarden eine solche Identität nicht an. Er schrieb im Streit: „Alle Rede von einer «Dieselbigkeit», die zwischen empfundenen und gegenständlichen (dinghaften) Qualitäten herrschen soll, oder von einer «Synthese», welche die letzteren den ersteren gegenüber bilden sollen ist eine […] Vereinfachung und Verunstaltung der vorliegenden Verhältnisse“ (II/1, 183). Eine umfangreiche und penetrante Diskussion des Problems der Sinnesdaten bei Ingarden befindet sich in: Arkadiusz Chrudzimski, Die Erkenntnistheorie von Roman Ingarden, Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer 1999, 156–177.

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An einer anderen Stelle derselben Vorlesungen fragt zwar Ingarden, ob wir „im Falle der Empfindungsdaten nicht mit etwas, was von allen anderen «Gegenständen» (nicht nur «Sachen», aber auch Subjekten von Eigenschaften, die eine «gegenständliche formale Struktur» haben – vgl. H. Bergson) radikal verschieden ist zu tun haben“.21 Aber er entwickelt diesen Gedanken nicht weiter und betrachtet im Folgenden die Empfindungsdaten als Gegenstände einer gewissen Art.

3. Ingardens Weltbild und seine Ontologie 3.1 Ingardens Weltbild. Die zentrale Rolle der handelnden Person Wie aber sah Ingarden die Welt, in der wir leben? Er war einer von Husserls Schülern. Man kann vielleicht sogar sagen, dass er derjenige Schüler Husserls war, welcher die von seinem Meister verkündete Idee der Philosophie als strenger, verantwortlich getriebener Wissenschaft besonders ernst nahm und zu realisieren versuchte. Deswegen verfasste er selten und eher zögernd umfassende Skizzen über das Seiende oder über die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos und zitierte jene eigenen Aufsätze, die einen solchen Charakter trugen, mit einer gewissen Verlegenheit. Dennoch gibt es einige Äußerungen Ingardens, die uns die generellen Züge seines Weltbilds ein wenig verraten können. Sie sind in dem posthum veröffentlichten Band Das kleine Buch vom Menschen, zusammen mit der polnischen Übersetzung seiner letzten, etwas technischeren Abhandlung Über die Verantwortung gesammelt worden.22 Sehen wir uns das Weltbild, das er dort schildert, etwas näher an. Die Lage des Menschen ist für Ingarden gewissermaßen paradox. Einerseits befindet sich der Mensch an der Grenze zwischen zwei Seinsregionen – der Natur und der spezifisch menschlichen Welt. Während aber nur das letztere seine Menschlichkeit konstituiert, ist er doch von dem 21

Studia…., op. cit., 108. Meine Übersetzung. Roman Ingarden, Książeczka o człowieku, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie 1972; alle Aufsätze in Englischer Übersetzung in: Roman Ingarden, Man and Value, transl. by Arthur Szylewicz, München-Wien: Philosophia Verlag 1983. 22

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ersten abhängig; und diese scheint sogar realer zu sein als jene. Die eigentlich menschliche Welt ist nämlich für Ingarden vor allem die der intentionalen künstlerischen und theoretischen Schöpfung. Sie ist also etwas, was sich zwar in einem gewissen Sinne über die Natur erhebt, aber doch in dieser Natur ihr Seinsfundament hat und selbst nicht real, sondern rein intentional, also gewissermaßen nur ein Schatten, ein Schein ist. Dennoch öffnet sie dem Menschen neue Dimensionen des Seins. In diesen neuen Regionen – die ihm nur in einer vagen Vorahnung gegeben sind, – „findet er aber Mächte, die ihm so fremd sind wie die Welt, aus der er kommt, und die viel höher stehen als alles, woran er heranwachsen kann“.23 Die Vorahnung dieser Mächte wird uns nach Ingarden vor allem von der Kunst, welche uns die von ihm so genannten „metaphysischen Qualitäten“ – wie z.B. Erhabenheit (eines Opfers), Gemeinheit (eines Verrats), Heiligkeit (eines Lebens) zur Gegebenheit bringt, gegeben. Eigentlich gibt es also für Ingarden drei „Welten“, in welche der Mensch verwickelt ist: 1. Die reale Welt der Natur, 2. Die intentionale Welt der menschlichen Schöpfung, und 3. Die Welt der höheren Mächte, die sozusagen durch die zweite Welt durchschimmert. Die menschliche Natur besteht dabei „in der stetigen Bemühung, das Tier, das in dem Menschen enthalten ist, mit dem eigentlich Menschlichen und mit der Rolle des Menschen als des Schöpfers der Werte zu transzendieren“24. Der Mensch kann nur dann wirklich existieren, leben und frei sein, „wenn er sich freiwillig der Schöpfung des Guten, Schönen und Wahren widmet“.25 Die Hauptrolle des Menschen ist also nach Ingarden die Schöpfung der Werte. Diese Rolle kann er aber – manchen Äußerungen Ingardens gemäß – nur in einer Welt realisieren, die lediglich intentional existiert. Darin sieht er eine tiefe Tragödie. Das Transzendieren der Natur scheint illusorisch zu sein, und die menschlichen Bemühungen vergeblich. Was an diesen Äußerungen vor allem einfällt, ist der Nachdruck auf Erzeugen und Hervorbringen; auf die poietische Seite des menschlichen Lebens und der Kultur. Auf den ersten Blick könnte es scheinen, dass der 23

Książeczka, op. cit., 40, Man and Value, op. cit., 30 (meine Übersetzungen). Książeczka, op. cit., 18, Man and Value, op. cit., 24. 25 Książeczka, op. cit., 74, Man and Value, op. cit., 51. 24

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Mensch die Werte buchstäblich produziert. Das ist aber nach Ingarden nicht der Fall. Er schreibt: Das, was wir Wert nennen, das Gute, das Schöne, das Wahre das Gerechte usw. das befindet sich nicht in diesem physisch-biologischen Unterbau unserer menschlichen Welt, sondern es tritt erst in dieser von uns geschaffenen und dem Menschen eigenen, überbauten Wirklichkeit auf, oder auch – wie das moralisch Gute – sich durch diese Wirklichkeit offenbart; oder aber braucht es ihre Erzeugung, um sich zu verkörpern.26

Und in einer Fußnote lesen wir: Das soll nicht bedeuten, dass die Werte von dem Menschen selbst erzeugt seien. Aus welcher Quelle sie kommen und ob man über ihre Erzeugung überhaupt sprechen kann, das ist schon eine ganz neue Perspektive der Probleme, die zum Problem des Wesens des Menschen schon nicht gehört. Wesentlich für den Menschen ist nur, dass er zu dieser Region des Seins, welche die Werte bilden, überhaupt gelangen kann.27

Die Hauptaufgabe des Menschen ist also, nach der zitierten Äußerungen Ingardens, die Erzeugung der Welt der Kultur – der intentionalen Gebilde, die zu der Welt der „höheren Mächte“ gehören, oder die mit dieser Welt in einer nahen Beziehung stehen und welche die Werte verkörpern können – der Gebilde, die der Mensch nach seinen eigenen Entwürfen auf dem Fundament der entsprechenden realen Objekte aufzustocken weiß. In der klassischen Philosophie, besonders bei Plato und Aristoteles, hat man den Vorrang des Handelns vor dem Machen, der Ethik vor der Technik ausdrücklich unterstrichen. Die neuzeitliche Kultur der Technik und der Industrie wird heutzutage oft deswegen kritisiert, weil sie das Gleichgewicht ihrer Elemente durch die Annahme des Vorrangs der Technik vor der Ethik gestört hat; man sagt, sie habe auf die Anerkennung der endgültigen Ziele, welche schon nicht als Mittel angesehen werden dürfen, verzichtet und die Natur ausschließlich als den Stoff einer beliebigen Bearbeitung angesehen. Das Ergebnis einer solchen Haltung sei – sagen die Kritiker – das Verderben sowohl der uns umgebenden Natur, als auch des Menschen selbst. Man predigt also die Notwendigkeit eines Wiederaufbaus des Vorrangs der Ethik vor der Produktion. Wie sieht Ingarden 26 27

Książeczka, op. cit., 38, Man and Value, op. cit., 29–30. Man and Value, op. cit., 31.

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diesen zweiten, für den Gedanken der Alten und auch für viele Kritiker der heutigen Zivilisation wichtigeren Zweig der Kultur – das ethische Handeln? Vor seiner letzten Abhandlung, Über die Verantwortung hat Ingarden nicht viel über das Handeln publiziert. Und doch steht das Problem des Handelns, seiner Meinung nach, in einer nahen Beziehung zum Hauptthema seiner ontologischen Bemühungen, zu dem Streit um die Existenz der Welt. Diese Beziehung bespricht er in einem kurzen Aufsatz „Der Mensch und die Zeit“. Die ersten zwei Teile dieses Aufsatzes hat er auf dem IX Internationalen Kongress für Philosophie in Paris im Jahre 1937 vorgetragen,28 die drei weiteren hat er sukzessiv während der folgenden 10 Jahre angeschlossen.29 In einer Fußnote erklärt Ingarden, dass erst seine Untersuchungen „in einer anderen Arbeit“ (diese andere Arbeit kann nur der Streit sein) ihm das Schreiben des Schlussteils ermöglicht haben. Dieser Schlussteil soll eine Lösung des Problems des Verhältnisses des Menschen zur Zeit – aber auch zur realen Welt – geben; und diese Lösung hat auch eine entscheidende Bedeutung für den Streit um die Existenz der Welt. Ingarden stellt in diesem Aufsatz fest, dass die Entscheidung dieses Streites mit der Konzeption der Natur des Menschen eng verbunden ist und dass sie auf die Weise, wie wir diese Natur verstehen, einen entscheidenden Einfluss hat. Ingarden sieht das wichtigste Argument gegen die idealistische Lösung in der menschlichen Freiheit. Es gibt nämlich, sagt er, freie und verantwortliche sowie reale menschliche Taten; ich vollbringe sie in den schweren Momenten meines Lebens und sie sind in dem innersten Kern meines Selbst verankert. Diese Taten sind aber nur dann möglich, wenn ich wirklich in der Zeit derselbe bleibe. Und noch mehr: in jeder solchen Tat entwickle ich mich und baue mich so auf, dass ich mehr und mehr von der Zeit unabhängig werde; wenn ich dagegen zu unreif bin, um solche Taten zu unternehmen, wenn ich also mir selbst untreu bleibe, verschwende ich meine Kräfte und zerfalle in der Zeit. 28

Traveaux du IX-éme Congrès International de Philosophie (Congrès Descartes), vol. 8, Paris 1937, 129–136. 29 Auf Polnisch in Książeczka, op. cit., 43–74, englische Übersetzung in Man and Value, op. cit., 33–51.

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In seinem freien und verantwortlichen Handeln ändert sich also der Mensch selbst. Das ist zwar nur kurz gesagt, und Ingarden gibt keine ausführliche Erklärung, worin diese Änderung besteht und welchen Faktoren der Mensch seine Integration und seine wachsende Unabhängigkeit von dem vernichtenden Einfluss der Zeit verdankt, jedenfalls soll aber dieses Handeln der Verwirklichung des Guten, Schönen und Wahren dienen; es soll ein bewusst in der Verantwortung für die Werte gelebtes Leben sein. Diese Problematik hat Ingarden später in Über die Verantwortung teilweise ausgearbeitet. In dieser Abhandlung erörtert er vor allem die ontologischen Voraussetzungen einer verantwortlichen Handlung. Neben einer eigentümlichen dynamischen Identität in der Zeit und einer besonderen substantiellen Struktur des Subjekts, das verantwortlich handeln können soll, wird dort auch die Existenz der Werte und die Möglichkeit ihrer Konkretisierung in den realen Objekten und Situationen als die erste Bedingung eines solchen Handelns genannt. Und es scheint klar, dass es hier hauptsächlich um die ethischen Werte geht. Die zentrale Stellung, welche in der Entwicklung seiner Philosophie die Problematik des freien, verantwortlichen Handelns schrittweise einnimmt, und auch der Nachdruck, den er schon früh genug, in dem während des zweiten Weltkrieges geschriebenen Schlussteil von „Der Mensch und die Zeit“, darauf legt, dass nur ein verantwortliches auf die Verwirklichung der höheren Werte gerichtetes Handeln den Menschen integriert und ihn immer mehr von dem vernichtenden Einfluss der Zeit unabhängig macht – diese beiden Aspekte von Ingardens Denken, zusammen mit dem Umstand, dass er das kulturelle – künstlerische und wissenschaftliche – „Machen“ als eine Realisierung der von dem Menschen unabhängig existierenden Werte ansieht, bezeugen ausdrücklich, dass er – ungeachtet eines gewissen Scheins des Vorrangs des Machens vor dem sittlichen Handeln – wirklich entschieden den Primat des ethischen Handelns vor dem Machen im menschlichen Leben und in der Schöpfung der Kultur annimmt.

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3.2 Die Ontologie des „Streites“ und die Struktur der Welt Wir sahen, dass sich die von Ingarden angenommene Teilung der Ontologie im Grunde von der husserlschen Analyse der Wahrnehmung herleitet. In seinem Buch, Welt im Widerspruch. Gedanken zur Phänomenologie als ethischer Fundamentalphilosophie,30 das im Jahre seines Todes erschien und das man als sein philosophisches Testament ansehen kann, versuchte Stephan Strasser zu zeigen, worin der Fehler des husserlschen offiziellen Phänomenologiebegriffes gelegen hatte. Er ging dabei von manchen späteren Äußerungen von Husserl selbst aus. Strasser argumentiert, dass die Reflexion, die Husserl als „Rückbeziehung auf das frühere Erlebnis”31 bezeichnet, eine mittelbare Wendung, also keine Erfahrung ist, weil jedes erfahrene „etwas” sich in der Welt befindet. Deswegen kann die Philosophie nicht als eine Pyramide auf der „immanenten Wahrnehmung” gebaut werden. Dabei geht Husserl von den beschreibenden Begriffen der Wissenschaft aus. Die Wissenschaft treibt aber – sagt Strasser – eine erkenntnismäßige Reduktion. Sie nimmt die Haltung eines „unbeteiligten Zuschauers” an – eine Haltung, die dem Seienden seinen weltlichen Charakter wegnimmt. Die Wissenschaft, wie auch eine idealistisch interpretierten Transzendentalphänomenologie, wissen nichts von der Welt als solcher. Husserl schrieb: „Birgt das Etwasüberhaupt der formalen Logik, in ihrer Fassung als objektiver Logik, letztlich auch den Sinn weltlichen Seins in sich, so gehört dieser eben mit zu den Fundamentalbegriffen der Logik, zu denen, die den ganzen Sinn der Logik bestimmen”.32 Husserl betont, dass die Wahrheit absolut ist. Aber die Wahrheit der Welt – bemerkt Strasser – soll auch den Umgang mit ihr – und zwar sowohl als physis als auch als polis – umfassen. Man soll also vom Anfang an den Gesichtspunkt sowohl der Praxis als auch der Ethik in Betracht ziehen. Der Fehler der offiziellen Doktrin Husserls liegt darin, dass er ihre Konstruktion nicht vom Anfang an realisiert. Emmanuel Levinas hatte 30

Dordrecht/Boston/London 1991, Phenomenologica, Bd. 124. Husserliana Bd. I, 73. 32 Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, 2. Aufl., Tübingen: Niemeyer 1981, 203. Hervorhebung des Originals. 31

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gezeigt, dass die in der Haltung eines „unbeteiligten Zuschauers” betriebene Ontologie als eine systematische Erkenntnis alles Seienden kein Fundament der Philosophie sein kann. Diese Betrachtungen Strassers scheinen auf die Ontologie Ingardens ebenso anwendbar zu sein. Ingarden hat den aristotelisch-thomistischen Begriff der ersten Materie als innerlich widersprüchlich abgelehnt; denn – argumentiert er – diese Materie soll einerseits keine Eigenschaften haben, anderseits aber werden ihr gewisse Züge zugesprochen. Er hat aber in einem Gespräch eine, wie es scheint, analoge Schwierigkeit seines Formbegriffes erwähnt: soll nämlich die Form eines Gegenstandes etwas absolut qualitätslosen sein, dann ist es nicht klar, wie man eine Form von einer anderen unterscheiden könnte. Die Behauptung, man könne die kategoriale Form von der Materie scharf abgrenzen, scheint dem von W. V. O. Quine kritisierten Dogma des Empirismus, dass man empirische und formale (analytische) Sätze scharf abgrenzen kann, parallel zu sein. Sowohl die Schwierigkeit der Unterscheidung der kategorialen Formen als auch das parallele Problem des Mangels an Determination der ersten Materie des Aristoteles sind wohl Folgen der Zuspitzung einer abstrahierenden Analyse bis zu ihrer äußersten Grenze. Die entsprechenden Seinskonzeptionen scheinen jedoch grundsätzlich gegenseitige Haltungen dem Sein gegenüber auszudrücken. Die aristotelische Materie ist vor allem als Potenz, Möglichkeit einer Entwicklung, und die aristotelische Form als Entelechie – das, wonach man strebt und was man dank dieser Möglichkeit erreicht, zu verstehen. Dagegen ist Ingardens Materie etwas Statisches, nach dem Muster einer sinnlichen Qualität gedachtes, und das Grundpaar seiner Ontologie, Form-Materie hat ihre Quelle in einer im Geiste des britischen Empirismus durchgeführten Analyse der Wahrnehmung. Es scheint evident zu sein, dass die aristotelisch-thomistische Konzeption der dynamischen Natur des Wirklichen dem Bilde, das sich Ingarden von der Welt, in welcher der Mensch lebt, und von der Rolle, die nach ihm die Werte – besonders die moralischen Werte – in dieser Welt spielen, geschaffen hat, viel näher steht, als die Ontologie, in der er selbst – ohne Erfolg – einen Platz für die Werte zu finden versuchte. Denn es besteht ein – von Ingarden erblickter – enger Zusammenhang zwischen den moralischen Werten, dem Leben, der Dynamik und der Entwicklung.

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Davon gibt Zeugnis seine Zustimmung, dass den moralischen Werten ein Seinsollen und eine „Positivität oder Negativität“ zukommt. Wie konnten also derartige Werte in einem statischen Schema einer solchen Ontologie ihren Platz finden? Die Meinung Ingardens, man solle für die Werte eine mittlere Seinsweise zwischen dem Realen und dem Intentionalen finden, scheint auch eine dynamische Natur der Werte in einem gewissen Sinne zu bezeugen. Vom Standpunkt einer statischen Unterscheidung der Seinsweisen scheint nämlich eine solche Aussage den hohen Rang der Werte zu bestreiten. Bei einem dynamischen Verständnis der Werte, das zumindest die moralischen Werte in einem engen Zusammenhang mit der Entwicklung der Personen sieht, kann man hingegen eine solche Formulierung insofern billigen, als diese Werte über ein einfaches Erscheinen in dieser oder jener Seinsweise hinausgehen. Sie sind Aspekte der Seinsweise der entsprechenden Personen, wenn man sie unter dem Gesichtspunkt ihrer Entwicklung betrachtet. Sie können also nicht einfach als in einem Moment völlig präsentierbar und unwandelbar angesehen werden. 3.3. Eine analytische Philosophie des Bewusstseins oder eine Ontologie (Metaphysik?) der Welt? In seinem Bemühen, die Problematik des Streites um die Existenz der Welt zu klären und diesen Streit im realistischen Sinne zu entscheiden, stand Ingarden – in einer gewissen Parallelität zu Husserl – am Scheideweg zwischen einer, kann man sagen, analytischen Bewusstseinsphilosophie und einer auf den Phänomenen basierten Analyse und Beschreibung der realen Welt, in der die Menschen leben – vor allem der Welt der freien, für ihr Handeln verantwortlichen Personen. Unter einer „analytischen Philosophie des Bewusstseins“ will ich hier eine Philosophie verstehen, die auf der Analyse der sinnlichen Wahrnehmung im Geist des britischen Empirismus aufgebaut wird. Eine solche Einstellung hat die Tendenz, das Zusammengesetzte durch seine Elemente zu erklären und diese Elemente als in sich selbst verständlich anzunehmen, also ihr Verständnis nicht aus ihrem Platz in einem umfassenderen Ganzen zu schöpfen – eine Tendenz zum Atomismus und Reduktionismus.

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Dass der junge Ingarden um die Wende des zweiten und dritten Dezenniums des XX Jahrhunderts sich zu etwas ähnlichem bekannte, bezeugen z.B. seine Äußerungen in dem unvollendeten dritten Teil seiner Betrachtungen über die Gefahr einer petitio principii in der Erkenntnistheorie. Er behauptet dort, dass eine „konstitutive Rechtsbetrachtung“ der noetischen und noematischen Sinne von einer Feststellung der „letzten, ursprünglichen, in sich nicht mehr «konstituierten» Elemente des Noemas“ – des gegenständlichen Korrelates des Aktes – als absoluter Faktizitäten, und von ihrer „wesensmäßigen Untersuchung ihrer Gehalte und [ihrer] Form nach“ beginnen solle. Es müsse „weiterhin untersucht werden, ob der Gehalt und die Form dieser Elemente sowie der weitere Bau des ganzen Noemas und des zugehörigen Aktes derartig sind, dass ein zu setzender oberster noematischer Sinn bei dem Enthaltensein dieser Elemente in dem betreffenden Noema notwendig «gegeben» sein muss“. Ingarden meint hier, dass es „die tiefste Frage der Erkenntniskritik“ sei, „ob die Sinneseinheiten höherer Schicht […] Einheiten sind, welche sozusagen ohne willkürliches «Hinzutun» des Erkenntnissubjektes notwendig zustande kommen müssen“.33 Anderseits haben wir gesehen, wie Ingarden in „Der Mensch und die Zeit“ die Problematik der Existenz der Welt mit der Frage nach der Natur des Menschen verknüpft, und besonders mit der Weise, wie man die Zeit erlebt. Wir haben auch gesehen, wie für ihn die Werte eine Schlüsselrolle in dem Verständnis des Menschen und der Welt spielen. Auch gewisse Texte seiner Ethikvorlesungen bezeugen es deutlich. In welchem Verhältnis steht aber diese Feststellung zur Ontologie, die er im Streit entwickelte – zur Ontologie, der Ingarden doch einen großen Teil seiner philosophischen Arbeit widmete? 3.4 Ingardens Probleme mit der Ontologie der Werte Die ontologische und metaphysische Stellung der Werte war für Ingarden ein Rätsel, und in seinen Analysen zu diesem Thema sprach er eher davon, was wir über Werte nicht wissen. Bezüglich der ethischen Werte hielt er 33

Roman Ingarden, Frühe Schriften zur Erkenntnistheorie, hrsg. von Włodzimierz Galewicz, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1994, 265. Hervorhebungen des Originals.

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die Frage, ob sie eine besondere Wertgruppe bilden, als unentschieden. In der deutschen Fassung seines Aufsatzes „Zum Problem der Relativität der Werte“34 von 1969 war er aber schon bereit, diese Frage „versuchsweise“ zu bejahen und einen spezifischen Unterschied dieser Werte von allen anderen Wertarten anzunehmen. Er behauptete, dass ihre Fundamente real und dass das ethische Verhalten oder Handeln im Zentrum der psychophysischen Organisation der handelnden Person verankert sein muss. Wir können also annehmen, dass die ethischen Werte für Ingarden in der realen Welt realisiert werden. Dabei will er, seiner Meinung über die Rolle der Qualitäten entsprechend, die verschiedenen Wertarten nach ihren Qualitäten ordnen. In Über die Verantwortung schrieb er, dass die „Existenz“ eines Wertes oder Unwertes in der Idee bedeutet, „dass es derartige ideale Wertqualitäten gibt, die erst eine Konkretisierung im individuellen Fall zulassen […]“35. In einer unveröffentlichten Diskussion in 1969 sagte er aber, dass es ein sehr schwieriges Problem ist, was eigentlich den sittlichen Charakter eines Wertes determiniert und gab zu, dass es für ihn nicht ganz klar ist, ob der hier entscheidende Faktor nicht ein bestimmtes Verhältnis zum Menschen sei. Als Werte in ihrem nicht idealen Sinn versteht Ingarden etwas, was an individuellen Gegenständen nicht bloß zur Erscheinung gelangt, sondern in ihnen auf charakteristische Weise verankert und infolgedessen ihnen gegenüber auch seinsunselbständig und in gleichem Sinne individuell ist, wie die Gegenstände, an denen es auftritt.36

Ingarden betont, dass keine Hypothese über das Wesen der Werte ihre charakteristischen Züge – ihre „Werthaftigkeit“ und ihre „Höhe“, welche mit einer hierarchischen Ordnung der Werte in Zusammenhang steht – wirklich erklärt. In der polnischen Fassung des zitierten Aufsatzes schrieb er: 34

In: Roman Ingarden, Erlebnis, Kunstwerk und Wert, Vorträge zur Ästhetik 1937– 1967, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1969, 95. 35 Roman Ingarden, Über die Verantwortung, Stuttgart: Reclam 1970, 50–51. Hervorhebungen des Originals. 36 Roman Ingarden, „Was wir über die Werte nicht wissen“, in: Erlebnis, Kunstwerk und Wert, op. cit., 118.

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Die „Werthaftigkeit“ ist […] schon etwas, was für jeden Wert unentbehrlich, aber weder Form, noch Materie, noch Seinsweise ist, obwohl sie, in dem Wert auftretend, einen Unterschied der Form des Wertes in Verhältnis zu der Form des Gegenstandes, der selbst kein Wert ist – ein [besonderes] Moment – zur Folge hat. Sie zieht auch eine besondere Modifikation der Seinsweise des Wertes nach sich.37

In der deutschen Fassung fehlen die Worte „noch Seinsweise“ und der Text lautet: […] noch Materie des Wertes ist. Dieses Moment zieht eben die besondere Form des Wertes nach sich. Auch die besondere Modifikation der Seinsweise des Wertes steht mit dem Moment seiner Werthaftigkeit in engem Zusammenhang.38

Betreffs der Seinsweise der Werte sagte Ingarden in einer Ethikvorlesung am 13 März 1962 folgendes: Die Werte sind weder in dem Sinne real, in welchem der elektrische Strom […] real ist, noch in dem Sinne, in welchem ein menschlicher Zorn oder ein Entzücken real ist; aber sie sind auch keine intentionalen Korrelate unserer Gefühle, unseres Begehrens, unserer Gedanken oder Beurteilungen. Man soll hier einen mittleren Weg, einen anderen modus existentiae suchen, welcher einerseits etwas weniger, etwas anderes als einfache Realität, anderseits aber etwas mehr und etwas anderes als einfache Intentionalität wäre, ein gewöhnliches Gespenst, das auf die Welt wegen eines menschlichen Fehlers oder irgendwelcher Gefühle aufgedrungen würde. […] Vielleicht soll man die existentiale Ontologie noch weiter ausbauen, als ich es getan habe, und neue modi existentiae ausklügeln, die gerade für Werte geeignet wären – und zwar vielleicht [sogar verschiedene modi] für Werte von verschiedenen Arten, wie einerseits moralische, anderseits ästhetische und Nützlichkeitswerte.39

Ingarden hatte also ernste Schwierigkeiten, den Werten in dem Schema seiner Ontologie einen Platz zuzuweisen.

37

Roman Ingarden, Przeżycie, dzieło, wartość, Kraków 1966, 97–98. Auch in: Roman Ingarden, Studia z estetyki, Bd. 3, Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe 1970, 232. Meine Übersetzung. 38 Erlebnis, Kunstwerk und Wert, op. cit., 113. 39 Roman Ingarden, Wykłady z etyki, Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe 1989, 337. Hervorhebungen des Originals. Meine Übersetzung.

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Soll aber die Aufgabe der Ontologie sein, apriorische Modelle der Wesen der möglichen realen Gegenstände vorzubereiten, dann scheint die Unmöglichkeit, in einer gegebenen Ontologie einen Platz für die Werte zu finden, eigentlich eine Unbrauchbarkeit dieser Ontologie im Rahmen der Philosophie Ingardens zu bedeuten. Denn, wenn man den Werten eine so prominente Rolle in der menschlichen Welt zuschreibt, kann man wohl kaum annehmen, dass eine Ontologie der Werte nicht einen zentralen Teil der Ontologie oder der Metaphysik des Wirklichen bilden, sondern nur ein Annex sein sollte, der „irgendwann“ hinzugefügt werden könnte und an den Grundrissen dieser Ontologie nichts zu ändern hätte. Es ist eher zu erwarten, dass die Ausarbeitung einer adäquaten Wertontologie in diesem Fall zu einer Umgestaltung des ganzen Systems der Ontologie führen würde.

4. Richtung Realismus 4.1 Das Problem des „reinen Bewusstseins“ bei Ingarden Nach Husserls Ideen einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, also dem Werk, das in 1913 den ersten Versuch eines Entwurfs der Problematik und einer Verwirklichung des Programms einer reinen, transzendentalen Phänomenologie darstellte, ist das reine Bewusstsein (1) in der immanenten Wahrnehmung auf eine zweifellose und adäquate Weise gegeben; (2) ein für sich geschlossener Seinszusammenhang des absoluten Seins, „in den nichts hineindringen und aus dem nichts entschlüpfen kann“;40 (3) etwas, das „prinzipiell nulla «re» indiget ad existendum”;41 (4) und schließlich eine Sphäre der “Irrealität”, etwas außerweltliches, in dem sich alles Reale konstituiert.

40 41

Husserliana. III, hrsg. von Walter Biemel, Haag 1950, 117. Ibid., 115.

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Der erste Punkt ist eine epistemologische, die übrigen sind eigentlich metaphysische Feststellungen. Ingardens Analysen scheinen dagegen zu zeigen, dass reines Bewusstsein höchstens als ein individueller Gegenstand, und nicht als eine Gegenstandsregion angesehen werden darf, was gegen den Punkt (2) spricht. Was den Punkt (3) betrifft, so schließt die in dem Streit festgestellte Zeitlichkeit, und besonders die „Spalthaftigkeit“ der Bewusstseinserlebnisse (d.h. der Umstand, dass die aktuelle Existenz nur dem zukommt, was gegenwärtig ist), die Möglichkeit einer „absoluten“ Existenz des menschlichen Bewusstseins aus. Betreffs des Punktes (4) muss man sagen, dass reines Bewusstsein und das reine Subjekt nach Ingarden zusammen mit dem realen Subjekt eine untrennbare Einheit einer menschlichen „Monade“ bilden. Sowohl dieses Subjekt, als auch der zu ihm zugehörige Bewusstseinsfluss sind dabei eng mit dem menschlichen Leib verbunden. Auf diese Weise ist die Möglichkeit, das reine Bewusstsein als etwas außerweltliches, was auf eine „stärkere“ Weise als die reale Welt – und besonders als die menschliche Person, welcher der gegebene Bewusstseinsfluss zugehört – existieren würde, ins Wanken gebracht. Sollte man einen existenziellen Unterschied zwischen der menschlichen Person und dem Bewusstseinsstrom annehmen, dann scheint nach Ingarden eher eine „stärkere“ Seinsweise der Person, und nicht diesem Strom zuzukommen, da der Bewusstseinstrom in Verhältnis zu dieser Person ja unselbstständig ist. Von den vier genannten Charakteristiken des reinen Bewusstseins die in Husserls Ideen postuliert wurden, würde also nur die erste, epistemologische Charakteristik bestehen bleiben, nämlich die Unbezweifelbarkeit der Existenz und zumindest mancher klar und distinkt gegebenen Beschaffenheiten der reinen Erlebnisse, die uns in einer immanenten Wahrnehmung gegeben sind. Ingarden betont zugleich, dass Ontologie und Erkenntnistheorie zwei voneinander unabhängige Disziplinen sind und dass es ein Fehler wäre, ontologische Feststellungen aus den epistemologischen Analysen zu deduzieren. Das scheint besonders klar zu sein, wenn es um einen Versuch geht, die Struktur oder die Seinsweise des Realen – also dessen, was

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seinem Begriff nach von seiner Gegebenheitsweise gerade unabhängig sein soll – von der Weise, auf die er erfahren wird, abzuleiten.42 Ingarden stellt auch ausdrücklich fest, dass das Problem der ontologischen Struktur der menschlichen Person nicht mit der Frage nach dem, was unzweifelhaft gegeben ist, identifiziert werden darf und dass die Grenzen zwischen den ontologisch zu unterscheidenden Seinssphären ganz anders verlaufen, als die epistemologischen Grenzen zwischen dem, was unzweifelhaft und was zweifelhaft ist. Ingarden verzichtet aber auf den Begriff des reinen Bewusstseins nicht und nimmt es als ein besonderes Element der realen Welt an. Er will auch, um der Gefahr einer petitio principii vorzubeugen, in der Erkenntnistheorie die transzendentale Methode anwenden. In den Textabschnitten, die er in der dritten, deutschen Auflage des Streites hinzugefügt hat, spricht er sich auch klar dafür aus, die Betrachtung des Problems der äußeren Welt auf eine Analyse des reinen Bewusstseins zu stützen – eine Analyse, welche die Voraussetzungen zu einer Feststellung der zweifellosen Gegebenheit des Bewusstseins in einer immanenten Wahrnehmung gäbe. Anderseits schreibt er aber schon während seiner Arbeit an dem Streit unseren Bewusstseinsakten keine andere als reale Existenzweise zu, was er noch in der ersten Auflage seines Literarischen Kunstwerks nicht tat. Das reine Bewusstsein, schreibt er auch ausdrücklich, „scheint in concreto im innersten Kern des realen Ichs enthalten zu sein und lässt sich nur rein abstraktiv, gewissermaßen rein gedanklich und nur zu einem gewissen Grade für sich abgrenzen“. Somit ist es „aus dem ganzen Netz der weltlichen Kausalzusammenhänge nicht herauszulösen“.43 Unsere Überlegungen scheinen aber zu zeigen, dass schon die Annahme der Existenz des „reinen“ Bewusstseins als eines besonderen Seins nicht aus einer ontologischen oder metaphysischen Analyse fließt, sondern eine epistemologische Konstruktion ist – eine Konstruktion, welche die Absolutheit der epistemologischen Erkenntnis stützen und eine strikte 42

Roman Ingarden, „Der Brief an Husserl über die VI. Untersuchung und den Idealismus“, Analecta Husserliana 2 (1972), 366 ff. Auch als „Brief an Husserl (Juli 1918)“, in: Husserl, Briefwechsel (Husserliana, Dokumente III), in Verbindung mit E. Schuhmann hrsg. von K. Schuhmann, Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: Kluwer 1994. 43 Der Streit, op. cit., Bd. II/2, 370.

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Ausweisung der Existenz der Welt vom reinen Bewusstsein aus möglich machen soll. 4.2 Die primären Gegebenheiten und die hyletischen Stoffe Das Problem der Empfindungsdaten hatte Ingarden schon in den Diskussionen mit Husserl im Jahre 1916 aufgegriffen.44 Er sieht ihre Stellung in dem „reellen“ Gehalt des Bewusstseins als prekär und unverständlich und versucht ohne Erfolg, seinen Lehrer zu überzeugen, dass sie eigentlich zu der noematischen Seite des Bewusstseinsaktes gehören. Husserl hat damals nur soviel zugegeben, dass die Empfindungsdaten „ichfremd“ sind. Trotz aller Kritik hat aber Ingarden auf den Begriff der Empfindungsdaten nie verzichtet. Es scheint nun, dass für eine konsequent realistische Betrachtungsweise solche aus der empiristischen Tradition stammenden Empfindungsdaten den denkbar schlechtesten Ausgangspunkt darstellen. Es ist höchst unwahrscheinlich, dass wir durch eine philosophische Analyse oder epistemische Operationen auf einem solchen Material die reale, bewusstseinsunabhängige Welt jemals rekonstruieren können, und zwar unabhängig davon, wie wir den ontologischen Status und den phänomenologischen Charakter dieser Empfindungsdaten letztendlich interpretieren. Wie soll man dann aber phänomenologisch – also mit vollem Bewusstsein des gewählten Erkenntnisweges – die reale Welt, in der wir leben, und deren Verstehen im Grunde Ingardens Hauptziel war, philosophisch erfassen und beschreiben? Hier braucht man wohl eine ganzheitliche und dynamische Konzeption der Sinne. Eine solche Konzeption hat Erwin Straus in Vom Sinn der Sinne vorgeschlagen.45 Straus schildert das Empfinden als eine totale Weise der sympathetischen Kommunikation. Als eine Kommunikationsweise umfasst das Empfinden ein Spektrum der Sinne, unter denen jeder eine besondere Art unserer Kommunikation mit der Welt ist. In ihrer Ganzheit ist die 44

Siehe: Roman Ingarden, „Meine Erinnerungen an Edmund Husserl“, in: Edmund Husserl, Briefe an Roman Ingarden, Den Haag: Niemeyer 1968, 123–131. 45 Erwin Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne. Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Psychologie, erste Aufl. 1935, zweite, vermehrte Aufl. Berlin: Springer 1956. An die straussschen Überlegungen hat später M. Merleau-Ponty angeknüpft.

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Kommunikation aber total, d.h. sie ist die Kommunikation des Subjekts als eines Ganzen mit der Welt, die ebenfalls als Ganzes auftritt – als ein Ganzes, das für mich immer schon differenziert ist und sich im Laufe des Lebens weiter differenziert. Das Empfinden ist eine sympathetische Kommunikationsweise, denn es ist in dem Werden des Subjekts beschlossen – in einem Werden mit der Welt und in der Welt; es ist auch immer ein Empfinden des Subjekts mit seiner Welt. Das primitive sinnliche Leben ist ein Leben des Empfindens und der Bewegung, ein Leben des Werdens. Der prominente französische Psychiater und Denker Henri Ey schrieb: „Das psychische Wesen […] bewusst seiend und bewusst werdend, nimmt sich selbst in Besitz, indem es über einen personalen Modell der Welt verfügt“;46 und an anderer Stelle: „Bewusst zu sein bedeutet, über einen personalen Modell der Welt zu verfügen“.47 Der späte Husserl wusste es. Er schrieb z.B. von einer Gesamtwahrnehmung, die „[…] nebst einem im speziellen Sinne wahrgenommenem Ding oder Vorgang Ich und Umwelt umfasst […]“.48 Dieses Modell der Welt ist aber natürlich nicht im Bewusstsein enthalten, wenn man das Bewusstsein als die aktuelle anschauliche Präsenz versteht. Es steckt sozusagen hinter den Kulissen, um von daher die wache Anwesenheit des Subjektes und das Verstehen der von den Sinnen gelieferten Daten zu ermöglichen. Dieses Verstehen kommt durch ein pattern matching zustande, in dem die ganze aktuelle Lage des Subjekts zur Beachtung kommt. 46

„l’être psychique... en étant et devenant conscient, prend possession de lui-même en disposant du modèle personnel de son monde”, Henri Ey, La conscience, 2. Aufl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968, IX. Meine Übersetzung. 47 „Être conscient c’est disposer d’un modèle personnel du monde”, Ibid., 36. In Die Erkenntnistheorie von Roman Ingarden (op. cit., 2. Kapitel) interpretiert Arkadiusz Chrudzimski Ingardens „Intuition des Durchlebens“ als eine „normative Zugangsweise“ zu den Gegenständen der Erkenntnis. So verstanden, wäre diese Intuition sozusagen eine Projektion eines Grundteils des Modells der Welt auf das „reine Bewusstsein“, parallel zu den Empfindungsdaten, welche man als eine deformierende Projektion der sinnlichen Gegebenheiten auf das Bewusstsein ansehen kann. Nach Ingarden soll aber die Intuition des Durchlebens eine unmittelbare, völlig anschauliche Präsentation des Stromes des reinen Bewusstseins bieten; und man kann eine solche Anschaulichkeit der „normativen Zugangweise“ zu den Gegenständen kaum zuschreiben. 48 Husserliana XVI, 87.

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Man kann also das Bewusstsein als Präsenz von dem, was nicht aktuell präsent ist, nicht scharf trennen. Das macht eine phänomenologische Analyse, in welcher die Existenz eines stetigen Übergangs zwischen den „anschaulichen Gegebenheiten“ und ihrem mehr oder weniger unbewussten Hintergrund nicht ausdrücklich in Betracht gezogen wird, so zweideutig. Die „Auffassung“ der hyletischen Stoffe durch die Intention, von der Husserl und Ingarden gesprochen haben, ist kein phänomenologisches Datum, das man am Beispiel einer Dingwahrnehmung sichtbar machen könnte. Es ist eine erkenntnistheoretische Theorie, im Grunde eine psychologist’s fallacy – ein Missverstehen dessen, was man in der Theorie annimmt, als unmittelbarer Erfahrung. Das wusste der spätere Husserl auch, und dieses Problem führte ihn zur Problematik der „passiven Synthesen”. Eine ganzheitliche und dynamische Konzeption der Sinne besaß natürlich auch die aristotelische Tradition, besonders Thomas von Aquin mit seiner vis cogitativa oder ratio particularis. Er schrieb: „omnis nostra cognitio originaliter constituit in notitia primorum principiorum indemonstrabilium. Horum autem cognitio in nobis a sensu oritur”.49 Etienne Gilson betont dabei, man solle diese Sätze nicht so verstehen, dass „wenn der Mensch keinen sinnlichen Gegenstand wahrnehmen würde, dann der Intellekt nicht imstande wäre, ein erstes Prinzip zu formulieren, das er aber in sich einschließt und Recht hat, es den Sachen zuzuschreiben. In Wahrheit“ – schreibt Gilson – „gestaltet es der Intellekt in eigenem Lichte, seinen Inhalt lieht er aber von den Sinnen”.50 Der Rest dieses inneren Sinnes, dieses intelligibelen Inhalts der Sinne, liegt in der Aktanatomie der Logischen Untersuchungen darin, dass die Empfindungen den intellektuellen Sinn der Intention doch irgendwie rechtfertigen sollen. Eigentlich gehört also das „hinter den Kulissen“ funktionierende Modell der Welt zu der Sinnlichkeit, zu der primär gebenden Fakultät. Was ist uns also „primär gegeben“?

49 50

De ver. Qu. X Art. 6 Praeterea. Etienne Gilson, Réalisme thomiste et critique de la connaissance, Paris 1947, 201.

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F. J. J. Buytendijk widmete einen Essay dem ersten Lächeln des Kindes.51 Durch eine eindringliche Analyse des physiologischen Aspekts des Lächelns und seines Sinnes kommt er zu einem interessanten Ergebnis: Schon das erste Lächeln des Kindes „ist der Ausdruck der aufblühenden Menschlichkeit in der ersten schüchternen, sympathischer Begegnung, und deshalb ist es eine Antwort, worin das Für-sich-Sein sich konstituiert, aber auch mit sich selbst verlegen wird, indem es aus dem vitalen Bei-sichselbst-Sein auf die Schwelle der zarten Gemeinsamkeit tritt, weil es von der Mutter, der Matrix der reinen Liebe, gerufen wird“.52 Diese Sachlage ist von Vergilius mit den von Buytendijk zitierten Worten: Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem ausgedrückt worden.53 Auf diese Weise wird das Kind schon durch sein erstes Lächeln in die Gemeinschaft der Personen eingeführt, in die volle menschliche Welt. Das geschieht, ehe es irgendetwas über die „äußere“, physische Welt oder über sinnliches Erfahren lernt und ehe es zu sprechen beginnt. Diese primäre, nicht begrifflich gefasste, aber tief erlebte Erfahrung, die von der großen Weltliteratur erblickt und ausgedrückt wurde – diese Erfahrung gibt uns schon ein Verstehen, ein Bild der Menschheit und der Welt, in der wir leben. Von diesem Weltbild ausgehend, können wir schon mit Robert Spaemann sagen, dass der metaphysische Realismus eben das ist, was das menschliche In-der-Welt-Sein von dem tierischen unterscheidet.54

5. Ingardens Ontologie und die intentionalen Gegenstände In seinem als klassisch geltendem Buch Das Literarische Kunstwerk unternahm Ingarden eine ontologische Analyse des literarischen Werkes.55 Diese Arbeit, die ursprünglich als eine Hilfsaufgabe für die Bearbeitung des Realitätsproblems unternommen wurde, stand zu Beginn seines langen, 51

„Das erste Lächeln des Kindes“, in: F. J. J. Buytendijk: Das Menschliche. Wege zu seinem Verständnis, Stuttgart 1958, 101–118. 52 Op. cit., 117 f. 53 Ecl. IV, 60. 54 Robert Spaemann, Personen. Versuche über den Unterschied zwischen „etwas“ und „jemand“, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1996, 88. 55 Halle (Saale): Max Niemeyer 1931.

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umfangreichen und fruchtbaren Schaffens auf dem Gebiete der Kunsttheorie und Ästhetik, dem Gebiet, auf dem vielleicht seine wichtigsten Leistungen liegen. Dass diese sozusagen „Nebenproduktion“ sich wichtiger als das Werk, welches der Philosoph als seine Hauptleistung ansah, zu erweisen scheint, liegt teilweise daran, dass der von dem frühen Husserl übernommene Ausgangspunkt – die Situation, in der wir zu beschreiben versuchen, was in einer Wahrnehmung gegeben ist – eine analoge Struktur zu dem Versuch hat, eine fiktive Realität mittelst der Sprache zu dichten. Man kann sagen, dass es eine Wahrnehmungssituation mit dem umgekehrten Vorzeichen ist. Dabei eliminiert diese Umkehrung des Vorzeichens die von dem Inhalt der Sätze unabhängige und nicht einfach die Struktur der Sprache besitzende Realität des Beschriebenen – die Realität, die einen von der immanenten Analyse des „reinen Bewusstseins“ ausgehenden Philosophen in Verlegenheit bringen muss. In einer ästhetischen Betrachtung des literarischen Kunstwerks treten dabei die ästhetischen Werte an die Spitze, Werte, die eng mit der das Wahrnehmen nachahmenden Aktivität des sich Vergegenwärtigens der im Werk vorgestellten Gegenständlichkeiten verbunden sind, und die z.B. von den ethischen Werten, welche durch das reale Handeln der Menschen in der Welt realisiert werden, sehr verschieden sind. Man kann leicht sehen, dass der Begriff des Wertes bei Ingarden viel besser auf die ästhetischen, als auf die ethischen Werte passt.56 Die Ontologie Ingardens scheint besser zu den intentionalen als zu den realen Gegenständen zu passen.

6. Schlussbemerkungen In seiner philosophischen Entwicklung blieb also Ingarden in einer dauernden und – möchte man sagen – dramatischen Spannung zwischen dem Bauen der Philosophie auf der Basis einer Analytik der Wahrnehmung im Geiste des britischen Empirismus und seiner Intuition der Welt, in der 56

In diesem Kontext kann man zweifeln, ob es eine einzige allgemeine Idee des Wertes überhaupt gibt.

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Menschengemeinschaften leben und handeln. Das war die Spannung zwischen einer statischen, atomisierenden und reduktionistischen Einstellung und einer dynamischen, ganzheitlichen und kontextuellen Vision der Welt. Dabei scheint es für diese Sachlage charakteristisch zu sein, dass – seine späte Abhandlung über die Verantwortung ausgenommen – dieses sozusagen Zweckthema seines Denkens im Allgemeinen nur skizzenhaft, fast metaphorisch ausgedrückt wurde. Wenn unsere Diagnose korrekt ist, dann folgt das – neben dem Charakter des Gegenstandes selbst, der eine andere Ausdrucksweise braucht, als eine im Geiste der Wissenschaft redigierte Beschreibung – wohl teilweise davon, dass Ingarden zu einer tieferen Bearbeitung dieses Themas einfach Begriffsapparatur fehlte. Es scheint, dass die von ihm in dem Streit ausgearbeitete Apparatur zu diesem Zweck nicht ausreichend war und dass er sich erst ganz neue Begriffe – sozusagen wider den Strom seiner eigenen ontologischen Betrachtungen – mühsam erarbeiten musste. Was dagegen in seiner Einstellung auffällt, ist eine imponierende Ehrlichkeit, ein aufrichtiges Zugeständnis aller Schwierigkeiten und das Fehlen irgendwelcher Bemühungen, diese Schwierigkeiten zu vertuschen.

Contributors Arkadiusz Chrudzimski (born 1967) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Szczecin and Research Assistant at the University of Salzburg. He is the autor of: Die Erkenntnistheorie von Roman Ingarden (Kluwer 1999), Intentionalitätstheorie beim frühen Brentano (Kluwer 2001), Die Ontologie Franz Brentanos (Kluwer 2004), and Intentionalität, Zeitbewusstsein und Intersubjektivität. Studien zur Phänomenologie von Brentano bis Ingarden (Ontos-Verlag 2005). He is currently working on a book on Meinong’s Gegenstandstheorie and on a defense of the ontology of intentional objects. Gregor Haefliger, Ph.D at the University of Fribourg (CH). He is the author of: Über Existenz: Die Ontologie Roman Ingardens (Kluwer 1994) and articles on Roman Ingarden and phenomenology. He is also the editor of: Roman Ingarden, Einführung in Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie. Osloer Vorlesungen (1967) (Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 4, Niemeyer 1992). Guido Küng, born in 1933, is professor emeritus of the University of Fribourg / Switzerland. He has published numerous articles in the area of analytic philosophy and phenomenology. He is the author of Ontology and Logistic Analysis of Language: An Enquiry Into the Contemporary Views on Universals (Dordrecht 1967), and he has been co-editor of Roman Ingarden’s Gesammelte Werke (Niemeyer). Jeff Mitscherling is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph. He is the author of Roman Ingarden’s Ontology and Aesthetics (University of Ottawa Press, 1997), The Author’s Intention (with Tanya DiTommaso and Aref Nayed, Lexington Books, 2004), and numerous articles in aesthetics, classical philology and philosophy, hermeneutics, the history of philosophy, and phenomenology. Andrzej Półtawski, Ph.D 1964 at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, taught at this University from 1957 to 1970, and then at the Philosophical Faculty of the Roman Catholic Academy (now Cardinal Wyszyński University) in Warsaw, full Professor since 1985, emeritus since 1993. Main

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research interests: epistemology (in particular the problem of the sense perception) and philosophical anthropology. Main publications: Rzeczy i dane zmysłowe. Świat i spostrzeżenie u G. E. Moore’a (Things and Sensedata. World and Perception in G. E. Moore, in Polish, 1966). Świat, spostrzeżenie, świadomość. Fenomenologiczna koncepcja świadomości a realizm (World, Perception, Consciousness. The Phenomenological Conception of Consciousnesss and Realism, in Polish, 1972). Realizm fenomenologii (The Realism of Phenomenology, in Polish, 2001). Some articles in German, English, French and Italian. Visiting professor at the International Academy of Philosophy, Irving, Texas (1982), International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein (1989), Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio (1991), MEDO Institute, Rolduc, Netherlands (1993). Peter Simons studied Mathematics and Philosophy at Manchester. He worked at the University of Salzburg from 1980 to 1995, since when he has been Professor at the University of Leeds. Besides Austrian and Polish philosophy, he specializes in metaphysics and the philosophy and history of logic. He is Director of the Franz Brentano Foundation. Edward Swiderski (University of Fribourg, Switzerland) teaches aesthetics, philosophy of culture, social philosphy, as well as the history of Russian and Soviet philosophy. His Mongraphs include a study on the philosophical foundations of Soviet aesthetics as well as an analysis of the action theory of the “Poznań School”. Over the years, he has written regularly on aspects of Ingarden’s ontology and phenomenology and collaborated in the preparation of the Collected Works of Ingarden published by Niemeyer. In addition, Swiderski is the editor of Studies in East European Thought (Springer-Kluwer) and has in this capacity promoted several thematic issues covering the “state of philosophy” in a number of post-communist countries, including Poland. Amie L. Thomasson (born 1968) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. She is the author of Fiction and Metaphysics (Cambridge 1999), co-editor (with David Woodruff Smith) of Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind (Oxford 2005), and author of numerous articles in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and aesthetics.

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She is currently working on a defense of common-sense ontology in a manuscript entitled Ordinary Objects. Daniel von Wachter (* 1970) studied mechanical engineering, theology, philosophy, and musicology. M.A. in philosophy and musicology at the University of Innsbruck 1995, Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Hamburg 1997 with a thesis on ontology (Dinge und Eigenschaften, published 2000). M.A. in Philosophical Theology (1999) and Ph.D. (2003) in Theology at the University of Oxford. In 2002 researcher at the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) at the University of Leipzig. Since 2003 he is research fellow with the Bayerischer Habilitationsförderpreis at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Munich. His current research is on philosophy of religion, causation, laws of nature, action, and ethics.

Index of Names Abrams, M. H., 147 Aristotle, 40, 43, 47, 49, 52, 57, 66f, 196, 207 Armstrong, D. M., 56f, 59f, 70, 73 Bennett, J., 28, 34 Bergson, H., 159 Boyd, R., 166, 186 Brand, M., 17, 26–29 Brentano, F., 32, 83–86, 93f, 96, 101f Brink, D. O., 160 Buytendijk, F. J. J., 218 Campbell, K., 73 Carnap R., 17 Chisholm, R. M., 26f, 32f, 100f, 167 Chrudzimski, A., 39, 84, 86, 96, 177, 200, 216 Conrad-Martius, H., 194 Davidson, D., 28 De Man, P., 152 Derrida, J., 152 Dickens, C. M., 62f Dilthey, W., 159, 188 Doyle, C., 43 Ducasse, C. J., 90 Eco, U., 152 Ey, H., 216 Fichte, G., 39 Filek, J., 159 Forbes, G., 16 Foucault, M., 152 Frege, G., 43 Gadamer, H. G., 152, 156–158 Gierulanka, D., 159 Gilson, E., 217 Ginsberg, E., 61 Goldman, A., 27 Gottlieb, D., 15 Griffin, N., 15 Haefliger, G., 177 Haefliger, G., 9, 13f, 17, 19, 22, 24, 31 Hartmann, N., 166 Heidegger, M., 119, 179

Herder, J. G., 188 Heyting, A., 32 Hirsch, E., 15 Howell, R., 131 Hume, D., 48, 73 Husserl, E., 9, 11, 33, 39, 41, 43, 47, 49, 55, 59, 63f, 66, 68, 89, 91f, 101, 104, 137, 144, 159, 160, 171–176, 180, 185, 188f, 191, 193f, 196–198, 206, 208, 212–217, 219 Kant, I., 173 Kim, J., 28 Küng, G., 9, 13, 58 LaBossiere, M. C., 70 Levinas, E., 206 Locke, J., 162 Lombard, L. B., 15–17, 26, 28f, 32 Loux, M., 70 Lowe, E. J., 15, 69, 70 Mackie, J. L., 163 Makota, J., 159, 177 Mann, T., 55 Marty, A., 86, 89 McDowell, J., 162f Meinong, A., 86, 89, 104 Meixner, U., 56f Merleau-Ponty, M., 179, 215 Mitscherling, J., 134 Mulligan, K., 11, 14, 18 Niiniluoto, I., 166 Noonan, H. W., 15 Ogien, R., 160 Perler, D., 84 Półtawski, A., 42, 159 Quine, W. V. O., 15, 19, 20, 58, 207 Ray, W., 149 Russell, B., 98, 108 Ruthven, K. K., 151 Sartre, J.-P., 179 Sayre-McCord, G., 160 Scheler, M., 58, 179, 186 Searle, J., 130f, 188

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INDEX OF NAMES

Sepp, H. R., 9 Sierszulska, A., 34 Simmel, G., 159, 188 Simons, P., 14, 16, 18–21, 26, 29, 57, 61, 101 Smith, B., 11, 14, 18, 49, 59, 61, 68f, 79, 130 Spaemann, R., 218 Strasser, S., 206 Straus, E., 215 Strawson, P., 15, 56f, 59 Stróżewski, W., 159, 170 Stumpf, C., 47 Swiderski, E., 34, 175, 188

Takei, Y., 141 Thomas Aquinas, 60, 70, 207, 217 Thomasson, A. L., 123, 125, 130, 136 Toumela, R., 168 Twardowski, K., 89, 103f, 120 Van den Beld, T., 163 Vergilius, 218 Vico, G., 188 Von Wright, G. H., 167 Wachter, D. von, 57, 61, 64, 68, 73, 78 Węgrzecki, A., 159 Yagisawa, T., 130 Zalta, E., 87 Zeno of Elea, 32

PHENOMENOLOGY & MIND

Edited by Arkadiusz Chrudzimski • Wolfgang Huemer Vol. 1

Vol. 3

Arkadiusz Chrudzimski Wolfgang Huemer (Hrsg.)

Arkadiusz Chrudzimski

Phenomenology and Analysis Essays on Central European Philosophy ISBN 3-937202-36-6 Paperback, 381 Seiten, EUR 32,00 Die Geschichte der Philosophie des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts ist von der Kluft zwischen analytischer und kontinentaler Philosophie geprägt – und das, obwohl beide ihre Wurzeln in der Tradition der „österreichischen“ oder „mitteleuropäischen“ Philosophie haben. Die Essays dieses Bandes zeigen in historischen wie systematischen Studien, wie eine Rückbesinnung auf die mitteleuropäische Philosophie interessante Möglichkeiten eröffnet, die Kluft zwischen kontinentaler und analytischer Philosophie zu überwinden und zudem eine originelle Perspektive auf zentrale Probleme der Philosophie ermöglicht. Die Autoren: Wilhelm Baumgartner (Würzburg), Christian Beyer (Erfurt), Arkadiusz Chrudzimski (Salzburg/Zieleno Góra), Dagfinn Føllesdal (Stanford/Oslo), Wolfgang Huemer (Erfurt), Dale Jacquette (Pennsilvania State University), Edgar Morscher (Salzburg), Tommaso Piazza (Florenz), Roberto Poli (Trento), Robin Rollinger (Löwen), Peter Simons (Leeds), Barry Smith (Buffalo/Leipzig), Gianfranco Soldati (Fribourg), Jan Woleński (Krakau).

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Intentionalität, Zeitbewusstsein und Intersubjektivität Studien zur Phänomenologie von Brentano bis Ingarden

ISBN 3-937202-63-3 Hardcover, 211 Seiten, EUR 78,00 Dieses Buch beschäftigt sich mit verschiedenen Intentionalitätstheorien, die innerhalb der „phänomenologischen” Tradition entstanden sind. Diese Tradition beginnt mit dem Projekt der deskriptiven Psychologie Brentanos. Charakteristisch für sie ist die Betonung der Beschreibung dessen, was sich uns präsentiert, und was den Ausgangspunkt für jede theoretische Verarbeitung bilden soll. Die phänomenologische Bedeutungslehre fasst die sprachliche Intentionalität in der Regel als sekundär in Bezug auf die ursprüngliche mentale Intentionalität auf. Unsere Worte sind – behaupten die Phänomenologen – nur deswegen bedeutend, weil sie psychische Akte ausdrücken, die ihrerseits ihrem Wesen nach intentional sind. Das Buch beginnt mit der Lehre Franz Brentanos und die nächsten Kapiteln betreffen die wichtigsten seiner Schüler wie Anton Marty, Carl Stumpf, Kazimierz Twardowski, Alexius Meinong und Edmund Husserl.

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