By all accounts, Roman Ingarden was Husserl’s favorite and most devoted student. When all the students from Göttingen and Freiburg schools abandoned their teacher before the threshold of the transcendental philosophy, Ingarden persisted in his efforts to understand the motives and nature of Husserl’s phenomenology, drawing the line at what he thought were its idealistic conclusions, and thus preserving his own realistic presuppositions.
As Husserl’s constitutive phenomenology evolved, Ingarden questioned Husserl’s new construal of meanings and essences, as well as the consequences of the reduction, both in written correspondence and informal conversations. In a letter to Husserl, Ingarden questioned his teacher’s idealistic move to include noemata in the content of consciousness, and then obliterate the distinction between noemata and the real things, maintaining that in this way the reduction resulted in an idealistic construction of reality. In private conversations Ingarden repeatedly questioned Husserl about the nature of the sense data, whether they belonged to consciousness, whether they were egological, whether they were acts or objects.
In his published work, Ingarden went rather far to resist Husserl. He wrote three volumes on the realism-idealism controversy, and before that he wrote the Literary Work of Art, motivated in part to show that the structure of the purely intentional objects is radically different than the nature and the mode of existence of the real objectivities so that the latter cannot be reduced to the former, as he suspected Husserl’s idealistic turn was attempting to do.
In his Oslo lectures, Ingarden advanced several criticisms regarding the nature and purpose of the reduction. He questioned the nature of a general thesis, i.e., the belief in the existence of the world that the epoché was supposed to suspend, he inquired into the nature of the reduction itself, what it accomplished, whether it presupposed what it purported to achieve? Did the reduction involve ego-splitting? Did the epoché change the world into a phenomenon? Was there a criterion for the validity of the noema? Ingarden realized that noemata were not ad hoc creations, that there was an eidetic necessity governing the process of constitution and yet he never ceased suspecting Husserl’s phenomenology of creationism.
In this paper I will examine Ingarden’s critique of Husserl’s constitutive phenomenology, J.N. Mohanty’s criticism of Ingarden’s objections to Husserl, and my evaluation of Ingarden’s understanding of transcendental phenomenology. I will examine the consequences of Ingarden’s reluctance to follow Husserl for his theory of identity of a literary work of art, and his attempt to refute subjectivism and relativism in the theory of interpretation and evaluation of literary works. At the end of the paper, I sketch the outlines of a more phenomenological theory of identity that Ingarden could have pursued if he did not abandon the Husserlian path, as well as a more phenomenological way to overcome relativism without falling back on essentialism. I will then show the application of Ingarden’s modified theory to the religious and political disputes regarding the interpretations of the religious (literary) texts, such as Quran, where the insistence on “the one correct interpretation” results in violence.