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Ingarden did not contribute directly to the "social ontology' to which several of his colleagues in the Göttingen Kreis made significant contributions. His life-long preoccupation with the idealism – realism controversy and the ontology of art and aesthetics kept him at some remove from investigations of empathy, social acts, and the metaphysics of community. He did however share with his colleagues the conviction that the theory of values initially propounded by Scheler, the "material-value' theory, is sound. Given that, according to this conception, values are ideal qualities and thus objective, they underlie and shape human relations. Three contexts of considerations in Ingarden's thinking attest to the role he assigned to values, thanks to which aspects of his work are relevant to phenomenological social ontology: the ontology of the work of art, the ontology of responsibility, and Ingarden's reflections on the status of cultural entities. Key to the first two contexts is the notion of the "value situation" in which "response to value" on the part of subjects in direct contact or separated in time and space is suggestive of a kind of "social cement'. Reflecting on the nature of cultural entities Ingarden held that the impetus to bring cultural entities into existence is motivated by the desire to incorporate and share (transcendent) values. In this last regard I draw attention to a recent attempt to read Ingarden's ontology of purely intentional objects (artworks) into contemporary social ontology (Searle's institutional facts) and note that it fails to take into account the role Ingarden ascribed to values.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-27692-2_12

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