Ontological Aspects of the Literary Work of Art in Roman Ingarden and Nicolai Hartmann

Abstract

The aesthetics of Roman Ingarden and Nicolai Hartmann are phenomenological in the Husserlian sense of the term. Although both Ingarden as well as Hartmann owe their ideas to Husserl, each of them worked independently of the other and provided different accounts with regard to the anatomy and the mode of existence of the literary work of art, which have proven to be invaluable for its study. While Ingarden’s account utilizes the properties of conscious acts to explain the appearance of an aesthetic object, Hartmann employs the founding properties of the conscious acts in the human temporality, within which these acts are performed. However, there are also some specific similarities to be found in their theories of ontology, concerning the “stratified structures” of the different kinds of aesthetic objects. The present paper is an attempt to develop a comparison with respect to certain questions related to Ingarden’s and Hartmann’s ontologies of the literary work of art. The aim is to answer these questions from the point of view of both Ingarden as well as Hartmann.

Keywords

• phenomenology
• ontology
• aesthetics
• literary work of art
• roman ingarden
• nicolai hartmann