Central and East European
Society for Phenomenology

Conference | Paper

The Affective-Volitional Experience of the World through 'Metaphysical Qualities' in Roman Ingarden's Phenomenology

Wojciech Starzyński

Wednesday 4 September 2024

11:45 - 12:25

TU-Main Venue

Although Roman Ingarden’s phenomenology is most often associated with his ontology of the formal type, this does not mean that the Polish phenomenologist did not develop his own conception of the lived world in an anthropological context. One can point to a three-stage reflection on the world: (a) in the spirit of realism, according to which the real world appears to the subject as a structured network of interrelated individual objects, and which as such does not depend on the activity of human consciousness; then (b), still bearing in mind this foundation of the real world, one can speak of a specifically human world of intentional objects, which in its existence depends on the creative and reproductive acts of consciousness. Finally, (c) Ingarden speaks of a transcending human world of ‘higher powers’, which is revealed subjectively through the experience of so-called ‘metaphysical qualities’. In my presentation, I would like to focus on understanding the world in this third sense. It seems that the phenomenalisation of the world understood in this way goes beyond the limits of rational argumentation and takes place at the level of specific experiences of the mystical-extatic type, which constitute an important factor and even a peculiar axis of human action in the world. This particular volitional-affective phenomenon, about which Ingarden writes, among other things, in the essay “Man and Time”, seems to constitute the subjective bond of the experience of the world in general. Ingarden describes this experience in two stages: in a preliminary form, it can be spoken of at the level of the experience of art (especially in literature, as he writes about in his “Literary Work”), and in the proper sense it takes place through the first-person realisation of the values of “truth, goodness and beauty” in the real world.