CC BY
18
HORIZON 9 (2) 2020 : I. Research : H. Williams: 703-728
ФЕНОМЕНОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ • STUDIES IN PHENOMENOLOGY • STUDIEN ZUR PHÄNOMENOLOGIE • ÉTUDES PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIQUES
https://doi.org/10.21638/2226-5260-2020-9-2-703-728
CHALLENGING INGARDEN'S "RADICAL" DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE REAL AND THE LITERARY*
HEATH WILLIAMS
PhD in Philosophy, Research Associate.
Department of philosophy (Zhuhai),
Sun Yat-sen University.
Tangjiawan, Xiangzhou District, Zhuhai.
519082 Guangdong, China.
E-mail: [email protected]
Ingarden's phenomenology of aesthetics is characterised primarily as a realist ontological approach which is secondarily concerned with acts of consciousness. This approach leads to a stark contrast between spatiotemporal objects and literary objects. Ontologically, the former is autonomous, totally determined, and in possession of infinite attributes, whilst the latter is a heteronomous intentional object that has only limited determinations and infinitely many "spots of indeterminacy." Although spots of indeterminacy are often discussed, the role they play in contrasting the real and literary object is not often disputed. Through a close reading of Ingarden's ontological works and texts on aesthetics, this essay contests the purity of Ingarden's ontological approach and the ensuing disparity between real and literary object, particularly on the question of spots of indeterminacy. I do this by demonstrating the following five theses: 1) Ingarden's claim that the real object has an infinitude of properties belies an epistemology, and we should instead conclude that ontologically the real object's properties are finite. 2) Ingarden's a priori argument that absent properties of real objects are ontologically determined is unsound. 3) The radical difference between the infinitude and finitude of givenness and absence of the real and the literary object ought to be relativised. 4) Indeterminacies within the novel are concretised in much the same way that absent properties of real objects are intended. 5) Literature makes claims that have a truth value that we can attribute to their author.
Key words: Ingarden's aesthetics, Ingarden's ontology, real and literary objects, spots of indeterminacy, finitude and infinitude, truth in literature.
* My thanks to the two anonymous reviewers and Michela Summa for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
© HEATH WILLIAMS, 2020
АНАЛИЗ «РАДИКАЛЬНОГО» РАЗЛИЧИЯ МЕЖДУ РЕАЛЬНОСТЬЮ И ЛИТЕРАТУРОЙ
ХЭЙТ ВИЛЬЯМС
Доктор философии, научный сотрудник.
Департамент философии (Чжухай),
Университет Сан Ят-Сен.
Танцзявань, Сянчжоу, Чжухай.
519082 Гуандун, Китай.
E-mail: [email protected]
Феноменология эстетики Ингардена характеризуется, прежде всего, реалистичным онтологическим подходом, который вторичен по отношению к актам сознания. Этот подход приводит к принципиальному различию между пространственно-временными и художественными объектами. Онтологически первый автономен, полностью детерминирован и обладает определенными атрибутами в то время, как последующий акт — гетерономный интенциональный объект, имеет лишь ограниченные определения и бесконечно много «моментов неопределенности». Хотя моменты неопределенности часто обсуждаются, роль, которую они играют в противопоставлении реального и литературного объекта, зачастую не оспаривается. После скрупулезной работы с онтологическими работами Ингардена и его текстов по эстетике, автор этого эссе ставит под сомнение чистоту онтологического подхода Ингардена и вытекающее из этого несоответствие между реальным и литературным объектом, особенно в отношении «моментов неопределенности». Я обосновываю свою позицию, приводя следующие пять тезисов: 1) Утверждение Ингардена о том, что реальный объект обладает бесконечным количеством свойств, противоречит эпистемологии, и вместо этого мы должны заключить, что онтологические свойства реального объекта конечны. 2) Априорный аргумент Ингардена по поводу того, что отсутствующие свойства реальных объектов онтологически детерминированы, не обоснован. 3) Радикальное различие между бесконечностью и конечностью данности или отсутствия реального и литературного объектов должно быть релятивировано. 4) Неопределенности в романе конкретизируются примерно так же, как и отсутствующие свойства реальных объектов. 5) В литературе выносятся истинностные утверждения, которые мы приписываем автору.
Ключевые слова: эстетика Ингардена, онтология Ингардена, реальный и литературный объекты, моменты неопределенности, конечность и бесконечность, истина в литературе.
1. INTRODUCTION
The philosophical projects of Roman Ingarden and Edmund Husserl are often motivated by the same concern: what is it exactly that grounds the judgements contained in the special sciences, both empirical and a priori (Husserl, 2001a; Ingarden, 2013). For Husserl, the solution to this concern lay in an epistemological investigation that interrogated, like Kant, thinking's capacity to acquire objects of knowledge; Husserl account emphasises that the objects of knowledge are the products of the constitutive activity of consciousness. His emphasis is therefore epistemological, i.e.
concerned firstly (but not exclusively) with acts of consciousness. For Ingarden, the difficulties in grounding knowledge arise because we do not yet have a clear idea of the types of possible objects that might exist, and the way they might bear properties and enter relations. What sort of "formal structures" of objects or processes are possible. Ingarden's focus is therefore objectual. For him, the problems of grounding the sciences "all pertain to pure possibilities or the strictly necessary connections between merely possible moments, or between entire ensembles of such moments. I shall call them here 'ontological' problems" (Ingarden, 2013, 57-58).
A fundamental difference between Ingarden and Husserl (and one that they were quite explicit in acknowledging), then, is the fundamental orientation of philosophy.
Whereas Husserl repeatedly stressed that phenomenological analysis must proceed from an epistemological starting point and concentrate on analysing the constitutive activity of consciousness, Ingarden maintained that such analysis can be properly undertaken only after the completion of a preliminary ontological examination of the object whose constitution is to be analysed. (Mitscherling, 1997, 83)
For Ingarden, literary works compose a peculiar category of objectivity which he expended much effort analysing (Ingarden, 1973a, b). This essay interrogates and challenges Ingarden's thesis that "spots of indeterminacy" "radically" and "fundamentally" distinguish the literary from the real object (Ingarden, 1973b, 246, 248). I contend that Ingarden's desire to conduct epistemology only after he had carried out his ontological analysis leads him to an unjustified dogmatism concerning this radicality.
This paper attempts to marry the rigour of philosophical analysis characteristic of ontology and epistemology with the liveliness of aesthetics and the phenomeno-logical demand to closely analyse the matters at hand (or, "return to the things themselves,") much like Ingarden himself and commentators such as Mitscherling (1997), and Thomasson (1999). Spots of indeterminacy are often discussed in the context of literary theory (Iser, 1978; Chrzanowska-Kluczewska, 2015), but in the philosophical context the radicality of Ingarden's distinction between real and literary objects on the question of spots of indeterminacy is seen as relatively straightforward and is often presented without criticism (see for example Johansson, 2010, Uemura, 2019). My contribution points out the unnoticed fact that Ingarden actually fails to compare the real and the literary object purely along ontological lines and without incorporating an epistemological framework and, moreover, once the latter framework is employed, the fundamentality of the distinction between them is blurred.
After briefly laying some critical groundwork via the provision of Ingarden's account in the next mainly expository sections (§2.1-§2.3), this article quickly moves on
to critically argue for its major claims (§3-§7), the overall effect of which is a relativi-sation (though not a collapse) of the distinction between the real and literary object. I shall conclude with a summary and some brief remarks on the consequences of these discussions.
2.1. INGARDEN AND THE ONTOLOGY OF REAL-WORLD OBJECTS:
THE DETERMINED
According to Ingarden's ontology, real-world objects are "autonomous." For an object to be autonomous, it's attributes must be immanent ones that constitute the object properly speaking: "Where this immanence is lacking, the respective entity cannot be autonomous, and is for this very reason heteronomous" (Ingarden, 2013, 112). The immanence of properties presents the object and constitute it: "presents its very self" as a "concrete unity" (Ingarden, 2016, 87). Relatedly, the qualities of autonomous objects (and thereby the objects themselves) are "concretised." Ingarden explains that the "concretisation" of a quality entails "that existentially constrained form of a quality which it displays once it appears in some particular, individual mode of being" (Ingarden, 2013, 112).
For Ingarden, concretion is synonymous with the notion of being determinate; indeed, one of the German words Ingarden uses for the qualities of real-world objects is „Bestimmtheiten" whilst "determinate" is „bestimmt"; to be "determined" means very much just to be an immanent, particular, and individuated concrete attribute. And so, to say that all the attributes of a concrete object are 'determined' is almost analytically true; one could just as well say that all determinations are determined. The real object is "unequivocally, universally (i.e., in every respect) determined" (Ingarden, 1973b, 246).
Ingarden uses "determined" as an adjective denoting an existential situation, equivalent to "definite" or "particular," and not as a success verb equivalent to "known." To be determined is to be one way and not another and to not be further specifiable. Moreover, the real object exists without "being perceived or in some other way intended [...]. Reality exists only insofar as it is something 'in itself' " (Ingarden, 2013, 425-426). The same holds for determinateness: the real world, the objects in it, and their properties, "is a being completed at all times, and universally determined. There is no indeterminateness in the world" (Ingarden, 2013, 426). An autonomous object is "completely... exhaustively', determined (Ingarden, 2016, 79); "universally (i.e., in every respect) determined' (Ingarden, 1973b, 246). Thus, all the properties of a real object are determined, regardless of whether they are known. And so, Ingarden's account of the determinateness of spatiotemporal objects arises from an a priori on-
tological analysis conducted prior to epistemological considerations, i.e. prior to consideration of the manner or mode of givenness.
2.2. THE INFINITY OF DETERMINATE PROPERTIES
Yet, not every aspect of Ingarden's analysis of real objects is divorced from an epistemological context. Even though, as will be shown, Husserl and Ingarden disagree over the status of the determinateness of properties that remain unknown (and the independence of the real world from consciousness), Ingarden follows Husserl in claiming that the determinations of real objects that can be given to us and known via perception constitute an "infinite, i.e., inexhaustible manifold" (Ingarden, 1973b, 247). As Husserl states, the "spatial object is without fail, more" (Husserl, 1977, 136). What might such claims amount to? Already to answer this we must shift into a mode of analysis which takes not only ontology into consideration (i.e., an analysis of the possible modes of being of possible objects) but also epistemology (i.e. an analysis of the way that objects are given to acts of consciousness).
The essence of the object is inexhaustible because as I turn an object over or move around it, every presentation of a new side leads to the concealment of the current side, but I might then turn the object over again and re-view the side I had just concealed, and so on, ad infinitum. Thus, the cognition of real objects is always inadequate; one can never experience a presentation which views all sides contemporaneously. So, no matter how much of the object we have viewed, or how many perspectives we have taken on it, there is an infinite possible givenness' of perceptual objects, "always other determinations still to be apprehended"1 (Ingarden, 1973b, 247). Thus, for Ingarden, the existential status of the properties of the real object is totally determined, while the number of potential properties that can be perceived is infinite.
2.3. ON THE ONTOLOGY OF THE LITERARY OBJECT
Unlike the real object, the literary work of art is constituted by the intentional activity of consciousness, and
every purely intentional entity is heteronomous, hence an entity which draws its being and its collective stock of attributes from the enactment of an intentional conscious experience, which in a specific integrated fashion is endowed with a content, and it would not exist at all without this enactment. (Ingarden, 2013, 113)
1 My italics. — H. W.
More specifically, the literary work is a complex, founded entity that owes its existence to four ascending strata which constitute it: (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 and, finally, (4) represented objectivities (things, characters, situations, events in the novel) (Ingarden, 1973b). The intentional and thus heteronomous nature of the literary work of art arises because
the represented objects [4] exist solely by virtue of the fact that they are projected — i.e., intended — by those units of meaning ('contained in' the words and sentences [2]) whose intentionality is, in turn, ultimately dependent upon the reader's acts of consciousness. (Mitscherling, 1997, 136)
For the novel, "determinations" belong to the layers of objects (4) within the literary work. They are the analogue of properties of real objects and events. But they are constituted via assertoric sentences and nominal expressions (layer 2). If I write that "the dog is red," we know there is a dog (which is not a cat) and that dog has the attribute of being red (and so is definitely not black). For the intentional object, all "the material attributes appearing in its content [...], are merely 'allotted' to it, 'intended,' but not 'embodied' [i.e. immanent] in it in the genuine sense" (Ingarden, 2016, 115).
What makes the objects in the novel "schematic" (layer 3) is the fact that some of the features of the represented objectivities are "determined," others not. Unlike the real world, the world of the novel is incomplete, like a blueprint. It contains "spots of indeterminacy" (Ingarden, 1973a, 50; 1973b, section 38; 2016, section 47b). This indeterminacy arises from two factors. Firstly, language is often general but, as Ingarden notes, it "is always the 'last,' 'lowest' differences that determine [autonomous objects] materially" (Ingarden, 2013, 77). For example, a spatial object will not only be 'red' but also the most specifiable shade of red, yet the adjective "red" can be used generally without specification. This means that even if I describe an object as "red" it has been partly determined (we know it is not black) but partly not (we don't know which shade of red it is); it is up to the reader to decide exactly which shade of red via the process of intentional "concretisation" (Ingarden, 1973a, section 11). So even singular simple intentional acts which intend only one property might be indeterminate. Though it might be possible to describe in excruciating, technical detail some properties so they are completely determined (I might describe an object as "Red Crayola colour P75126"), to do so in all, most, or even frequent occasions would take away from the aesthetic value of the novel.
Moreover, Ingarden is adamant that spots of indeterminacy remain ineliminable in principle, and this remains true even for complex founded intentional acts. Why is
this? Ingarden writes that the explicit "content of the straightforward act of meaning is always finite [...], even when the act is closely interconnected with a multitude of acts that refer to the same intentional object" (Ingarden, 2016, 215). Put otherwise, even multiple detailed descriptions of an object list a finite number of features.
Yet at the same time that content always contains intentive moments, which, in accordance with their essence, in principle require an unbounded multitude of object-moments, hence would have to occur with them in the unity of one object in the event of their occurring in an autonomous object. (Ingarden, 2016, 215)
Put otherwise, intentional objects are intended as "concrete unity" which, just like their real-world counterparts, contain a potential infinity or "unbounded multitude" of properties.
Thus, if we enrich a simple nominal expression with further predicates, adding "old, Chinese man" to "Chinese man," the gap has still not been lessened between the finite determined and infinite potential of properties, much as listing the real numbers sequentially never brings one any closer to numerical infinity (Ingarden, 1973b, 249). So, despite what Mitscherling suggests (1997), the indeterminacy of the novel not only arises because single acts cannot constitute an infinitely complex object. No matter how many properties we list and intend in a complex act, "the number of spots still left open [.] is not at all diminished" (Ingarden, 2016, 217) because it "is impossible to establish clearly and exhaustively the infinite multiplicity of determinacies of the individual objects portrayed in the work with a finite number of words or sentences" (Ingarden, 1973a, 51). Spots of indeterminacy in fact result from the "opposition between the finitude of content-moments in an intentional act of meaning [...] and the infinitude of the determinations compelled by the established individuality of the object" (Ingarden, 2016, 217-218). These spots constitute a "horizon" of intended but unfilled meaning (Ingarden, 2016, 216) and the intentional object remains "always unfinished in terms of its Content, always just in the midst in being formed" (Ingarden, 2016, 219).
Table 1. Axiomatic ontological differences that radically distinguish the real from the literary object
Type of Properties that Properties that Absent
object are intended or meant are given properties
Real individual Infinite Infinite Determined
Literary individual Infinite Finite Indeterminate
3.1. THE INFINITUDE OF PROPERTIES
As has already been indicated, we should not conclude from these discussions that Ingarden's account of the difference between the real and the literary object is divorced from an epistemological context. On his own lights this is not entirely correct. Take the thesis that the properties of the real-world object are infinite. He states: "There are many properties in an individual object — and indeed, it would appear, infinitely many" (Ingarden, 2013, 77). As it just exists, prior to being known, the spatiotemporal object surely has a great many properties. Think of all the properties of an object that might be revealed by an ongoing analysis; subjecting the object to all sorts of different conditions and listing properties like "soft," "4 grams," "soluble," "acidic," "composed of quarks," etc. We might thus imagine all the primary, secondary, dispositional, and essential properties that any object possesses. The list of such properties which might emerge indeed appear endless.
But, surely, it is not. Surely nothing could be more realistic than to admit that there is in fact a complete list of all the properties an object has. Even though the list of properties might change (its location, for example), ontologically speaking, at any given time an object has a finite number of features. Poli (Poli, 1998, 107) (citing [1975]) suggests that Ingarden recognises this finitude in Cognition of the Literary Work, but I have not been able to substantiate this reading, as in this work Ingarden still refers to "the infinite multiplicity of determinacies of the individual objects"2 (Ingarden, 1973a, 51). Importantly, then, an account stating that the spatiotemporal object has "always other" properties which might unravel via ongoing perception relies on the notion of this finite number of properties being presented, and potentially re-presented, and re-presented, etc., to a knowing subject who cannot present them all at once.
Ingarden does acknowledge the cognitive nature of the infinity of properties when he states that "an autonomous, individual entity cannot be exhausted by any sort of finite process of cognition that studies the object with regard to its individual properties"3 (Ingarden, 2016, 218). He admits the epistemological nature of this thesis when he says that the determinations of real objects are ontologically a "fused unity," and it is only when perceived that they can be said to constitute an infinite, inexhaustible manifold (Ingarden, 1973b, 247). Thus, the notion that objects have infinitely many properties is one which only makes sense when correlated with a knowing subject. So, Ingarden states that the infinitude of properties is one axis which purportedly constitutes the fundamentality of the difference between the real and the literary object
2 My italics. — H. W.
3 My italics. — H. W.
(Ingarden, 1973b, 248), yet, following his own line of thought, we cannot divorce this discussion from an epistemological context4.
3.2. THE DETERMINATE BUT UNKNOWN PROPERTIES OF REAL-WORLD OBJECTS
Ingarden holds that determinacy is an essential structure of real objects, it "is part of the intuitively apprehendable essence of real objects, and it would be absurd to claim to the contrary" (Ingarden, 1973b, 246). He also makes the claim that the properties of real objects are determinate with modal force: real objects not only are determined but cannot and could not be indeterminate (Ingarden, 1973b, 246). It is therefore impossible that any property of a real object, whether known or unknown, given or ungiven, could be indeterminate. These claims are mutually implied. An ontological claim about an essential feature of an object of a certain type correlates with the modal claim that it is impossible that there could be an object of that type which lacks that feature. For example, to claim that extension is an ontological feature of all real objects is to make the modal claim that it is impossible that a real object could fail to be extended.
Essential features show in two ways. Firstly, positively speaking, every example of an individual which partakes of an essence, shows that essence when we experience that object. For example, every spatial object that is seen is extended. But of course, proof of an essential property is not inductively constituted by an nth number of examples, though it may be suggested by them and can be falsified by one counterexample. Thus, additionally, a claim about an essential feature does not admit the possibility that the contrary could be the case. We cannot vary the object to produce a counterexample. As a further consequence, there arises the negative criterion of the impossibility of imagining a counterexample. It is this inability to imagine a counterexample that underwrites the modal claim, off the back of the ontological structure.
There is an obvious problem of applying these criteria to the determinacy of unknown properties. There is no sense in which we see that any example of a spatiotemporal object's properties 'partakes' of being determinate when unknown, nor is there any possibility of falsifying them. Unknown determinate properties are reminiscent of the Kantian Ding an sich. There is not and never could be one single positive example of an unknown but determinate property. Unlike properties which are given, we have no positive cases to suggest this structure pertains. If we point to properties that are given as proof or indication, we are of course making an ontological claim (about the
Yet, as we shall see in §4, the epistemological infinity of given properties can be challenged on a practical level.
4
structure of a type of object) off the back of an epistemological thesis (i.e., one based on the way properties are given). The positive criterion could only be satisfied in the context of a metaphysics that accepts, perhaps, an inference to best explanation (or some other form of reasoning along those lines). Ingarden, however, relies on eidetic intuition for his claim.
Ingarden's claim regarding the determinacy of ungiven properties seems more common-sensical than essential. There is no incoherence, contradiction, or absurdity to the idea that, once a property is no longer known, it ceases to be determinate. It is possible to imagine a spatial object whereby, once its aspects become hidden, they become indeterminate. This conceivability is more than a theoretical possibility. Ingarden notes that Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty might bear some relation to the thesis of spots of indeterminacy (Ingarden, 1973b, 249, footnote), but it does so as a comment on the purported determination of unobserved properties of real world objects. Quantum physics holds that quantum states are indeterminate until observed, quantum objects behave like both waves and particles, and that any quantum object can be in a state of superposition, and thus quite literally in two incommensurable states at once. Most importantly, all these effects cease to apply once states or objects become observed, suggesting that we cannot automatically assume that what is true of the observed carries over to the unobserved. Such arguments, I admit, need fleshing out and are prey to the claim that what holds at the ultra-micro level may not carry over to the phenomenal macro-level. The only important point for my discussion is that the indeterminacy of unobserved properties is conceivable, and so the negative criterion is not satisfied. Ingarden's modal ontological a priori claim is false.
Table 2. Comparison of my account and Ingarden's thus far
Account of real objects Absent properties Properties that are given
Ingarden Determined a priori Epistemologically infinite
My account Not necessarily determined Ontologically finite
4. EPISTEMOLOGICAL VS. ONTOLOGICAL DETERMINACY
Unlike Ingarden, for Husserl, it is not merely being a lowest differentia that provides determinateness; the notion of determinateness is always also linked to intuitive givenness. Regarding intentional objects, Husserl and Ingarden agree, for example, that meaning remains abstract until the addition of intuition provides a higher degree of determination in perception or imagination. It is at this point that intuition
"in fact gives complete determinateness" (Husserl, 2001b, 197). For Husserl, however, intuition is linked to determinateness even in the case of real objects too — to be determined is to be known in fullness. The difference between the two on the issue of the determinateness of real objects can be understood as a difference in approach.
For one, the notion of 'determinate' is a state of being, for the other it is an epistemic acquisition. For Husserl, because the perceptual object includes intentions directed towards aspects which are non-intuitive and not given, the perceptual object includes indeterminations. When we see an object, "only very little 'of it' is presented in 'actual,' 'proper,' perception" (Husserl, 1989, 185). Thus, the physical objects is not completely determined. In fact, perception "of something physical, in conformity with its essence, includes indeterminations" (Husserl, 1989, 185). Husserl goes on to say, however, that these indeterminates are included "as determinable '5 (Husserl, 1989, 185). This analysis suggests that what separates the real from the literary is not the fact that absent properties are determinate, but that real objects possess indeterminates that are determinable.
Table 3. Key difference between Ingarden and Husserl
Author Absent properties of spatiotemporal objects
Ingarden Determinate
Husserl Indeterminate but determinable
But we can go further than even Husserl does. When we take an epistemological perspective, the notion of absent properties of real-world objects present themselves as analogues for the spots of indeterminacy in the novel. I do not merely mean by this that the world contains many places of epistemological indeterminacy — properties we don't know about for certain, such as the colour of the backside of the object in front of me right now. The situation for these indeterminates is indeed disanalogous to that of the novel, as in the actual world I can just move around the object and view its backside and make the indeterminate determinate. I cannot do so in the case of the literary object; there is no backside to see.
What is unchallenged by previous accounts of spots of indeterminacy is that other aspects of the real world are epistemologically indeterminate in a deeper sense. Johansson writes that "Nothing like [spots of indeterminacy] can be true of ordinary things and their property instances" (Johansson, 2010, 91). Yet, how many litres of
5 My italics. — H. W.
water passed through the Suez Canal yesterday, for example, is deeply indeterminable, and not just in the way that the backside of the object in front of me is indeterminate. Not only do I not know about the Canal, it was entirely unobserved, and I never could find out the precise answer to this query. For another example, I may not see my friend Pierre between Monday night and Tuesday morning, and so not know what he did, and he may have been alone and then lose his memory, so it is forever impossible for anyone to find out what Pierre actually did. These sorts of deep indeterminacies are epistemologically analogous to the places of indeterminacy of the literary novel, as they are directly unknowable with any certainty.
Ontologically speaking, in the case of Pierre and the volume of water in the Canal, something did indeed happen. The places of indeterminacy in the novel are not merely unknown and unknowable in the same way, they do not (and never did), in fact, exist. In a novel, we may read about a characters adventures on Monday, and then in the next chapter, about his adventures on Tuesday morning, but it makes no sense to say that something happened in between, even something that we may forever know not what. We, "as readers, not only do not know what happened in the stretches of time not portrayed, but the events are not determined at all; they are neither A nor not-A" (Ingarden, 1973a, 51).
In practice, however, I may as well construct an answer as to what Pierre did on Monday night, and the only constraint will be that I provide a plausible one (see §5). The essential epistemological difference is that the indeterminate places in the novel never afford the possibility of being determined. But even though every indeterminacy in the real world may present such a possibility at some point, this point may have passed. Thus, Pierre's actions may turn out to be indeterminable as a matter of fact, the novel's spots of indeterminacy are indeterminable in principle. It is this less radical distinction that epistemically divides the ungiven properties of the real world from the spots of indeterminacy of the novel.
Table 4. The epistemological difference between the absent properties of the real and literary object
Type of object Epistemological status of the properties that are absent (my account) Ontological status of the properties that are absent (Ingarden's account)
Real Sometimes indeterminable as a matter of fact Sometimes determinable Determinate
Literary Indeterminable in principle Indeterminate
5. INFINITUDE AND GIVENNESS
Further evidence for the relativisation of Ingarden's so-called radical distinction between real-world and literary objects on the question of determinacy can be found in a closer examination of the extent to which real world objects are indeterminate6. There is much that is absent and not given to consciousness. For Ingarden, the inadequacy of real-world objects is established due to the infinite givenness of perceptual properties, but as I will show, in practice this givenness is finite and there are also an infinity of absences which is corollary to the degree of given properties. As we will see at the end of this section, Ingarden is aware of these structures but does not spell them out in detail nor draw out their consequences.
Part of this absence has already been hinted at. As I mentioned, the infinity of givenness stems from the fact that, as I turn an object over and present a new profile, I cover another, but I can always re-receive that covered profile by turning the object back over, and I can carry on in this fashion forever. Yet, of course, to get that profile back I must lose the perception of another, and so, an infinity of profiles will forever remain imperceptible to me at the same time. Due to the very infinite determinacy, the perceptual object is riddled with unavoidable absences and unknown indeterminacies too. Everything that is given implies something has been taken.
Husserl noted this interplay, because he always has in mind the correlation between the object and its mode of givenness to conscious acts. He stated that when we examine a series of perceptions of a material object we see that gain and loss are "balanced at every step: a new act has richer fullness in regard to certain properties, for whose sake it has lost fullness in regard to others"7 (Husserl, 2001b, 227-228). As highlighted, this loss is not ontological but an epistemological one (the real number of properties having not changed). Naturally, the dis-appearing profiles are not immediately lost, as we hold them briefly in retention. However, as perception continues, they slip further and further into retention and lose more and more of their fullness, and with the presentation of every new profile we empty others further down the retentional chain. Every perception is formed by a network of partially full and partially empty intentions. My point here is that the infinity of knowable and given properties of perceptual objects is relative to an infinity of absent properties. The real-world object has an infinity of determinations to be known (in effect it has only an infinity of knowable properties; not known, and certainly not actual, properties), whilst the liter-
6 In what follows, I use the term "determined" not as coextensive with "real," but with "known" or "given."
7 My italics. — H. W.
ary object has only a finite number of knowable properties, but both have an infinite number of unknown determinations.
It is worth stressing the above distinction between knowable and known properties. For Ingarden, the fact that the perceptual object can forever be known in other detail is a reason to consider it fuller of knowable determinacies, therefore placing it in greater contrast with the literary object, which is composed of only a finite number of knowable determinacies. As discussed though, the idea of an infinity of properties only makes sense if correlated with an act of perception. Given this framework, however, another essential feature of inadequately given real-world objects is that properties must be revealed one after another, sequentially, over time. In practice, due to the finite expanse of time that every perception goes on for, in effect we only ever come to possess a finite number of known properties of their admittedly infinite knowable potentiality. Many if not most of the perceptions that occur in our ongoing dynamic experience of the spatial world are fleeting. Essentially, an infinitum of revelation could only ever be realised during an infinitely long perception, which is of course impossible.
Ingarden notes that the finite nature of literary objects is inevitable because ob-jectual spots of ontological indeterminacy are created through the limited intentional process of reading, but the determinacy of real objects is similarly finite due to the temporally limited nature of the act of perception, and the continual unfolding and concealment of properties drives an unsatisfiable demand for further examination. The fundamental difference is that the literary object meets a certain limit in principle at which point it cannot in fact ever be known anymore. However, in practice, this limit point is also met by every perception. Ingarden's radical distinction thus, again, becomes relativised.
Finally, it should be mentioned that Ingarden acknowledges the finite nature of perception and the infinity of absences when he states that because cognition "occurs in a finite manifold of actions, we can never know how a given real object is determined in every respect; the great majority of its properties is always concealed from us" (Ingarden, 1973b, 247). Yet, he immediately goes on to point out that "However, this does not mean that in itself [the real object] is not unequivocally, universally determined" (Ingarden, 1973b, 247). This may be the case, but whether we wish to consider the determinateness of properties independent from epistemology is a separate issue (one discussed in the previous section). The axis that was under discussion was the finitude/infinitude of givenness/absence. In changing the topic at this point, Ingarden overlooks the fact that, because ontologically speaking there seems to be a finitude if not a singularity of properties, and, as he has just admitted, epistemologi-cally speaking the number of properties that we know about the real object is finite
and the number of properties we do not know about is legion, then real objects fail to contrast strongly with literary ones along this particular axis.
Table 5. Summary
Account Absent properties Given properties.
Ingarden. Real Objects Determined a priori Ontologically/ epistemologically infinite
My account. Real Objects Not determined a priori Sometime epistemologically indeterminable as a matter of fact Infinite Ontologically finite and epistemologically finite in practice
Ingarden/myself. Literary objects Ontologically indeterminate. Epistemologically indeterminable in principle Infinite Finite a priori
6.1. THE ABSENT PROFILES OF THE REAL-WORLD OBJECT
What I also think is that the intending of the absent properties of the real and literary object share an important similarity that Ingarden fails to notice in his discussion of the process of the "concretisation" of the literary work. Regarding real world perception, every instance includes an "inauthentic" or apperceptive surplus: that dependant part of the intention which has no corresponding sensational data, what I am calling "absent" or "empty" properties. These empty profiles of real object are, as Byrne points out, not "imaginative intentions. Partial signitive intentions are rather, as moments of a perceptual intention, simply directed perceptually at the occluded sides of the perceptual object" (Byrne, 2019). The significance of absent or empty profiles is that they merely intend perceptual possibilities. They intend emptily what would happen were I to bring the absent profile to givenness, but this is not the same as constituting an expectation. I have empty intentions even if I never expect to reveal the occluded side of an object; empty intentions are revealed in the analysis of perceptual intentions as connected with perceptual profiles even in a hypostatised, purely static moment. Instead of empty intentions referring to determined properties, "the series of possible future perceptions of, say, one side of a thing, leave open a range of different possible fulfilments" (Mulligan, 1995, 205).
Not all possible fulfilments, however, are equal. Husserl makes a fundamental distinction between "pure" or "empty" possibilities and "real" or "motivated" possibilities. His most well-known demonstration of this distinction comes in Ideas 1, where he
writes that it "is emptily possible for the desk I am writing on to turn out to have thirty legs; the possibility of the desk having four legs is motivated" (Husserl, 1983, 337). Thus, absent perceptual profiles are paradigmatic examples of motivated possibilities. Pure possibilities are arbitrary and unlikely (Husserl, 2005, 661); we are justified in thinking that real or motivated possibilities will probably come about in the future. Empty perceptual profiles, meanwhile, intentionally represent perceptual profiles that we find likely to be revealed, if an individual's perceptual orientation were to change. Empty perceptual intentions are therefore indications, rather than expectations or imaginings, and are not pure but motivated perceptual possibilities (Mulligan, 1995, 193).
6.2. WHAT IS ABSENT IN THE CASE OF THE LITERARY WORK
Ingarden's account of spots of literary indeterminacy has some similarities and dissimilarities with the above account of the absent profiles of perceptual objects. In at least some cases, we "overlook the places of indeterminacy as such and involuntarily fill many of them out with determinacies" (Ingarden, 1973a, 52). Although many places of indeterminacy remain totally unfilled and empty, sometimes the imagination spontaneously '"fills out' various places of indeterminacy with elements chosen from among many possible or permissible elements" (Ingarden, 1973a, 53). Ingarden goes on to state that the imagination is given "free rein" and "complements the objects with a series of new elements, so that they seem to be fully determined" (Ingarden, 1973a, 53). This "filling out" is analogous to empty intentions in function, in that it represents absent profiles, but is disanalogous in that does so by adding intuitive content (imaginative "phantasms" and "quasi" elements).
Ingarden does not consider indeterminate details that are either implied or consequences of places that are determinate as "proper" places of indeterminacy (Ingarden, 1973a, 243). If the novel depicts a human, we can assume she has the regular features of a human, even if the novel never states as much. Other indeterminate details present a variety of possibilities that we might fill in many ways that make no essential difference; the range of possibilities is very wide and unconstrained. For example, "the text of Shakespeare's Hamlet does not indicate the height of the Danish prince or how his voice sounded or what position he assumed when he spoke with Yorick's skull" (Ingarden, 1973a, 54). We may thus fill such characteristics in however we want within a broad scope (Ingarden, 1973b, 253).
However, in some cases the number of possibilities we may choose from are limited. Ingarden states that
many places of indeterminacy, for instance those concerning the character of the person,
his sensibility, the depth of his thought and of his emotionality, may not be filled out in
just any way because the filling-out of these places of indeterminacy is of great importance for the portrayed person. (Ingarden, 1973a, 54)
Some concretisations ("filling ins") add or detract from the aesthetic value, others can deviate from an author's intentions. The reader ought to lend themselves "to the suggestions and directives proceeding from the work and in actualizing not just any aspects [she] chooses but rather those suggested by the work" (Ingarden, 1973a, 57). Importantly, for Ingarden, constraints to the filling in process, when they exist, are internal to the world of the novel; concretisation should occur "within boundaries set by the work itself" (Ingarden, 1973a, 51).
However, even where one is given some direction by the novel as to the range of possibilities which might fill a spot of indeterminacy,
the reader is not forced to choose a particular one of the possibilities predetermined by the representing states of affairs. The literary work does not necessarily have to be "consistent" or to be contained within the bounds of what is possible in the actual known world. (Ingarden, 1973b, 253)
He says elsewhere that the reader "is never completely bound by the work itself" (Ingarden, 1973a, 57). In the process of concretisation, we can intentionally project what is improbable (Ingarden, 1973b, 253). These are critical points. For Ingarden, one need not fill in spots of indeterminacy in a fashion consistent with the world of the novel, or according to real world possibility. Due to the non-autonomous nature of intentional objects, I am always at liberty to exercise my freedom, and cannot be constrained by what may or may not be possible or likely both within the novel and especially in the real world. So, because these constraints are internal to the world of the novel, and the novel is a heteronomous object, part of the essence of the literary work is that these constraints are both "loose" (in that a variety of choices will always present themselves) and also "non-binding" (we may disregard the internal suggestions we encounter, and in doing so we only contravene the sense of the novel).
For example, I might claim that, during the periods of time in which Ron Weasley is not portrayed in the novels, he is in fact an underground spy working for Slytherin and a co-conspirator with Snape for resurrecting He Who Shall Not Be Named. The portrayed determinations which indirectly suggest otherwise could just be explained away by the necessity of presenting as a realistic double agent8. As this thesis concerns that which is in principle indeterminable, it is neither true nor false, neither A nor not
Let us assume, merely for the sake of argument, that none of the novel's determinations explicitly forbids this interpretation, i.e. that Rowling nowhere wrote "Ron Weasley was not a spy working for Slytherin.. " This would then, of course, constitutes a binding spot of determination.
8
A. It can never be said I am wrong (or right), because what Ron Weasley did when he was not being portrayed is indeterminable in principle, and it is this which grants me the freedom to interpret the novels this way. Ingarden's point is that nothing short of making the indeterminate precisely determinate (or a direct consequence of what is determinate) could constrain this interpretation, especially not real world probability. The most we may say is that this does not seem to be the sense of the novels. Ingarden's thesis is that, although the reader of a literary text is loosely and non-bindingly constrained in this interpretation via the portrayed spots of determinacy concerning Ron's character in the novel, nothing, really, stops me from holding this position.
I think Ingarden oversteps the mark here, because he underestimates the role that real-world possibility plays during imaginative representation. The imagination is, like the capacity to intend empty perceptual profiles, a possibility generator. As Husserl notes, an "experience 'in' phantasy is itself a possible experience" (Husserl, 2005, 661). Ingarden is right that I undoubtedly have the capability or the capacity to concoct pure possibilities, and am afforded the opportunity to exercise this capacity because of the in principle indeterminability of the novel, but to say as much disregards the fact that our imaginings are rarely completely pure and random. Normally, the imagination does not in effect operate in such an unconstrained fashion. Most imaginative acts are at least partially conditioned and shaped by reality, and thereby depict impure possibilities.
Not only is it unlikely that we would imagine Ron this way but and this unlikelihood arises because, though we are free to choose the content of imagined possibilities, we are not altogether free to imagine them in any light we choose. Not many of the readers of the Harry Potter novels imagined that Ron was a traitor, and most of them would agree that such an interpretation is implausible. What might such an assessment be based on? What Ingarden's analysis does show is that this implausibility is not (indeed could not be) constituted by internal constraints. Although the process of filling might be conducted in a random fashion, we are never free to unshackle ourselves from the constraint of real-world possibility which colours a phantasy world, and such a constraint adds a normative dimension to the representation of indeterminacies.
Because rooted in the real world, the relationship between represented possibility and notions like plausibility and likelihood are binding. The reason it is unlikely that Ron is a traitor is the same reason that it is unlikely that someone who exhibited Ron's loyalty in real life would turn out to be a traitor: the fact that so few people who are loyal behave in an egregiously dishonest manner constitutes a generally harmonious social style. Thus, the imagination at the base of the filling operations in the case of the novel is informed by probability calculations, and the process of filling in
is shaped by the general tendency of the imagination to fill in indeterminables with likely possibilities.
In both the novel and the real world, this background of reliable styles informs the analogous ways we go about filling in or representing empty profiles. As stressed, the absent aspects of real objects given via empty intentions are not constituted as something which we expect to be given in the future. Individuals intend them whether there is any possibility of bringing them to givenness and thus do not strictly expect them. Yet, they are constrained. They are constrained, however, not by the fact that they are determinate but, as possibilities, by how strongly they are motivated. There are normative constraints on the degree of probability of our perceptual indications. Patterns will continue, what has come before will reoccur, if most desks have four legs, the one I am writing on probably will too, etc. We might represent to ourselves, perhaps in a hallucination or delusion, that when I turn an object over, like a chair, it will have ten legs, or will have changed colour since I last saw it, etc. But we cannot motivate these possibilities. So, the indeterminate spots of the real world are only loosely but bindingly constrained too, but by normativity, not determinateness.
To say that the process of concretisation is open to pure fantasy as Ingarden does is to tell only half the story, and we cannot conclude that the literary world is therefore potentially open to pure possibility and unconstrained because it contains spots that are in principle indeterminable. The interpretability of the novel's spots of indeterminacy is not a function of the possibility of bringing them to givenness, just as the motivated nature of possibilities is not a function of our expectation that they will appear. The factors that constrain what is absent do not do so on the condition that what is absent might at some point be given but based on probability driven motivational relations.
The implication of this discussion is that we are not as free to reconstruct the indeterminate spots of the literary novel as Ingarden makes out. Or at least, his account fails to mention some important addendums. Though he might be right that we are not tightly constrained by what we can purely possibly represent, what is likely, and thus constitutes a motivated possibility, provides the loose yet binding constraint of plausibility, and this latter constraint forms a common structure for our experience of literary works.
6.3. DISCUSSION
The view just articulated should be distinguished from the possibility theory of fiction, which holds that characters are examples of possible but unactualized people; I just think that the concretising process of the representation of spots of indeterminacy is constrained by being subject to motivated possibility. To give a definitive state-
ment on the ontological status of literary objects is beyond the scope of the present essay, but generally I resonate with Thomasson's sentiment that fictional characters are real cultural artefacts (Thomasson, 1999).
Indeed, my view answers one of the major questions that the possibility theory cannot. After outlining the indeterminacy of the literary world, Thomasson points out that
we run into trouble immediately if we try to identify characters with possible people, for the features of a character left open by the story could be filled out in an infinite variety of ways by different possible people. Selecting any one as identical with a particular character seems hopelessly arbitrary. (Thomasson, 1999, 17, 18)
On my view, this arbitrariness is not only removed because of the dependence of the literary object on the inter subjective and ergo objectified cultural community that constitutes it, but the concretisation of spots of indeterminacy is also non-arbitrary due to the shared constraints on imaginative functioning.
My claim is that the representation of the absent profiles of aesthetic objects is constrained by the same factors that constrain the representation of absent profiles of perceptual objects, i.e., the probability driven motivation relation. I agree with Plotka's reading of Ingarden which maintains that the fictional object has "a double foundation [...] in the actual (immanent) experiencing, and, on the other hand, in the real object, say, a novel or a drama" (Plotka, 2020, 17). My point is that, not only are literary objects constituted by their real world material foundation and their actualisation within a cultural community (as Thomasson stresses), but what Ingarden fails to appreciate is that even the intrapsychic (or, immanent) act of imaginative intention and concretisation is often one which has motivational real-world possibility as a moment. Not only is the intentional object founded twice, but even the complex intentional act which founds it brings with it an anchor into the real world. The literary object is both intra- and extra-psychically embedded against the background of the real-world.
Finally, what should be appreciated is how much the idea that literary objects are partly constituted or concretised against a background of real-world possibility in fact adds instead of detracts from the thesis of the worlds realism. As Bernard-Donals points out, one of the problems with Ingarden's thesis that concretisation is a subjective operation constrained only by the world of the novel is that it seems to leave us in a predicament as to how intersubjective communication about the novel arises. If
decisions about reading [...] are made differently from decisions about everyday receptions of autonomous objects, two receivers of the same work cannot make a transition from the reception of some aesthetic object to agreement upon those receptions in terms of the everyday [...]. What one is left with [...] is an impasse between actual aesthet-
ic understanding and the negotiation of that understanding between various subjects.
(Bernard-Donals, 1994, 51-52)
In the case of spots of determinacy within the novel we can obviously just in-tersubjectively consult the text. Yet, how is that we can realistically engage in dialogue about spots of indeterminacy (discussing, for example, about what drove Zenia to steal her friends' partners in Atwood's The Robber Bride) as we often do? Even in-tra-subjectively, how is that we can wonder about a character, i.e., who Leonard was in Nolan's screenplay of Momento, whether the Hulk could really defeat Captain America, even what happened to Chiron and Kevin after the events depicted in In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. These thoughts only make sense against the admittedly loose yet binding constraints of real-world motivational relationships. These constraints must be shaped independently of our acts of consciousness, or else we would be involved in a regressive, pointless soliloquy. That is to say, what constitutes a motivated possibility itself must arise from within our intersubjectively shared life experience of a world which is independent of consciousness if it is truly to exert a normative force on our acts of cognition, and it is only because we transpose this realistically formed framework into the novel that we can converse about spots of indeterminacy.
7. ARE THE THINGS CHARACTER'S SAY "TRUE," AND CAN WE ATTRIBUTE THEM TO THE AUTHOR?
A similar and final example serves to relativise the distinction between the real world and the world of literature, this time a reply to Ingarden's article On So-Called Truth in Literature (Ingarden, 1983). For Ingarden, the utterances characters make should only be considered in relation to the internal context of the literary work. When a character makes a statement, it "refers to the presented world [...]. It is not permissible to consider its truth or falsity in relation to any extra-artistic world, the real world especially" (Ingarden, 1983, 146). Ingarden wants to maintain that all assertoric sentences uttered by a character within a literary work are "quasi"-judgements, ones made with a certain half-heartedness and not in seriousness. This claim is repeated by Johansson, who states that fictional assertions "lay no claim to be true, and are therefore neither true nor false" (Johansson, 2010, 13). So, apparently, even when we find, a series of statements which resemble the sort we might find in a work of non-fiction, we ought not to take them as referring to reality.
A theory of fictional truth is an important project. Moreover, it is indeed a mistake to assess the judgements that a character makes and attribute them to an author
without further ado. Some seeming truth claims contained within the literary work are there for dramatic effect, or they serve as a premise for the plot that adds a sense of realism, etc., but the author does not in all seriousness endorse such an idea. Ingarden explores many cases where we are often tempted to assign a truth value to a character's claims and attribute them to the author but ought not to, and his analysis adroitly uncovers various functions these propositions perform (Ingarden, 1983).
However, Ingarden leaves no room for real truth in literature. I think that authors have an artistic freedom to use the novel (or the poem) and the characters in it as a medium for conveying truths. Indeed, they sometimes do, and Ingarden misses some of the important roles that propositions which are supported by an author and purport to contain truths about the real-world play in literature. Thus, where both Johansson (Johansson, 2010, 13) and Ingarden hold that the following two options exhaust the possibility space: 1) factual assertions that are either true or false, 2) fictional assertions that are neither strictly true nor false, I would add the third option, that 3) assertions made in fiction that are either true or false.
Recall, for example, the way that Professor Pangloss, in Voltaire's Candide (2006), continues to expound the metaphysical speculative philosophical claim that this is the best of all possible worlds, as the characters contemporaneously undergo horrific experiences that demonstrate the world's imperfection. One can infer from this satire that Voltaire disagrees with the Leibnizian thesis. It is not only the plot of the novel but the characters which express Voltaire's disdain for metaphysical philosophy when they implore us that we should humbly "cultivate our garden" because "work [...] is the only way to render life tolerable" (Voltaire, 2006, 59). The characters give voice to the moral of the story, a moral which Voltaire supports, and one which applies not only to the fictional world.
Another clear example is John Galt's infamous speech towards the end of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (1957). This novel articulates Rand's views concerning the inherent superiority of the capitalist class and their right to own private property, amass wealth, and control the means of production. The plot of the novel demonstrates what Rand thinks will happen when the class of innovators and natural born leaders of industry are stymied by a jealously motivated political bureaucracy that prevents the possession of intellectual property. The ruling class is forced to retreat from public life in order to create their own utopia which promptly brings about the collapse of modern civilisation. Not only can this novel be read as an extended parable of sorts, but Rand ends the narrative when Galt gives direct voice to some of Rand's beliefs hitherto conveyed only by the plot of the novel. The claims Galt makes in this speech clearly do not only apply to the context of the novel. When Galt says: "Man's mind is
his basic tool of survival" (Rand, 1957, 1056) one understands that this claim is made about the real world, and that Galt is voicing Rand's opinion.
These are examples where an author uses a fictional world as a type of thought experiment which serves to give vivid justification to a purportedly factual claim. One then has a character, such as Candide or Galt, give voice to the claim, which the author holds, that has been demonstrated by the thought experiment of the novel. Ingarden rightly emphasises that there is no reliable method for determining when we should make such an attribution (Ingarden, 1983, 146). But is reliability really the deciding factor when it comes to methods of literary criticism? I admit that sometimes we ought to be very careful about attributing views to an author, especially to those who specialise in irony, gleefully trapping naive readers into thinking they hold a perspective espoused by one of their characters that they in fact do not (i.e., Kierkegaard). Yet Ingarden is again going too far when he states that therefore we ought never to make such an attribution. Sometimes this attribution is relatively straightforward, and it is too intellectually timid to claim that one can never make it.
Ingarden does allow that we can impute a position stated by a character to the author only if
there is clear evidence for this either in the text of the work itself or in some extraneous evidence in the form of instructions from the author that he wished certain sentences in the work to be interpreted as his own views. (Ingarden, 1983, 164)
Yet, the connection between the views of the author and the character need not be explicitly formulated in the form of instructions. Ingarden underestimates our capacity to read between the lines. Even when we know nothing about an author like Ayn Rand, there is already often an automatic, ongoing transference and interchange between the views of imagined interlocutors and the author as we read the novel with its imagined world against the background of our own. When we begin to read Galt's speech, for example, the sentences in the novel suddenly 'punch through' the fourth wall of the literary world into our own and we tacitly know the author is now communicating with us albeit indirectly.
One might contend that the examples I have provide here (Rand, Voltaire) comprise examples where there is clear "evidence" in the text, and so perhaps Ingarden escapes the charges I put forward. However, he immediately goes on to say that it is precisely in these cases, when we do find such serious reflections in literature, we ought to recognise the novel as
merely a pretext for the expression of certain views that should have been expressed in a proper and unambiguous way in a written work like a diary, a scientific treatise, or a political article, and not in a work of art. (Ingarden, 1983, 146)
A little further on, Ingarden says something similar regarding lyrical poetry. He thinks that if someone wished to communicate true judgements, they would not employ emotionally infused imagistic verse form but "suitable arguments and justifications" (Ingarden, 1983, 155). Ingarden intimates that any example containing both quasi and real assertions should be classified as "borderline works [...] more or less far removed from a pure literary work" (Ingarden, 1983, 156). However, this seems to be an artificial constraint on the essence of literature, and the examples I have given here prevent this line of argument. The simple fact is that some characters in some works of literature (as "purely" literary as they come) espouse factual claims that the author is making, and we know this, and this does not detract from literary value.
Moreover, I think it false that "sentences uttered as judgments by a portrayed person [...] claim to be true only within the framework of the portrayed world" (Ingarden, 1973a, 148) and that the ensuing purported truths "adds nothing to their character of being works of art" (Ingarden, 1973a, 147). Seeing as Rand's novels voice her political views, we can judge the merits of Galt's speech against the background of whether it is a true statement about the world we live in. We might say to ourselves "what a heap of nonsense," and, in doing so, criticise the novel, Rand, and Galt. Conversely, we value novels that seem to provide us with some sort of deep insight into the nature of the real world, such as the works of Voltaire, or Orwell. Thus, considerations of truth and falsity in relation to the extra-artistic real world about what a fictional character says factor into the aesthetic experience and evaluations of the novel. Our judgements directly result from the transposition of the intentional state of affairs depicted by the sentences in the literary work through the literary world and over into the corresponding 'ontic/existential' state of affairs in the real world. The nature of this detour deserves a paper all of its own, but though we detour through the world of the novel, it is this transposition that Ingarden identifies as definitive of genuine judgements (Ingarden, 1973b, 161)9.
8. CONCLUSION
In summary, it should not be thought that I am urging a collapse of the distinction between the real and literary. The first major portion of this article just demonstrated that there are some axes, such as the intersection between the determined/ undetermined and the finite/infinite axes, whereby aspects of the real and the literary object sometimes occupy places along a continuum. The final two section showed that
9 Ingarden operates with a correspondence theory of truth. It is beyond the scope of this essay to assess this theory.
the literary object and the aesthetic experience is one which occurs within the real world and is enacted by real cognisors, and both the created world and the propositions it contains cannot and should not always be divorced from this background.
That we need a conceptual distinction is uncontroversial, it is the nature of the distinction, its radicality or fundamentally, that I have contested. Real and literary objects are not antonymic, but neither do they thereby occupy the same place on this continuum. Generally speaking, I do not think the positions I have articulate lean towards an idealism but further away from it. I would dub my view a phenomenological hyper-real theory, one which affirms the primacy of the things themselves as they are given but is happy to see the real in even the fictional.
REFERENCES
Bernard-Donals, M. F. (1994). Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. Byrne, T. (2020). Husserl's 1901 and 1913 Philosophies of Perceptual Occlusion: Signitive, Empty, and
Dark Intentions. Husserl Studies, 36, 123-139. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-019-09255-5 Chrzanowska-Kluczewska, E. (2015). Textual Indeterminacy Revisited: From Roman Ingarden Onwards. Journal of Literary Semantics, 44(1), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2015-0001 Husserl, E. (1977). Phenomenological Psychology. Lectures, Summer Semester: 1925 (J. Scanlon, Trans.).
The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1983). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (F. Kersten, Trans.). The Hague: Mar-tinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book. Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (R. Rojcewitz, & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (2001a). Logical Investigations, Vol. 1 (J. N. Findlay, Trans.). London: Routledge. Husserl, E. (2001b). Logical Investigation, Vol. 2 (J. N. Findlay, Trans.). London: Routledge. Husserl, E. (2005). Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory (J. Brough, Trans.). Dordrecht: Springer. Ingarden, R. (1973a). The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (R. A. Crowley, & K. R. Olson, Trans.).
Evanston: Northwest University Press. Ingarden, R. (1973b). The Literary Work of Art. An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic,
and Theory of Literarature (G. G. Grabowicz, Trans.). Evanston: Northwest University Press. Ingarden, R. (1983). On So-Called Truth in Literature. In P. J. McCormick (Ed.), Selected Papers in Aesthetics (133-162). Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Ingarden, R. (2013). Controversy over the Existence of the World, Vol. 1 (A. Szylewicz, Trans.). Frankfurt: Peter Lang Edition.
Ingarden, R. (2016). Controversy over the Existence of the World, Vol. 2 (A. Szylewicz, Trans.). Frankfurt: Peter Lang Edition.
Iser, W. (1978). The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Johansson, I. (2010). Fictions and the Spatiotemporal World — in the Light of Ingarden. Polish Journal of Philosophy, 4 (2), 81-103.
Markiewicz, H. (1975). Places of Indeterminacy in a Literary Work. In P. Graff, & S. Krzemin-Ojak (Eds.), Ingarden and Contemporary Polish Aesthetics (159-171). Krakow: Polish Academy of Science.
Mitscherling, J. (1997). Roman Ingarden's Ontology and Aesthetics. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.
Mulligan, K. (1995). Perception. In B. Smith (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl (168-238). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plotka, W. (2020). A Controversy Over the Existence of Fictional Objects: Husserl and Ingarden on Imagination and Fiction. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 51(1), 33-54. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2019.1629553
Poli, R. (1998). Levels. Axiomathes, 1(2), 197-211.
Rand, A. (1957). Atlas Shrugged. New York: Signet Books.
Thomasson, A. (1999). Fiction and Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Uemura, G. (2019). Demystifying Roman Ingarden's Purely Intentional Objects of Perception. In N. de Warren, & S. Taguchi (Eds.), New Phenomenological Studies in Japan (139-162). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Voltaire. (2006). Candide. EBook: Project Guttenberg.
