The Enduring Importance of Roman Ingarden for Reception Theory

There have been few philosophers in the 20th century more creative and profound and yet more obscure than Roman Ingarden. He anticipated many of the major philosophical questions that would dominate literary theory in the 1960s and 70s in Germany, France, and the United States. In this paper, I argue that his primary contribution to literary theory is an ontology that arcs deftly between the poles of idealism and realism with a nuanced way of upholding both the formal reality of the literary work of art and the subjective assessment of aesthetic value, all the while preserving the fundamental meaning-making function of language. It was this philosophical foundation that proved to be a fertile ground for later philosophers, like Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, who wanted to push back on what they saw as analogous forces to idealism and realism in the rigidity of formalism and Marxist materialism and the ostensible epistemological nihilism of the psychological hermeneutics.