Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Reflections after reading Ingarden

This morning I read Roman Ingarden's "Phenomenological Aesthetics- An Attempt at Defining Its Range" a nineteen page essay written in 1969. Reflecting on it helped me to further delineate my concerns, as well as raising specific questions about Ingarden's thought, art history and its objects and phenomenology and its methods. As such, these are mostly questions for consideration rather than answers.
1. a)There is a tension between an empirical description of phenomena and a subjective account of that phenomena. b)This reveals more than just that the mind is subject to error. c)It suggests the mind's observation of empirical data, as opposed to phenomena may in turn be subject to error. d)The empirical data is itself phenomena seperate from the phenomena it purports to describe. e)When we consider the colour red we can use positivist empirical methods to analyze the pigment, the light reflecting from it and received by the eye and the optics and cerebral structures that process light into images. But these are not the experience of the colour red. To reject conciousness as an intellectual cul-du-sac because it resists empirical analysis would be to banish perhaps the most significant of human phenomena- that of experience and so meaning itself. Perhaps the stage I have set suggests a radical scepticism, but as Heidegger presents in his book "What is Called Thinking" 'Needful to Say: Being, is"

2. d)Is there an aesthetics towards factual writing or does this stretch the domain of aesthetics beyond its limits?

3. Ingarden seems to suggest that the creator and audience share similar relationships to a given art object. Ingarden argues that editing a literary work is similar to the process by which an audience engages with the given work. He refers to poet sometimes composing 'in one go' and I interpret that as similar to my experience of "the stanction deer".

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Who's to say that the empirical analysis of the colour red is not part of the experience of the colour itself?
Or even the most pleasurable part of the experience, to the analytical mind...?
Is experience not multi dimensional?

adamvs said...

The experience of analyzing an example of colour red is not the same experience as looking at red, at least if one were to analyse "red" using a spectrometer, for example. The electromagnetic frequency, the saturation of a colour can be empirically examined, but the pleasure then comes from doing spectral analysis and so forth- not from the immediate perception of a colour with its visual nuances and emotional resonances.

Anonymous said...

Good point. Althought the experience stems from the colour red, it's not actually a product of it.
:)