Abstract
Roman Ingarden was one of the pioneers and most influential proponents of phenomenological aesthetics, a discipline that he actively developed for almost forty years. After ontology, this is the second most important domain in his oeuvre.
In the presentation, I aim to make evident my claim that there was a fundamental change in Ingarden's aesthetic, which I call the axiological turn, and show its impact on his aesthetics. There are two main indicators of this turn: 1) the shift in focus from the purely intentional object to aesthetic experience as the central concept of aesthetics and 2) the formation of his aesthetics, independent of the ontology of work of art, based on this shift.
The period of this change is framed by the formation of Literary Work of Art (LWA) in 1927/28 and the publishing of The Cognition of Literary Work of Art (CLW) in 1937. My main argument is based on contrasting Ingarden's ideas in these two books and by clarifying the historical circumstances of the formation of LWA.
Ingarden meant this book to be a preparation for discussion of the idealism-realism problem. This ontological motivation shaped his ideas, including the often-quoted stratified structure of literary artwork.
At the same time, he realised the limitations of this approach to aesthetics that he later overcame by introducing the concept of aesthetic experience in CLW. This allowed him to broaden the scope of aesthetics and to make it an independent discipline.