Psychologism and Psychology in Literary Scholarship

Abstract

Note from the translator: Most of the contentions that Roman Ingarden (1893-1969) makes in the ensuing article cannot nowadays be easily contested or rejected. After several decades of structuralist, formalist, and phenomenological argumentation about the ontic position of the literary work, we have learned not to seek its locus any longer in psychological space. However, at the time Ingarden wrote his article,1 psychologism, or, it would be better to call it, neo-psychologism, disguised in behaviorist, Gestalt, and psychoanalytical terminology, was still, albeit inadvertently, claiming the primacy of in literary scholarship. Moreover, in Anglo-American criticism, I. A. Richards, in spite of his earnest search for a serviceable psychology of literary art, which would not conflict with the methodologically autonomous literary scholarship, was still confusing this art with appentices and coenesthesia-in brief, was still groping in the psychologistic circulus viciosus. In Germany, Ernst Elster, Ed. Scherrer, Hubert Rdtteken, H. Hamann, Robert Hartke, and a score of other scholars continued to consider the Grundwissenschaft in literary aesthetics almost with the same resoluteness the initiators of psychologism in aesthetics toward the end of the last century. Also psychologistically oriented was the so-called typologische Literaturbehandlung of Eduard Spranger and Richard Miiller-Freinfels. Yet, even though Ingarden's resolute stand against psychologism was spurred by these and other psychologizers, relativists, or subjectivists, it stemmed, however, from the philosophy as a rigorous science or phenomenology of his mentor, Edmund Husserl. As is generally known, this philosophy has posited a thesis of absolute presuppositionlessness a fundamental method through which the philosopher at the beginning secures an absolute foundation for himself. 2 In Ingarden's opinion, empirical applied to aesthetic phenomena presupposes an essential knowledge of the psyche which created them and thus surrounds them a priori with the barrier of naturalistic prejudices. Ergo, it becomes a formidable obstacle to a disinterested reflection and description of the aesthetic object and must be put out of action, must be bracketed.