Meetings Roman Ingarden in Recollections

Roman Ingarden. Portrait of a Teacher Leszek Sosnowski Roman Ingarden. Portrait of a Teacher History in general, including the history of philosophy, has its prophets, masters and craftsmen. Which category can you include Roman Ingarden in? An ambig- uous picture of the philosopher as a master emerges from the statements of his students. It unites them around this figure, but also distinguishes it from among other teachers, students and trends. The greatness of their master becomes part of them, marks them and, to some extent, makes them great themselves. In addition, it sometimes makes their period of apprenticeship under Ingarden special, extraor- dinary. The philosophical craft gives its journeymen very specific requirements that can be mastered in various ways. Without a doubt, the best of them is work under the supervision of a master of the profession. The term master, or its Latin and German equivalents of magister and Meister, have nowadays lost the subtle and profound meanings referring to professional competence and work ethic. Adjective descriptors in the highest degree – perfect, absolute, supreme, for example perfect professionalism, absolute knowledge or the highest morality, are not the sign of the loss of these features, the devaluation of meanings in contemporary culture, because they possess the semantic property of strengthening a given feature or skill. In contemporary popular culture, we are dealing with different types of descriptors which in the form of prefixes super-, mega-, extra-, giga- or hyper- mainly bear the nature of exclamations. In semantics, they are referred to as intensifiers, which raises the as to question whether the intensifi- cation that occurs is one of the characteristics possessed by the object or rather of the emotional attitude on the part of the subject. In any case, their purpose is to draw attention to something that would not have been noticed in the in- 64 Leszek Sosnowski formational chaos. In a sense, these exclamations are supposed to ‘drive up’ the value of something that lacks it. What actually takes place here is the definition of impact, increased exposure of an element in an aggregate of similar entities, so basically putting exclamative emphasis on an object (noun) in compounds such as super-hottie, mega-fraud, hyper-nationalism. There is no quantitative or qualitative measure in these expressions, because they are not defined here. Ingarden’s ‘apprenticeship’ took place in a different cultural atmosphere, in accordance with different models and values. First it was the family home, later secondary school and finally university. During his period of education there was no cult of professional competence, because work ethic was simply the norm. In any work, without exception, regardless of whether it was academic or practical, or related to everyday or eternal matters. Ingarden had his masters in each period, at every level of study, who were models in life and work, and whom he could imitate in life, professional and academic dimensions. Each dimension was naturally permeated by ethics, for each one was guided by the three Platonic virtues. In the last one of these dimensions, the academic one, Ingarden had great role models in both Lviv and Göttingen. In 2018 there were three anniversaries related to his teachers from both university centers. In 1938, Kazimierz Twardowski, Mścisław Wartenberg and Edmund Husserl passed away within short intervals of each other: Twardowski on February 11, Wartenberg on April 13 and Husserl on April 27. The first two did not significantly influence Ingarden’s philosophical development as a student, but they played an important role in later years in his personal and professional life. The third was the most important teacher for Ingarden, he was his Master, guiding his philosophical interests and career path choice. From this point of view, one can say that the current publication has a jubilee reference and, to some extent, it is also another of Ingarden’s jubilee anniversaries. There were already several of them, and each was similar in the particular sense of it gathering several generations of his indirect and direct students who were or felt connected with him or his philosophical thought. The present volume is different – in the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of -Ing arden’s death coming in 2020, it contains memories of his direct students and continuators of his philosophical work. For each of the contributors, Ingarden has always played an important, and often unique, role in their academic biography. 65 Roman Ingarden. Portrait of a Teacher No doubt Ingarden was important to every student-disciple. In his memoirs and letters, he strongly emphasized the importance of his teachers. Here, the authors of this book take on a similar role, speaking in memory of their Teacher and Master. These recollections are as different from each other as the people who express them are in their life and academic biographies. However, in each of those it is easy to see that Ingarden played a formative role for each given author. He influenced the formation of their academic personality, defined their approach to philosophy and academia in general, for future professional years, and formed their life and moral attitudes. All the individuals presented in the volume took their Master’s path in various forms and passed on the values they learned from him to their own students. This is an important indicator of the position occupied by Ingarden at the time and of the educational and academic importance it possesses. Further remarks have been divided into two parts; the first concerns Ingarden as a teacher, and thus covers the interwar period. The second part presents the psychological and academic portrait of Ingarden, and thus talks about him as a person / personality and as an academic teacher. Ingarden as a secondary school teacher Ingarden was a teacher at secondary schools for 15 years from 1918 to 1933. It was a long and, as we know from his correspondence and memoirs, very intense practice of the teacher-academic. During this period he taught in four cities: Lublin, Warsaw, Toruń and Lviv1. Only in the first of them was he a bachelor, in the others he had to support a growing family. The number of teaching hours Work in each city differed in terms of the number of teaching hours, school subjects taught and additional duties required. In Lublin, Ingarden worked from 1 Not counting his work as a private tutor at the estate of Countess Tarnowska in Końskie. 66 Leszek Sosnowski October 1, 1918 to June 30, 1919, teaching of the introduction to philosophy, mathematics, logic and German in three schools. In total, he had 32 mandatory school teaching hours. We do not know much about Ingarden’s life in this city. The brief correspondence with Kazimierz Twardowski does not reveal details from this period. “Not much new here in Lublin. There are no people with whom you could work academically and a total lack of books. These are the big things that are killing me here, and the reasons for why I want to get out of here at any cost”, he wrote to Twardowski [4/30/1919]. In a letter from June 11, 1919 he accurately presented his schedule for June, justifying the delay in correspondence: “In the morning I had lessons in one of the schools, in the afternoon there was a secondary school exam in the second school, then the en- trance exams, now a variety of work before the end of the school year”. In the same letter [6/11] Ingarden expressed his satisfaction at the end of his stay in Lublin: “I am very happy to move to Warsaw. I am expecting that my school activity[…] as much as academic will be more prolific than here”. In Warsaw Ingarden received a job as a teacher at the St. Adalbert Private Male Secondary School with a philological profile, commonly referred to as the Górski Secondary School. He worked there from September 1, 1919 to July 31, 1921, teaching mathematics and psychology. It was an important change in Ingar- den’s professional life for three reasons: he received a job “on much better terms than he could get in a state school”2; the number of teaching hours amounted to twenty-two hours a week3; he had easier contact with Lviv philosophers, who moved to the capital in large numbers, taking up work at the University of Warsaw, and much more time for academic work. However, all these advantages 2 See: “Letter to Kazimierz Twardowski written 19.05.1919,” The Digital Archive of Roman Ingarden, accessed March 20, 2018, http://ingarden.archive.uj.edu.pl/en/ archiwum/letter-to-kazimierz-twardowski-written-19-05-1919/. All other quotations from Ingarden’s letters to Twardowski’s come from this Archive: http://ingarden.archive. uj.edu.pl/home. The search engine on this website allows for search either by phrase or by the date of a specific letter. See also: Radosław Kuliniak and Dorota Leszczyna, Mariusz Pandura, comp., Korespondencja Romana Witolda Ingardena z Kazimierzem Twardowskim (Kęty: Wydawnictwo Marek Derewiecki, 2016). 3 Roman Stanisław Ingarden, Roman Witold Ingarden. Życie filozofa w okresie toruńskim (1921-1926) (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2000), 40. 67 Roman Ingarden. Portrait of a Teacher lost quite a bit of their importance fairly quickly, since the housing conditions were very difficult, prompting Ingarden to move to a better place for the family and himself. Stefan Błachowski, a friend from Göttingen, warned his younger friend about the danger an academic faces living in a small town4. Likewise, Edith Stein expressed her regret about him having to leave Warsaw, writing in a letter of October 9, 1920: “It would be a real shame if you had to leave Warsaw.

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