The article argues that, paradoxically, Roman Ingarden is unable to demonstrate that the world „exists” in any essential sense of the word „existence”, since he assumes (in line with Edmund Husserl) an ego-centered, living-through model of pure consciousness, and thus, again following Husserl, he postulates as the starting point of his considerations the existence of two separate realms of individual objects: the realm of pure consciousness (understood in a Husserlian manner as a stream of experiences) and the realm of objective world. Consciousness is grasped as a set of acts, not contents. However, consciousness (as pointed out in neo-Kantianism by Paul Natorp and in phenomenology by Jean-Paul Sartre) is something primary, in which only later on the world and the real existing subject can be constituted as such; hence consciousness cannot be equated with any subject whatsoever. Consciousness does not constitute anything but is a position from which we can see the constitution itself. Thus conceptualized consciousness does not contain the lived experience of the world but stands closely to the being itself. The fact that we have the living-through experience of the world is only secondarily conjectured by the subject already constituted in the primary consciousness. The failure of Ingarden’s project is caused by his Cartesian assumption regarding the primacy of the empirical conscious subject (a view shared with Husserl), his co-opting of the British- -empiricist model of epistemology, namely the distinction between the ‘sense data’ and ‘intentional grasping of the sensuous data’, in conjunction with something what Hermann Schmitz has called ‘metaphysics of the solid object’. In the aftermath of these considerations those aspects in Ingarden’s philosophy which truly lead toward realism are revealed.

The subject of the article is the assessment of the way of presentation of the issue of realism and idealism in the Controversy over the Existence of the World by R. Ingarden. First, the author of this paper offers his own systematization of the issue of ‘realism – idealism’, then he goes on to show Ingarden’s position. The modern opposition ‘realism – idealism’ can be divided into three main areas: (1) the problem of the existence of the so‑called ‘constitutive a priori’, (2) the problem of the argumentative transgression of the immanence of consciousness (the so‑called ‘bridge problem’), (3) the problem of the causal genesis of the image of the world at the disposal of human cognitive subjects (skeptical hypotheses). The author undertakes to show that the Controversy over the Existence of the World takes as a starting point only a specific interpretation of the issue of realism and idealism: the interpretation contained in the writings of E. Husserl, while omitting the fundamental issue of the nature of time and space, and is limited thereby to the interpretation of realism and idealism from the point of view of the question of the existence qualified as constitutive a priori.

The distinction between primary and secondary qualities, most famously outlined by Galileo, and subsequently supported, inter alia, by Descartes and by Locke, has widely been considered one of the crucial factors in the development of modern idealism. In its contemporary form, the distinction identifies some of the perceived properties as mental phenomena due to their content and structural dependence on the mind. However, this account of the primary/secondary distinction is largely different from its original version developed by the above-mentioned philosophers, within whose work the mental being of the perceived qualities was demonstrated objectively, from the conceptually-derived nature of matter, and not subjectively, by referring to the mind’s participation in the cognitive process. It was only at the next stage of the early modern subjectivisation of sense perception, best exemplified by such philosophers as Arnold Geulincx and Richard Burthogge, that the creative role played by the mind in sensation and, consequently, the mind-dependency of the sensible qualities was recognised – a turn influenced by the reinterpretation of Aristotelian philosophy offered by Jacopo Zabarella and the Paduan school, as well as by anti-Aristotelianism of the kind developed in Netherlands. Furthermore, the two different approaches to the primary/ secondary distinction can be linked with two main types of post-Cartesian idealism, i.e. Berkeleian and Kantian – a claim for which illustrative evidence from British philosophy, namely from Berkeley’s and Burthogge’s respective theories, can be drawn.