Time and memory: Roman Ingarden's concept of the order of sequence in a literary work of art in view of Francisco Varela's neurophenomenology, and Shaun Gallagher's front loading phenomenology

There are two important reasons to return to the Ingardenian conception of the order of sequence in a literary work of art. First and foremost, as distinct from the concepts of the stratum structure, ^z/nsz'-judgements and concretiza-tion, which became part the canon of world literary studies, Ingarden’s reflections on “particular structure of the literary work inhering in it from its ‘beginning’ to its ‘end’” [Ingarden 1973, 305] have not sparked much interest. With a few exceptions [Iser 1990, 177-218, 267-280; Ricoeur 1985, 244-245] the studies concerning his philosophy of literature do not even mention a fact strongly underscored in his writings, namely - that “the literary work itself is temporally extended” [Ingarden 1973, 305]. However, in Ingarden’s view, the literary work is characterized by an integral two-dimensionality of strata and phases. And it is precisely Ingarden’s analyses of the phase structure - which is to say, the extension-in-time of the work and the resulting temporariness of its cognition - that address the fundamental issues of identity versus changeability, or temporariness versus stability, or dynamic versus static character of different phenomena. His analyses - albeit conducted on literary material - far exceed the bounds of literary studies. Indeed, they concern every phenomenon persisting in time (including the human person) and the work of consciousness cognizing this particular, processual object; needless to say, this kind of work is itself a process that occurs in time.

Although we hardly associate Ingarden with the philosophy of time, let alone the philosophy of the subject, he had been preoccupied with these problems for his whole life. It behooves us to recall that, when he visited Husserl in Gottingen in 1912, he suggested Die menschliche Person [On human person] as a theme for his doctorate, but Husserl discouraged him due to its utopian character [Ingarden 1968, 114]. It is also worth to mention that during his first appearance in an international forum - at the 10th International Philosophical Congress in Paris in 1937 - Ingarden delivered a speech “Der Mensch und die Zeit” [Man and Time], At the time, he has already been the author of Das literarische Kunstwerk [The Literary Work ofArt] [Ingarden 1931, 1-389] and О poznawaniu dziela literackiego [The Cognition of the Literary Work] [Ingarden 1937, 1-276], the so-called Lvovian version of his future Уот Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks [Ingarden 1968, 1-507]. We may treat the last one as a material concretization of his earlier studies on the temporary structure of consciousness and identity or the changeability of phenomena persisting in time, which he included in his 1918 doctoral dissertation Intuition und Intellekt bei Henri Bergson. Darstellung und Versuch einer Kritik [Intuition and Intellect at Henri Bergson. Presentation and Attempt at Criticise] [Ingarden 1922, 286-461]. Moreover, Ingarden addressed these questions in his lectures at Jan Kazimierz University in Lvov in 1932-33 and a three-year seminar on aesthetics in 1934-37 (a typescript copy of the protocols is deposited in the Library of the Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, sig. 6071) [Ulicka 2020, 5-28]. Later, he summarized these reflections in his fundamental two-volumes ontological treatise, Spor о istnienie swiata [Controversy over the Existence of the World] written intentionally in Polish during the Second World War [Ingarden 1947, 1-296; 1948, 1-848]. Apparently, however, this summarization proved insufficient, since the problems of time, identity, object and subject enduring in time continuously returned in his lectures at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow in the year 1945, and later in the years 1959-1960 as well as during numerous discussion panels of the Section of Aesthetics of the Polish Philosophical Association in Cracow in the years 1961 1969 [Ingarden 1981, 1-450]. Ingarden also dealt with them, as it is worth mentioning, in his less known works from the field of mathematical philosophy and physics. Finally, the problematics of time and identity appear in the last of his works published in his life, a study on ethics titled Uber die Verarntwortung: Hire ontischen Fundamente [On Responsibility: Its Ontic Foundation] [Ingarden 1970]. What is of particular importance, as we will see later, he justified there not only ontic but also linguistic origins of responsibility.

To be sure, Ingarden had never written his dreamed-of book about human nature, but his recurrent, and insistent, reflections on this problem clearly show that it is precisely the temporal structure of consciousness and the identity of phenomena persisting in time that would become central concerns in this undertaking. I shall begin right away with a strong thesis that this question was most emphatically - albeit indirectly - formulated in Ingarden’s studies on the philosophy of literature or, more precisely, in his reflections which concern the phase structure of the literary work.

In the contemporary humanities, the field that addresses the phenomenological conception of the temporal structure of consciousness most intensely is neurophenomenology. Ingarden’s conception differs essentially from the one assumed in the foundational works of this branch of neuroscience, namely -Francisco Varela’s writings, slightly reformulated in Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi. The latter three thinkers outlined the discipline’s conceptual framework, proposed its methodology, terms and tools, and defined the spectrum of problems that concern the phenomenology of mind, which other scholars developed later according to their indications. This is the second reason for which we should recall Ingarden’s conception here. The attractiveness of his idea comes precisely from its alternative - if not competitive - character to the propositions which enjoy world recognition. The shortest way to explain differences between them is to say that the neurophenomenological propositions are geometrical, monophonic, and narrativist, while Ingarden’s is stereometric, polyphonic, and dramaturgic.

These differences are all the more important given that, for Ingarden, just as for Varela, Gallagher, and Zahavi, the point of departure is Husserl’s conception of the internal phenomenological consciousness of time. Neurophenomenolo-gists consider this conception to be the most perfect account of the temporal structure of consciousness in the history of philosophy [Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 4-5], which is why they adopt Husserl’s thesis on its three-pronged structure - primal-impressive, retentive, and protentive - almost without question. (However, one should add that this relatively uncritical approach is present only in Gallagher’s propaedeutic works. In his more specialized texts, he has often revised and corrected this interpretation. The most important reservations concern Husserl’s understanding of retention, primal-impression and protention as phases for Gallagher lies in “they are functions of consciousness rather than phases or types of consciousness” [Gallagher 1979, 445]).

Husserl developed this account through an analysis of a simple tune that consisted of several tones, which he visualized in the form of the diagram. On the horizontal line (retention), he marked a sequence of tones which had only just passed; the vertical lines that cross it are meant to designate anticipations of each tone which is about to appear in the sequence (protentions); the crossing points of the horizontal and vertical lines refer to primal impressions, while the diagonal lines stand for the position of each tone in the developing retentional series.

Following Husserl’s visualization found in one of the so-called Bernauer Manuskripte [Bernau manuscripts], and its slightly modified version by Gallagher and Zahavi [Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 76], we achieve the simpler model, which, as literary scholars, we know very well. In 1940, Jan Mukafovsky employed the model in his О jazyce basnickem [On Poetic Language], where he analyzed the second principle of the semantic accumulation of the sentence [Mukafovsky 1940]. To be sure, he did not refer directly to Husserl, but to Sergey Karcevsky [Karcevsky 1931] and Valentin Voloshinov [Волошинов / Vo-loshinov 1930], who Roman Jakobson propagated intensely in Prague. Nonetheless, a Husserlian inspiration is more than probable in this case (despite the fact that Ondfej Sladek rejects this possibility in his monograph of life and works of Mukafovsky [Sladek 2015, 194]). In Mukafovsky’s version, the diagram serves to illustrate not the work of consciousness, but the work of language. It has a simpler form than Husserl’s:

a-b-c-d-e-f a b c d e abed a b c a b

a

Thirty years later, Janusz Slawinski cited Mukafovsky’s version in order to

describe the mechanism of meaning-formation not in a single sentence but in a complex narrative utterance [Slawinski 1967, 22]. For both the Czech and the Polish structuralists the model of a sentence - an equivalent of the Husserlian simple melody consisting of several tones - turned out sufficient.

Also neurophenomenologists begin with Husserl’s model when they develop their own conception of mind. Once they adopt it, they proceed toward a “naturalization” of phenomenology. The naturalization is supposed to be “a methodological remedy for the hard problem,” as Varela puts it in the title of his treatise [Varela 1996], that would respond to the fundamental challenge posed by David Chalmers [Chalmers 1995]. Varela’s radical program of naturalization is about confronting phenomenological and empirical data. Scholars derive the former, so-called first-person data from subjective experiences of time, reported by “witnesses,” who are previously specially trained in reaching cognitive insights; i.e. direct phenomenological experiences. The training should eliminate introspection. According to the assumptions of Husserl’s phenomenology, reports produced through transcendental analysis should be apodictically certain. Researchers confront information excerpted from insights with the so-called third-person data, obtained through measurement of brain processes. First- and third-person data are comparable by virtue of analytical tools taken from the theory of dynamic systems. The final conclusions appear in the form of formal models. This is believed to be the way to achieve a “mutual enlightening” of phenomenology and neurophenomenology; i.e. of speculative and empirical conceptions of the mind.

This is how Varela’s project, presented in The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time-Consciousness [Varela 1999] is described: “Varela directly tackles the issue of the neural-dynamics roots of the present moment while relying on a detailed account of Husserlian time-consciousness. What is here at stake is to bring together the third-person analysis of dynamic synchronization of long-distance neural assemblies in the brain, and the first-person account of the lived time as it is experienced by each singular subject (analyzed by Husserl in his structured description of time-consciousness). The underlying hypothesis is that both analyses are not only isomorphic to each of the but literally со-generate each other, that is, produce new experiences and renewed categories of both side” [Depraz and Gallagher 2003, 7].

However, the procedure of “naturalization of phenomenology” proposed by Varela rose reservations even among neurophenomnologists. As distinct from Varela, Gallagher exhibits a far-reaching skepticism regarding both the infallibility of first-person testimonies - produced, as he believes, in an artificial manner, reinforced by a special training, including meditation (that is why he opts for what he calls front-loading phenomenology exclusively) - and their translatability into objective third-person data without the mediation of a second-person translator. As he mentioned in the interview for the Polish periodical Avant, “in neurophenomenology, you try to stay close as possible to first-person data, even though it always occurs in a second-person process in which analytical data are derived directly from first-person relations” [Gallagher 2011, 192].

Gallagher also does not trust empirical confirmations: “Brain imaging, like all other scientific techniques, has its limitations. In fact, it is a general principle: the only questions that can be asked about a scientific technique are those to which it can answer <...>. our machines and research methods can provide answers only to those questions for which they were created - and are limited to them” [Gallagher 2011, 187].

The procedure of “naturalization of phenomenology” proposed by neuro-phenomenologists raises reservations also from the perspective of Ingarden’s conception. The most problematic seems the basis of this procedure: the uncritically adopted Husserlian model, which supports all further empirical verification procedures that usually confirm Husserl’s unerringness.

Ingarden treated Husserl’s conception merely as a point of departure. Perhaps, he knew it better than Varela, Gallagher or Zahavi and from a more direct source (his conversations with Husserl). Ingarden even credited himself for gaining Husserl’s interest in the problematics of time. In his Gottingen memories and diaries from this period, as well as in his letters to Kazimierz Twardowski, his first master and the founder of Lvov-Warsaw school of philosophy, Ingarden noted that, before meeting him, Husserl had no inclination to bother with temporality and did not even know Bergson [Ingarden 1968, 114]. This, however, is hardly probable; it is possible that Husserl became familiar with Bergson’s thought through Alexandre Koyre [Spiegelberg 1965, 399], even though Ingarden maintains his version also in his philosophical works [Ingarden 1963, 536-537]. At any rate, Ingarden not only had an opportunity to discuss this subject with Husserl but he also read Husserl’s notes to lectures on Zeitbewusstsein [Consciousness of Time] from 1904-1905. He had access to the notes thanks to his friend, Edith Stein, who was Husserl’s assistant responsible for assembling them (later Husserl committed this task to Heidegger).

This, of course, was not the main cause of the differences between Ingarden’s and neurophenomenological interpretations of Husserl’s conception of the internal phenomenological consciousness of time. What is important is that Ingarden preoccupied himself with essential ontological problems; above all, with Husserl’s transcendental idealism, which the former initially rejected. This is not the place to discuss it in much detail. I will only indicate two main consequences of this critique for pointing to the difference of Ingarden’s approach to the problematic of the temporal structure of consciousness. The first one was related to his observation that Husserl ignored the specificity of the object that persists in time and turned his focus exclusively to the work of transcendental consciousness; as Ingarden writes, not without irony: “In Lectures, Husserl overlooked the categorical problem and instead raised the problem of retention and protention” [Ingarden 1963, 537]. The second one is Husserl’s profound belief that his construct is apodictically certain by necessity. As Ingarden emphatically states, “Husserl would never be able to understand <.. .> the constitution of time as a kind of illusion or ‘intellectual’ deformation” [Ingarden 1963, 537]. This belief is shared by neurophenomenologists, who assume the infallibility of the unassuming transcendental consciousness as an indispensable foundation of

their conceptions, which only then are empirically tested.

Let us confine to making these rudimentary statements, without entering into more detailed discussions on science and faith nor appraising different methodologies, in order to proceed to what is really important in research practice, not only for phenomenologists and neurophenomenologists, but also for narratologists. It is about the issues related to research material, which usually dictate the limits of interpretation.

First, Ingarden, as distinct from Husserl and neurophenomenologists, analyzed a literary - that is, linguistic - utterance, not a musical composition. Second, as distinct from neurophenomenologists and structuralists, what Ingarden analyzed was not a single sentence (as an equivalent of a simple tune), but a complex and multithreaded novel with complicated plot and narrative, such as Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim.

This choice was not accidental. Of course, one would expect Ingarden to have engaged in a polemic against Husserl precisely in the field of music. After all, the former was famous for his passion for music as a piano amateur virtuoso. Moreover, Ingarden devoted a whole study to the musical work [Ingarden 1986] and was a promoter of eminent Polish musicologists’ doctoral dissertations (for instance, Zofia Lissa, but, to some extent, also Stefania Lobaczewska-Gerard de Festenburg, both participants of his Lvovian seminar) as well as various works on music in literature [Szulc 1937] and film [Lissa 1934; Lissa 1937]. Apparently, however, the polemic required arguments of complexity, which Husserl, examining his simple tune consisting of several tones, failed to recognize, and which can be provided through analysis of the linguistic utterance.

These complications were bound with differences between the asemantic art, like music, and the semantic (which for Ingarden means representational) art, like literature. Both these forms of art are similar in their temporal character, but this is virtually all they have in common with each other. The cognition of a literary work, which is extensive in time and whose units - by the very nature of language - grow in a sequential manner, requires not only compliance with its linear nature (that is, Husserl’s retentive-protentive processes) but also taking into account the specificity of these units: a) their energy to constitute intentional objects; b) their semantics, i.e. their reference (even if suspended) to reality; c) semantics bound to both social and historical character of language (particular traditions and conventions) as well as its individual usage; d) which cumulates both private and common emotions and experiences; e) semantics со-determined by the prosodic layer, which, according to Ingarden, is effectively present also in written utterances, where it determines meanings (modalities); f) semantics strictly related to the materiality of the object and the subject (the subject’s affects and corporeality).

For now, these are the most important complications, which made it necessary to change focus in phenomenological reflections from the constitution of the object that is extensive in time and to the temporal structure of the consciousness that constitutes it. For this reason, the focus shifted from the musical work to the linguistic one. But there are other, perhaps more important complications resulting from the fact that Ingarden, in his reflections, did not use an example of a novella or an anecdote, which would be counterparts of Husserl’s simple tune or the structuralists’ sentence (that is, a sequential configuration of limited amounts of information received in a linear time order, in accordance with the nature of language). Instead, he engaged in reflection on a complex novel with a multithreaded plot, a wide range of protagonists, and large amounts of information from different subjects (narrator, protagonists) from different viewpoints. What is more, a novel with subjects being variously related to one another and to their fictional universe (entering different affective and plot relationships) and with pieces of information given in different modes (monologue, dialogue) as well as different narrative modalities (direct, reported or free indirect speech), received successively, in accordance with the nature of language, but not necessarily with the chronological development of events, sometimes difficult to comprehend or unorganizable into chronological-causal sequences.

Given the abovementioned (and by no means the only) complications which affect the analysis of cognition confronted with a temporal object such as a complex literary work, it is understandable that Ingarden had to develop a different conception than the one proposed by Husserl and structuralists. In order to describe the process of cognition of a literary work, he could not simply embrace the single-line, geometrized conception of cumulation and anticipation (retention and protention), whose only difference from mathematic schematizations, at the time viewed as authoritative, was that it joined temporally parametrized points into a stream of changeable and reciprocally determining data. Ingarden criticized such a mathematical conception and especially the authoritative solution by Julius W.R. Dedekind of right line and forming it points, which, according to Dedekind, are described by the set of rational numbers. Polish phenomenologist proved that the right line is not a multiplication of points but another original quality, a separate individual being, untransformable to a number of denoting it beings [Bielawka 2001, 13-16]. This was not an amateurish critique. Ingarden begun his studies in mathematics under Waclaw Sierpinski, among others [Ingarden 1998, 12]. Later, he continued under David Hilbert in Gottingen. The third volume of Controversy over the Existence of the World, titled Uber die Kausale Struktur des realen Welt [Ingarden 1974] and published post mortem, proves Ingarden’s thorough knowledge in mathematic logic. The problematic of time occupies an important position in these logical-mathematical considerations.

For Ingarden it quickly turned out that the case of the cognition of a literary work required a different approach. Firstly, it requires taking into account as many linear schemes as is the number of its plot threads. Secondly, and more importantly, it requires taking into account that the received data comes from different and variously interrelated subjects. In other words, it requires taking into account different - intersecting, overlapping, mutually exclusive, etc. -cognitive perspectives. The interference of these different perspectives is itself a temporal - and, moreover, dynamic and non-linear - process. It is additionally complicated by what Ingarden calls “foreshortenings” in cognition of every

temporal phenomenon (not only linguistic or musical). They are a consequence of the nature of memory. If cognition aims toward obtaining a correct result, which gives justice to the cognized object - as Ingarden used to say - then it follows that the subject has to perform a constant revision of the objects produced through successive foreshortenings, in accordance with the corrections which they introduce.

Thirdly, a simple tune consisting of several tones can be grasped in a measurable and relatively short time. Reading a complex novel cannot be closed within a predictable time period. This additionally complicates the process of its constitution and cognition. Using the material of the tune is very convenient: asemantic and limited in time (in terms of Ingarden’s formal ontology, it is an event rather than a process). Husserl analyzed merely a living experience, present in actual consciousness. Thus, Husserl can conclude that the object of experience retains its identity both in time and space: “An object maintains its place, just as a tone maintains its time <.. .>. The tone itself remains the same” [Husserl 1966, 25].

This applies to acts of perception. Ingarden, in turn, examined a case which required taking into account also other cognitive mechanisms: forgetting, remembering, recollecting. Husserl avoided these mechanisms like fire in order not to fall into psychologism and neurophenomenologists ignored them as a threat from belief-desire psychology. The mechanisms were nevertheless familiar to Ingarden from the studies on memory conducted intensively in Kazimierz Twardowski’s Lvov-Warsaw school, especially by Wladyslaw Witwicki, Stefan Blachowski, Stefan Baley, Bronislaw Bandrowski, Walter Auerbach. These thinkers were Ingarden’s closest friends in Lvov, together with literary scholars, such as Zygmunt Lempicki and Juliusz Kleiner, whose intuitive insights into the cognitive work of memory in literary reading inspired Ingarden even further [Kleiner 1956, 77-81]. What was of particular importance with regard to a complex literary work, which is experienced within a longer time, were Walter Auerbach’s studies on “past objects,” recalled in memories, and their identity with actually experienced objects [Auerbach 1933, 167-198].

Ingarden proposed a dual solution to the problem of the identity of past and actual objects by emphasizing their simultaneous identity and difference. The shortest way to explain the difference between them was his well-known formulation: there are as many concretizations as readings (and each concretization is different and unique). This conception was a result of Ingarden’s belief that repetition does not exist, that each repetition is different from its predecessors, even in the same linguistic version. Ingarden was probably inspired in this respect by the Indo-European scholar Jan Michal Rozwadowski [1904, 1-118]. Every concretization is different, because even its own versions differ: produced in temporal acts of reading, which require recollections and actualizations of past, already performed concretizations. The indefinite, undetermined spots in concretizations are neither reproducible nor repetitious. They continue to reappear, each time in a different perspective, in another foreshortening, overlapping with their past constitutions and revised or corrected by new influxes of data.

No wonder, then, that Ingarden concludes his reflections on the stratum structure of the literary work by saying that it seems astonishing that the cognition of such a complicated object is possible at all.

However, an integral part develops in these successive, temporal, and entangled cognitive acts, which are changeable, unstable, dynamic, and non-linear. This integral part is a higher order entity, irreducible to its parts and qualitatively new; the kind of entity which was introduced to philosophy under the name of “emergent entity” by Joachim Metallmann, a Polish philosopher, who posed the problem of identity as produced by utterly different events [Metallmann 1938, 45-53]. Contemporary neurophenomenology (and other theories proposed in neurosciences, for example, by Daniel Dennett and Antonio Damasio) explains and visualizes the constitution of this kind of entity in research on the integrating work of the brain and mind. Ingarden, in turn, discovered it through his insightful analysis of the cognition of a complex literary work. He described the result of this integration as the aesthetic object. This kind of object is different every time it is constituted (concretized).

If we were to diagramatize Ingarden’s conception, it would be necessary to replace Husserl’s single-line scheme with several (or several dozens of) schemes and then combine them, marking the points, in which they intersect or exclude one another. As a result, a stereometric model with a complicated structure would appear. A graphic designer would probably draw such a spatial model refering to Maurits Cornelis Escher’s images, which seem to come close to Ingarden’s conception.

Escher’s images have been invoked not by accident. The painter - what is important: inspired by mathematics - became a protagonist of one of the most important cognitivist interpretations of the mind’s work proposed by Douglas R. Hofstadter [Hofstadter 1979, 1-777]. Another protagonist was Johann Sebastian Bach. It is worth mentioning that Ingarden himself, if he ever used the example of the musical work, always referred to the many-voiced fugue, not to the Husserlian simple tune. Fugue - similarly to a multithreaded literary work with a complex, multiperspectival narrative - was for Ingarden an emblem of the complex processual object, which he distinguished in his ontological reflections from the event (short-lasting like Husserl’s simple tune) and from the simple process-object. In literary works with complex plots and narratives, Ingarden writes, “like in music, for example <.. .> many-voiced fugues <...> several melodies develop simultaneously, run in parallel, intersect and intertwine, and undoubtedly modify each other, but without thereby losing their distinct character \Eigenart\ and self-sufficiency. Their interplay undoubtedly calls forth distinctive derivative phenomena in the whole of the musical work that are decisive for its wholeness and unity” (Ingarden 2016, 500).

The reference to multi-voiced fugues links Ingarden’s conception to his contemporary literary scholars (of course, Mikhail Bakhtin) and modernist prose writers who, like James Joyce, and Thomas Mann, wrote and commented on their works precisely in relation to fugues and Arnold Schonberg’s compositions. This analogy allows one to call this conception “polyphonic” or “drama-

turgic” (which is practically the same). Let us remind: Bakhtin developed the concept of “polyphony” in his analysis of Dostoyevsky’s novel, based on Nietzsche’s account of tragedy as a dramatic work. Ingarden himself used the term “polyphony” even in his studies on the stratum - i.e. non-temporal - structure of literary works, when he reflected on the problem of harmony of artistic values. And when making (few) attempts to describe mental cognitive mechanisms, he always resorted to a dramaturgic metaphor, which alluded to David Hume’s notion of the “mind theatre” [Hume I960, 253]. Ingarden was interested in Hume as a philosopher of perception already in his doctoral dissertation. Later he often returned to Hume in relation with the question of determinism in many major [Ingarden 1974] and minor works [Ingarden 1980, 5-8]. By the way, it is this metaphor that Dennet often explores in his account of brain processes, which are said to occur analogically to Hume’s collections of distributed processes with no central scene, that is, no real neurological center of experience [Dennet 1978, 112].

Ingarden thus resigned from the aquatic imagery of “stream” employed by Bergson, Husserl, neurophenomenologists, and many others. For the aquatic imagery unwittingly suggests causal relationships (chronological, sequential), which he excluded from his ontology, considering them to be a convenient illusion and a persuasive mode of explaining things which, in fact, are far more complicated. If Ingarden ever used an aquatic analogy, it was not the metaphor of stream, but the metaphor of wave. It is because the image of a wave better captures the non-linearity of consciousness of time [Ingarden 2016, XVI, 645-742].

What consequences does it have for narratology and, above all, for the part of narratology focused on literary texts?

The dramaturgical metaphoric, corresponding to Ingarden’s conception of cognition of objects persisting in time, and the polyphonic metaphoric (nonlinear and non-sequential), corresponding to his description of the structure of consciousness, explain the complexities of modernist prose better than Husserl’s and neurophenomenological accounts, which are suitable for single-threaded realist novels and which are used also in narratological interpretations of narrative identity, self-narratives, autobiographical self, etc. This kind of prose embraced the challenge of depicting different, concurrently occurring events and the simultaneousness of their multisensory cognition in spite of the constraints imposed by linear, sequential language. Modernist writers sought to represent this aporetic situation of dissonance between mental capturing of events and language by breaking logical and chronological plot relationships and using complicated narrative modes, which were capable of at least suggesting the simultaneousness of the perception of plot and mental events.

This was also the challenge for the philosophers and literary scholars of the Lvov-Warsaw School. It was aptly described by the Germanist Zygmunt Lempicki, in his review of Florian Znaniecki’s globally recognized Cultural Reality [Znaniecki 1919], where Lempicki argued that the major problem pervading this book is “how to grasp with thought <...> the dynamic-revolution- ary character of reality” [Lempicki 1921, 51]. The philosophical milieu around Twardowski focused primarily on the problems of causal relationships. While working in this field, they laid foundations for multi-valued and modal logics, which call into question the Aristotelian logic [Lukasiewicz 1910, 1-208]. The latter, in turn, may be considered as a source of teleological thinking that informed - and still informs - both neurophenomenology and narratology.

For neurophenomenologists, all departures from the Aristotelian model of the plot with beginning, middle, and end - a model in the twentieth century applied by Vladimir Propp in his analysis of the fairy tale [Пропп / Propp 1928, 1-152] and popularized thanks to the suggestive accounts of Hayden White [White 1987, 1-264] - have to be considered as pathologies. Thus, in light of neurophenomenology, all interrupted, disturbed, disintegrated or entangled narratives - which Gallagher described as disnarratives [Gallagher 2007, 208] - are interpreted as symptoms of the subject’s disintegration, moral deficits, schizophrenia, psychosis, and all other problems with ipseity. The norm is determined by a coherent narrative [Gallagher 2007, 217-219], that is to say, a “well-craft-ed,” consistent plot recounted by the narrator, who controls the course of events. Or, at least, a narrative translatable into such a plot. If this is the measure of art in the twentieth century, applicable equally to literary, plastic, and musical arts, then their most eminent examples should be considered as nothing more or less than pathologies. That is why Ingarden’s dramaturgical conception of the plot and polyphonic conception of the narrative provide a better account of the specificity of modern art.

The point, however, is not to reproach neurophenomenologists for not knowing Ingarden’s proposition (we can record only one, albeit purely historical, reference to his name - in Varela’s study [Varela 1996, 335], where it is mispronounced: “Ingarten”. Rather, the point is that neurophenomenologists remain indifferent - in fact, blind and deaf - to literature, and even to language. It is understandable that the aim of their studies is different than to gain knowledge about the mind operating through language and creating fictive possible worlds. Nonetheless, it is language testimonies, or so-called first-person data, that constitute the point of departure of neurophenomenological inquiries. And, their disregard for the linguistic nature of these testimonies, their belief in the ability to gain insights into the direct experience of time comes close to Freud’s conviction that he reached the unconscious - in fact, what he reached were merely autobiographical narratives. Being both Husserl and Twardowski’s disciple, Ingarden was convinced that cognition is “languaging” [Ingarden 1972, 100] and that access to direct experience is always mediated by a conventional and essentially social system. That is why Ingarden acutely analyzed grammatical indicators of communication, e.g. forms of perfective and iterative verbs which secretly govern the work of memory and consciousness [Ingarden 2016, 151-152]. Ingarden never trusted in the infallibility of immediate insights. Moreover, he was well aware of both the indispensability of their cultural symbolizations and all the emotional and body experiences (visual and acoustic) inscribed in these symbolizations. What is more, Ingarden did not overlook the materiality of the

object which incorporated these symbolizations. In his analyses of the material object-instrument, emotions and body of a virtuoso performing Beethoven’s Moon Sonata we read: “the virtuoso executes a system of movements by the relevant parts of the body, and the same happens with the piano, whose parts execute numerous movements that happen to be integrated with each other. But the virtuoso also participates in the whole process as a psycho-physical organism [Organisation], and executes various - partially physical, partially mental -activities <...>. Finally, the score of the Sonata participates in this” [Ingarden 2016, 495]. In short, Ingarden never ignored the components, whose reduction in Husserl criticized the neurophenomenologists and whose return they discovered only in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology [Varela and Depraz 2005, 64].

The essence of Ingarden’s conception was wonderfully grasped by Jan Patocka in his afterword to the Czech translation of The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art [Patocka 1967, 261-276]. Patocka’s text - if one can make such an assessment - is one of the best accounts of Ingarden’s conception, which situates it in the wider context of the European humanities of the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. But the complex relationships between Husserl, Tomas Masaryk, Twardowski, Patocka, and Ingarden - or between Central and Eastern European phenomenology and contemporary neurophenomenology - is surely a subject for another story. If we were to analyze these relationships, it would be worthwhile to include the work of another thinker besides Patocka, namely - Eugene Minkowski, a Polish phe-nomenologist and psychiatrist who wrote a remarkable study on time, important also for neurophenomenological research on the narrative identity and its disorders [Minkowski 1933, 1-432]. Regardless of these remarks, it remains true that both for phenomenologists and cognitivists, as well as for the precursors of neurolinguistics, such as Roman Jakobson (also absent form Varela and Gallagher’s treatises, even as the author of the fundamental study on aphasia), literature has always been a powerful source of inspiration. This is, perhaps, one more evidence for the ubiquity of literature in the scholarly culture of Central and Eastern Europe, which determines this culture’s specificity.