Ingarden, Dufrenne, and the Passivity of Aesthetic Experience

ABSTRACT Recent phenomenological research has picked up on the old claim that sometimes artworks seem to take possession of the perceiver. Simon Høffding and Tone Roald have argued that Edmund Husserl’s notion of passive synthesis offers significant explanatory force in understanding aesthetic experiences where the artwork exhibits signs of such agency. Husserlian passivity refers to the non-egoic acts of consciousness that precede and enable higher-order acts such as judging and reflecting. Høffding and Roald suggest that experiences of being overwhelmed by an artwork stem from the way the work triggers passive processing and alters the perceiver’s sense of agency. In this article, I take their suggestion further by reading Roman Ingarden’s and Mikel Dufrenne’s accounts of aesthetic experience in the light of Husserlian passivity. I claim that both Ingarden’s and Dufrenne’s accounts have weaknesses that can be amended by interpreting them as describing aesthetic experience as a form of passive synthesizing. This interpretation in turn leads towards a more robust understanding of the exact role of passivity in aesthetic experience, which Høffding and Roald’s tentative suggestion leaves largely unexplored.