The article presents the origin and intellectual backgroud of the project called „Roman Ingraden in the Space of the Word”, which resulted in the conference on the 130th anniversary of Ingarden’s birthday, and the monograph issue of Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis. The author proposes that throughout his scholarly career, Ingarden explored the space of the word, tackling it on various levels. The philosopher was convinced that words can be epistemic tools and as such are open to understanding. He wrote about the difference between the living word, used in a specific situation, and the polysemous `word of language’. It is also noted that Ingarden himself was involved in creative writing and subjected it to description, translated literary works and discussed the nature of literary translation. In the space thus outlined, the introductory article locates the analyses of the project participants who have decided to reflect on the multifaceted question of the word in Roman Ingarden’s thought.

In this article I reflect on the concept of fidelity, which I believe is of fundamental importance in any discourse on translation. According to Roman Ingarden in his essay “On Translation,” this concept may appear in a variety of different contexts – ethical, epistemological and aesthetic – allowing us to better understand the essential components of a faithful translation. When attempting to reconstruct Ingarden’s own concept of what constitutes a faithful literary translation, I refer not only to the above text, but also to his research within the fields of ethics, epistemology and the philosophy of literature. I also consider his role as an author and editor of translations of Immanuel Kant’s works, published in the series Library of Philosophical Classics. To conclude, I try to place the results of this reconstruction within the context of the various theories to be found in contemporary translation studies.

Works written in the cognitivist vein have been clearly inspired by and connected with Gestalt psychology – a fact recognized by scholars who describe the beginnings and subsequent development of cognitive theories of language. However, the discoverers of hidden aspects of the history of Cognitive Linguistics hardly ever put on their lists of forerunners the name of Roman Ingarden. And yet many of fundamental principles that underlie cognitivist theories of language and grammar can be found in Ingarden’s writings, notably in his The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, first published in 1937 – exactly half a century before the year 1987, the annus mirabilis of Cognitive Linguistics, when its founding fathers published their groundbreaking monographs. Ingarden wrote about “literature”, while Langacker and his followers focus upon “non-literature”, i.e. text and discourse as elements of everyday communication. But both the (narrower) aesthetic concepts of Ingarden and the wider (linguistic) notions of Langacker, Lakoff or Talmy are based upon the fundamental opposition between the objectivist and the subjectivist approach. Most striking is the convergence of their view upon the shape of language as it occurs in verbal expression, inevitably connected with consciousness and mental activity of the producer: a cognizant subject of perception, conceptualization and expression. Deeper knowledge of Ingarden’s phenomenological thought might enrich cognitivist reflection on language and by taking account of phenomenological aspects of language use promote the search for markers of “everyday literariness”.

The discourse on non-anthropocentric humanities has an essentializing and ontologizing character, allowing connections to be made with Roman Ingarden’s own ontology. The problems considered by researchers such as Bjørnar Olsen and Graham Harman appear to allign with those of the Polish philosopher. Concepts problematized in both non-anthropocentric discourse and Ingarden’s theory include self-containedness, autonomy and independence of the object from the cognizing subject, together with the manner in which the object itself is endowed as a subject with its own merits. Although functional questions (how things act as non-human actors in reality and what relations they form with human actors) seem to be the most important for modern researchers, the essential points they raise allow for a better understanding of what conditions objects require for their action and even causality. Introducing the discourse of non-anthropocentric humanities into the context of Ingarden’s ontology could allow, among other things, for the clarification of certain concepts. In this way, the return to things, a subject hitherto lacking its own vocabulary, can be perceived as a significant new discourse within contemporary humanities.

The introductory part of the article is a thought recapitulation. The formula of “the axiological rhythm of values” stems from my previous considerations, inscribed in the theoretical findings devoted to the category of aesthetic concretisation by Roman Witold Ingarden. They became the source of further analytical research conducted in the last five years. They led me to the conclusion that the axiological rhythm of values should be understood as the language in which values are shared by creators (and recipients). The main part of the article presents the author’s concept of functionalising this language. The characteristics of the experiential, creative and style-generating functions are accompanied by a literary exemplification – a reference to selected themes in Romain Rolland’s novel Jean-Christophe. This reference is not accidental, because Jan Parandowski’s reflection about this work (from Alchemia słowa/Alchemy of the Word) gave rise to inquiries devoted to the axiological rhythm of values, to outline the concept presented here. The whole consideration is crowned with the statement about the need to take into account the language of values in a reliable interpretation of Ingarden’s understanding of the word space.

This article presents an attempt at a phenomenological reading of several selected poems by Miron Białoszewski. Phenomenological tools were not often used in the study of this writer’s work. The author of the article argues that this state of affairs was caused, on the one hand, by the dominance of formal and structural analyses, which was noticeable up to a certain point, and on the other hand, by the concept of a layer of linguistic meanings, contained in Roman Ingarden’s book On the Literary Work. The poet’s works selected for analysis are treated in the article from a different perspective than Ingarden’s, namely as phenomenological minianalyses, showing the process of constructing the objective world.