  Seen more as a whole, Ingarden’s body of work revolves not around aesthetics, but rather around the realism/idealism problem — an issue that was to dominate his thinking ever since, as a young man, he recoiled against Husserl’s transcendental idealism. As I will discuss in §3.1 below, Ingarden’s work in aesthetics was actually motivated by his interest in the realism/idealism problem. His studies in fiction and the ontology of art were intended to form part of a large-scale argument against transcendental idealism, based in emphasizing the difference between ‘real’ entities entirely independent of our minds, and social and cultural entities that (as ‘purely intentional objects’) owe their existence, at least in part, to human consciousness — thus showing that, in virtue of the very meanings of the ideas involved, the ‘real world’ as a whole cannot be properly treated as a purely intentional object that owes its existence to consciousness.