Presence and philosophical aesthetics in Pascal Mercier’s novel Perlmanns Schweigen.

Abstract

The Swiss author Pascal Mercier, which is the pen name of the philosopher Peter Bieri, made his debut as a novelist with the ‘thriller of consciousness’ Perlmanns Schweigen (Perlmann’s Silence) in 1995. Already in the first sentence, the reader is confronted with the main character’s failing ability to experience presence, and the oscillation between presence and lack of presence is one of the novel’s main themes. Although being an analytical philosopher himself, philosophi­cal aesthetics seems more relevant than analytical philosophy to the novel’s use of the category of ‘presence’. Therefore, this paper presents a short account of the tradition of philosophical aes­thetics from Baumgarten to Gumbrecht and Dorthe Jørgensen. This tradition is the common thread in the presentation of the following themes: “The Psychology of Presence”, “The Stereotypical versus the Presence-enhancing Use of Language”, and “Presence in the Light of the Beauty of Nature and the Beauty of Art”.

Key words: Presence, aesthetics, analytical philosophy, aesthetics of philosophy, language, beauty, Baumgarten, Gumbrecht, Dorthe Jørgensen