Den udtømte sandhed og den sande uudtømmelighed

Abstract

The Exhausted Truth and the True Inexhaustibility
 What are the relations between images and truth? How can truth be represented? In the
 article “The Exhausted Truth and the True Inexhaustibility”, the German romanticist and
 philosopher Friedrich Schlegel’s theories concerning the great value and unmeasurable
 importance of the endless, the unintelligible, and the inexhaustible serves as the opening
 to a discussion of what is to be understood by the question of truth. Does truth pertain
 to the forever unsayable domains of the oblique and evasive – that which must remain
 outside the firm grasp of enlightenment and understanding? Or, on the contrary, is truth
 that which not only can be enframed, but also reproduced and represented? The discussion
 of this question brings forth a fundamental divide between Schlegel’s and Romanticism’s
 idealizations of the creative and vitalistic transgressions of the human limits of
 understanding and the boundaries set up in the names of enlightenment and knowledge.
 As argued in the article, this divide would also describe a discrepancy between, on the one
 hand, a contemplative search into the unknown depths of the world, and, on the other
 DEN UDTØMTE SANDHED OG DEN SANDE UUDTØMMELIGHED 43 PERISKOP NR. 18 2017
 hand, the desire to bring into light, into form, and into image. The Information Age in
 which we are said to live today would appear to provide us first and foremost with the
 latter image of truth: The substitution of Romanticism’s inexhaustive image of truth with
 the true exhaustiveness of our image culture.