Den udtømte sandhed og den sande uudtømmelighed

Resumé

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.