The visible truth. The epistemic power of the image in the digital age,

BELGRANO, MATEO

Bonn

Congreso; Der Anfang der wirklich Großen Erzählungen. Serielle Identität(en) und serienhafte Existenz; 2022

Bonner Institut für Hermeneutik (ifh) in Kooperation mit der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Reli-gionsphilosophie (DGR) und dem Wiener Forschungszentrum Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society

A fundamental presupposition was that truth, understood as adequacy, depends on a prior interpretative framework. The question is: what or who founds that prior framework? Different philosophers have given different answers to this question. Faced with the increasingly visual world in which we live because of digitalization, the iconic turn proposed by Boehm gave us some clues on how to understand our contemporaneity. But digitalization not only increased access to images, but it also developed in us an increasingly visual sensibility. Digitalization brought with it multiple possibilities in the construction of the visual, which do not necessarily coincide with a “real” referent. For a long time we spoke of virtual reality to distinguish it from the world in which we live in flesh and blood. Today that distinction seems increasingly impossible. Here the image does not seek to reduplicate reality but to inaugurate a framework that allows us to move in an uncertain reality. A framework that allows us to determine what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong. Some of this could be seen in the COVID-19 pandemic, a need to visualize the invisible. Only in this way could we make the incomprehensible understandable. Ultimately, truth enters through the eyes.