From The Frontier

Knowledge is always whole and all-embracing. As soon as new things are discovered, they are already integrated.

But on the other hand, in particular the fact that there remains always something new to discover indicates that all knowledge is sort of limited.

Traditionally we resolve this contradiction in holding that knowledge advances. The limit of knowledge is a frontier being pushed farther and farther towards the unknown. Thus knowledge grows continuously.

This approach is somewhat aggressively expansive. Resistances must be overcome, the fight never ends, the enemy is everywhere. Not only does he crop up out there in the not yet known, but he is also lurking around in here where his name is oblivion. How easily the hard-won fortune may vanish into nothingness! Finally experience teaches that this cannot really be inhibited. Still we are far from accepting it. It’s just a weakness. And every weakness can and must be overwhelmed.

This is almost a natural law. That’s how it works. Only the fittest, the strongest will survive. This applies also – and even particularly – to knowledge. Because real knowledge must be true. There is only one knowledge, the true one. Knowledge cannot be false. What proved to be false was ultimately no knowledge. True knowledge does not accept any other beside it. Everything not according to our consolidated knowledge is merely illusion, even if others suppose to know it. Everything that is true, however, automatically integrates.

Not least this mental attitude drove us to accumulate more and more knowledge, while permanently enhancing the corresponding methods. Even the loss of knowledge, the forgetting, was pushed further and further back. By means of the new media, for instance, which allow us to represent knowledge in new forms and store them persistently.

But when we make ample use of them we probably become aware of a quite different face of knowledge. It turns out that knowledge has many faces. Which do not look all together in the same direction. And this is exactly what makes knowledge! The diversity, the different angles and perspectives. Together they draw an image which no single image can ever display.

True knowledge comprehends everything, it is the whole – and just for this reason there is no single all-embracing knowledge, but rather a basic substantial pluralism. With contradictions not to be wiped off.

Differences are essential for knowledge.