ABSTRACT
The ‘hermeneutic imperative’ described in Chapter 3 might seem intrinsic to any culture concerned with the adequate interpretation of texts or other linguistic utterances. Gerald Bruns, for example, who thereby provides a condensed history of many of the concerns that have at times been located under the banner of ‘hermeneutics’, considers an examination of hermeneutics to be potentially concerned with:
the interpretation of oracles, the silencing of the muses, the quarrel of philosophy and poetry, the logic of allegory, the extravagance of midrash, mystical hermeneutics, the rise of literalism and the individual interpreter, the relation of self-understanding and the understanding of other people…the problem of historicality or the finitude of understanding.
(Bruns 1992 p. 17)