Extract
[...] In his Fragments of an Unknown (Fragmente eines Ungenannten, published anonymously between 1774 and 1778), Lessing rekindles the controversy over the authenticity of biblical texts, particularly through a rigorous critique of the reliability of evangelical testimonies12. It poses a fundamental question: can eternal truth depend on a contingent historical fact? His answer is clear: no. According to Lessing, history can never prove the truth of a doctrine. In his view, it is absurd to base a religious belief on past events whose transmission relies on human narratives that are necessarily fallible. [...]
[...] This desire for systematization, although still fragmented at this time, constitutes a decisive step towards a hermeneutics conceived as an autonomous discipline. A revealing example is Georg Friedrich Meier, a philosopher influenced by Leibniz and Wolff, who proposes in his writings reflections on the art of understanding a text correctly9. Thus, in the work Theology and Enlightenment, Kirscher analyzes Meier's attempt to formulate a logic of interpretation, combining language analysis, thought structure, and argumentative progression. Similarly, authors such as Johann Martin Chladenius emphasize the need to define rigorous hermeneutic procedures, particularly through the concept of 'point of view' (Sehepunkt), which anticipates the modern reader's subjectivity. [...]
[...] Thus, before the Enlightenment, to interpret is primarily to re-affirm a truth already established. B. The Protestant Reformation and the Emancipation of the Reader A first shift occurs as early as the 16th century with the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, in advocating for sola scriptura and the universal priesthood of believers, introduces a major change in the way of approaching the biblical text5. The sola scriptura affirms that only Scripture has authority for faith, and not tradition or ecclesiastical magisterium. [...]
[...] All of them prolong, in their own way, the momentum of the Enlightenment, while seeking to overcome its aporias: Schleiermacher by systematizing interpretation as an art of understanding individualities, Dilthey by founding the human sciences on lived experience, Gadamer by revaluing tradition as the horizon of meaning. In other words, if the Enlightenment is not the end of hermeneutics, it is certainly its major turning point. Ultimately, hermeneutics at the time of the Enlightenment represents a founding moment: that where the act of reading ceases to be a submission to the text to become a critical dialogue with it. This mutation, carried by confidence in reason, history, and freedom, continues to nourish our relationship with texts today - whether they are religious, political, literary, or philosophical. [...]
[...] He formulates an essential idea, destined for a long posterity: the hermeneutic circle. According to this idea, one can only understand a part of a text from the whole, and conversely, the whole can only be understood through its parts. This circular movement is not a defect, but a structural necessity of all understanding. Ast extends this dynamic to all cultural objects: texts, works of art, traditions, philosophical discourses. Interpretation, from then on, is no longer a simple translation of meaning, but a reconstruction of the living relationship between the reader and the work, in their respective historicity. [...]
