HERMENEUTICS AND RHETORICS: FROM 'TRUTH AND METHOD' TO 'TRUTH AND POWER'

Abstract

The claim that ‘rhetorical criticism of literature take the exegetes of biblical literature beyond the study of the meaning of texts to something more inclusive than semantics and hermeneutics’, or that ‘rhetorical criticism is taking us beyond hermeneutics and structuralism to poststructuralism and posthermeneutics’, needs to be elaborated and qualified.  For the unity of hermeneutics and rhetorics has been taken for granted for too long.  Schleiermacher, one of the founders of modern hermeneutics, saw this unity resulting ‘from the fact that every act of understanding is the obverse of an act of discourse in that one must come to grasp the thought that was at the base of the discourse.