阐释的普遍性

As an erudite scholar knowledgeable in the Chinese and Western traditions, Qian Zhongshu pointed out that both the Chinese philological scholarship of the Qing dynasty and Western hermeneutical theory came to the realization that understanding or interpretation is a circular movement from the parts to the whole, and from the whole to the parts. The current author argues that this "hermeneutic circle" can already be seen as early as in the chapter on lines and verses in Liu Xie’s The Literary Mind or the Carving of Dragons, in which Liu Xie used the analogy of a cyclical dancing movement to describe the interrelationship between words, lines, and the entire text. The questions discussed in hermeneutics, however, are such first-level philosophical questions as language, expression, understanding, and interpretation, and they bear on a certain universality; it is entirely possible for us to make use of rich Chinese traditional resources and classical arguments with reference to Western hermeneutic theory, and to make theoretical contributions that are both characteristic of our own tradition and meaningful within a universal framework.