“Spirit” versus “Letter”

To distinguish the “spirit” from the “letter” of a philosophical text or system is always to ask for trouble, since this distinction can all too easily excuse an indifference to what a particular thinker may actually have said and written and often reveals an attitude of cavalier disregard for questions of documentary evidence. Yet it is equally true that a refusal to rise above the most literal construal of a text can all too easily transform the study of the history of philosophy into a lifeless exercise in “the history of ideas” or reduce it to a branch of philology that remains blithely indifferent to the philosophical issues at stake.

The hermeneutic problem that presents itself here is simply another way of describing the relationship between understanding a portion of a text and the text as a whole. Without an appreciation of the “spirit” of a philosophy or of a philosophical work, one can scarcely understand or appreciate the “letter” of the same, and yet it is equally true that there is, in this case, no path to the spirit except through the letter, just as there is no way to grasp “the whole” except by means of the parts.