Hermeneutics of Suffering
Cambridge University Press eBooks February 19, 2026 Dustin Breitenwischer
The author argues that William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, presents a hermeneutics of suffering that treats suffering as both a source of and a challenge to openness to understanding, rather than complying with a promise of experiential openness. Through a comparative reading of James, Ralph Waldo Emerson's struggle with his son's death, and Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method, the author contends that suffering marks an impaired connectivity within the self and between self and world, yet conditions the sufferer's reconnection with the social world. James, Emerson, and Gadamer use literary and philosophical imagination to center suffering as a hermeneutic process that entails the conditions of its own overcoming.