In an effort to further contextualize the question of interpretation and underscore the
deep-rootedness of the problem raised by its extreme meaning bias, Gumbrecht situates
his argument more generally by briefly retelling the history of Western metaphysics. He
thereby tries to highlight the following facts: firstly, the hegemony of interpretation as a
meaning-only epistemological paradigm is not a universal constant; its historical origins
can be traced back to Early Modernity and the subordination – enshrined by the
Cartesian metaphysics of the cogito – of all the things of the world, including the human
body, to the mind. Ours, according to Gumbrecht, is a typical "meaning culture", which
can be opposed to "presence cultures" such as the pre-Socratic or medieval cultures, in
which preeminence is given to the body. Secondly, the "Cartesian" exclusion of
presence from metaphysics (or from the "hermeneutic field") is highly problematical, and
manifests itself as such at the latest with Kant’s Critiques. Gumbrecht thus remarks that
"the emergence of aesthetics, as a subfield of philosophy, in the eighteenth century,
makes it clear that, counter to the premises of the hermeneutic field, world-appropriation
through the human body […] was now also reappearing as an epistemological option."
(37) As a consequence, a continuing tension between meaning and presence can be
traced throughout the XIXth and XXth century, in the various attempts by thinkers and
writers such as Flaubert, Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson and Heidegger to find a connection
between intelligible concepts and the human senses.