An interpreter should avoid hostility toward the people he is interpreting

Herder proposes (prominently in This Too a Philosophy of History, for instance) that the way to bridge radical mental difference when interpreting is through Einfühlung, “feeling one’s way in”. This proposal has often been thought (for example, by Friedrich Meinecke) to mean that the interpreter should perform some sort of psychological self-projection onto texts. However, that is not Herder’s main idea here—for making it so would amount to advocating just the sort of distorting assimilation of