Depth Or Surface? On The Readings Of The Scripts Of Christian Thomasius On Polygamy And Concubinity

With the help of two dissertations by Christian Thomasius on peripheral topics of marriage instruction, De crimine bigamiae (1685) and De concubinatu (1713), the paper illustrates the problematics of a reading practice that continually reduces the Enlightenment to hidden, polemic statements. In contrast to this type of depth hermeneutics, new perspectives of understanding are opened up by a method that reads the texts as wholes on their surface, thereby using their latent contradictory nature as a basis for a functional interpretation.