 The first insight concerns radical differences in concepts, beliefs, values, and so on. Since literature paradigmatically expresses such things and is obviously linguistic, Herder’s general hermeneutic principles for interpreting linguistic texts and discourse in the face of radical mental difference (as already discussed) of course apply to literature in particular. Accordingly, in the Critical Forests he emphasizes that it is important to penetrate Homer’s alien linguistic and conceptual world by using careful philological means; that it is always necessary to interpret the local features within a work, for example, “ridiculous” passages, such as the Thersites passage, in the Iliad (II: 211–277), in light of the economy of the whole work; and (this time in connection with the example of Horace’s odes) that the solution to the problem of achieving such holism despite the need to interpret the parts of a text sequentially lies in working through the text in sequence in order to arrive at a provisional interpretation of all its parts together, then applying this provisional interpretation of the whole text in order to refine the interpretation of each part, and so on indefinitely.