Literally, " The thing, itself, speaks, at first face. "

An ideal of hermeneutics which insists that the logical foundation for an interpretation should be the most straightforward, most obvious, most logical, most self-evident reading which one would most likely assume from a text when taking it as it comes to one, or reading it as it as, in it's own terms and in its own words, at face value.

Ideally it is an attempt to read a text with fresh wide-open eyes, free from prejudices and preconceptions and all outside influences; as if reading it for the first time, with no foreknowledge, thereof. Ideal in theory but likely impossible in practice.

Further elaborations should be built upon this foundation if and only if sound, valid, objective, and logical reasons exist to support such deviations.

When you eat dirt for the first time and leave your family to build a shack in the woods