Caveat lector, let the reader beware: biohermeneutics is a theory.  Theory is not for all tastes.  The following are certain distinctive and defining features of theories. 

To begin with, all theories are abstract.  Theories refuse to take the world at face value.  Within a theory, an object in the world does not simply exist in its own right, but is a representation of something else.  The visible world is the mere outward appearance of a more fundamental reality.  All theory derives ultimately from Plato, who said that individual worldly objects were nothing other than instantiations of a higher and purer concepts.  The concepts belonging to any given theory need not be rarefied and ethereal like Plato's – for instance, Freud proposed a set of visceral, bodily concepts – but the Platonic bifurcation between philosophical abstraction and worldly embodiment persists.  Theory's belief in a shadowy realm beyond surface appearances is necessarily galling to empiricism.  A rose is a rose, after all, is supposed to be a rose.  Theory's response, however, is that even empiricism requires certain abstractions – for instance, language itself.  A rose has to be partly a "rose," doesn't it, for us to talk about it at all. 

Theories are also analytic, in that they decomposing wholes into constituent parts.  Theory's corrosive dismantlement much disrespects its individual integrity of the objects it studies.  In its dissection, theory sets aside the aliveness of the individual, that is, the individual's subjective experience of the interaction of its parts.  Theory is interested only in the parts themselves, with the individual serving merely as an object of study.  The effect of analysis is utterly bracing, distancing and rigorous.  In effect, the individual turns out to consist not of itself but of a set of external phenomena, of which the individual is only the intersection or nexus.  Unsurprisingly, the individual may feel miffed at this utter compromise of its territorial boundaries. Theory's sole apology is that only the acid of analysis can discern of the true dimensions of the components of the world and self.  Reconstruction is possible once  constituent elements are properly apprehended.  Aristotle is perhaps the paramount example of the unblinking analytical eye. 

Finally, all theories – to be worthy of the name – are synthetic, meaning that they subsume the manifold things of existence into an overarching unity.  Theory channels seemingly disparate phenomena into an ordered uniformity.  Things which look different are secretly the same.  The manifold variety of the world is regarded as mere fodder for an overarching schematic.  In effect, theory always proposes that there are fewer, not more, things in heaven and earth than there appear to be.  To be sure, theory adds its own things to the world – the theoretical categories themselves, that is, the containers into which theory sorts the things of the world.  But these philosophical constructs are much fewer in number than the data they purport to organize.  Of course, the various earthly things continue to survive as unique irreducible quantums, despite theoretical classification.  But theory peels off a portion of the individuality of each thing, in the service of a general rationale.