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Quote :Truth and Method
Not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well.
Are you done with the psychology stuff yet? Whether Dilthey’s Romance stuff or Heidegger’s vampires, sometimes understanding goes beyond that whole mental life thing.
But wait, what about when you say something because you’ve got some meaning you wish to communicate? Doesn’t it matter that you want to be understood? Sure—whether by pencil, pen, computer, or smartphone, you’ve authored a text, a text that has meaning you intend to be there.
So let’s be clear—Gadamer’s not denying that texts have intentional meaning. When he says the meaning of the text goes beyond the author, he means that it may include in its meaning more stuff than what the author consciously put there.
For realz? When you text your buds “LOL,” doesn’t that just automatically represent the mental state of laughing out loud?
Sure, but Gadamer would say there’s more to it than that, and he would say that for two reasons. First, every author writes from within a set of traditions that inform her thinking, sometimes without her being fully aware of the influence. No author can utterly dictate the full scope and power of the language she uses and the prejudices and presuppositions that direct her composition. The author of “LOL” may or may not be aware of the power of using that abbrev over, like, “LMAO” or the simple and antiquated “Haha.”
Second, the reader encounters the text from the context of her own world and so, in the act of interpreting it, creates something new and unique. Readers read both in terms of the text and in terms of their own place. In some places, “LOL” may mean “lots of love” or may refer to laughter sarcastically only.
This is why we have secondary literature: every written interpretation of a primary text is a new, distinct, and separate text that calls for interpretation. For Gadamer, a text is less an object of the past than an event realized in the present with each new reading. You, dear reader, have to make the text come alive! And, yes, inflection and character voices help. Only through such analysis will we come to learn what LOL really means in our culture.