Although the nature of textual meaning is a crucial subject for hermeneutics, neither Gadamer nor Hirsch have devoted a sub-stantial discussion to it. Rather, they approach this problem in terms of the question of the identification of meaning with "the author’s intention." In Truth and Method Gadamer rejects explicitly the identification of meaning with the intention of the author on the presupposition that the author’s intention and textual meaning are essentially different entities. In this context, Gadamer asserts: "Not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author."108

However, we should recall that, according to Gadamer, this detachment of meaning from the intention of the author happens in the case of writing109 and not in living conversation. As we saw above, he explicitly says that in everyday speaking, where it is not a matter of passing through the fixity of writtennes, one "has to understand the other person’s intention."110 Therefore, the problem of author or mens auctoris plays a hermeneutical role where one is dealing with fixed expressions.111

If this is the case, how should we understand Gadamer’s contention that the construction of the author’s intention can be a subject of interpretation only if the attempt to accept what is said as true fails when one tries to understand the text.112 With this statement, does Gadamer imply that there is no total detachment of meaning from the intention of the author? If we take this to be the case, Gadamer’s counterthesis to Historical Criticism becomes problematic:

Reconstructing the original circumstances, like all restoration, is a futile undertaking in view of the historicity of our being. What is reconstructed, a life brought back from the lost past, is not the original.113

 

According to Gadamer, textual meaning becomes "an ex-perience that changes the person who experiences it"114 due to its truth-claim which transcends any historical individual consciousness of it. Thus, the text has its real being when it points away from itself and lets us see what it is the author is speaking about.115 In other words, the text does not refer back to the author’s intention or consciousness of the author, but rather points to the open realm of interpretation.116 Furthermore, Gadamer remarks that ". . . it is a fortiori true of understanding what is written down that we are moving in a dimension of meaning that is intelligible in itself and as such offers no reason for going back to the subjectivity of the author."117

Hence, since meaning functions primarily in its being-directed to the open possibilities (future), it must refer to the past secondarily—i.e., by way of abstraction. Here Gadamer is not saying that meaning detaches itself essentially from the past and has only one (future) dimension. Rather, he means that the being of a work of art reveals itself from the horizon of time which is the past stretching into the future by effecting the present. Thus the author’s intention with respect to the "historical continuity" of the textual meaning must represent just one of the dimensions (past), and thus becomes a matter of abstraction (which Gadamer calls aesthetic differentiation) whenever it is reconstructed.118

From this perspective, we can say that when posing the idea that the ‘original meaning of a historical text can be reached at,’ the Historical Critics seem to presuppose that the author’s conscious-ness (or the originating moment) is, as it were, a reserved space in the realm of history for the stability (identity) of meaning. In other words, the Historical Critics seem to consider history primarily as the realm of "discontinuities." If this is the case, since the identity of a historical event is revealing itself in its abstract (disconnected) form, this means that they should be picturing mentally the tem-porality of meaning as if it were a spatial entity with its boundaries and not a continuity.119 This atomic perspective of history seems to lead them to the presumption that meaning functions primarily (essentially) in its being-directed to the stable past and secondarily (accidentally) to the unstable future. Hence the basic problem the Historical Critics are faced with is how to establish the historical continuity of meaning on the basis of these temporal (atomic) discontinuities. We will discuss this question in the context of the application of meaning in the following chapter in detail.

However, the question we posed above concerning Gada-mer’s seemingly opposite views remains open. Even if Gadamer claims that by way of abstraction (i.e., secondarily) meaning refers to the author’s intention (past), he still seems to deny that a past meaning can be understood in its originality (atomic character) in view of the historicity of our understanding.120 If this is the case, suspending the truth-claim of a text must be in fact changing not the direction of meaning to the past, but our perspective to it (meaning) as a viewer.

Gadamer escapes this paradox by asserting that the relation between author and textual meaning is not genetic and intrinsically referential. Hence, for him the author must be an accidental or occasional aspect of the history of a text. In this context, he remarks that the "real meaning of a text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author."121 Therefore, in his view the question whether textual meaning is an effect of a cause (consciousness of historical author) is not significant.

In other words, meaning has essentially a symbolic character or, as it were, a mirror-like function. Hence, the meaning becomes what it is in the re-experiencing of the author’s original experience of meaning. From this kind of intentionalist approach it follows that textual meaning is "an object that stands over against a subject [interpreter] for itself,"122 since meaning reflects only the irredu-cible nature of the individuality of the historical author. Thus this approach seems to lead to a sort of solipsism by reducing ‘meaning’ to the private experiences of the author when he wrote the text. Wimsatt and Beardsley call this approach the "Intentional Fallacy," known also as the "Genetic Fallacy."123

There is a close relation between the genetic approach and the Romantic approach which is said to be the characteristic of tradi-tional hermeneutics. The Romantic approach is charged by an anti-intentionalist perspective—which seems to be the common charac-teristic of modern hermeneutics—while operating with a conception of meaning which was "subjectivistic" and ultimately "psycholo-gistic."124

Condemning the genetic approach to meaning, Hirsch’s intentionalism, the New Critical formalism of Wimsatt and Beard-sley, and Gadamer’s position come close to each other. Refuting the identification of meaning with the mental acts by invoking Husser-lian intentionalism,125 Hirsch argues that "The psychologistic identi-fication of textual meaning with a meaning experience is inad-missible. Meaning experiences are private, but they are not meanings."126

According to him, the author’s subjective stance is not part of his verbal meaning even when he explicitly discusses his feelings and attitudes. "This is Husserl’s point. . . . The intentional object represented by a text is different from the intentional acts which realize it."127

Thus Hirsch distinguishes the reconstructible part of the consciousness (content of the consciousness, intentional object) of the author from the non-reconstructible part of it (mental or inten-tional acts) and tries to base the identity of textual meaning on the reconstructible part of consciousness. Nevertheless, he does not stop at this stage but takes a further step by distinguishing "private meaning" from "sharable meaning." In other words, while pre-viously separating mental acts from ‘meaning’ (intention), he later distinguishes the meaning which the author intended to convey from the meaning which the author did not intend. In this context, Hirsch notes, "Why should anyone with common sense wish to equate an author’s textual meaning with all the meanings he happened to entertain when he wrote? Some of these he had no intention of conveying by his words."128

Like Hirsch, Wimsatt and Beardsley refute the usefulness of any genetic analysis of the concept of intention and deny the sort of relationship of the poet’s personality to his poems put forth by the Romantics.129 They do employ the concept of intention in the sense of design or plan in the author’s mind which has obvious references to the author’s attitude "towards his work, the way he felt, what made him write."130 However, for them Hirsch’s distinction bet-ween mental acts and their content does not lead to a concept of meaning which is solely the identification of meaning with the author’s intention. In this context, Beardsley remarks:

The question is not whether textual meaning and the author’s meaning can coincide—that is, be very similar. Certainly they can. The question is not whether textual meaning is often adequate evidence of the author’s meaning. Certainly it often is. The question is whether they are one and the same thing.131

 

Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art."132 Textual meaning is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it.

Thus texts acquire determinate meaning through the interactions of their words without the intervention of an authorial will.133 Accordingly, works of art are self-contained (autonomous) organic entities; they create a privileged mode of discourse not available to other kinds of objects.134 In Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s view, poems, for instance, are verbal structures made out of public language which is governed by the conventions of a language com-munity:135 "The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language."136

Nevertheless as indicated above, Wimsatt and Beardsley hold that the autonomy of the text does not imply that there cannot be any kind of relation between textual meaning and the author’s intention. There are many practical occasions of which the interpreter’s task is to try to reach the authorial intention, such as when there is a difficulty in reading a will or a love letter, or in grasping an oral premise or instruction. Moreover, based on the distinction between works of art and other kinds of discourse, they argue that some texts, such as practical messages are successful if and only if we correctly infer the intention.137 Nevertheless, "the proper task of the literary interpreter is to interpret textual meaning."138

From this perspective, their approach to textual meaning seems to be very close to that of Gadamer, who argues "it is only when the attempt to accept what is said as true fails that we try to ‘understand’ the text, psychologically or historically, as another’s opinion."139 However, as we noted above, Wimsatt and Beardsley do not take the interpreter’s historicity into account and ignore what Gadamer calls "an ontological, structural aspect of understanding."140 Therefore, in their view the meaning of the text is an objective fact, something which in principle could be discovered once and for all.141

By the concept ‘onto-logical’ we refer to the conviction that authorial intention is not a historically contingent entity, and thus separated from textual meaning, but embodied or fixed in the expression itself like a cause in its effect. Therefore, meaning does not refer to the personality and historicality of the author but reveals the content of the mind of the author "in" itself. Hence, it is self-referential. Accordingly, as the ontological and rational cause for the meaning, the author is but a "rational entity."142

However, what do they mean by rational entity? It seems that by rational entity, intentionalists not only refer to a "person" to whom the production of a text, a book, or a work can be legitimately attributed but they also assign to it a "realistic" dimension, as they speak of an individual’s intentions or the original inspiration manifested in the text.143 Therefore, a "text" seems to become a mere "occasion" for the manifestation of the author’s mind.144 We find the most striking example of this approach in the identity thesis of Knapp and Michaels.

According to Knapp and Michaels, since "the meaning of a text is simply identical to the author’s intended meaning, the project of grounding meaning in intention becomes incoherent."145 In other words, moving from authorial intention to textual meaning is in fact irrelevant to the nature of their identity because it presupposes either an intentionless language or the priority of language to intention. This perspective leads some intentionalists who fail "to recognize the fundamental inseparability of the elements involved" to consider the author’s intention as "an ingredient to be added" to textual meaning.146 According to Knapp and Michaels, Hirsch, Juhl, and Searle are some of the victims of this mistake.

Precisely because of this fact, they do not attempt to prove the identity of meaning and intention but show that language (text) can be what it is as long as we posit an already existing author. Otherwise the marks on a paper, wood, etc. will "merely seem to resemble words."147 Accordingly, an authorless text is but an accident, i.e., meaningless. With this argument, they seem to refute Beardsley’s contention for the possibility of authorless meaning. Beardsley notes that "When Hart Crane wrote ‘Thy Nazarene and tender eyes,’ a printer’s error transformed it into ‘Thy Nazarene and tinder eyes’; but Crane let the accidental version stand."148

Knapp and Michaels try to conclude from the assertion that all linguistic or textual meaning is intentional, the idea that the meaning of a text is identical with the authorial intention. In other words, they deny the distinction between language and speech acts. Never-theless, they also contend that "the interpreter who disregards the author’s intention is not interpreting the same text but producing a new one."149 It is obvious that with this latter argument they shift from the "original author" to the interpreter as author and thus posit the interpreter’s intention as the constitutive for textual meaning. Since the "text" is not identical in both cases, they must also be arguing that there is no possibility of a "middle point" between the original author’s intention and the interpreter’s intention as an author.

A string of letters accidentally produced by a computer or by the movement of the tide on the sand would still depend for its meaning on an intentional act, here the intention of the reader to see the marks as a meaningful text, as language rather than simply marks.150

 

This acute rejection of the social aspect of human under-standing, which reflects itself in the transcendence of the language of individual consciousness, must also be the rejection of the possibility of meaning. If only the individual consciousness (posited rational entity) can be responsible for the intelligibility (meaning) of a text, this means that meaning must exist in its full actuality in the mind of the author. In this case, what would happen if an author failed to mean what he intended to convey?151

Juhl could say that this "it" is the meaning of the "words" which are detached from the author’s intention that makes them an utterance. In other words, by distinguishing speech acts (such as literary works) from language, Juhl accepts the existence of intentionless but meaningful words. Thus he can argue that when a parrot utters the words ‘Water is pouring down from the sky,’ one can understand that the words mean ‘it is raining’ but one can deny that the ‘parrot said that it is raining.’ 152 Nevertheless, by the same token, he also seems to hold that intentionless meaning cannot be subject to an interpretation since "an interpretation is a statement about the author’s intention."153

we cannot even take the various parts of a text (its lines, sentences, etc.) as constituting a whole, as forming a unit or as . . . belonging together, in the sense which our concept of a literary work requires, without assuming that the text has been produced by a person and with certain kinds of intentions.154

 

At this point, we should note that Juhl’s notion of an author is mostly as a "rational entity" though he does not discard the concept of a historical author from his intentionalist theory, and gives it a secondary place with respect to the author as rational entity. In this context, he remarks that biographical evidence by itself does not have the same weight as textual evidence. An author may change his mind as to what he wants to convey, he may forget what he meant, or he may intend one thing before he begins to write and then, possibly without being fully aware of it, come to do something else.155

Juhl argues that since the authorial intention remains identical with the meaning interpreted, interpretation can disambiguate an author’s utterance. Thus there is a logical connection between inter-pretation and authorial intention. However, he does not show from where an interpreter can have a sense of coherence and evidence, and thus the identity of text. He merely considers a whole-part relation between coherence and evidence. Accordingly coherence and evidence become what they are in terms of each other. However, the problem remains of how an interpreter can enter into this circle from outside, since to say that meaning is identical with intention is to argue that this circle is a ‘closed’ one. Nevertheless, when he contends that an interpretive statement is logically connected with the identical meaning of a text, he seems to argue that the circle is also an ‘open’ one. Thus since Juhl’s thesis of identity is based on two opposite arguments, we can say with Bagwell that Juhl’s identification of understanding with intention tends to blur the difference between author and reader, and falls victim to the so-called ‘interpretive fallacy.’ By interpretive fallacy, Bagwell refers to the assumption that "secondary interpretive texts are semantically equivalent to the literary text."156

Moreover, by overlooking the interpreter’s own sense of coherence and evidence (i.e., the pre-understanding, which is essential to Gadamer’s hermeneutic),157 Juhl’s identity thesis seems to take the form of a petitio principii: it assumes the premise that meaning is identical with authorial intention, which he wants to prove. In other words, meaning is what the author intends and "whatever meaning interpretation yields is, ipso facto, what the author intends."158

Precisely because of this fact, the main problem for Hirsch is to show how the identity (determinacy) of the author’s intention can be the basis of the identification of meaning with it. Knapp and Michaels fault Hirsch for accepting the intentionless meaning and for distinguishing between the author’s intention and textual meaning while arguing for their identity. If they are identical, Hirsch must accept that to talk about the author’s intention must be already to talk about textual meaning.159 In fact, this objection gives us a direction to consider Hirsch’s concept of an author in his relation to language as the preparatory level for discussing the problem of the foundation of textual identity.

Hirsch seems to view the meaning of ‘author’ in terms of an interaction between individual consciousness (the author) and the language in which he expresses himself. He argues that "a word sequence means nothing in particular until somebody either means something by it or understands something from it" (italics mine).160 In other words, since the conventions of language can sponsor different meanings from the same sequence of words, language cannot be the determiner of meaning of a text by itself. This fact according to Hirsch, reveals itself, for instance, in the disagreement of interpreters on the same sequence of words. Thus, with respect to the conventions of language, one interpretation can be as valid as another, so long as it is "sensitive" or "plausible".161 It seems that according to Hirsch, language is the realm of possible meanings to be actualized.162

Here, the word "possible" does not mean that an individual consciousness (an author) can form or create meanings as he wishes in a convention of language. In this context, Hirsch maintains that when somebody does use a particular word sequence, "his verbal meaning cannot be anything he might wish it to be."163 All meaning communicated by texts is to some extent language-bound. Therefore, "no textual meaning can transcend the meaning possibi-lities and the control of the language in which it is expressed."164 The phrase ‘the control of language’ should refer to the fact that language is the source of the intelligibility of meaning. Accordingly, the sensitivity and plausibility of different interpretations should stem from this characteristic of language. If this is the case, Hirsch seems to accept that meanings165 in general are ‘pre-given’ to individual consciousness (author or interpreter) by linguistic conventions which seem to represent `social or traditional consciousness’.166 Hence, the description of language as the realm of ‘possible’ meanings must indicate the character of the ‘pre-givenness’ of meanings.

It seems, however, that, for Hirsch, since linguistic signs can-not speak their own meanings, the pre-givenness of language refers to the abstract and general character of language. In other words, Hirsch holds that language in its abstract structure does not refer to any determinate object by itself. Thus it remains detached from the particular reality until it is willed by an individual consciousness. Consequently, an individual’s understanding of a particular reality is pre-linguistic and his mind is the medium between the particular reality and language.167 In short, Hirsch presupposes a correspon-dence between language and particular reality and this correspon-dence is actualized by the individual (author)’s mind.

In this context, he remarks that meaning in itself (which he calls verbal genre) has no ‘entelechy’ or ‘will’ of its own. "It is not a living thing with a soul or vital principle. It is mute inert matter that is given ‘soul’ or ‘will’ by speakers and interpreters. In other words, the purpose of a genre is the communicable purpose of a particular speaker, nothing more nor less."168 Thus due to its generality, lan-guage cannot generate the purposeful character of a particular meaning by itself.

If this is the case, the process of transformation in the status of meaning from possibility to actuality must occur in the interaction between the traditional consciousness and the individual conscious-ness.169 While traditional consciousness provides individual con-sciousness with possible (pre-given) meanings,170 individual con-sciousness actualizes these possibilities.171

Here Hirsch follows the Saussurean distinction between langue and paroles. Saussure defines ‘langue’ as the system of linguistic possibilities shared by a speech community at a given point in time. However, this system of possibilities is distinguished from the actual verbal utterances which he calls paroles. Paroles are uses of language and actualize some (but never all) of the meaning possibilities constituting the langue.172

Nevertheless, according to Hirsch, the distinction between language and individual consciousness is not an absolute distinction. If we look at the meaning as a ‘willed’ one, we emphasize the indivi-dual consciousness behind it as the determining power, but when we consider it as a ‘shared’ meaning, we pay attention to the social con-sciousness (language). Thus, ‘being willed’ and ‘being shared’ look to be two sides of a single coin.173 For Hirsch meaning reveals itself in this opposite but complementary relationship between individual and social consciousness.

From this perspective, we get the impression that for Hirsch, the author (individual consciousness) must have a privileged (distant) standpoint with respect to the possible meanings (pre-given language), and thus can transcend the boundary drawn by traditional consciousness. As indicated above, this must be the logic behind Hirsch’s defense of authorial intention in the constitution of textual identity. The author is not the determination of tradition (historical or social consciousness), but, as the basis of the process of meaning, has his own space.174

This space reveals itself in the author’s free act of determining a purpose when using language. Here Hirsch is following Schleier-macher’s hermeneutics of individuality. As Gadamer remarks, Schleiermacher considers the statement a text makes as a free production: "The discourse of the individual is in fact a free creative activity, however much its possibilities are limited by the fixed forms that language has taken."175

This difficulty is also manifest when Hirsch says that "Until the nature and purposes of a text have been grasped, its meaning will remain inaccessible, because its meaning is precisely something willed, something purposed."176 It seems that Hirsch has to give social consciousness the role of ‘continuing’ to actualize the meaning of the text on the basis of the author’s purpose. Therefore, while moving from the indeterminacy of language to the author as the determining and actualizing power of the possibilities of meaning, he has to turn back again to social consciousness, as the basis of actualizing the author’s purpose. However, in this circular move-ment, since the indeterminacy (pre-givenness) of language is the main characteristic of social consciousness, the community of interpreters has to take the pre-givenness of language as the starting point for grasping the author’s intention. Nevertheless, since language is too general to refer to the particular intention of the author, the interpreter cannot talk about the purpose or will of an author until it is guessed or actualized. If this is the case, the gap between universal (general reality, language) and particular (determinate object) occurs also between language and the author’s intention. Accordingly, does not the author also become a matter of construction since the mind of the interpreter has to be a mediator between language and the author’s intention?

This point refers to the distinction Hirsch makes between historical author (biographical person) and speaking subject (rational entity, implied author)177, whose intention is present in his expression, due to the fact that the actual (historical) author in his individuality is "inaccessible."178 In this context, Hirsch says:

The speaking subject is not, however, identical with the subjectivity of the author as an actual historical person; it corresponds, rather, to a very limited and special aspect of the author’s total subjectivity; it is, so to speak, that ‘part’ of the author which specifies or determines verbal meaning. 179

 

Hirsch gives ‘lying’ as an example of this distinction. When I want to deceive, my hidden perception that ‘I am lying’ is irrelevant to the verbal meaning of my expression. The only correct interpre-tation of my lie is, paradoxically, to consider it as a true statement, since this is the only correct construction of my verbal intention. "Indeed," Hirsch continues, "it is only when my listener has understood my meaning (presented it as true) that he can judge it to be a lie."180 If this is the case, the author must detach himself from himself when he expresses himself. Thus he concludes that for the process of interpretation, the author’s private experiences are irrelevant. The only relevant "aspect of subjectivity is that which determines verbal meaning or, in Husserl’s terms, content."181

However, in light of the very possibility that authors can change their mind and ideas in the course of time and thus reject their previous views, one can say that the relationship between the historical author and the speaking subject is not an internal but an external relation. This is the logic which stands behind the idea that the historical author becomes a reader or a critic of his meaning after having expressed his ideas. Hirsch calls the meaning in its relation to the historical author as reader ‘significance.’182 According to him, the point in the distinction of meaning from significance is that the meaning of a text does not change when the author changes his mind with respect to his text. What is changed is only the relationship between the meaning and its readers.

The question I always want to ask critics who dismiss authorial intention as their norm is one that could be transposed into the categorial imperative or simply into the golden rule. I want to ask them this: "When you write a piece of criticism, do you want me to disregard your intention and the original meaning? Why do you say to me ‘That is not what I meant at all’? Why do you ask me to honor the ethics of language for your writings when you do not honor them for the writings of others?"183

 

Behind this polemic lies Hirsch’s main tenet that textual meaning is determinate due to its being identical with authorial intention.184 He seems to base the interaction between historical author and speaking subject on the assumption that to understand correctly is to understand authorial intention. In this context, he notes that "I was once told by a theorist who denied the possibility of correct interpretation that I had not interpreted his writings correctly."185

However, if we consider Hirsch’s ideas that "meaning is understood from the perspective that lends existence to meaning"186 and that meaning is reproducible, we can say that the interaction between the historical author and the speaking subject can be found between the historical author and the interpreters who reconstruct his intention as well. The interpreter is supposed to adopt the author’s subjective stance "in order to make sense of the text."187 This point becomes clear when Hirsch argues that when the interpreter posits the author’s stance, "he sympathetically reenacts the authorial intentional acts, but although the imaginative act is necessary for realizing meaning, it must be distinguished from meaning as such." 188

Thus since the reader or interpreter must realize verbal meaning by his own subjective acts,189 the sympathetic interaction between historical author and reader should be restricted to the private experiences of the interpreter. This is the subjective aspect of divination or guess. Accordingly, the individuality of the historical author is not a part of meaning, rather, it is just the psychological background of the identification of verbal meaning with intention (speaking subject). Hence, the task of Hirsch’s hermeneutic theory is to show how this identification happens, i.e., how it is possible to pass from the subjectivity of a sympathetic relation to the historical author to the objectivity of the speaking subject as rational entity. From this perspective, Hirsch’s polemic with the anti-intentionalists seems to take the form of a petitio principii: it assumes the premise that meaning is identical with authorial intention, which is what he wants to prove.

Since for Hirsch the interaction (or the process of under-standing) between the author’s and the interpreter’s subjectivities has two sides, pre-conceptual and conceptual,190 he must be adopting the Schleiermacherian view of the author as considered by means of Husserlian intentionalism. As we saw above for Schleier-macher, since meaning is a free activity of unconscious genius, the truth of what the author says can be hidden from himself. In other words, an interpreter can understand an author better than he (the author) understood himself.191 Though Hirsch discards the concept of unconscious genius by accepting meaning as an intentional object,192 he still follows Schleiermacher by distinguishing meaning from unique, concrete content.193

Hence for Hirsch the idea of better understanding which stems either from the mis-identification of meaning with subject matter194 or from the concept of unconscious genius195 has no legitimacy. However, the main point in this rejection can reveal itself when we look at the issue in terms of the problem of the author’s authority. From the idea that the author is unconscious of his meaning it follows that the author is "not the appointed interpreter of it. As an interpreter he has no automatic authority over the person who is simply receiving his work."196 Hence in order to secure the identity of textual meaning through the author’s authority, Hirsch invokes the Husserlian idea that consciousness is the consciousness of the identity of the object. In short, Hirsch takes the directedness of consciousness to an intended object as the basis of the identity of textual meaning. Therefore, he avoids identifying meaning with the givenness of the intentional object since this would be to discard the authorial intention and the author’s authority.

This extrinsic data is not, however, read into the text. On the contrary, it is used to verify that which we read out of it. The extrinsic information has ultimately a purely verificative function. The same thing is true of information relating to the author’s subjective stance. No matter what the source of this information may be, whether it be the text alone or the text in conjunction with other data, this informa-tion is extrinsic to verbal meaning as such.197

 

Indeed, accepting the distinction between a mere intention to do something and the concrete accomplishment of that intention, Hirsch says that "The anti-intentionalists are surely right when they insist that an author’s aim is not to be taken for his accomplishment, his wish for his deed."198 It seems that this distinction between intention and the accomplishment of it is related to the gap between language (universal) and the particularity of the author’s intention as indicated above.

Since language is too flexible to refer to the determinate intention of the historical author, and the accomplishment of the historical author is reflected in the language of the text, the ac-complishment is too ambiguous to refer to the determinate historical intention or wish of the author. What we describe as "the ac-complishment of the author" becomes a matter of construction (in-terpretation), i.e., not a determinate given entity. Thus the speaking subject cannot be an authority over the text either.199 If this is the case, who will make the decision as to what extent the historical author’s intention and purpose was embodied in the text?

Hirsch could object to this argument and contend that the speaking subject mediates between the historical author and the textual meaning since it can account for the coherence or consist-ency of the text by revealing itself as the ontological center of the organic unity of the text. In other words, the function of the speaking subject (implied author) reveals itself in the coherence of the meaning of the text by referring back to the unifying and purposeful consciousness of the historical author.200 He makes the following argument for the author as the basis of coherence of textual meaning. The quality of coherence of a text rests on the context inferred. Thus, it is necessary to establish the most probable context or horizon. This is possible only if we posit the author’s typical out-look.201

Of course, the text at hand is the safest source of clues to the author’s outlook, since men do adopt different attitudes on different occasions. However, even though the text itself should be the primary source of clues and must always be the final authority, the interpreter should make an effort to go beyond his text wherever possible, since this is the only way he can avoid vicious circularity.202

 

Against this view of the author as a rational entity which represents dogmatic certainty and priority of consciousness to meaning,203 Gadamer suggests another perspective of the author by accepting `rationality’ in the sense of knowing `the limits of one’s own understanding.’204 In this view, consciousness (understanding) is drawn into the course of events when it actualizes the ‘historical potential of what is understood.’205 Thus the author is not indepen-dent of the particular aspect that the world shows him but, as a being who has ‘world,’ he is dependent on society and tradition.

Precisely because of this fact, there is "no point of view outside the experience of the world in language from which it [the linguistic world] could become an object."206 Since the linguistic world cannot be viewed from above, individual consciousness has no pre-linguistic space. Hence with respect to human understanding, language is both immanent and transcendent. We can call this the dialectic of the immanent and transcendental aspects of language. This dialectic which we find in Gadamer’s theory is not the same as the interaction between the pre-linguistic consciousness and the linguistic conventions which Hirsch’s theory assumes. This is clear when Gadamer argues:

In fact there is no reflection when the word is formed, for the word is not expressing the mind but the thing intended. The starting point for the formation of the word is the substantive content (the species) that fills the mind. The thought seeking expression refers not to the mind but to the thing. Thus the word is not the expression of the mind.207

 

The referentiality of an expression to the thing intended, not to the mind of the author, shows why Gadamer views the author as occasional. The occasionality of the author can be understood in terms of the occasionality of an interpretation (interpretive condi-tions) in which the meaning of a text finds "its concretion (i.e., is understood) in its relation to the understanding I—not in recon-structing the originally intending I."208 As soon as meaning is expressed (especially in written form), it enters into a new relation with its author: since meaning has its own being and direction, authorial intention stays in its subjective form, and the author enters into a relation with meaning as an understanding I. Referring to the distinction between the understanding I and the intending I, Gadamer remarks that the occasionality of interpretation must appear as a meaningful component in the work’s claim to truth and "not as the trace of the particular circumstances that are, as it were, hidden behind the work and are to be revealed by interpretation."209 In his view, if the latter were the case, it would be possible to understand the meaning of the whole text only by re-establishing the original situation.210

Accordingly, a condition (original or interpretive) does not have any priority to meaning as the fixed reference point, but can be what it is only when meaning is actualized in it. Therefore, meaning fills out its condition and makes it its own. Gadamer refers to this by his conception of aesthetic non-differentiation.211 He opposes this concept to that of ‘aesthetic differentiation,’ which refers to the difference between the work of art and its representations (inter-pretive conditions), which allows the work of art to be seen in its originality. He maintains that the work of art (text) cannot simply be isolated from the "contingency" of the chance (interpretive) condi-tions in which it appears. However, due to its "open indeterminacy," i.e., its ability to integrate itself constantly in different times and spaces,212 meaning cannot be restricted to any condition.

Gadamer discusses this point in the context of a ‘play.’ He remarks that the nature of a play itself cannot be found in the player’s subjective reflection. In other words, the subject of the experience of work of art is not the subjectivity of the person who experiences it, but rather the work itself.213 Aesthetic consciousness is a part of the event of being that occurs in presentation, and belongs essentially to the play as play.214 Gadamer concludes from this that the "play is not to be understood as something a person does."215 Thus, authorial intention cannot be foregrounded from what is meant (being of work of art).

Admittedly, it is primarily persons that have authority; but the authority of persons is ultimately based not on the subjection and abdication of reason but on the act of acknowledgment and knowledge—the knowledge, namely, that the other is superior to oneself in judgment and insight and that for this reason his judgment takes precedence—i.e., it has priority over one’s own. This is connected with the fact that authority cannot actually be bestowed but is earned, and must be earned if someone is to lay claim to it.216

 

Gadamer argues that authority has nothing to do with blind obedience, as what authority says is not "irrational and arbitrary but can, in principle, be discovered to be true."217 The prejudices which they (what the authority says) implant are not in favor of a person but a content, because they effect our disposition to believe some-thing that can be shown in other ways and with good reasons.218 Thus it seems that authority is not the basis of the intelligibility of meaning, but rather is based on it. Hence, the shareability of meaning (truth-content) of a text plays an essential role in providing an author with authority.219

From this perspective, authority has no relation to the individuality of the historical author.220 Rather, since authority understood in this way symbolizes the common acceptance of the content of a text by a community of interpreters, it reflects only the social aspect of the author. However, the social aspect of author in Gadamer’s theory should not be confused with the social (cultural) aspect of author (speaking subject) in Hirsch’s view. As we saw, Hirsch’s ‘speaking subject’ has a function of controlling the ‘deter-minacy’ of meaning in its teleological character. Therefore, meaning is determined when it is reduced to a speaking subject.

However, if, according to Gadamer, an author is not an authority over his text, i.e., his intention cannot be the basis of the identification of textual meaning with itself, what should we understand by the identity of textual meaning? How can Gadamer give us an account of textual identity if in human sciences, the ‘object in itself’ clearly does not exist at all?221