There are certain categories which designate the roles of the entities of the hermeneutical drama. An author creates the meaning. The text is the means by which the author formulates, articulates, and communicates the meaning. The reader is the one who receives the meaning.
Now, any number of Reader Response (RR) interpretive theories might say: “By defining a reader as a mere receptor, you have already stacked the methodological deck in your favor!” Perhaps. But I’m not the one who stacked the deck. The hermeneutical mechanism existed before me, and according to my God, finds its origin in the very mind of the Trinity (John 1:1-3; Col. 1:15-20; John 17:7-8).
However, here is the reason why it’s okay to designate these specific definitions to these specific words: They don’t mean anything to begin with! “Reader” just means someone who encounters a “text,” which, according to Hirsch, can be more than just words, and is, in fact, the entire world! And so, if the entire world is a text, and Schleiermacher’s literary and psychological hermeneutical circles propose that every author is just reorganizing material from the text of his language and experience, then there is no difference between an author and a reader! A reader is just a consciousness that encounters a reorganized text, which is exactly what the author had to do with his language, location, experience, conceptual categories, etc. In the conversation of philosophical hermeneutics, at the bare-bottom level of semantics, in the philosophical-hermeneutical discussion, there is no difference between the author and the reader! There are only “text-encounterers.” Therefore, I have every right define “author,” “reader,” “text,” context,” “cotext,” or anything else however I want to, because it has been done so poorly by everyone in the conversation!
IF YOU DON’T WANT TO READ THIS WHOLE THING, JUST SKIP TO THIS PART.
In the “reader-response” hermeneutical in-crowd (I’m not just talking Derrida and Foucault; I’m talking Jewish, Liberation, Feminist, Post-colonial, etc.), by prioritizing the “reader” above the “author,” according to the definitions layed out above, and also demonstrated in the ambiguity of their own terms, there is no such thing as a reader! If it is up to the reader to determine the meaning of the text, he BECOMES the author. If it is just a “meaning in the text,” then the hermeneutical scholar who determines the rules for finding the meaning becomes the author!
My point is that these basic semantics of the hermeneutical conversation explicate the true nature of most philosophical-hermeneutical views. If they are RR, they actually UNDERMINE what a reader really is, and create a world with only authors. This is significant because the very question that started the RR movement was the authority of the author over the meaning of the text! So RR actually comes full circle back to authorial intent. Although they would not say that each "reader" (author in denial) determines any sort of single meaning, in the RR hermeneutic, he is designated authority, and does act pseudo-authorially in his approach to text, and therefore, by converting his receptivity into “authority,” he forfeits the very thing (receptivity) that makes him a reader.
I’m not making a case for a positivist approach to hermeneutics. Jut demonstrating that philosophy is actually a lot easier than it looks, and once basic words have basic definitions, “complicated” philosophical views are shown to be very basic and obviously incoherent.
Final Remarks: I’m not saying that there is not a subjective element to hermeneutics. There certainly is. When we distinguish between sense (meaning, origination), application (instantiation, manifestation), and import (the maintaining of the consistent correspondence between meaning and instantiation), there is room for the objective and the subjective. However, this note is WAY too long already, because you are already tired of reading it. Final challenge to all of us:
Have an understanding of language and hermeneutics that accounts for these theological phenomena:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” –John 1:1-3 (There was not a grammatical or historical context from which or into which God spoke the words of creation, yet the reader—material creation—perfectly responded to the precise intention of God’s mind, the sole determiner of the nature of created reality).
“Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.” –Heb. 1:1-3 (To know Christ is to accept the Father’s interpretation of himself; how could we “read in” pre-conceived notions of a category which would be entirely unknown to us except by God’s revelation itself?)
“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” –Heb. 4:12-13 (God effectively instantiates His objective word in the heart of the reader)
