Quote: “We all approach the reading of texts with the baggage of our values and our experience, with certain categories, assumptions, prejudices and 'fore-understandings'. To have such baggage is what it is to be a human being in history; without it we could not read at all.”
Comment: The author claims that it’s a stronger theory to believe that it’s impossible to fully understand/find the true and/or original meaning in ancient texts because we, as readers, will be influenced by our own (and drastically different) lives, experiences, values, and modern thinking. But I wonder if because so much of society, politics, and law is based on the Greeks and Romans, if positivists' are underestimating how accurately we would be able to “recover” aspects of the past with our own understanding of the modern world.
Question: Is it the role of an author to keep not only their current readers in mind, but also any future audiences in mind while reading? How do they determine with audience is worth writing to?