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“By using the lens of the event of meaning, DaVia and Lynch
revive the legacy of Gadamer’s hermeneutics and show
Gadamer in a new light, opening up new encounters with his
work from both continental and analytic philosophical
approaches to language, meaning, and interpretation.”
Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Radboud University, The
Netherlands
The Event of Meaning in
Gadamer’s Hermeneutics
This book presents the first detailed treatment of Gadamer’s account
of the nature of meaning. It argues both that this account is
philosophically valuable in its own right and that understanding it
sheds new light on his wider hermeneutical project.
Whereas philosophers have typically thought of meanings as
belonging to a special class of objects, the central claim of
Gadamer’s view is that meanings are events. Instead of a pre-
existing content that we must unearth through our interpretive
efforts, for Gadamer the meaning of a text is what happens when
we encounter it in the appropriate way. In events of meaning the
world makes itself intelligibly present to us in a manner that is
uniquely and irreducibly bound up with the concrete situation in
which we find ourselves. When we recognize that Gadamer thinks of
meaning in this way, we are better positioned to appreciate what his
wider views amount to and how they hang together. Gadamer’s
accounts of interpretive normativity, the aspectival character of
understanding, and the nature of essences, for example, snap into
more vivid relief when we see them as outgrowths of his underlying
conception of meanings as events.
The Event of Meaning in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics will especially
appeal to researchers and advanced students working in
hermeneutics, phenomenology, and the philosophy of language.
More broadly it will be of interest to humanities teachers and
researchers concerned with the question of how texts from distant
cultures can be relevant to readers here and now.

Carlo DaVia is a Lecturer in Latin and Classical Studies at the

University of California, Riverside, as well as an Instructor at the
CUNY Latin/Greek Institute. He has published articles in a number of
venues, including the Journal of the History of Philosophy, European
Journal of Philosophy, and the Review of Metaphysics.

Greg Lynch is Associate Professor of Philosophy at North Central

College in Naperville, Illinois. He is co-editor (with Cynthia Nielsen)
of Gadamer’s Truth and Method: A Polyphonic Commentary and he
has published essays in a range of venues, including Ergo,
Philosophical Investigations, Acta Analytica, and The Southern
Journal of Philosophy.
Routledge Studies in
Twentieth-Century
Philosophy
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An Ethics of Rebellion
Pedro Tabensky

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Edited by Florian Franken Figueiredo

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The Event of Meaning in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics
Carlo DaVia and Greg Lynch

For more information about this series, please visit:

https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Twentieth-Century-
Philosophy/book-series/SE0438
The Event of Meaning in
Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

Carlo DaVia and Greg Lynch

First published 2024
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 Carlo DaVia and Greg Lynch
The right of Carlo DaVia and Greg Lynch to be identified as authors of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
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storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
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infringe.
ISBN: 978-1-032-24798-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-24993-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-28109-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003281092
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Carlo:
To my mom, who taught me the difference between what is
essential and what is not

Greg:
To my dad, who taught me to carve the beasts of nature at
their joints
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works by Gadamer
Introduction
1 Occasionality
2 Ideality
3 Interpreting Correctly
4 Originalism and the Fusion of Horizons
5 Aspects of Being
6 Essences
7 The Task of Philosophy
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
There are a number of people from whose generosity we have
benefited in the course of writing this book. First and foremost we
want to thank our wives for their patience and long-suffering as we
have worked on and stressed about the project. We are also grateful
to numerous friends and colleagues who have offered helpful
feedback along the way. Theodore George, Tad Lehe, Cynthia
Nielsen, Lawrence Schmidt, and David Vessey offered comments on
papers that turned out to be the initial sketches of the ideas for this
book. John Drummond and David Vessey provided helpful advice on
the proposal, as did two anonymous referees for Routledge. James
Gordon, Ryan Kemp, Alex Loney, Joe Vukov, and Adam Wood not
only took the time to read a (nearly) complete draft but also gave us
the gift of a long and invaluable discussion of their critiques and
suggestions. We are also grateful to the excellent teachers who
kindled our interest in Gadamer’s work and gave us ears to hear
what he has to say, especially Linda Martín Alcoff, David Mills, and
Merold Westphal. Similar thanks go out to our many colleagues at
the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics for the
countless conversations over the years that have shaped our
thinking about Gadamer in more ways than we can recognize. Lastly,
we are grateful to North Central College, which funded a sabbatical
grant that greatly helped accelerate the book’s completion.
Abbreviations of Frequently
Cited Works by Gadamer
GW 1–10
Gesammelte Werke vols. 1–10
LU
“Language and Understanding”
ML
“Man and Language”
OTW
“On the Truth of the Word”
PL
“Philosophy and Literature”
SH
“Semantics and Hermeneutics”
TI
“Text and Interpretation”
TM
Truth and Method
WT
“What Is Truth?”
Introduction
DOI: 10.4324/9781003281092-1

‘Semantics’ is something of a dirty word in hermeneutic circles, and

not entirely without reason. Beginning with the epoch-making work
of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, the term has gradually come
to function as a shorthand way of referring to a particular approach
to the philosophy of language, one that takes the formal, artificial
languages devised by mathematical logic as the paradigm for
understanding language in general. This approach stands in stark
contrast to the focus on concrete, historically situated, and culturally
inflected uses of language that characterize the hermeneutic
tradition. When Hans-Georg Gadamer uses the term ‘semantics’
(which is not all that often), it is typically in this oppositional sense.1
Semantics is an alternative to hermeneutics, one that, in his view,
rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of language.
Taken in this sense, the primary aim of this book—to articulate the
semantic dimension of Gadamer’s hermeneutics—must seem like a
curious task, if not an outright fool’s errand.
However, while ‘semantics’ can function as an abbreviation of
‘formal semantics,’ it need not do so. In its most general and basic
sense, ‘semantics’ refers simply to the study of meaning, a study
whose fundamental question concerns what meaning is.2 Taken in
this way, formal semantics represents just one way of undertaking
the semantic enterprise, just one possible answer to the basic
question that semantics poses. Others are possible. We want to
reclaim this broader sense of ‘semantics’ because we think these
other possibilities—and in particular, the one found in Gadamer’s
hermeneutics—deserve a hearing.
Understood in this sense, semantics is nothing that hermeneutics
needs to oppose. In fact, it is something it cannot avoid. Just as any
account of knowledge inevitably presupposes something about the
nature of the things to be known, and just as any account of
experience must presuppose something about the nature of what is
experienced, so too any account of understanding will presuppose
something about the nature of that which is understood—that is,
something about meaning. Any hermeneutics, in short, will imply a
semantics. That is not to say that every thinker who has articulated
an account of understanding has also articulated an account of
meaning. The semantics implied by a hermeneutics is in many cases
just that—implicit. But it is implied nonetheless. Hermeneuts may
ignore semantic questions, but they cannot, at the end of the day,
avoid them.
The idea that hermeneutics, whether it wants to or not, cannot
help weighing in on semantics provided the initial impetus for this
book. Our thought was that it would be illuminating to try to
reconstruct the account of meaning that underlies Gadamer’s theory
of understanding, both for its own sake and because it would allow
us to position his views with respect to other, more explicitly
semantical, thinkers. This task seemed especially worthwhile given
that nobody else had undertaken it in depth. Despite the immense
and diverse literature on Gadamer’s thought, there are only a
handful of articles that discuss the semantic implications of his
hermeneutics, and no one has attempted to give a systematic
account of what a Gadamerian view of meaning might look like.3
What we found as we began looking into this question is that
identifying Gadamer’s semantics requires much less reconstruction
than we had initially expected. It turns out that Gadamer weighs in
quite directly and explicitly on a number of central semantic debates.
He presents developed and subtle positions, for instance, on the
extent to which meaning is context-dependent, on the relationship
between literal and metaphorical speech, and on the relationship of
meaning to truth. These topics are common in Gadamer’s work, and
he does not treat them as peripheral or secondary concerns; he sees
them as central to his overall hermeneutic project. In other words,
what we found is that you do not need to read between the lines of
Gadamer’s work to find out what he thinks about meaning; you just
need to read different lines than the ones commentators usually
focus on. Gadamer has been an explicitly semantic thinker all along;
his readers have just tended not to notice it.4
This initial realization was accompanied by two others. The first
was that attending to the semantic dimension of Gadamer’s project
requires thinking differently about the other dimensions that are
more frequently discussed. At many points, an appreciation of
Gadamer’s semantics serves to augment traditional readings of his
hermeneutics. Claims that have often struck Gadamer’s readers
(including past selves of the present authors) as unmotivated or ad
hoc snap into sharper focus when we see how they grow out of his
underlying view of meaning. At other points a recognition of
Gadamer’s semantics serves to challenge received interpretations of
his work. Because readers have tended to ignore Gadamer’s view of
meaning, they have sometimes unwittingly interpreted his claims
about understanding on the basis of semantic assumptions that he
rejects, and thus misunderstood them. Attending to Gadamer’s
semantics helps correct these misreadings and invites new ways of
construing what some of his more well-known ideas and positions
amount to. In short, an account of Gadamer’s semantics cannot just
be tacked onto a pre-existing picture of his views; it calls for a
reevaluation of his hermeneutic project.
Second, when one rethinks Gadamer’s work in light of its semantic
dimension, he emerges as a more original, more challenging, and in
general more interesting figure than he is often taken to be.
Gadamer has a reputation for being something of an arch-moderate.
His philosophy is often seen as the result of synthesizing important
insights from earlier thinkers—Plato’s commitment to dialogue,
Kant’s emphasis on the limits of human knowledge, Heidegger’s
focus on historicity, and so on—while simultaneously rounding off
their hard edges and reining in their excesses.5 Now, to be sure,
there is no shame in being a moderate; radicality is not a goal to be
pursued for its own sake. And there is no doubt that Gadamer’s
synoptic understanding of the history of Western philosophy and his
willingness to draw inspiration from throughout it are among his
greatest intellectual virtues. Attending to Gadamer’s semantics,
however, makes it clear that this common narrative tells only half the
story. As much as he wants to reawaken the tradition and the
important truths it has to teach us, Gadamer is equally concerned to
challenge certain deep-seated assumptions that have defined the
tradition and that, in his view, block us from understanding the
central phenomena of hermeneutics. This is nowhere more true than
in his account of meaning. In place of traditional views, Gadamer
offers a new and genuinely radical (in the literal sense of going ‘to
the roots’) picture of what meaning amounts to, one that is
undoubtedly inspired by earlier thinkers but which cannot plausibly
be construed as a mere rehash of their ideas.
In sum, Gadamer has a lot to say not just about how we come to
understand meaning but also about what meaning itself is. These
two aspects of his thought cannot be understood independently of
one another. They comprise a unified whole, one that offers novel
and challenging answers to a range of fundamental philosophical
questions. Such, in a nutshell, is the thesis of this book. What will
emerge from our attempt to articulate it is by no means a
completely novel picture of Gadamer’s thought, but it is one painted
from a new perspective, one that allows aspects of his thought that
typically remain in the background to stand out in more vivid relief.
An additional benefit of highlighting these underappreciated
aspects of Gadamer’s work is that it can help make Gadamer
accessible to a wider swath of the philosophical community.
Accordingly, we hope that this book not only will contribute
something of value to the existing literature on Gadamer but that it
can also serve as an entrée to Gadamer’s thought for philosophers
who are not already familiar with it. This includes readers whose
primary training is in the analytic philosophical tradition, some of
whom might be keen to hear about what hermeneutics can
contribute to semantics. To that end, we have tried, as much as is
feasible, to start at the beginning—to spell out what we take the
basic aims and concerns of Gadamer’s project to be rather than
assume that the reader already knows them. For the same reason,
we have made every effort to avoid the tendency—unfortunately all
too common in works of secondary literature—to merely repeat the
tropes and terminology of the thinker under discussion rather than
clarifying and explaining them. In general, we think that Gadamer’s
work has something to offer anyone who cares about the nature of
meaning, language, and understanding. We hope that this book can
help guide such a reader, whether an expert in Gadamer or a novice,
along the path of his thinking.

0.1 Sinn Happens

In one of the few explicit discussions of Gadamer’s view of meaning
in the secondary literature, Joel Weinsheimer identifies an apparent
tension in Gadamer’s thought. On the one hand, many key ideas in
Gadamer’s work suggest that he eschews the notion of meaning
altogether—that his hermeneutics is, as Weinsheimer playfully puts
it, “meaningless.”6 Weinsheimer notes that the concept of meaning
has traditionally been bound up with “the surface/depth distinction.”
Philosophers are inclined to think of the text or expression through
which something is communicated as a “covering” or “veil” that
stands between the message conveyed and the one who aims to
understand it. Understanding, accordingly, is taken to be a matter of
lifting the veil, of “dis-covering” the meaning that lies beneath it. By
contrast, Weinsheimer observes, while Gadamer offers a number of
models for conceiving of the nature of understanding—the model of
artistic performance, of a “fusion of horizons,” and of dialogue—none
of them involves discovering a meaning that exists beneath or
behind the text or expression to be understood. Rather, they suggest
that understanding is a matter of an interpreter’s direct encounter
with a text or expression, without some further thing, ‘the meaning,’
entering the picture.
On the other hand, however, there are also aspects of Gadamer’s
work that point in the opposite direction. Perhaps the most obvious
of these is the fact that Gadamer does appeal to meanings, quite
clearly and directly, at numerous points. He states, for example, that
“the task of hermeneutics is to clarify this miracle of understanding”
that consists precisely in the “sharing in a common meaning” (TM,
303/GW 1:297, emphasis added), and similarly that “the task of
understanding is concerned above all with the meaning of the text
itself” (TM, 380/GW 1:378, emphasis added). These affirmations are
necessary, Weinsheimer notes, because without them it is impossible
to explain the normativity of understanding. Without a notion of
meaning, there seems to be no way to mark the distinction between
understanding a text and misunderstanding it.
Weinsheimer appears to be unsure of how to reconcile these two,
seemingly contradictory, aspects of Gadamer’s thought. He settles on
the conclusion that “sometimes we need a dualistic hermeneutics”
that acknowledges the existence of meanings, and “sometimes we
need a monistic hermeneutics” that does not, and that “Gadamer’s
hermeneutics acknowledges just this double need.”7 This response,
however, serves only to label the tension at hand, not to alleviate it.
It is not at all clear how a single, consistent hermeneutic theory
could satisfy both sides of this “double need”—both the need to
affirm meanings and the need to deny them—and Weinsheimer says
nothing to explain how this might be possible.
Despite this disappointing conclusion, however, Weinsheimer has
put his finger on something importantly right about Gadamer’s
semantics. Though he does not flag it as such, Weinsheimer’s
discussion makes it clear that he is working with a particular
conception of what meanings are. His analysis assumes that
meanings, if there are any, must be some sort of object, one that is
“hidden” in or behind the text and the “finding” of which would be
the task of interpretation. He is certainly not alone in this. Nearly
everyone in the philosophical tradition thinks of meanings as objects
—be they psychological objects (like the “ideas” of Descartes, Locke,
and company) or non-psychological abstract objects (like Frege’s
Gedanken, Husserl’s ideal species, or Russell’s propositions).8 If we
accept this traditional account of what meanings are, then
Weinsheimer’s initial hypothesis is absolutely right. Meanings in that
sense make no appearance in Gadamer’s thought, and this marks a
crucial respect in which Gadamer’s hermeneutics differs from most
other accounts of interpretation. Where the hypothesis goes awry is
in moving from this to the stronger claim that Gadamer rejects
meanings altogether, and so introducing a problematic “double
need” into his thinking.
In short, Weinsheimer occludes his important insight by presenting
it as the answer to the wrong question. The question is not whether
Gadamer acknowledges meanings—it is obvious that he does—but
rather what he takes meanings to be. When we get this question in
view, Gadamer’s answer becomes fairly clear: meaning is an event.
“Understanding,” Gadamer writes, “must be conceived as a part of
the event of meaning [Sinngeschehen], the event in which the
meaning of all statements—those of art and all other kinds of
tradition—is formed and actualized” (TM, 164/GW 1:170, translation
modified).9 When we recognize this, the apparent tension that vexes
Weinsheimer disappears. If meanings are events, rather than
objects, then affirming them is perfectly compatible with the
“monistic” picture of understanding that he rightly identifies in
Gadamer’s work. Meaning, on such a view, is not a second thing,
beyond the text, that an interpreter must discover—because it is not
a thing at all. Meaning, rather, is what happens when an interpreter
encounters a text in the appropriate way.
An event is something whose mode of being is occurrence. For an
event, to be is to happen. But what could it mean to conceive of
meaning along these lines? Seeing our way to a coherent answer to
this question requires suspending some deeply ingrained semantic
prejudices, and as a result it will require a long discussion—one that
will unfold over the chapters that follow. Nevertheless, we can get
an initial, if incomplete, idea of what Gadamer means by this from
his comments on the paradigmatic example of theological
hermeneutics. The meaning of Christian scripture, Gadamer writes,

cannot be detached from the event of proclamation. Quite the

contrary, being an event is a characteristic belonging to the
meaning itself. It is like a curse, which obviously cannot be
separated from the act of uttering it. What we understand from
it is not an abstractable logical sense like that of a statement,
but the actual curse that occurs in it.
(TM, 444/GW 1:431, emphasis original)

On Gadamer’s view, the gospel, qua gospel, is not a collection of

religious doctrines that scripture presents to us; it is “Christ’s
redemptive act” itself made present to us through God’s word. In
this, Gadamer notes, the word of God is like a curse; more generally,
it is an instance of what J.L. Austin calls a ‘performative.’10 To utter a
curse is not to report the fact that you have imprecated someone; it
is to perform the imprecation itself, and the meaning of the curse
consists precisely in this performance. In the same way, scripture is
not a representation of Christ as having redeemed the world; it is a
vehicle by which the redemptive act is accomplished. The meaning
of scripture, Gadamer contends, is realized only when the
redemptive act actually transpires, only when the gospel exercises
its saving power in the lives of those who hear it.
Of course, the view of scripture articulated here—one that is
heavily indebted to Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann—is controversial.
But the theological content of this passage is not what interests us
at the moment. Instead, what matters for present purposes is what
it indicates about Gadamer’s more general thesis that meaning is an
event. As the passage suggests, the heart of this thesis is the idea
that meaning is something effected or accomplished in language, as
opposed to an “abstractable sense,” like a proposition, that language
expresses. The redemption accomplished by the gospel is just one
(possible) instance of this among a nearly infinite variety of others.
It is just one form that an event of meaning can take. The language
of Hamlet, a State of the Union address, and a discussion of the
family budget with your spouse all accomplish quite different things.
On Gadamer’s view, however, there is something that they all have
in common: in all of them the self-presentation of the world occurs.
What makes language truly language, what makes it meaningful, is
the fact that “in language the world itself presents itself” (TM,
466/GW 1:453). This, for Gadamer, is the essential core of meaning.
Meaning is an event in which the self-presentation of the world is
accomplished.
In thinking of meanings as events, Gadamer breaks not only with
traditional conceptions of what meaning is but also of how meaning
is related to other phenomena: most notably to the world, to
understanding, and to language. Meanings are events in which some
part or dimension of the world—what Gadamer calls a “subject
matter” (Sache)—makes itself intelligibly present to understanding in
language. Thus, rather than relations of representation or
signification, Gadamer thinks of the world, understanding, and
language as related to meaning by way of participation. Each
element is a participant in the event that meaning is. Each makes, as
it were, its own contribution to the event. These contributions are
essential; they are all needed if the event is to occur at all. For this
reason, events of meaning can just as appropriately be called ‘events
of being,’ ‘events of understanding,’ or ‘events of language,’ and,
indeed, Gadamer does refer to them in each of these ways.11 To
better flesh this out, let’s briefly consider the contributions made by
each of these elements in turn.
First, the subject matter participates in an event of meaning by
giving itself to understanding, by “offer[ing] itself to be understood”
(TM, 491/GW 1:479). This might sound mystifying to some ears—as
if the subject matter were a kind of quasi-agent who consciously
desires and actively solicits human understanding. But nothing of the
sort is envisioned here. In speaking this way Gadamer is attempting
to steer a course between two opposite and, in his view, equally
mistaken pictures of the relationship between reality and our
understanding of it. On the one hand, he is rejecting the idea that
the being of things lies forever beyond the grasp of human
understanding, the idea of an unknowable thing-in-itself. On
Gadamer’s view we can understand reality itself, not just a reality-
for-us, and this is precisely what happens in an event of meaning.
On the other hand, Gadamer also rejects the idea that the subject
matter is, at bottom, an inert substratum onto which we can foist
whatever significance we want. The world, for Gadamer, has its own
integrity, and as such it is able to ‘push back’ against our
interpretations of it. The world, in this sense, “offers itself” to us: it
is an offer of genuine understanding, but one that we must accept
on its own terms.
Second, what understanding contributes to events of meaning is
openness (Offenheit) (TM, 281, 369/GW 1:273, 367). Understanding
holds itself open to the intelligible presence of the subject matter.
Though this contribution is passive in the sense of being a response
to the prior activity of the thing, it is not for that reason automatic or
effortless. On the contrary, in its openness understanding “has its
own rigor: that of uninterrupted listening.” Gadamer explains,

A thing does not present itself to the hermeneutical experience

without an effort special to it, namely that of “being negative
toward itself.” A person who is trying to understand a text has to
keep something at a distance—namely everything that suggests
itself, on the basis of his own prejudices, as the meaning
expected—as soon as it is rejected by the sense of the text
itself.
(TM, 481/GW 1:469)
To be open is to allow the event of meaning to be guided by the
subject matter that is offered rather than by one’s own preferences,
expectations, or preconceptions. This does not mean that openness
requires you to efface yourself before the subject matter. To
understand is precisely to participate, as yourself, in the event of
meaning. It is to allow the subject matter to make itself intelligibly
present to you. To do this is not to eliminate your prejudices but
rather to put them “at risk” and allow them to be called into
question (TM, 310/GW 1:304). It is precisely in this that the world’s
self-showing becomes effective. The prejudices understanding puts
at risk are what the world pushes back against.
Lastly, language participates in events of meaning by providing the
medium in which the event transpires, the “medium in which I and
world meet, or, rather, manifest their original belonging together”
(TM, 490/GW 1:478). ‘Medium’ (die Mitte) here does not mean
‘intermediary.’ Language is not something that comes between
understanding and the world. Rather, ‘medium’ for Gadamer carries
the sense of the condition or environment that enables the
emergence of something, as when we speak of clay as the medium
employed by a sculptor or of the nutrient-rich gel in a petri dish as a
‘growth medium.’ Similarly, language is that in which the intelligibility
of a subject matter takes shape. It is not a vehicle through which
meaning-objects are conveyed but an environment in which the
intelligible presence of the world is realized. It is through our
attempts to find the right language to express what the world offers
of itself—and in our rejection of language that fails to do so—that
the self-presentation of the subject matter is accomplished.
 On Gadamer’s account, meaning is phenomenologically primary in
the sense that it provides the framework in terms of which its
constituent parts are to be understood.12 What this means is that
the world, understanding, and language are constituted as the
phenomena they are by their participation in events of meaning.
When Gadamer, for example, claims that the world “offers itself to
be understood,” he is not saying that some entity, ‘the world,’ which
can be defined on its own terms (say, as an objective spatio-
temporal reality) also happens to offer itself from time to time to
understanding. Rather, what the world is cannot be divorced from
the way it offers itself in events of meaning. “Being,” Gadamer tells
us, “is self-presentation” (TM, 500/GW 1:488).
The same is true of understanding. Understanding is that posture
of openness to the world that enables its intelligible self-
presentation. Openness, therefore, is not what marks the difference
between responsible and irresponsible understanding or between
morally good and bad understanding. It is what marks the difference
between understanding and non-understanding. To be closed off to
what a text has to say is not to understand it poorly but to engage in
something other than understanding it.13 Thus, when Gadamer
claims that his account of understanding is descriptive, not
prescriptive (TM, xxv–xxvi/GW 2:438), he means it. He is not trying
to tell us how we ought to go about understanding things but rather
what understanding, as a moment of an event of meaning, is.
This point is perhaps most important to note with respect to
language. Language is the medium in which intelligibility takes
shape, and as a result the scope of the term ‘language’ in Gadamer’s
work is in some respects narrower, and in others broader, than we
might expect it to be. As we will discuss in Chapter 1, it is narrower
in that some things we are apt to describe as languages—like
computer languages or the artificial languages constructed in formal
semantics—are not instances of ‘language’ in Gadamer’s sense. They
are not media in which being comes to intelligible presence. At best
they are capable of re-presenting something that has already
become intelligible in another language. On the other hand, as
Gadamer acknowledges in a 1996 interview with Jean Grondin, his
sense of ‘language’ is in another respect broader than we might
expect, because words are not the only media in which intelligibility
can take shape. “Language in words,” Gadamer explains, “is only a
special concretion of linguisticality.”14 Thus, Gadamer is not being
sloppy when he speaks of the “language of the work of art”15 or the
“language of gesture, facial expression, and movement” (TM,
573/GW 2:204). These are languages in just as robust a sense as
are English and Cantonese because they are original media in which
the world presents itself.
This fact about Gadamer’s use of the term ‘language’ is easy to
miss. One reason (for English readers, at least) is that the
translators of the English edition of Truth and Method made the
unfortunate choice to sometimes render sprachlich as ‘linguistic’ and
sometimes as ‘verbal.’ Another is that, while Gadamer typically uses
Sprache and its variants in the phenomenological sense just
described, he doesn’t always do so. In fact, he will sometimes use
the term in two different senses in consecutive sentences, as when
he cites the “language of gesture” (Sprache der Gesten) as an
example of something “pre-linguistic” (vorsprachlich) (TM, 573/GW
2:204, emphasis added).16 As a result, Gadamer’s claims about the
linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit) of human experience have struck some
commentators as unmotivated or even self-contradictory.17
Recognizing how Gadamer’s conception of language is framed by its
involvement in events of meaning is, in our view, the key to making
sense of this central concept.
We will call this conception of the nature of meaning and its
relationship to the world, understanding, and language, Gadamer’s
event semantics, by way of contrast with the object semantics that
characterizes much traditional philosophy of language. Our aim in
the chapters that follow will be to articulate in more detail what this
view consists in, why Gadamer thinks it is true, and what its
implications are for his wider project.

0.2 Looking Ahead

The discussion that follows will be divided into seven chapters.
Chapters 1 and 2 lay out the core of Gadamer’s event-semantic
conception of meaning, focusing respectively on his claims that
language is occasional and that meaning is ideal. The remaining
chapters consider implications of this view of meaning for his wider
hermeneutics. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the relationship of
meaning to understanding. They show how some central
hermeneutic questions—concerning the sort of normativity at play in
interpretation and the role of original context in limiting acceptable
interpretations—appear in a quite different light when we think of
understanding as participation in a meaning-event rather than
representation of a meaning-object. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the
relationship of meaning to the world by exploring the ontology
implied by Gadamer’s event semantics. This ontology allows him to
Another random document with
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 “That must have been a pretty sight, though, father! I should like to
see a great many turtle-doves together.”
“You would not, if you were a Peruvian farmer, for these poetical
birds are the very mischief in the grain-fields. They only troubled us
by their melancholy wail. Their sad notes made this dreary solitude
still more awful.
“But I had a consolation. Before me rose grandly up the high
peaks of the Andes. Their white tops seemed to touch the sky.
“After a time, to my surprise, we began to descend. In a few hours
more we were in a lovely valley, filled with villages, and farms, and
trees, and flowers. I staid there two days enjoying the valley, and
inspecting its curiosities, which I will tell you about some time.”
“Was it warm in the valley?”
“Yes, but not oppressively hot. It was high up on the hills; and then
it was the month of August, and the winter season.”
“Winter season in August?”
“Of course. I was south of the equator, where the seasons, you
know, are just the reverse of ours. We commenced the ascent of the
mountains in high spirits. The wind was cool and bracing; and the
vegetation all around us was of great interest to me. But it began to
change rapidly; and, before night, we were among huge stones, and
jagged rocks, where only evergreens were seen.”
“How could you find the way?”
“There was a rough kind of road over the mountains. In many
places I should never have been able to find it at all, but the guide
knew all the landmarks.
“The first night we spent in an Indian cabin; and the next morning
continued our journey, but we were not so gay as on the preceding
day. It was bitter cold, and we needed all the wraps we had with us. I
do not know how our two companions managed to wander away
from the road, as they afterwards insisted that they did. I think the
cold was too much for their courage, and they grew tired of their
bargain, and made up their minds to fall back of us, and watch a
chance to turn around and go home. The guide and I soon missed
them, and we rode about in various directions, calling them, and
searching for them. But it was easy enough for them to conceal
themselves behind a rock, or in a ravine, and we could not find them.
We gave them up at last, hoping they would find their way back
again.
“But we soon discovered that, in looking for them, we had lost our
way. For hours we wandered about, and my guide could not find a
trace of the road. This was serious, for we had but a small stock of
provisions, as there were Indian huts scattered all along the regular
route, on which we had relied for supplies. We could not travel over
this rough country at night; and a night’s exposure to the cold was
not to be thought of without a shudder. And besides, we might never
find our way out of this frightful solitude.”
“Was there nothing anywhere about to show that any kind of
people lived there?”
“No. It seemed to me we were the first human beings who had
ever set foot there. In the midst of our perplexities my guide pointed
silently to the sky. There were several small, thick, white clouds
floating there. They did not look very terrible, but the guide said we
would soon have a storm, and we must try to find shelter. Soon more
white clouds floated into sight, and they increased until they hid the
sun from us. We were now on smoother ground, and pressed
forward as fast as we could, but there was no place of shelter to be
seen, not even an overhanging rock.
“Soon the wind came with a rush; and then the thunder and
lightning. Our mules broke into a gallop. We enveloped ourselves in
the folds of our great woolen wrappers, called tapacaras, lifting our
heads once in a while to see where we were going. Next we were
treated to a shower of hail-stones. Fortunately they were not very
large, but we were rather severely thumped with them. The poor
mules fared the worst.
“And then came the snow. The arctic regions could not furnish a
better example of a snow-storm than this tropical place! It fell so
thick and fast we could not see twenty steps in advance. My heart
failed me then. I thought we were lost, and would be buried in snow
drifts.
“But just then a dark object loomed up before us. ‘An Indian lodge!’
I cried in joy.
“The guide said nothing, but rode on before me, and called to me
to dismount. I was glad enough to do this, and he pointed to the
open doorway of the building. It was so low I had to crawl through it,
but I was thankful to get in, in any fashion.”
“I wonder, father, that you were not afraid of finding something
dreadful in there!”
“I did not stop to think about the matter. And then I knew there was
something dreadful outside. So, in I went, and found the place
entirely empty. The guide followed me as soon as he had covered
the mules, and made them as comfortable as he could.”
“It was a deserted house, I suppose.”
“No, it was a tomb.”
“A tomb! Out in that lonely place!”
“Yes, but then the place had not always been lonely. I found out
afterwards that that region was once inhabited by a tribe of Indians.
They all perished before their country was discovered by Europeans,
but some of their dwellings, and many of their tombs remained.
These tombs were large stone buildings, with one room, lighted by a
single window. This room was capable of holding ten or twelve dead
bodies, placed in a sitting posture. These bodies were first
embalmed—made into what we call mummies. When the tomb was
full the door was sealed up. The Europeans opened these
sepulchres that had been sealed up for centuries; and carried the
mummies away to put into museums.
 A REFUGE FROM THE STORM.
“The tomb in which we had taken refuge had been despoiled of its
mummies long before. The room inside was about ten feet square. It
was built of very large stones, and had sloping walls. It was a
cheerless place enough, but seemed sumptuous to us, after what we
had passed through.
“In half an hour the storm ceased, and we proceeded on our
journey, hoping to recover the road. But we could not, and night was
approaching, with no prospect of a shelter. So we retraced our steps
to the sepulchre once more, lighted a fire within, consumed the last
of our provisions, gave the mules what was left of their provender
and slept soundly all night.”
“Were you not afraid of wild beasts?”
“There were none in that region, or at least the guide knew of
none. There were too many settlements among the mountains. And
the guide still insisted upon it that we had not wandered far from the
regular route. I had my doubts on the subject, but they did not
prevent me from sleeping soundly, for I was very tired.
“The next morning was bright, and we set off in better spirits, and
with renewed hope, though rather hungry. Our hunger became so
great after a time that it quite conquered our spirits, and we stumbled
about the rocks, sick and dispirited. We spared our mules all we
could, for the poor beasts were nearly worn out and half starved. If
they failed us we would indeed be in a bad plight.
“Finally, utterly exhausted, we all laid down, beasts and men
together, to keep warm, and to rest. I was just dropping into a doze
when I heard the sound of music. The guide heard it also, and we
both started up, and felt new life in our veins. So suddenly did hope
spring up in our hearts, that all fatigue dropped from us as if by
magic. The mules too pricked up their ears at the sound. We sprang
upon their backs and were soon traveling towards the point from
whence the music came. It was not long before we came upon the
musician.
 THE MAIL CARRIER.

“A bare-legged Indian, in a gay striped cloak and broad Panama

hat was running along at a rapid pace, and playing upon a mouth-
organ. He led a bony horse which trotted gently after him. Across its
back was a leathern bag.
“This man was a mail carrier, and was on his way from the sea-
coast to some mountain town. So it turned out that the guide was
right, and we had not been at any great distance from the
settlements. Nevertheless, had it not been for the music of this poor
little mouth-organ we might have wandered off in a contrary direction
from the highway, and have lost ourselves in the forest, and perished
there. Indeed we might never have awakened from the sleep into
which we were falling when we heard the strain of music.”
“Did you go with the mail carrier, father?”
 “No. He was not going to the place for which we were bound. But
he told us that just behind the spur of the mountain we would find an
Indian village. And there we rested for a day and refreshed
ourselves, and filled our provision bags, and procured a guide to the
road we wished to take. The rest of my journey was made in safety.”
“But, father, I don’t think that was a tropical snow-storm, when it
happened in so cold a place. I always think of tropic as meaning
hot.”
“It was a tropical snow-storm George, certainly, for we were in the
tropics, only a few degrees south of the equator. The weather was
cold because we were so high up in the air.”
 HOW THREE MEN WENT TO THE MOON.

That is, how it is said that they went to the moon. That no man
ever did go is very certain, and that no one ever will go, is very
probable, but true as these statements are, they did not prevent a
Frenchman from writing a story about a trip to the moon, undertaken
by two Americans, and one Frenchman.
I cannot tell you all this story, but I can give you a few of the
incidents that occurred during the journey, and although these are
purely imaginary, they are very interesting and amusing. If any one
ever had made this journey he would probably have gone as these
three people went in the story. Everything is described as minutely
and carefully as if it had really happened.
The journey was made in an immense, hollow cannon ball, or
rather a cylindrical shot, which was fired out of a great cannon, nine
hundred feet long!
This cannon, which was pointed directly at the spot where the
moon would be by the time the ball had time to reach it, was planted
in the earth in Florida, where thousands of people congregated to
see it fired off.
When the great load of gun-cotton was touched off by means of an
electrical battery, there was a tremendous explosion, and away went
the great hollow projectile, with the three travelers inside, directly
towards the moon.
This projectile was very comfortably and conveniently arranged.
The walls were padded and there were springs in the floor, so that
the inmates might not receive too great a shock when they started. It
was furnished with plenty of provisions, with contrivances for lighting
and ventilating it, and a machine for manufacturing atmospheric air,
which is something that travelers do not expect to find at the moon.
There were thick plate-glass windows in the sides, and everything
that could be thought of to make the trip comfortable and safe was
found in this curious aerial car.

THE DOGS THAT STARTED FOR THE MOON.

Not only were there three men in the projectile, but it contained
two dogs and some chickens. The picture shows the dogs, which
were handsome creatures, and it will also give you an idea of the
inside arrangements, with the telescope, and the guns hanging on
the wall.
The distance from the earth to the moon was to be accomplished
in about four days, and after the first shock of the starting, which was
quite heavy, notwithstanding the springs and the cushions, our
travelers began to make themselves at home.
They talked, they ate and drank and smoked. They took
observations out of their windows, and watched the earth recede
until it looked like a great moon, and saw the moon approach until it
seemed like a little earth.
One of them, the Frenchman, was in such high spirits that if his
companions would have allowed him he would have got outside of
their little house and stood in triumph on the very top, as it went
whizzing through the air.
The artist has given us a picture of how he would have looked if he
had stood out there where he wanted to perch himself.
His idea was that as there was as much momentum in him as
there was in the projectile, there was no danger of his falling off and
being left behind.
But if any of you ever do go to the moon in a hollow cannon-ball, I
would strongly recommend you not to get outside.
After a while they passed beyond the limit of the earth’s attraction,
and began to enter that of the moon. But when they were about on
the line between these two attractions, a very singular thing took
place. Everything in the projectile, the men, the dog, (one of the dogs
died the first day and was thrown out) the telescope, the chickens
and every article that was not fastened down, seemed to lose all its
gravity or weight.
As there is no reason why anything without weight should stay in
any particular place, unless it is fastened there by some mechanical
means, these people and things began to float about in the air.
 THE FRENCHMAN OUTSIDE.
The men rose up and were wafted here and there by a touch. Hats
floated away and chickens and telescopes hung suspended between
the floor and the roof, as thistledown, on a still summer’s day floats
in the air.
Even the dog, who thought that he was sitting on the floor, was
sitting in the air, several feet from the floor.

EVERY THING WAS FLOATING IN THE AIR.

This was a most remarkable state of things, and it is no wonder

that the travelers could not very soon get used to it.
 To feel oneself soaring like a balloon must certainly be a curious
sensation.
But these men expected all sorts of strange experiences, and so
this did not frighten them, and the nearer they came to the moon, the
more effect her gravity had upon them, and as the projectile
gradually turned its heaviest end towards the moon its inmates
gradually recovered their weight, and sat and stood like common
people.
After journeying still further they had another very strange
experience.
As they gradually neared the moon they found that they were also
revolving around it. This was very unfortunate. If this motion
continued, the result of their journey would be that their projectile
would become a lunar satellite—a moon’s moon. They would go
around and around forever, and never reach the moon or be able to
get back to the earth.
After a while they got around to the shadow side of the moon, so
that she was between them and the earth.
Then they were in total darkness excepting when they lighted their
gas-burner, and they could not keep the gas burning all the time, as
their supply was getting rather low.
But the darkness was not their chief trouble. It began to be very
cold. And then it got colder and still colder, until they thought they
should freeze into solid lumps. Their breath congealed so that it fell
in the form of snow about them, and the poor dog, shivering under a
cloak, lay upon the floor as cold as if he had been dropped into a
deep hole in an ice-berg.
They thought it must be still colder outside, and so they lowered a
thermometer through a small trap-door in the floor, and when they
drew it in the mercury stood at 218 degrees below zero!
That was a very fine thermometer, and it is a Frenchman who tells
this story.
 THE TRAVELERS ARE COLD.
At last they passed around the moon, and again found themselves
upon its sunny side. Then they were happy. Light and heat, after the
dreadful darkness and cold through which they had passed were
enough to make men happy, especially men so far away from home
and all the comforts and conveniences of civilized society.
 As they passed around the moon they had a fine opportunity of
observing the lunar landscapes. They were not so far away but that
with their glasses they could see the mountains and plains, and all
sorts of curious caves, and wonderful formations like forts and
castles, but which they knew to be nothing but great masses of the
moon’s surface, thrown up in these strange shapes by volcanic
action. It is probable that what is described in this story is very like
what the real surface of the moon must be.
After they had revolved some time they found that they were
getting farther and farther away from the moon, and this made them
suppose that they were moving in an elliptical orbit. They were much
discouraged by this idea, for they thought, and very justly too, that
there was now no chance of the moon’s drawing them towards itself,
so that they would fall upon its surface.
This they had hoped to do, and they did not expect to suffer from
the fall, for the attraction of the moon is so much less than that of the
earth that they thought they would descend rather gently on the
moon’s surface. But now there seemed to be no chance of their
getting there at all.
At last, however, they found that they were passing entirely out of
the line of the moon’s attraction, and after that they perceived plainly
that they were falling.
But not upon the moon. They were falling towards the earth!
This was dreadful. A fall of 240,000 miles! But they could not help
it, and down they went.
Out in the Pacific ocean there was a United States steamship,
taking soundings. The captain was astonished to find at the place
where they were sailing, about two hundred miles from the coast of
California, that the water was so deep that the longest sounding lines
would scarcely reach the bottom.
As he and his officers were discussing this matter, a distant
hissing sound was heard, like the escape of steam from a steam-
pipe. But it sounded as if it were high up in the air. It came nearer
and nearer and grew louder and louder, and as all eyes were turned
upwards towards the point from which the hissing seemed to come,
they saw what they thought was a great meteor, rapidly approaching
them from the sky.

THE NARROW ESCAPE OF THE STEAMER.

It seemed to be coming directly towards the ship. In a moment
more they saw plainly that it was coming straight down on the ship!
Before they had time to do anything, or even to give warning to
those who were below, it dashed into the sea just before the vessel,
carrying away the bowsprit in its furious descent.
Fortunately that was all the damage it did. Had the vessel been a
few yards farther in advance it would have been instantly sunk.
It was a most narrow escape, and everybody felt wonderfully
relieved when this great object, which looked like a ball of fire as it
came so rapidly through the air, sank hissing into the sea.
But the officers guessed what it was, when it had disappeared.
They had heard of the wonderful trip to the moon that had been
undertaken by the three adventurers, and they very sensibly
supposed that this must be the projectile that had fallen back upon
the earth.
When they had made up their minds about the matter, and this did
not take them long, they began to think what they should do. The
unfortunate men in the projectile might be yet alive, and measures
should instantly be taken to rescue them, if they were living, and in
any case, to raise the projectile and discover their fate.
But the vessel had no machinery by which this ponderous mass
could be drawn up from the bottom of the sea, especially as the sea
was at this spot about four miles deep.
So they determined to return as rapidly as possible to San
Francisco and obtain the necessary machinery for the work.
Fortunately they had been sounding and had a line out. So they
fastened a buoy to this line to mark the place, and steamed away at
the best speed of their vessel, for San Francisco.
When they reached this port the news was telegraphed to the
proper authorities, and, indeed, all over the country, and of course it
created a great excitement.
The officers of the Society which had been the means of sending
off these three men on their hazardous journey, went immediately to
work, and in a few days the steamer, supplied with diving machinery
and grappling irons, set out to return to the scene of the disaster.
There everybody worked rapidly and manfully. Diving bells were
lowered and everything that could be done was done, but although
they labored day and night, for several days no trace of the great
projectile could be found on the bottom of the ocean, after searching
carefully for a mile or two on every side of the buoy that had been
left when they returned to San Francisco.
At last they became convinced that further search was useless,
and much to the disappointment of everybody, and the intense grief
of the friends of the unfortunate men who had come out on the
vessel when it started on its errand of rescue, the Captain ordered
the steamer to return to San Francisco.
When they had been sailing homeward for an hour or so, a sailor
discovered, about a mile from the vessel, what seemed to be a large
buoy, floating on the surface of the sea.
In an instant every glass in the vessel was directed towards this
object. It was like a buoy, but it had a flag floating from the top of it!
The steamer immediately headed for it, and when they came near
enough everybody saw what it was.
It was the great projectile quietly floating on the waves!
The air which it contained had made it so buoyant that although it
probably sank to the bottom of the ocean in its rapid descent, it had
risen again, and was now riding on the surface of the ocean like a
corked bottle.
But were the men alive? This must be settled instantly.
In a very few minutes two boats were launched and were soon
speeding towards the floating projectile as fast as strong arms could
pull them.
When the first boat reached the great hollow iron cannon-shot they
saw that one of its windows, which was some distance above the
water, was open.
Two of the boat’s crew stood up and looked in.
Our three moon-travelers were quietly sitting inside playing
dominoes!
 TWO OF THE CREW LOOK IN.
The great depth of the ocean had broken their fall, and they were
all safe and uninjured. They knew some one would come for them,
and they were making themselves as comfortable as they could.
Of course they were speedily taken out of their iron house, in
which they had lived for nearly a month, and in which they had met
with such strange adventures and such narrow escapes.
Then with our three friends on board, the steamer started back for
San Francisco, where our adventurers were received with the wildest
enthusiasm, which indeed attended them during all their journey to
their homes in the Atlantic States.
And so ended this trip to the moon.
It was a very wonderful thing for any one to even imagine such a
journey as this, and I do not believe that any one but a Frenchman
would have imagined it.