The Event of Meaning in Gadamer's

Hermeneutics 1st Edition Carlo Davia

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-event-of-meaning-in-gadamers-hermeneutics-1st-
edition-carlo-davia/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

The Event of Meaning in Gadamer's Hermeneutics 1st

Edition Carlo Davia

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-event-of-meaning-in-
gadamers-hermeneutics-1st-edition-carlo-davia/

The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer 1st Edition

Darren Walhof (Auth.)

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-democratic-theory-of-hans-
georg-gadamer-1st-edition-darren-walhof-auth/

Ductal Carcinoma in Situ of the Breast 1st Edition

Carlo Mariotti (Eds.)

https://textbookfull.com/product/ductal-carcinoma-in-situ-of-the-
breast-1st-edition-carlo-mariotti-eds/

The Fundamentals of Event Design 1st Edition Antchak

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-fundamentals-of-event-
design-1st-edition-antchak/
Hans Georg Gadamer The Hermeneutical Imagination 1st
Edition Jon Nixon (Auth.)

https://textbookfull.com/product/hans-georg-gadamer-the-
hermeneutical-imagination-1st-edition-jon-nixon-auth/

Meaning-centered psychotherapy in the cancer setting :

finding meaning and hope in the face of suffering 1st
Edition William S. Breitbart

https://textbookfull.com/product/meaning-centered-psychotherapy-
in-the-cancer-setting-finding-meaning-and-hope-in-the-face-of-
suffering-1st-edition-william-s-breitbart/

The meaning of partisanship 1st Edition White

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-meaning-of-partisanship-1st-
edition-white/

Adonis The Myth of the Dying God in the Italian

Renaissance 1st Edition Carlo Caruso

https://textbookfull.com/product/adonis-the-myth-of-the-dying-
god-in-the-italian-renaissance-1st-edition-carlo-caruso/

Biosemiotic Medicine Healing in the World of Meaning

1st Edition Farzad Goli

https://textbookfull.com/product/biosemiotic-medicine-healing-in-
the-world-of-meaning-1st-edition-farzad-goli/
“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 valu-
able 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 un-
earth 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, phenome-
nology, 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 es-
says in a range of venues, including Ergo, Philosophical Investigations,
Acta Analytica, and The Southern Journal of Philosophy.
Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy

Camus and Fanon on the Algerian Question

An Ethics of Rebellion
Pedro Tabensky

Wittgenstein’s Philosophy in 1929

Edited by Florian Franken Figueiredo

Henri Bergson and the Philosophy of Religion

God, Freedom, and Duration
Matyáš Moravec

Kripke and Wittgenstein

The Standard Metre, Contingent Apriori and Beyond
Edited by Martin Gustafsson, Oskari Kuusela, and Jakub Mácha

Between Wittgenstein and Weil

Comparisons in Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics
Edited by Jack Manzi

The Turing Test Argument

Bernardo Gonçalves

Wittgenstein and Nietzsche

Edited by Shunichi Takagi and Pascal F. Zambito

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
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
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 hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to 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
Typeset in Sabon
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
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 x
Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works by Gadamer xi

Introduction 1

1 Occasionality 16

2 Ideality 46

3 Interpreting Correctly 82

4 Originalism and the Fusion of Horizons 118

5 Aspects of Being 144

6 Essences 185

7 The Task of Philosophy 203

Bibliography 224
Index 237
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 Philo-
sophical Hermeneutics for the countless conversations over the years that
have shaped our thinking about Gadamer in more ways than we can rec-
ognize. 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

‘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 math-
ematical 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 her-
meneutic 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 out-
right 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, ‘seman-
tics’ 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 pos-
sible. 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

DOI: 10.4324/9781003281092-1
2 Introduction

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 hermeneu-
tics, 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 ini-
tially 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 con-
text-dependent, on the relationship between literal and metaphorical
speech, and on the relationship of meaning to truth. These topics are com-
mon in Gadamer’s work, and he does not treat them as peripheral or sec-
ondary 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 interpreta-
tions 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
 Introduction 3

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 reputa-
tion 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 simultane-
ously 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 synop-
tic 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 understand-
ing 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 under-
stand 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
4 Introduction

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 ten-
dency—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 herme-
neutics 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 “cover-
ing” 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 per-
formance, 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, with-
out 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
 Introduction 5

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, seem-
ingly contradictory, aspects of Gadamer’s thought. He settles on the con-
clusion 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 “dou-
ble 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 psy-
chological 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, trans-
lation 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
6 Introduction

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 utter-
ing 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 redemp-
tive 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 accom-
plished 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 discus-
sion of the family budget with your spouse all accomplish quite different
 Introduction 7

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 tradi-
tional 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 rela-
tions of representation or signification, Gadamer thinks of the world,
understanding, and language as related to meaning by way of participa-
tion. 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 rea-
son, 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 sub-
ject 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 reject-
ing 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 open-
ness (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
8 Introduction

of the thing, it is not for that reason automatic or effortless. On the con-
trary, in its openness understanding “has its own rigor: that of uninter-
rupted 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 lan-
guage 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 mat-
ter 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 participa-
tion in events of meaning. When Gadamer, for example, claims that the
world “offers itself to be understood,” he is not saying that some entity,
 Introduction 9

‘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 under-
standing. 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 expres-
sion, 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)
10 Introduction

as an example of something “pre-linguistic” (vorsprachlich) (TM, 573/GW

2:204, emphasis added).16 As a result, Gadamer’s claims about the linguis-
ticality (Sprachlichkeit) of human experience have struck some commenta-
tors 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 tradi-
tional 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 mean-
ing, 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 inter-
pretation and the role of original context in limiting acceptable interpreta-
tions—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 assert without winking that it is being itself—not a
mere appearance of it or a mere being-for-us—that makes itself intelligibly
present in the events of meaning in which finite knowers participate.
Chapter 7 closes the book by considering how Gadamer’s event semantics
informs his account of the proper aims and scope of philosophy. Let us say
a bit more about each of these chapters individually.
Chapter 1 outlines Gadamer’s central argument in support of his con-
ception of meanings as events: his analysis of the occasionality of language.
‘Occasionality’ is the term Gadamer and other early phenomenologists use
to describe what is now called ‘context-dependence’ or ‘occasion-
sensitivity,’ the propensity of the meaning of a word or expression to
change from one situation of its use to another. Nearly everyone acknowl-
edges that at least some linguistic expressions are occasional in this sense,
but most philosophers of language, both in Gadamer’s day and in our own,
contend that occasionality is a merely accidental feature of language.18
 Introduction 11

It characterizes much of natural language, but it does not characterize lan-

guage as such, and so it can always be eliminated in principle through
semantic analysis. In contrast to this, Gadamer claims that occasionality
constitutes “the very essence of speaking” (SH, 88/GW 2:179) and thus
cannot be eliminated through any amount of analysis, explication, or
translation. Through a phenomenological account of the role that context
plays in giving determinate content to what one says, Gadamer argues that
meaning can exist only when it is embedded in a wider conversational and
social situation. To try to separate meaning from any such situation, to
consider it as an isolated, self-subsistent object, is to render it meaningless,
incapable of presenting the world in any determinate way. This means that
the occasionality that characterizes natural language, far from being a
defect, is a necessary prerequisite of its being able to mean anything at all.
It is on this point, we note, that Gadamer’s affinity with Ludwig Wittgenstein
and the ordinary language tradition of philosophy—an affinity that
Gadamer himself notes repeatedly in his work—primarily consists. Both
oppose attempts to construct an ‘ideal’ or ‘logically perfect’ language by
pointing to the essential role that context plays in constituting meaning.
Chapter 2 responds to a significant worry raised by Gadamer’s claim
that language is essentially occasional: if meaning cannot exist indepen-
dently of an occasion, then it would seem that meaning can never be shared
across occasions. This would appear to make Gadamer’s strong occasion-
ality thesis a complete non-starter, especially in hermeneutics, where the
central phenomena to be examined are precisely cases of understanding
across historical and cultural distance. The crux of Gadamer’s response to
this concern is to argue that meaning-events are capable of realizing an
“ideality” whereby they “detach” themselves from the particular occa-
sions on which they are first expressed. This detachment does not allow
meaning to float free from occasions; the idea, rather, is that meaning exists
only in and through the plurality of different occasions on which it is
understood. Like a work of performing art or a festival, meaning is neither
a timeless object nor a singular event that occurs only once. Rather, it
recurs throughout an indefinitely large array of different, historically situ-
ated occasions of understanding, and it is only in this recurrence that it
exists at all. Meaning possesses this ideality and repeatability when, and to
the extent that, the language in which it takes shape has the unified struc-
ture that Gadamer, in his later work, calls a “text.”
In Chapter 3 we turn to the question of normativity in interpretation—
that is, the question of what marks the difference between a correct inter-
pretation of a text and an incorrect one. Philosophers have traditionally
conceived of this in terms of correspondence. To interpret is to represent
something or someone as having expressed a certain meaning, and the
interpretation is correct just to the extent that the representation
12 Introduction

corresponds to what is represented. Most readers of Gadamer have recog-

nized that he rejects this conception of correctness. However, many have
taken this to imply that he rejects the notion of correctness in interpreta-
tion altogether. While understandable, this reading is difficult to square
with Gadamer’s writings. Gadamer discusses interpretive correctness
(Richtigkeit) repeatedly in his work, and he even goes so far as to claim
that an interpretation must aim at correctness if it is to count as an inter-
pretation at all (TM, 415/GW 1:401). We argue that, rather than dismiss-
ing the notion of correctness in interpretation, Gadamer reconceives it in
light of his event semantics. For Gadamer, when we interpret a text, we are
not aiming to represent a meaning-object but to participate in a meaning-
event, and our interpretation is correct just to the extent that we achieve
this aim. Since meanings are events in which a text’s subject matter becomes
intelligibly present to us, this does not happen as a matter of course when-
ever we read something. Instead, finding the subject matter intelligible
requires fulfilling what Gadamer calls the “fore-conception of complete-
ness” (Vorgriff der Vollkommenheit), the expectation that what the text
says will be internally coherent and at least plausibly true. It is this princi-
ple, not correspondence to a pre-given meaning-object, that provides the
standard of correct interpretation on Gadamer’s view. One has interpreted
correctly to the extent that one has found the most coherent and plausible
reading that the text will bear. Far from entailing that anything goes, we
argue that this criterion places greater normative constraint on interpreta-
tion than more traditional accounts of correctness, since it demands that
interpreters be radically open to what the text has to say.
In Chapter 4 we consider the implications of Gadamer’s event semantics
for his relationship to originalism: the view that the aim of interpretation
is to recover a text’s ‘original meaning.’ It is relatively uncontroversial that
Gadamer rejects any straightforward form of originalism, yet many of his
readers have supposed that his celebrated notion of a “fusion of horizons”
implies something like a moderated version of this view. On this reading,
while interpretation does not simply aim to recover the meaning a text
would have expressed in its original context, neither does it aim simply to
discover what it means in the interpreter’s own context. Instead, under-
standing involves, in some way or another, bringing these two meanings
together into a new unity. We argue that this interpretation of the fusion of
horizons is not only out of step with Gadamer’s wider project—including
his event semantics—it also faces a number of philosophical and dialectical
difficulties. In its place we offer an alternative reading according to which
the fusion of horizons is not concerned with the text’s original meaning or
original context at all, but rather with the ideal subject matter of which the
text speaks. So understood, the fusion of horizons does nothing to soften
the anti-originalist view that Gadamer consistently expresses in his work,
 Introduction 13

namely that the aim of interpretation is to discover what the text says to
us, not to reconstruct what it said to some past audience. This does not
imply, however, that information about the historical situation in which a
text was produced is irrelevant to interpretation, and appreciating
Gadamer’s event semantics helps us see why this is the case. One implica-
tion of the idea that language is irreducibly occasional is that there is an
essential difference between knowing a language and knowing the meaning
of something communicated in that language. Information about the origi-
nal historical situation in which a text was composed is typically necessary
for the first sort of knowledge, and thus it is, at least in most cases, an
indispensable preparation for interpreting a text. But to gather such infor-
mation is not yet to encounter the text’s meaning—not even its ‘original’
one. Interpretation itself begins only when we use our linguistic knowledge
to allow the text to address us.
In Chapter 5 we shift our attention from the relationship between mean-
ing and understanding to that between meaning and the world. On
Gadamer’s view, what becomes present in an event of meaning is the world
itself, not a mere appearance or a reality-for-us. As he puts it, “The multiplic-
ity of … worldviews does not involve any relativization of the ‘world.’
Rather, what the world is is not different from the views in which it presents
itself” (TM, 464/GW 1:451). At the same time, however, Gadamer insists
that human understanding never grasps more than an “aspect” of the
world. We could therefore call Gadamer an “aspectival realist.” It is not
immediately obvious, however, how to square these two dimensions of his
thought. His interpreters have employed two basic strategies. Some adopt a
schematistic reading that sees understanding as arising from the application
of a conceptual scheme to an underlying reality; others employ a holist
reading that seeks to make sense of aspects as parts of the larger whole that
is reality itself. Neither reading, we argue, succeeds in holding the two sides
of Gadamer’s position together. Each secures aspectivalism only at the
expense of realism, and so ends up depicting Gadamer as a sort of histori-
cized Kantian. In contrast to these readings, we argue that Gadamer’s
aspectival realism can be properly understood only in light of his event
semantics. Understanding is aspectival because the self-presentation of the
world is essentially occasional and thus always occurs in a different way. At
the same time, however, since the being of a thing is realized only in and
through these self-presentations, what our occasional understanding dis-
closes is nothing other or less than the thing itself. In other words, Gadamer
avoids the Kantian distinction of appearances and things-in-themselves
because, on his view, the world itself is aspectival, not just our understand-
ings of it.
Chapter 6 narrows in on a particular dimension of being that can come
to presentation in an event of meaning: essences. This will seem surprising
14 Introduction

to interpreters who read Gadamer as renouncing essentialism. To others it

will seem to vindicate their criticisms of Gadamer as a “closet essentialist.”
Neither response is without warrant, since Gadamer’s aspectivalism can
seem at odds with the traditional view of essences. If being is aspectival,
and so always bound to a particular, contingent occasion, then it would
seem that essences—the sets of universal attributes belonging to something
on any occasion—are impossible. In this chapter we argue that Gadamer is
an avowed essentialist and that his commitment to essences is not, in fact,
at odds with his event semantics. We begin by clarifying essentialism as any
theory that regards essences as causes explaining why things necessarily
are the way they are. We then show that Gadamer is, indeed, an essentialist
in this sense. For Gadamer, however, questions about essences, like all
questions, are occasional. They have context-specific contours that deter-
mine what will count as a satisfactory answer. Questions of essence are
shaped in particular by what we call the “conceptual breakdown” that
prompted them, and the correct philosophical account will be the one that
rectifies that breakdown. Every such occasion therefore brings to presenta-
tion a different aspect of a thing’s essence. When we see Gadamer’s view
for what it truly is, we better understand not only Gadamer’s place in the
tradition of essentialism, but also why his place can be tricky to locate.
Finally, in Chapter 7 we consider how Gadamer conceives of the task of
philosophy in light of his event semantics. Gadamer’s central claim that all
meaning is shaped by the particular situation applies no less to the mean-
ings of philosophical questions and statements. This, however, has caused
some readers to criticize Gadamer for describing philosophy in such practi-
cal, situation-specific terms that he is left unable to distinguish it as a theo-
retical enterprise. Philosophy becomes nothing more than a form of
practical reasoning. These critics are right that, on Gadamer’s view, phi-
losophy is similar to practical reasoning in a number of respects, and not
least on account of its also being motivated by the particular concerns and
interests of the inquirer. But despite these similarities, Gadamer neverthe-
less sees a real distinction between philosophy and practical reasoning. The
former is unique in that it is motivated by breakdowns in our concepts, and
thus it issues in reflection on the essences of things rather than deliberation
about how to act. We close the chapter by considering how this conception
of philosophy shapes Gadamer’s criticism of Wittgenstein’s philosophical
‘quietism,’ that is, his claim that philosophy’s only legitimate role is to free
us from the tangles that result when language is misused. Gadamer argues
that this overly reductive picture arises from Wittgenstein’s failure to
appreciate the role of language in the ever-ongoing transformation of our
social institutions and practices. This blind spot leaves Wittgenstein unable
to recognize the possibility of—and need for—the sort of shared thinking-
things-through that constitutes genuine philosophical dialogue.
 Introduction 15

Notes
1 See especially SH, 82–94/GW 2:174–83.
2 The first entry for ‘semantics’ in Merriam-Webster, for example, is simply “the
study of meanings.” Similarly, the OED lists “a theory or description of mean-
ing” as one of the term’s definitions.
3 Of course, insofar as hermeneutics always presupposes semantics, nearly every-
thing that has been written on Gadamer implies something about his view of mean-
ing. Our claim here is that it is only rarely that commentators have addressed those
implications explicitly, and even then it is typically only in passing. Those that do
address it explicitly include Gander, “Gadamer: The Universality of Hermeneutics,”
138–9; Lucas, Jr, “Philosophy, Its History, and Hermeneutics,” 177–8; Risser,
Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other, ch. 6; Weberman, “Is Hermeneutics
Really Universal?,” 49; Weinsheimer, “Meaningless Hermeneutics?”
4 As should be clear from this, we think that Michael Dummett is simply mis-
taken when he claims that “despite Gadamer’s great interest in the concept of
understanding, he manifests no interest in the correlative concept of meaning”
(Dummett, “Gadamer on Language,” 90).
5 Perhaps the most well-known example of this is Jürgen Habermas’s claim that
Gadamer “urbaniz[es] the Heideggerian landscape” (Habermas, “Urbanizing
the Heideggerian Province”). See also Bernasconi, “Bridging the Abyss”;
Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics; Gallagher, Hermeneutics and Education, 9–11;
Lammi, “Gadamer’s ‘Correction’ of Heidegger.”
6 Weinsheimer, “Meaningless Hermeneutics?” 158.
7 Weinsheimer, “Meaningless Hermeneutics?” 163–4.
8 W.V.O. Quine, who clearly does wish to eschew the notion of meaning, makes a
similar observation about how the term has traditionally been used: “For the theory
of meaning the most conspicuous question is as to the nature of its objects: what
sort of things are meanings? They are evidently intended to be ideas, somehow—
mental ideas for some semanticists, Platonic ideas for others” (“Two Dogmas,” 22).
9 See also TM, 163–4, 444, 488/GW 1:169, 431, 476.
10 See Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 5. This connection, we may note,
is not an extrapolation. Gadamer cites Austin in a footnote to the passage just
quoted.
11 For examples see TM, 159/GW 1:166, TI, 158/GW 2:330, and TM, 486/GW
1:474, respectively.
12 Hans-Helmuth Gander recognizes this point, although he does not flesh it out
in much detail. As he puts it: “In a decisive manner, Gadamer sets being (Sein),
presentation, language and comprehensibility in a constitutive relation to each
other, so that any particular entity achieves its being only in understanding”
(Gander, “Gadamer: The Universality of Hermeneutics,” 139).
13 It is worth noting that these other ways of engaging a text are not always inap-
propriate on Gadamer’s view. There may be texts that, for moral or other rea-
sons, we ought not open ourselves up to.
14 Gadamer, “A Look Back over the Collected Works and Their Effective History,”
420–2.
15 Gadamer, “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics,” 100/GW 7:5.
16 See also Gadamer, “Boundaries of Language,” 9/GW 8:350.
17 For example, see Vilhauer, “Verbal and Nonverbal Forms of Play.”
18 See Recanati, Literal Meaning, 1–4 for a helpful overview of the debate.
1 Occasionality

Gadamer’s event semantics ascribes to meaning a distinctive structure of

unity-in-diversity. On the one hand, as an event a meaning is always embed-
ded in the particular circumstances in which it occurs, and thus it always
occurs differently. On the other hand, since meanings are recurrent events,
it is possible for the same meaning to exist in and through these diverse
episodes. Our aim in this chapter and the next is to articulate this seemingly
paradoxical account of the nature of meaning and to identify the reasons
that motivate it. We will take up the unity side in Chapter 2, where we will
discuss Gadamer’s conception of the “ideality” of meaning. Our focus in
this chapter will be on the diversity side, on the idea that meaning always
happens differently owing to the different circumstances in which it occurs.
This diversity, Gadamer contends, is rooted in the fact that meanings are
not merely communicated in particular concrete circumstances; they are
partially constituted by these circumstances. His claim is that one cannot
separate the way that a meaningful item (like a linguistic expression) pres-
ents the world to be from the situation in which it presents it to be that
way. Meaning can be determinate (which is to say, it can be meaning at all)
only when embedded in a wider context. This thesis constitutes Gadamer’s
chief objection to traditional object semantics. If Gadamer can make good
on it, then he will have dealt the theory a decisive blow. For the idea that
Gadamer here aims to undermine—that of a stable, self-contained way-for-
things-to-be that can be abstracted away from any particular communica-
tive situation—just is the traditional idea of a meaning-object. Showing
that meanings are embedded in situations, therefore, is the key first step in
paving the way for Gadamer’s alternative conception of meanings as events.
This conception of meaning yields a corresponding conception of lan-
guage, one that in Anglophone semantics has come to be called ‘radical
contextualism.’ Radical contextualism is defined by two related claims.
The first is that every linguistic expression, not just a special class of them,
is context-sensitive in the sense that what the expression means depends in
part on the circumstances in which it is employed. Second, radical

DOI: 10.4324/9781003281092-2
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Chinese
pictures
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Chinese pictures

notes on photographs made in China

Author: Isabella L. Bird

Release date: October 27, 2023 [eBook #71968]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Cassell and Company, 1900

Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at

https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHINESE

PICTURES ***
the tb
 CHINESE PICTURES

Notes on Photographs
Made in China

BY
MRS. J. F. BISHOP
F.R.G.S., etc.

CASSELL AND COMPANY, Limited

London, Paris, New York & Melbourne
1900. All Rights Reserved
INTRODUCTION.
This little book is the outcome of talks with Mrs. Bishop over some of
the photographs which were taken by her in one or other of her
journeys into and across China. Some of the photographs have
already appeared in her published works, “The Yangtze Valley and
Beyond” and “Korea and Her Neighbourhood” (2 vols., Murray). The
notes were, in substance, dictated by Mrs. Bishop. It is hoped they
contain some real information on the people, their surroundings, and
habits which, though slight in form, may be helpful to a better
understanding of a very difficult problem.
According to our newspaper press to-day, the Chinese are simply
cruel barbarians. According to Mrs. Bishop, when you know them
they are a likeable people—and she has formed this opinion in spite
of the fact that, in their deeply-rooted hatred of the foreigners, they
twice attacked her with violence. A real understanding of the people
is for us, with our different modes of thought, most difficult to arrive
at; but we shall not advance towards it by accepting all the evil
reports and shutting our ears to the good ones. That the problem of
China is, and will for some time continue to be, the most interesting
question to the rest of the world is certain. The future of its people is
all unknown, but there are in it possibilities which make it a terror to
all other nations.
ERRATA.
The illustrations on p. 79 and p. 81 have been transposed. The
former represents “The Tablet of Confucius,” the latter, “The Altar of
Heaven.”

Chinese Pictures.

[Transcriber’s Note: this error has been corrected.]

CONTENTS.
PAGE
The Private Entrance to the Imperial Palace, 8
Peking

The Entrance to the British Legation 10

Entrance to the College of the Student 12

Interpreters

The State Carriage of the British Legation 14

The Great Imperial Stone Road from Peking to 16

Chengtu, the Capital of Sze Chuan

A Mule Cart 18

A Manchurian Family Travelling 20

Carriage by Bearers 22

A Traveller Arriving at an Inn in Manchuria 24

Carriage of Merchandise 26

The Mode of Carrying Oil and Wine 28

Wheelbarrow Traffic on the Chengtu Plain 30

The Wheelbarrow of North China 32

A Small Houseboat on the Yangtze Kiang 34

A Foot Boat Found in Central China 36

Hsin Tan Rapid on the Yangtze River 38

A Boat on the Min River, Used for Running the 40

Rapids

Part of a Fringe of Junks or River Boats at 42

Wan Hsien

The Bridge of Ten Thousand Ages, Foochow 44

A Bridge at Wan Hsien of the Single Arch Type 46

The Bridge of Mien Chuh Sze Chuan 48

A Simple Country Bridge 50

A Dragon Bridge 52

The Zig-zag Bridge of Shanghai 54

The Garden of the Guild of Benevolence, 56
Chung King

A Burial Charity 58

A Baby Tower, Foochow 60

Bottle Seller and Hospital Patient 62

The Dying Coolie 64

The Mode of Sepulchre throughout Southern 66

China

Coffins Kept Above Ground 68

The Temple of the God of Literature at Mukden 70

The Temple of the Fox, Mukden 72

Wayside Shrines 74

The Ficus Religiosa 76

The Altar of Heaven 78

The Tablet of Confucius 80

A Porcelain-fronted Temple on the Yangtze 82

Child Eating Rice with Chopsticks 84

Fort on the Peking Wall 86

Another Fort on the Wall of Peking 88

Colossal Astronomical Instruments on the 90

Peking Wall

Chien Mun Gate 92

The Gate of Victory, Mukden 94

The West Gate of Kialing Fu 96

The West Gate of Hangchow 98

The Gate of a Forbidden City 100

Silk Reeling 102

A Typical Entrance to a House 104

The Guest Hall in a Chinese House, Wan Hsien, 106

Sze Chuan

A Chinese Village 108

A Farmhouse in the Hakka Country, Southern 110

China

A Market Place or Market Street in Sze Chuan 112

The Cobbler 114

Carrying Liquid Manure to the Fields 116

The Marriage Chair 118

Mode of Carrying Cash and Babies 120

A Pai-fang, or Widow’s Arch 122

Two Soldiers of Sze Chuan 124

Opium Culture Encroaching on the Rice Lands, 126

Sze Chuan
THE PRIVATE ENTRANCE
TO THE
IMPERIAL PALACE, PEKING.

A subject of considerable interest, owing to the mystery

surrounding the members of the Imperial Family. The photograph
was taken from the wall of the Purple or Forbidden City, in which
only the Imperial Family and their entourage have the right to dwell.
The building in the centre, which is roofed with yellow tiles, is
supposed to be the residence of the Emperor, but where he does
actually reside remains a mystery. The entrance to the Palace is
through the arches in the building on the left.