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The Event of Meaning in Gadamer's Hermeneutics 1st Edition Carlo
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The Event of Meaning in Gadamer's Hermeneutics 1st Edition Carlo Davia
“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.
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The Event of Meaning in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics
Carlo DaVia and Greg Lynch
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The Event of Meaning in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics
Carlo DaVia and Greg Lynch
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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
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
‘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 selfshowing 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 meaningobjects 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 selfpresentation” (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 nonunderstanding. 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 meaningobject. 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 conception 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 ‘occasionsensitivity,’ the propensity of the meaning of a word or expression to change from one situation of its use to another. Nearly everyone acknowledges 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
It characterizes much of natural language, but it does not characterize language 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 independently of an occasion, then it would seem that meaning can never be shared across occasions. This would appear to make Gadamer’s strong occasionality 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 occasions 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 situated 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 structure 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 interpretation 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
corresponds to what is represented. Most readers of Gadamer have recognized that he rejects this conception of correctness. However, many have taken this to imply that he rejects the notion of correctness in interpretation 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 interpretation at all (TM, 415/GW 1:401). We argue that, rather than dismissing 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 meaningevent, 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 whenever we read something. Instead, finding the subject matter intelligible requires fulfilling what Gadamer calls the “fore-conception of completeness” (Vorgriff der Vollkommenheit), the expectation that what the text says will be internally coherent and at least plausibly true. It is this principle, 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 interpretation 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, understanding 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,
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 implication 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 original 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 information 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 meaning 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 multiplicity 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 historicized 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 discloses 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 understandings 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
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 determine 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 presentation 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 meanings of philosophical questions and statements. This, however, has caused some readers to criticize Gadamer for describing philosophy in such practical, situation-specific terms that he is left unable to distinguish it as a theoretical enterprise. Philosophy becomes nothing more than a form of practical reasoning. These critics are right that, on Gadamer’s view, philosophy 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 nevertheless 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 thinkingthings-through that constitutes genuine philosophical dialogue.
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 meaning” as one of the term’s definitions.
3 Of course, insofar as hermeneutics always presupposes semantics, nearly everything that has been written on Gadamer implies something about his view of meaning. 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 mistaken 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 inappropriate on Gadamer’s view. There may be texts that, for moral or other reasons, 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 embedded 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) presents 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-forthings-to-be that can be abstracted away from any particular communicative 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 language, 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
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Emperor T’ung-Chih, in accordance with precedent and the laws of the Dynasty. The text of this remarkable document is as follows:—
“I, your worthless servant, have heard that the fact of a nation being well governed does not necessarily preclude all possibility of anarchy, nor does a nation at peace dismiss altogether from mind the chances of violent disturbance; should anarchy and rebellion be regarded as possibilities too remote to merit a thought, it were idle and superfluous to advise the Sovereign of so perfect a State. To ask the Imperial wisdom to see danger where no real peril exists would be simply inviting evil omens.
“On a former occasion I, your guilty servant, wittingly incurred danger of death or imprisonment, because, in the heat of indignation, I dared to remonstrate with the Throne. At that time the Princes and Ministers about your Throne asked permission to subject me to a criminal enquiry, but His late Majesty T’ung-Chih was pleased to spare me, so that I neither suffered death by the headsman’s sword nor imprisonment, nor did I run the risk of further exciting the Imperial wrath by my evidence before a criminal court. Thrice have I deserved, without receiving, the penalty of death. Without desiring my forfeit life, it was granted me, so that my last few years have been, as it were, a boon at the hands of His late Majesty.
“But on the 5th day of the 12th Moon of the 13th year of T’ung-Chih the earth was rent and heaven itself was shaken by the great catastrophe, and on that day their Majesties the Empresses Dowager issued the following Decree: ‘The departed Emperor has mounted the Dragon and is become a guest on high, leaving no heir to the Throne. We are compelled to appoint Tsai T’ien, son of Prince Ch’un, to be heir to His Majesty Hsien-Feng, to enter on the great inheritance as the new Emperor. When to him an heir shall be born, he shall become son by adoption to the late Emperor T’ung-Chih.’
“I, your unworthy servant, wept bitterly as, reverently kneeling, I read this Decree. I cannot but feel, after most careful consideration, that the Empresses Dowager have doubly erred in appointing an heir to the Emperor Hsien-Feng and not to His late Majesty. For thus the new Emperor, being heir to His Majesty Hsien-Feng, enters upon the great heritage not, as he should, by mandate of His late Majesty T’ung-Chih, but by mandate of the Empresses. Hence the future succession must, as a matter of course, revert to the heir of the new Emperor, even though there should be no explicit instructions to that effect. But, as this Decree expressly ordains that this shall be so, it follows that a precedent will be established, whereby the great inheritance may pass by adoption.
“I, your unworthy servant, realise that it is no light matter for a loyal subject to refer to the future death of a Sovereign while that Sovereign is still alive, entitled to all his reverence and devotion. But, for more than two centuries, the ancestral tradition of our House-law has been observed that the Throne shall pass from father to son, and this law should be steadfastly maintained for ten thousand generations amongst those of us who recognise a common descent. Moreover, Prince Ch’un is a loyal statesman, justly revered by all as a virtuous Prince. His Memorial has inspired every one of us with fresh feelings of enthusiastic loyalty. His words are but the mirror of his mind; how could any falseness find therein a place? When I perused his Memorial, tears of joy irrepressible fell from my eyes. If ever the Prince should learn of this my humble Memorial, he may perchance be wroth at my perversity or pity my folly; at all events he will never blame me for endeavouring to stir up vain strife by my words.
“The new Emperor is of gentle disposition; from the Empress Dowager he had received the ‘precious inheritance’ and until his dying day he will naturally be of one mind with the Empresses in this matter. But in the Palace there are sycophants as well as honest men, and many conflicting
opinions. To take examples from history: at the beginning of the Sung Dynasty, even that great and good man the Grand Secretary Chao P’u, led the way in obeying the orders of the Empress Dowager Tu. Again, under the Ming Dynasty, a venerable servant of the State, the Grand Secretary Wang Chih, was ashamed that it should be left to a barbarian like Huang Kung (native of an aboriginal tribe in Kuangsi) to memorialise urging the lawful Heir Apparent’s succession to the Emperor Ching-T’ai, when no Chinese official dared to do so. If even virtuous men could act thus, what need to enquire about disloyal subjects? If such be the conduct of old servants, how shall we blame upstarts? To set aside settled ordinances may be bad, but how much worse is our case where no ordinances exist? We should therefore seek if perchance we may find some way out of this double error, whereby we may return to the right way. I therefore beg that the Empresses may be pleased to issue a second Decree explicitly stating that the great inheritance shall hereafter revert to the adopted son of His late Majesty T’ung-Chih, and that no Minister shall be allowed to upset this Decree, even though the new Emperor be blessed with a hundred sons. If, in this way, the succession be rectified and the situation defined, so that further confusion be hereafter impossible, the House-law of the present Dynasty will be observed, which requires that the Throne be handed down from father to son. Thus, to the late Emperor, now childless, an heir will be provided and the Empresses Dowager will no longer be without a grandson. And, for all time, the orderly maintenance of the succession will be ascribed to the Empresses, whose fame will be changeless and unending. This is what I, your guilty servant, mean, when I say that the double error which has been committed may yet serve to bring us back to the right way
“I, your most unworthy slave, had intended to memorialise on this matter when His Majesty died, and to present the Memorial through the Censorate. But it occurred to me that, since I had lost my post, I was debarred from addressing the
Throne. Besides, how grave a matter is this! If advice in such a matter be given by a Prince or a Minister, it is called the sage and far-reaching counsel of a statesman; but if it comes from a small and insignificant official it is called the idle utterance of a wanton babbler. Never could I have believed that the many wise and loyal statesmen of your Court could one and all regard this as a matter of no immediate urgency, dismissing it as a question unprofitable for discussion. I waited, therefore, and the precious moments passed, but none of them have moved in the matter
“Afterwards, having received renewed marks of the Imperial favour, and being again summoned to audience, I was granted the position of a Board Secretary, and placed on the Board of Appointments. This was more than four years ago; yet all this time apparently not one of all the Ministers of your Court has even given this grave matter a moment’s consideration. The day for His late Majesty’s entombment has now arrived, and I fear that what has happened will gradually pass from the minds of men. The time, therefore, is short, and the reasons which led me to delay hold good no longer. Looking upward, as the divine soul of His Majesty soars heavenward on the Dragon, wistfully I turn my eyes upon the Palace enclosure. Beholding the bows and arrows left behind on the Bridge Mountain,[36] my thoughts turn to the cherished mementoes of my Sovereign. Humbly I offer up these years of life that have been added unto me by His Majesty’s clemency; humbly I lay them down in propitiation of the Empresses Dowager, to implore from them a brief Decree on behalf of the late Emperor.
“But, on the point of leaving this world, I feel that my mind is confused. The text of this, my Memorial, lacks clearness; there are manifold omissions in it. It has ever been my custom to revise a draft twice before handing in a Memorial, but on this occasion I have not been able to make such careful revision. I, your unworthy servant, am no scholar like to the men of old; how, then, could I be calm and collected as they
were wont to be? Once there went a man to his death, and he could not walk erect. A bystander said to him ‘Are you afraid, sir?’ He replied, ‘I am.’ ‘If you are afraid, why not turn back?’ He replied, ‘My fear is a private weakness; my death is a public duty.’ This is the condition in which I find myself to-day. ‘When a bird is dying its song is sad. When a man is dying his words are good.’[37] How could I, your worthless servant, dare to compare myself with the sage Tseng Tzu? Though I am about to die, yet may my words not be good; but I trust that the Empresses and the Emperor will pity my last sad utterance, regarding it neither as an evil omen nor the idle plaint of one who has no real cause for grief. Thus shall I die without regret. A statesman of the Sung Dynasty has remarked: ‘To discuss an event before it occurs is foolhardy. But if one waits until it has occurred, speech is then too late, and, therefore, superfluous.’ Foolhardiness notwithstanding, it is well that the Throne should be warned before events occur; no Minister should ever have to reproach himself with having spoken too late. Heartily do I wish that my words may prove untrue, so that posterity may laugh at my folly. I do not desire that my words may be verified, for posterity to acclaim my wisdom. May it be my fate to resemble Tu Mu,[38] even though to imitate him be a transgression of duty. May I be likened, rather, to Shih Ch’iu, the sight of whose dead body proved, as he had hoped, an effective rebuke to his erring Prince. Thus may my foolish but loyal words be justified in the end.
“I pray the Empresses and Emperor to remember the example of Their Majesties Shun-Chih and K’ang-Hsi, in tempering justice with mercy: that they may promote peace and prosperity, by appointing only worthy men to public offices; that they may refrain from striving for those objects which foreigners hold dear, for by such striving they will surely jeopardise the future of our Middle Kingdom; that they may never initiate any of the innovations disdained by their ancestors, which would assuredly leave to posterity a heritage
of woe. These are my last words, my last prayer, the end and crown of my life.
P
“Having been a Censor, I venture thus to memorialise the Throne. But as my present official position does not permit of my forwarding this direct, I request the high officials of my Board to present it for me. As my name did not figure originally in the list of officials to represent my Board at the ceremonies preparatory to His late Majesty’s burial, I begged the Grand Secretary Pao Yün to allow me to be included in the list. Pao Yün could not have foretold my suicide, so that no blame can attach to him for being my sponsor. Under our enlightened Dynasty, how could anyone imagine a return to the ancient and happily obsolete practice of being buried alive with one’s Sovereign? But my grief is too great and cannot be restrained; for to-day my Sovereign returns, dragon-borne, to Heaven, and all the world weeps with me in woe unutterable.
“I have respectfully but fully explained my feelings in this question of the lawful succession to the Throne, and now, under the title of your guilty servant, I present this my Memorial.”
TZŬ HSI BECOMES SOLE REGENT
The days of mourning for T’ung-Chih being done, his remains disposed of as auspiciously as the Court of Astronomers could desire, and his ghost placated, thanks to Wu K’o-tu, by solemn promises on the part of his mother to provide him with a suitable and legitimate heir in due season, life in the Forbidden City settled down once more into the old grooves under the joint Regency of the Empresses of the Eastern and Western Palaces.
But before long the new Emperor, a nervous and delicate boy, became, all unconsciously, a thorn in the side of the woman who put him on the Throne. As he passed from infancy to boyhood, it was a matter of common knowledge and report in the Palace that he showed a marked preference for the Empress Tzŭ An, who, by her kind and sympathetic treatment, had won the child’s heart. In the innocence of his lonely youth he frequented therefore the Eastern Palace, while Tzŭ Hsi, whose pride could brook no rivals, even in the heart of a child, was compelled to look on, and to realise that the forming of the future ruler’s mind was in the hands of another woman. There were not lacking those who told her that her colleague, secretly and with ulterior motives, encouraged the boy to oppose and displease her. Under these conditions, it was inevitable that the young Emperor should gradually become a cause of increasing jealousy and friction between the two women.
I I K K
Tzŭ Hsi lived in these Apartments for some time after the death of T’ung-Chih.
Tzŭ Hsi undoubtedly resented the boy’s predilection as much as her colleague’s action in encouraging it. At Court, where everyone and everything is a potential instrument for intrigue and party faction, the young Emperor’s attitude could not fail to cause her grave concern. She was well aware that Tzŭ An could never become, of herself, a formidable rival, but should she hereafter enjoy the Emperor’s confidence and support, and instigate him to become the centre of a faction against her (which he did), there might be danger in the situation for herself. As the Emperor’s minority approached its end, it therefore became the more necessary for her to take all possible precautions. She had no intention of sharing the fate of that
Photo, Ogawa, Tokio.
Empress Consort of Ch’ien Lung who was banished to the “Cold Palace” and whose honours and titles were taken from her on charges of “wild extravagance, love of the theatre and insubordination to the Emperor’s mother.”
A further cause of friction occurred between the two Empresses Regent on the occasion of the Imperial progress to the Eastern tombs, in 1880, when the boy Emperor was nine years old. On this occasion, Tzŭ An, evidently prompted by Prince Kung to assert herself and her rights, insisted on taking precedence in all the ceremonies of the ancestral sacrifices at the Imperial Mausolea and at the prostrations which custom decrees shall be made before each of the “Jewelled Cities,” as the mounds are called which cover the Imperial grave chambers. When their Majesties arrived at the grave of Hsien-Feng, there was serious friction. Tzŭ An, as the senior Consort of the deceased monarch, claimed as her right the central position, at the same time relegating her colleague to the place on her right, leaving the place of honour on the left unoccupied. Not content with this, Tzŭ An went on to remind her Co-Regent that, where sacrifices to Hsien-Feng were in question, Tzŭ Hsi was entitled only to claim precedence as a senior concubine, her elevation to the position of Empress Mother having taken place after his decease. As a concubine, etiquette required her, during the sacrifice, to take a position on one side and slightly in the rear, while the vacant place of honour to Tzŭ An’s left belonged to the shade of Hsien-Feng’s first consort, who had died before his accession, but had been posthumously raised to the rank of senior Empress. Tzŭ Hsi, realising that this indignity was put upon her at the instigation of Prince Kung and the Princes of the Imperial family, had no intention of submitting, and peremptorily insisted upon taking the position to which her actual rank and authority entitled her. The quarrel was sharp but short. Tzŭ Hsi, as might have been expected, carried the day, but she felt that such a scene before the ancestral tombs, witnessed by a large entourage, was semi-sacrilegious and from every point of view unseemly. She had been made to lose face by the incident—clearly premeditated—and the fact had immediate
effect upon her subsequent actions and her relations with her colleague.[39]
At the time of this progress to the tombs, Jung Lu was in command of the Metropolitan Gendarmerie, entrusted with the duty of escorting their Majesties. Shortly after their return to Peking, however, he incurred her sharp displeasure by reason of conduct which Tzŭ Hsi was not likely to overlook, even in her chief favourite. Ever since the Jehol days of the Tsai Yüan conspiracy, and particularly during the crisis that followed the death of T’ung-Chih, this powerful Manchu had enjoyed her favour and confidence in an unusual degree, and as Comptroller of her Household, he had the right of entrée to the Forbidden City at all times. But in 1880, suffering no doubt from ennui induced by the inactivity of Court life, he committed the indiscretion of an intrigue with one of the ladies of the late Emperor’s seraglio. Information of the scandal was laid before Her Majesty by the Imperial tutor Weng T’ung-ho, between whom and Jung Lu there was never love lost. It was commonly rumoured at Court, after the event, that Tzŭ Hsi, leaving nothing to chance, had herself discovered the culprit in the women’s quarters of the Palace, a heinous offence. Be this as it may, Jung Lu was summarily, though quietly, deprived of all his posts, and for the next seven years he lived in retirement. In this case Tzŭ Hsi vindicated her pride at the expense of her own comfort and sense of security, and it was not long before she had reason to regret the absence of her most loyal and trusty adviser Amongst her courtiers she found none to replace him; she missed his wise counsel, courage and fidelity. But having once committed herself to the step of dismissing him, she was unwilling to lose face with him and with her Court by changing her mind. His removal, however, undoubtedly led to increased friction between herself and Tzŭ An, whom she suspected of being a party to Jung Lu’s liaison.
Finally, in March 1881, a serious quarrel took place between the two Empresses, on the subject of the influence which the Chief Eunuch Li Lien-ying had come to exercise, and the arrogance of his manner. Tzŭ An complained that this favourite and confidential servant of her colleague ignored her, setting her authority at nought,
so that she was mocked even by her own subordinates. She deplored and denounced the existing state of affairs, commenting unpleasantly on the notorious fact that the eunuch was openly known by the title of “Lord of nine thousand years,” a title which implied that he was but one degree lower than the Emperor (Lord of ten thousand years) and entitled to something approximating to Imperial honours.[40]
The quarrel on this occasion was exceedingly bitter, nor was any reconciliation subsequently effected between the Empresses. It is very generally believed, and was freely stated at the time that, incensed beyond measure and impatient of any further interference with her authority, Tzŭ Hsi brought about the death of her colleague, which was commonly attributed to poison. In the atmosphere of an Oriental Court such charges are as inevitable as they are incapable of proof or disproof, and were it not for the unfortunate fact that those who stood in the way of Tzŭ Hsi’s ambitions, or who incurred her displeasure, frequently failed to survive it, we should be justified in refusing to attach importance to the imputations of foul play raised on this and other occasions. But these occasions are too numerous to be entirely overlooked or regarded as simple coincidences. In the present instance, the Empress Tzŭ An fell ill of a sudden and mysterious sickness, and in the words of the Imperial Decree, she “ascended the fairy chariot for her distant journey” on the evening of the 10th day of the 3rd Moon. In accordance with prescribed custom, she drafted just before her decease a valedictory Decree which, as will be observed, touches hardly at all on the political questions of the day. These, even at the moment of her death, she appeared to leave, as by established right, to her strong-minded colleague. After referring to her position as Senior Consort of the Emperor HsienFeng and recording the fact that during his minority the young Emperor had done justice to his education (in which she had always been much interested), the Edict proceeds as follows:—
“In spite of the arduous duties of the State, which have fully occupied my time, I was naturally of robust constitution and had therefore fully expected to attain to a good old age and to
enjoy the Emperor’s dutiful ministrations. Yesterday, however, I was suddenly stricken with a slight illness and His Majesty thereupon commanded his physician to attend me; later His Majesty came in person to enquire as to my health. And now, most unexpectedly, I have had a most dangerous relapse. At 7 . . this evening I became completely confused in mind and now all hope of my recovery appears to be vain. I am fortyfive years of age and for close on twenty years have held the high position of a Regent of the Empire. Many honorific titles and ceremonies of congratulation have been bestowed upon me: what cause have I therefore for regret?”
At her request, and with that modesty which custom prescribes, the period of Imperial mourning was reduced from twenty-seven months to twenty-seven days. There is a human touch in the conclusion of this Decree which seems to preclude the conclusion that Tzŭ Hsi had any hand in its drafting, for it describes Tzŭ An as having been careful to “set a good example of thrift and sobriety in the Palace and to have steadily discountenanced all pomp and vain display in her share of the Court ceremonies.” As most of the charges levelled for many years against Tzŭ Hsi by Censors and other high officials referred to her notorious extravagance, this, and Tzŭ An’s last request for a modest funeral as the fitting conclusion to a modest life, were a palpable hit.
Tzŭ An was dead. The playmate of her youth, the girl who had faced with her the solemn mysteries of the Forbidden City, the woman who later, because of her failure to provide an heir to the Throne, had effaced herself in favour of the Empress Mother, her poor-spirited rival of many years—Tzŭ An would trouble her no more. Henceforth, without usurpation of authority, Tzŭ Hsi was free to direct the ship of State alone, sole Regent of the Empire.
And with the death of her colleague came the desire to be free from the restraints of advice given by prescriptive right of longstanding authority, the ambition to be the only and undisputed controller of the nation’s destinies, and acknowledged Head of the State. For many years—in fact, since the decapitation of her
favourite eunuch, An Te-hai, by Prince Kung[41] and her Co-Regent —she had been on bad terms with that Prince, and jealous of his influence and well-earned reputation for statesmanship. The manner in which, years before, she had taken from him his title of Adviser to the Government has already been described. Unable to dispense with his services, desirous of profiting by his ripe experience, especially in foreign affairs, she had borne with her Prime Minister grudgingly and of necessity. In 1884, however, she felt strong enough to stand alone, and the war with France (caused by the dispute as to China’s claims to suzerainty over Tongking) gave her an opportunity and an excuse for getting rid at one stroke of Prince Kung and his colleagues of the Grand Council.
The immediate pretext for their dismissal was the destruction of the Chinese fleet of junks by the French in the Min River, but Her Majesty’s real reason was that she believed that the Prince was intriguing against her with the young Emperor, and that he was to some extent responsible for a recent Memorial, in which several Censors had roundly denounced her for depraved morals and boundless extravagance.
The Decree in which she dismissed this able adviser of the Throne is in her best manner, displaying many of the qualities which explain this remarkable woman’s long and successful rule. The facts to which she refers have a direct and interesting connection with much subsequent history:—
“Our country has not yet returned to its wonted stability, and its affairs are still in a critical state. There is chaos in the Government and a feeling of insecurity amongst the people. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance that there should be competent statesmen at the head of affairs, and that our Grand Council should be an efficient pivot and centre of administration.
“Prince Kung, at the outset of his career, was wont to render us most zealous assistance; but this attitude became modified, as time went by, to one of self-confident and callous
contentment with the sweets of office, and of late he has become unduly inflated with his pride of place, displaying nepotism and slothful inefficiency. On occasions when we have urged the Grand Council to display zeal and singlehearted devotion to the State, he and his colleagues have ruthlessly stuck to their preconceived ideas, and have failed to carry out our orders, for which reason they have more than once been impeached, either on grounds of obstructiveness or general uselessness. It has even been said of them that their private lives are disreputable, and that they have dared to recommend persons for high office from improper and corrupt motives.
“The House-laws of our Dynasty are most severe, and if there were any truth in the accusations of treason that have been made against Prince Kung, we should not hesitate for a single moment to inflict upon him the extreme penalty of the law. We do not believe, however, that he can have dared to act in the manner suggested. We set these aside, therefore, and will deal only with the other charges to which we have referred, and for which there would appear to be good foundation. They are in themselves more than sufficient to cause the gravest injury to the State, and if we continue to treat the Prince with leniency, how shall we justify ourselves hereafter in the eyes of our glorious ancestors? We shall incur no small blame in the eyes of posterity, and when the day comes for the Emperor to take over charge of the Government there can be no doubt that he would be likely to fail, under such conditions, to shed lustre, by his reign, on the Dynasty.
“If we were to make public even one or two of the accusing Memorials that have reached us, it would be impossible for us, on grounds of privilege, to extenuate the Prince’s faults, and we should be forced to cashier several of our senior advisers. In the magnanimity of our heart we shrink, however, from any such drastic steps, being moved to deep compassion at the thought that Prince Kung and his
colleague, the Grand Secretary, Pao Yün, should have served us so long and now have come to deserve our stern censure and severe punishment. We are prompted to leniency by remembrance of the fact that Prince Kung suffers from a complication of diseases, while Pao Yün has reached an advanced old age. In recognition of their past merits we have, therefore, decided that their good fame may be left to them, and remain unsullied for the rest of their days. As a mark of our Imperial clemency we have decided to permit Prince Kung to retain his hereditary Princedom, together with all the emoluments thereof, but he is hereby deprived of all his offices, and the double salary which he has hitherto enjoyed is withdrawn. He is permitted to retire into private life and attend to the care of his health.
“As regards the Grand Secretary, Pao Yün, he also is allowed to retire from public life, retaining his present rank and titles. As for Li Hung-tsao,[42] who has been a member of the Council for many years, his narrow views and lack of practical experience have caused him to fail completely in his duties. Finally, Ching Lien, the President of the Board of War, seems to think that his duties are satisfactorily performed by adherence to a routine of procrastination, the man being devoid of the first elements of knowledge. Both these officials are hereby relieved of their posts, to be employed in lower positions hereafter Weng T’ung-ho, the President of the Board of Works, has only recently been appointed a member of the Council, at a time of serious complications, and has, so far, taken no active part in its proceedings. He therefore escapes censure or penalty. As a mark of our consideration we hereby remove him from his post on the Grand Council, but permit him to retain his position on the Board of Works, and he will continue his services as Tutor to the Emperor.”
“For a long time past we have been quietly observing the behaviour and general tendencies of Prince Kung and his colleagues, and we are quite convinced in our mind that it is useless to look to them for any activity or awakening of their
petrified energies. If they were retained in office, we firmly believe that they would end by incurring severe punishment by causing some really serious disaster to the State. For this reason we now content ourselves with mild censure from a sense of pity, as a measure of precaution. It is not because of any trivial misdemeanour, or because of the impeachment by Censors that we thus dismiss from office a Prince of the Blood and these high Ministers of our Government, nor is our action taken on any sudden impulse and without full consideration.”
As the result of this Decree, Prince Kung retired from the scene, to remain in unemployed obscurity until 1894, when, after the first disasters of the war with Japan, Tzŭ Hsi, older and wiser, turned to him once more for assistance. He never completely regained the influence with the Empress which he had enjoyed in the earlier days of the first Regency, but after his return to office until his death in 1898, his prestige, especially among foreigners, was great. Tzŭ Hsi, though she loved him not, was forced to admit that he had accepted and borne his degradation with dignity.
After the issue of the above Decree, Prince Kung was succeeded in office by Prince Li, the head of the eight Princely families and a descendant of a younger son of Nurhachu. With him were associated on the Grand Council, amongst others, the elder brother of Chang Chih-tung and Sun Yu-wen.[43] The latter was a bitter enemy of the Imperial Tutor, Weng T’ung-ho. In appointing him to the Council, Tzŭ Hsi followed her favourite tactics of creating dissension among her advisers and maintaining the equilibrium of her own authority as the resultant of their conflicting forces.
Her Majesty’s next step aroused a storm of opposition and criticism. She decreed that in all matters of urgency, the Grand Council, before advising the Throne, should confer with the Emperor’s father, Prince Ch’un, but added that upon the Emperor’s attaining his majority, she would issue further instructions on this subject. This was not only an entirely new and irregular departure, since it made the Emperor’s father de facto head of the executive,
but it implied the possibility of violation of the solemn pledges given to the nation in 1875, as to the provision of an heir to the Emperor T’ung-Chih. Fears were once more aroused in an acute form that Prince Ch’un might hereafter persuade his son to ignore the ancestral claims of the late Emperor, and thus constitute the house of Ch’un founders of a new line. The Prince would have great inducement to adopt this policy, as it would confer upon him and upon his wife (Tzŭ Hsi’s sister) Imperial rank during their lives and Imperial honours after their death. The reign of T’ung-Chih would in that case be practically expunged, going down to posterity dishonoured as the ignominious end of the senior branch of the Ta Ching Dynasty, and the Yehonala clan would become of paramount influence. A wide field would thus be left for future dissensions, treasons, stratagems and Court intrigues. In fact the position thus created would be somewhat similar to that which arose from the rivalry of the Houses of York and Lancaster in English history.
An Imperial Clansman, named Sheng Yü, and other scholars, memorialised in the most urgent terms praying the Empress to cancel this appointment and suggesting that if Prince Ch’un’s advice were really needed, it should be given to herself direct and not to the Grand Council. The writers advanced numerous arguments, all calculated to save the face of Prince Ch’un while preventing him from accepting the position. They doubted whether his health would stand the strain, and whether the duties of the post were consistent with his high calling; at the same time they foresaw that a post which practically conferred the powers of a Dictator must undoubtedly make him unpopular, a result which Her Majesty herself would be the first to deplore.
Besides, had not the Emperor Chia-Ch’ing declared (in 1799) that Princes of the Blood were not eligible for service on the Grand Council, except in cases of urgent and exceptional emergency?
“The truth is,” they concluded, “that a Prince of the Blood, by virtue of his position, cannot be liable to the same punishments as ordinary subjects, and for this reason he should not hold a Government office. Prince Kung has held
this high post, it is true, but this was merely temporary, and in any case, the power conferred upon him was much less than that which it is now proposed to confer upon Prince Ch’un. We therefore respectfully invite Your Majesty reverently to conform to the laws of the Dynasty, and to cancel the Decree conferring these functions upon Prince Ch’un.”
As final objections, the Memorialists observed that the Prince could not be expected to attend every morning at the Palace, nor could he usurp the Imperial prerogative by expecting the Grand Council to meet at his residence; and it would be irregular for the Censors to denounce any errors committed by a Prince of the Blood as head of the Council.
The Censor Chao Erh-hsün (an upright official who has since held office as Viceroy in Manchuria and in Ssŭ-Ch’uan) memorialised in the same sense, observing that the Grand Council would be superfluous if everything had to be referred to Prince Ch’un, whose position as father of the Emperor made him impossible for this post. “Why,” said he, “could not Her Majesty command the Prince to attend before her, whenever she needed his advice, and let him expound his views to her in person? There could be no objections to this course.”
To these remonstrances Tzŭ Hsi replied:
“There is no doubt that the sage decisions of former Emperors deserve to be treated with every consideration and respect, but it is to be observed that, ever since I assumed the Regency, I have been by circumstances compelled to confer regularly on confidential business with a Prince of the Blood. You must all be aware that this situation has been forced upon me owing to the exigencies of the times, and was none of my seeking. The Decree in which, some days ago, I appointed Prince Ch’un to be Adviser to the Council, had no reference to ordinary routine business, with which he has no concern, but only to urgent matters of State. I had not, and have not, any intention of giving him a definite appointment,
and he himself was most reluctant to accept at my hands even this advisory position; it was because of his repeated entreaties that I promised to issue further instructions in the matter upon the Emperor’s reaching his majority. The present arrangement is of a purely temporary nature. You cannot possibly realise how great and numerous are the problems with which I have to deal single-handed. As to the Grand Council, let them beware of making Prince Ch’un’s position an excuse for shirking their responsibilities. In conclusion, I wish that my Ministers would for the future pay more respect to the motives with actuate their Sovereign’s actions, and abstain from troubling me with their querulous criticisms. The Memorialists’ requests are hereby refused.”
Rescripts of this kind are curiously suggestive of Queen Elizabeth, and her manner of dealing with similar petitions from her loyal and dutiful subjects.
TZŬ HSI “EN RETRAITE”
In 1887 Kuang-Hsü completed his seventeenth year, and Tzŭ Hsi saw herself confronted by the necessity of surrendering to him the outward and visible signs of sovereignty. The change was naturally viewed with apprehension by those of her courtiers and kinsmen who for the last ten years had basked in the sunshine of her unfettered authority and patronage, whose places and privileges might well be endangered by a new régime. When, therefore, as in duty bound, she expressed a desire to retire from public life, it was not surprising that urgent petitions and remonstrances poured in, begging her to continue yet a little while in control of affairs, nor that she should finally allow herself to be persuaded. It was not until February 1889 that she definitely handed over the reins of government to the Emperor, on the occasion of his marriage to the daughter of her brother, Duke Kuei Hsiang.
Tzŭ Hsi was now fifty-five years of age. For nearly thirty years she had been de facto ruler of the Celestial Empire. She had tasted the sweets of autocracy, had satisfied all her instincts of dominion, and it seemed as if she were not unwilling to enjoy the fruit of her labours and to exchange the formal routine of the Forbidden City for the pleasures and comparative freedom of life at the Summer Palace, which was now in course of reconstruction. Always avid of movement and change, weary of the increasing toil of audiences and Rescripts, apprehensive, too, of the steadily increasing pressure of the earth-hungry Powers on China’s frontiers, she could not fail to be attracted by the prospect of a life of gilded leisure and recreation. Nor could she have remained on the Throne, Kuang-Hsü being alive, without an overt and flagrant act of usurpation for which, until he had been tried and found wanting, there was no possible justification. Certain writers, foreign and Chinese, have imputed to her at this
