Hermeneutic Calvinball versus modest digital humanities in philosophical interpretation

The paper begins by introducing the concept of "Calvinball," a game with constantly changing rules from the comic strip *Calvin and Hobbes*, as a metaphor for the inconsistencies and lack of established criteria in philosophical interpretation. The author highlights the challenges this poses, particularly within the history of philosophy, where different interpreters apply varying methodologies and focus on different aspects of a philosopher's work, leading to wildly divergent interpretations. This lack of consistency undermines the field's credibility and contributes to the broader attacks on the humanities. The paper proposes that digital humanities methods offer a solution by providing objective measures to analyze the frequency and relationships between concepts within a philosopher's work. These methods are introduced as a way to reduce subjectivity and inconsistency in interpreting philosophical texts.

The author reviews existing scholarship on Nietzsche's work, particularly regarding the emotions of resentment and shame. While Nietzsche wrote extensively about shame, the existing scholarship disproportionately emphasizes resentment. This discrepancy is attributed to a historical error in the translation of Nietzsche's work, where the term "ressentiment" was consistently italicized, mistakenly suggesting a French loanword instead of a naturalized German term. This misinterpretation has influenced generations of scholars, leading to an imbalance in the focus of research on these two important emotions.

The core methodology of the paper involves using digital humanities techniques to analyze Nietzsche's corpus. This includes: 1) Hierarchical clustering to group Nietzsche's works based on their linguistic similarity, revealing stylistic shifts across his career. 2) Lexical dispersion plots to visualize the distribution and frequency of terms relating to "shame" across his various works. 3) Network analysis to map the co-occurrence of concepts related to shame in Nietzsche's texts, thereby identifying key conceptual associations. This approach goes beyond simple word counts, focusing instead on the contextual relationships between concepts. The visualizations generated from these analyses provide a quantitative basis for further qualitative analysis and interpretation of Nietzsche’s work on shame.

The digital analysis reveals a significant discrepancy between the relative importance of shame and resentment in Nietzsche's own writings and in the secondary literature. While Nietzsche addresses shame far more frequently than resentment, scholarly work demonstrates the opposite bias. The analysis demonstrates Nietzsche's consistent engagement with shame throughout his career, contrary to prior assumptions. The network analysis reveals key conceptual connections between shame and other concepts in Nietzsche's philosophy such as conscience, contempt, laughter, solitude, and virtue. Based on these findings, the author proposes four functions of shame in Nietzsche's thought: 1) social regulation among near-equals, 2) the development of the "pathos of distance," a virtue associated with psychological nobility, 3) the potential for shame to be either virtuous or vicious depending on whether it targets malleable or fixed aspects of human nature, and 4) the use of "counter-shame" to critique those who misuse shame or fail to live up to their potential. The paper provides detailed close-readings of specific passages to illustrate these functions and support the interpretation derived from the digital analysis.

The findings of this study directly address the central research question by demonstrating how digital humanities methods can provide a more objective and nuanced understanding of philosophical texts. The paper shows how quantitative analysis can inform qualitative interpretation, leading to a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of Nietzsche's views on shame. The results challenge existing interpretations and highlight the limitations of relying solely on traditional close-reading methods. This study's significance extends beyond Nietzsche scholarship, advocating for the integration of digital humanities methods to enhance rigor and replicability across the field of philosophy and the humanities more generally. The ability to objectively analyze large datasets of textual data offers a potential solution to the issue of interpretative subjectivity, allowing for a more shared and evidence-based understanding of philosophical texts.

This paper successfully demonstrates the utility of modest digital humanities methods in addressing the challenges of subjective interpretation in philosophy. By analyzing Nietzsche's writings on shame, the author shows how quantitative data can be effectively integrated with traditional close-reading to produce a more robust and nuanced interpretation. The study's success suggests a potential shift towards a more rigorous and replicable approach to philosophical hermeneutics, potentially countering the current criticisms facing the humanities. Future research could apply these methods to other philosophical figures and explore the further development and refinement of these digital tools for textual analysis.

While the methodology offers a significant advance in objectivity, the study's findings are still dependent on the accuracy and completeness of the Nietzsche Source database used for the analysis. Future research could explore the potential biases inherent in the digital tools employed and examine how these might affect interpretations. Furthermore, the study focuses solely on Nietzsche's published and authorized works, neglecting the Nachlass, which could potentially alter the quantitative findings. However, the selection of published works is defended as focusing on Nietzsche's considered views as opposed to his less polished, developing ideas.