Hermeneutic Calvinball versus modest digital humanities in philosophical interpretation

Abstract

In “Calvin and Hobbes,” the character Calvin invents the game of Calvinball. No two games of Calvinball are alike because the only stable rule of Calvinball is that the players make up the rules as they go along, and no rule (other than the one stable rule) can be used twice. Whether a player is winning at a particular game of Calvinball is thus definitionally indeterminate. In philosophy, we risk playing something like Calvinball. It’s often unclear what the rules are, whether there are rules, and who gets to make up the rules as we go along. Even in the more restricted domain of the history of philosophy—the focus of the current paper—it’s often unclear what the rules are, whether there are rules, and who gets to make them up as we go along. Some interpreters of, for instance, Nietzsche, insist on sticking to the letter of the text. Others, most notoriously Heidegger and his followers, insist that what’s most important about a philosopher like Nietzsche is not what he wrote but what he didn’t write. Just like in Calvinball, because people play by different rules and make it up as they go along, it can be hard to tell who is winning an interpretive argument. This paper proposes that digital humanities offers a modest way forward for interpreters who don’t want to play Calvinball. In particular, it is argued that digital humanities methods can be used (1) to set a default for the importance of various concepts, (2) to periodize a philosopher’s works and track the increase or decline in importance of various concepts across a philosopher’s career, and (3) to establish which conceptual connections should or should not be attributed to a philosopher. The value of this approach is demonstrated with a detailed investigation of Nietzsche on the functions of shame.