Will and desire along Modern Philosophy II

Let’s continue with our work on philosophy and text mining. Looking our last post (http://man.herm3tica.tv/will-and-desire-along-modern-philosophy/) we can confirm how each philosopher speaks from a different point of view. In this new post, we will analyze these difference trying to find out how they express the concepts of will and desire along the philosophers chosen. First, I share with you again the last plot we created, we are going to talk about it now.

Spinoza’s keywords

Quick looking at Spinoza’s results of analysis, we easily can affirm that his thought is deeply determined by a deductive point of view. Words like whatsoever, wherefore or contrariwise appear very high in the table -and after cleaning words like qed or corollary-. Also words like anyone, everyone or solely seem to refer to an expository reasonings. Then, we find words like emotion, affected, pleasurably, painfully which talk about sensations, the relation of the reason with the body. We can confirm this in a new plot where we represent the most frequent word bigrams in Spinoza’s Ethics:

Schopenhauer’s keywords

On Schopenhauer’s case, we find some similarities with Spinoza. For example, there are words related with reasonings such as principio, individuationis or even priori. However, I would highlight how Schopenhauer relates, these reasonings, with a complex process which goes from the abstract to the inner, from phenomenon and manifestation to an empirical objectification. To Schopenhauer, we live this as a suffering state. Of course, we should take in account we are considering just the first volume of Schopenhauer’s work, more introductory-. Let’s see on the Schopenhauer bigram plot how these ideas are represented:

Hegel’s keywords

If we look at Hegel, curiously, although he is always presented as an abstract an idealistic philosopher, we find that he has a lot of words related with the opposite: subjective, concrete, immediacy, subjectivity, actuality, particularity. Of course, we also have the others: universality, liberty, ethical, universal. Actually, the work of Hegel is plenty of contradictions and opposite movements. Also, we can see the term phase, as well as the opposites externality and implicit. Finally, we can find these contradictions on the Hegel bigram’s plot. However, the opposition is not so emotional than in Spinoza and Schopenhauer: instead the word body -as in Spinoza- now is a form that can be empty what is correlated with human.

Nietzsche’s keywords

Finally, we have Nietzsche’s case, which is the most different approach. Of course, we have to consider the work we chose of Nietzsche: Zarathustra is not exactly a philosophical essay, but almost a novel. What Nietzsche tries with this work is to move the conflict between the abstract and the concrete, previously treated as reasoning matter, to a problem already embodied. Zarathustra represents that enbodyment, always speaking directly to ye, to brethren, yourselves, your…

In this sense, is also interesting how he talks about the truth with an adverb –verily– as something that is happening; or how he introduces the pain and the suffer directly, with the scream of Zarathustra –ah!-. If we look at the bigram plot, we can also check how there is an important node on the thou; always with this coloquial and informal register which emphasizes closeness. On the other hand, we can see the great doubt of Zarathustra, between give and receive –spoke versus answered-. Actually, it seems he decided to give.

So this post try to explore relations between philosophy and text mining. You can find more uses of tidytext package – https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/tidytext/index.html – applied to text minig here: https://www.tidytextmining.com/preface.html. I hope that in this case, the application to philosophy was, at least, attractive.