HoP 456 - Touch Me With Your Madness - Cervantes’ Don Quixote
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Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Touch Me With Your Madness, Cervantes Don Quixote.

I've lost count of the number of authors who sounded a triumphalist note in the 15th and 16th centuries. The age of darkness was over and all of Europe was glorying in the rebirth of art, literature, science, and philosophy that still gives the Renaissance its name. It would have been outright insanity to look back regretfully to the glories of the medieval past, right?

Well, exactly. It's this particular form of craziness that drives the plot of Don Quixote, the sprawling and pioneering novel that makes its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the only plausible rival to Shakespeare for the title of the greatest literary figure in Europe around the turn of the 17th century. As if to invite us to compare them, Cervantes and Shakespeare both died in 1616, probably only 11 days apart.

There are indeed resonances between them, especially due to the self-referentiality and self-awareness of both authors. Revantes, who was a playwright as well as a novelist, echoes the all-the-world's-a-stage idea by comparing the world to a theatrical performance. Much as Hamlet contains a play within a play, Don Quixote embeds shorter stories within its larger story. One of those interpolated tales was turned into a play that was put on at the Globe Theatre by Shakespeare's troupe.

Despite those parallels, the Elizabethan work that is most comparable to Don Quixote might be Spencer's Fairy Queen, which is a narrative rather than a play, and which reflects, with ironic distance, on chivalric literature and its ambiguous relationship to Christian ethics.

It is thanks to the assiduous collecting and reading of such literature, tales of noble and courageous knights who dedicate their heroic deeds to chaste and beautiful ladies, that has already driven Don Quixote mad at the beginning of Cervantes's novel. I call The Fairy Queen a narrative and Don Quixote a novel in recognition of the oft-made claim that Cervantes's work is the first modern novel or the first work of modern fiction.

One reason to make this claim is that it reflects certain social developments we associate with modernity, like economic ones. I'll come back to this. But the main point is what I already mentioned: the way that Don Quixote is aware of and calls attention to its own fictionality, and even to the nature of fiction itself. This is also a big part of what makes it of interest to us from a philosophical point of view. Pioneering though it may be, the book does fit snugly within its historical context.

Cervantes studied with a humanist scholar in Spain, imbibing the Erasmian spirit that had by this time come to Iberia. He then went to Italy, the home of humanism, in his twenties. So his literary gamesmanship can be connected to the same tendency in Erasmus and other humanist authors. A particularly tempting comparison is to Erasmus' own Praise of Folly.

one might see don quixote as embodying the message of that book since it's his own folly that makes him such an appealing and perhaps even admirable character his gift of madness allows him to see quotidian things as marvellous taking windmills for giants and a barber's shaving-bowl for the priceless helmet of mambrino

In general, it's a book where things are turned upside down and back to front. Ugly peasant girls are transformed into beautiful ladies, taverns into castles, and Quixote's faithful Sancho Panza from a lowly servant into the governor of an island, all through the alchemical magic of fervently believing one thing to be something else. This idea is already conveyed in the very title Don Quixote. I mean, the title of the man, not the novel.

He is at first Alonso Quijada, or maybe Quesada, or as it says at the end of the book, Quixano. Characteristically, Cervantes tells us that there is some disagreement about his real original name, conveying that the novel has only imperfect access to the facts it is recounting, facts which are, of course, entirely invented.

Having read too many tales of chivalry, Alonso decides to adopt the name Don Quixote, even though his social status does not give him the right to style himself as a Don, something flagged later on in the book. He renames his old horse, Rosinante, which means something like former old nag. Through simple acts of rechristening, both he and his steed have been turned into characters worthy of grand adventure.

Similarly, Quixote arbitrarily decides that a girl in a nearby village is to be called Dulcinea, and insists that she is the most beautiful woman in the world. Don't deny this or even ask to see her so you can decide for yourself, or Quixote will challenge you to a duel.

In the second part of the work, published ten years after the first, in 1615, Cervantes puts a further spin on the theme by having Sancho convince Quixote that an ugly peasant is in fact Dulcinea, but that an enchanter has cast a spell preventing Quixote from seeing her as she really is. As if that weren't enough, it's later pointed out to Sancho that as far as he knows there really is such an enchantment, leading him to doubt whether he conjured the spell or is instead a victim of it.

Just before that, Don Quixote has praised Sancho by saying that he "doubts everything and believes everything." Clearly then, Cervantes gives us yet another example of an author from around the turn of the 17th century who was fascinated by uncertainty and the limits of human knowledge, like Shakespeare, Montaigne, Charon, and so on. But I think we should not give in to the philosopher's impulse to reduce this to a question of epistemology.

In this context, themes of enchantment, doubt, and arbitrary misidentification are designed to get the reader to think not so much about the nature of knowledge as about the nature of fiction itself. It's been said that Don Quixote is a book about books, a claim merited not just by the fact that Quixote's madness is triggered by reading, but by the fact that he keeps meeting other people who enjoy the same kind of chivalric literature.

None of them have been driven mad, which rather undermines the apparent warning that such literature is harmful, at best trivial, and at worst dangerous, a message that we've already seen in the life story of Teresa of Ávila, a scene in which friends of Quixote burn his library is easy to read as a mockery of the book burnings overseen by the Inquisition and other censorious institutions of Cervantes' age.

Then there's the elaborate framing of the whole story, which is deliberately confusing to the point that scholars have disputed the exact details of what we are supposedly reading. The book begins with a preface, which self-consciously frets about the difficulty of writing a preface. The impasse was resolved only after a friend gave the advice simply to throw in learned references to authoritative sources, including Plato and Aristotle, and Italian humanists like Leone Ebreo.

Then the story proper begins, but after only eight chapters, the author tells us regretfully that this was all he could find of the tale. Then chapter 9 begins by announcing the discovery of another manuscript, so that things can continue after all. Yet another layer of artificiality is introduced when we are told that this manuscript was in Arabic, written by the real author or reporter, whose name is Sidi Hamete Benangeli.

So really, but of course not really, we're reading a story that has been translated into Spanish from Arabic and then edited to get the version being presented to us. Cervantes also indulges in the breathtaking and somewhat mind-bending tactic of having part one of Don Quixote exist within the world of part two. Our heroes meet several people who have read it, and who are excited to encounter two such famous literary characters, and in real life.

In fact, you could even say that Part 2 is brought into existence by Part 1, because Don Quixote and Sancho set out to have further adventures only once they learned that their original adventures have already won them some renown. Characters also challenged them about certain discrepancies or dropped plotlines from Part 1, like pedantic reviewers complaining that Cervantes wasn't paying enough attention in the first installment of his novel.

Sancho does his best to paper over the cracks, but is at a loss to explain one lapse and suggests that maybe it was just a printer's error. This second part is also animated by Cervantes' fury at an author calling himself Avellaneda, who had been so bold as to publish his own sequel to the first part of Don Quixote. This writer's true identity remains unknown, though he seems to have been a member of the circle of Lope de Vega, one of the other premier literary figures of Spain in this era.

Avellaneda set out to tame the anarchy of his source material, turning right-side up what Cervantes had turned upside down, as it were. He made both Sancho and Don Quixote into less appealing characters, treating them as upstart social rebels who needed to be put back in their place, namely a madhouse. Perhaps worst of all, he teased Cervantes for having a crippled hand, an injury he sustained when fighting at the famous Battle of Lepanto in 1571.

Cervantes was infuriated, though I can't help wondering whether part of him was tickled by having an excuse to indulge in further metafictional games.

In part two, he allows the main characters to learn about Avellaneda's unauthorized novel and to condemn it as being full of falsehoods. Cervantes goes so far as to change the plot by sending Quixote to Barcelona instead of Zaragoza, as originally planned, because that's where he goes in the rival book, just so that something else in that supposed sequel can be wrong. Of course, the constant fuss over the truth and accuracy of Cervantes' own version serves only to highlight its fictionality.

Just in case you missed the point, in Part 2, Cervantes sprinkles in passages that alternately label certain chapters and passages as most likely apocryphal or as certainly true, given the reliability of Benengeli. We are also warned that some material from the supposed original has been omitted by the translator or editor for reasons of relevance and length, including stories about the warm friendship between Rosinante and Sancho's donkey.

Again, the audience is being invited to wonder how the version of the story they are reading, in all its incompleteness and indirect transmission, might or might not correspond to events that, as the reader well knows, never happened in the first place. Within the story, the characters are doing the same thing. There are many examples, but the best is perhaps the scene in Part 1, in which a group of people take a vote as to whether that barber's basin really is a fabled helmet, as Don Quixote ludicrously believes.

In part to humor him, and in part to enjoy the humor of the situation, the group declares that Quixote is right. And having promised to accept the outcome of the vote, the barber is required to admit that his own basin is a magical helmet. Scholars have sometimes spoken of a kind of perspectivism in reference to passages like this. Because Don Quixote sees the basin as a helmet, for him it really is a helmet.

That's encouraged by Sancho's wonderful description of the item as a batellelmo, a basin helmet, suggesting that it is somehow both things at the same time. But I don't think Cervantes is really making a point here about perspectivism in the sense we usually use that word in philosophy to mean that the truth is determined for each person by their own beliefs. Rather, he's making a point about the extraordinary power of fiction, whereby facts can be summoned into reality by nothing more than authorial fiat.

The point is made from the very beginning of Part 1, where Don Quixote addresses the "wise enchanter" who is the chronicler of this wonderful history. The word "history" here is interesting, given that Cervantes will, towards the start of Part 2, echo the Aristotelian contrast between the poet and the historian: the poet recounts things not as they were, but as they should have been, whereas the historian tells things as they are, without adding anything or departing from the truth.

You might remember that Philip Sidney mentioned this contrast from Aristotle's Poetics in his Defense of Poesy. By repeatedly alluding to his own tale as a history, Cervantes thus suggests with heavy irony that we are reading a true account, one about a man with systematically false beliefs, when in fact we are reading something that is entirely invented, just like Quixote's own fantasies.

In another context, Cervantes said of himself that he was "one who surpasses many others in his powers of invention." And that is, of course, something he has in common with his main character. Indeed, as the real author of the tale, it is Cervantes who imagines that windmills could be giants, ugly peasants beautiful women, and a barber's basin a fabled helmet.

So alongside the obvious parallel between fiction and magic, something that may remind us of Shakespeare's Tempest, Don Quixote's madness stands for the power of the author to decide what will happen in the world he is creating. This is an insanity born of reading chivalric romances and an insanity that allows Quixote to turn the world around him into the setting of such a romance, the main character in a story he is writing as he goes along. But that's a very optimistic way of describing the plot.

In fact, Quixote, and poor Sancho along with him, undergo great suffering due to the refusal of reality to be rewritten. The self-proclaimed knight and squire are repeatedly beaten up and humiliated as they pursue one delusional adventure after another. Quixote's madness evokes not just mirth in the people he meets, but also pity.

It's frequently noted that his sanity, even his wisdom, remain intact apart from his conviction that the chivalric tales are all true and that he is following in the footsteps of the glorious knights of old. Quixote is even sane enough to know that other people think he is crazy, but counters that anyone who questions the authenticity of the romances is the real madman. When I say that Cervantes presents Quixote as "crazy," I mean it. He's not merely eccentric, he's suffering from a mental disorder.

As scholars have noted, Gervantes draws here on medical literature of the period, especially a treatise by Juan Juarte de San Juan. There are hints that Quixote suffers from "imbalance" of the humors, as a result of his excessive reading habits, which fits with Juarte's remark that people can become choleric if they "lose themselves in reading books of chivalry." Also relevant may be Quixote's diet and the climate of La Mancha, where he lives.

It's explicitly stated that his malady is seeded in his brain, and sometimes his sanity seems to return, at least partially, after injuries cause him to lose blood, which would help cool down his bodily mixture. So his condition has a physical basis. This makes the novel potentially interesting for the philosophy of disability, which we talked about with Scott Williams back in episode 442.

So one approaching it from that direction might want to consider Quixote's attitude towards his own disability, which seems to involve a conscious embrace of his own condition. He rationalizes away evidence that would undermine his delusions, as when he suggests that some kind of enchantment may be involved, or that only knights like himself can see things as they truly are. This is why Sancho thinks the helmet of Mambrino is only a barber's basin.

An especially interesting passage comes when he decides to imitate the way that chivalric knights sometimes went mad out of longing for the beloved. He proposes to strip naked, do somersaults, and wander aimlessly through a mountain landscape. When Sancho tries to dissuade him, Quixote tells his squire that the best kind of madness is the one that is deliberately chosen and for no good reason.

Centuries after its composition, this aspect of Don Quixote came to seem especially resonant for philosophers in the existentialist tradition. In particular, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno saw Cervantes' novel as anticipating ideas he valued in the work of Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard had even spoken of the Knight of Faith, which seems like a pretty good description of Don Quixote.

Like an existentialist Christian hero, Quixote adheres unswervingly to what he sees as the truth, no matter how absurd it may be, and he cannot be dissuaded by rational arguments against this faith. Unamuno was inspired by his example, enthusing, "'Touch me with your madness, my Don Quixote, touch me to the quick.'"

This reading might seem rather unpersuasive insofar as it centers on philosophical ideas that wouldn't be developed until the 19th century, but in Unamuno's favor, we might note that Kierkegaard was drawing out something genuinely present in the Protestantism of Luther and Calvin, encouragement to place one's hope and belief in things that lie beyond the limits of human understanding.

Of course, Cervantes was not a Protestant, but this sort of radical fideism, that is, reliance on faith over reason, spilled across religious and geographical boundaries in the 16th century. Another objection to this reading, though, would involve pointing to more specific features of the novel that actually contrast Don Quixote to religious figures. In both Part I and Part II, Quixote and Sancho consider the difference between being a knight-errant and being a monk or saint.

In one of these passages, Sancho piously attempts to convince Quixote that the best way to get to heaven is not to seek out adventures, but to become a saint. Quixote admits that more saints get to paradise than knights, but then again, not very many true knights have made the effort.

A defender of Unamuno could read these chapters as implicitly, and as always ironically, drawing a parallel between this knight of faith and the more conventionally faithful Christian, but to me, they look more like a satire on attempts to compare chivalry and Christian piety, a notion we also saw being interrogated by Spencer in The Fairy Queen.

The same would go for a chapter in which Quixote argues at length that knight-errantry is the highest of the sciences, because heroic figures like himself need to know so many things in order to succeed in their quests. There's some parody of scholastic culture here. Forget the metaphysician and the theologian, the greatest scholar is really a guy who puts on armor and fights giants for the honor of his lady love.

But the comedy is aimed at Quixote himself, too, and his pompous claims to comprehensive scientific knowledge. The reader need only recall that his vaunted skill with medicine, for example, has already been used to make a magic healing potion that made Sancho violently ill. That episode is only one of the many low points in the relationship between Don Quixote and his trusty squire. While the bond between them is as real as anything in this story, they get into numerous disagreements and at one point a physical altercation.

Quixote observes that his underling's willingness to mouth off to his "natural lord" reflects badly on both of them. Elsewhere, he more graciously says that he will deign to treat Sancho as an equal out of his chivalric love for all humankind. Evidently, Cervantes is using the pair to comment on class relations in Spanish society. The theme becomes even more explicit with Sancho's primary motivation for following the mad Don Quixote on his increasingly ridiculous and tumultuous adventures.

Quixote has offered to make Sancho the governor of an island, in imitation of literary chivalric characters who bestowed such gifts on their squires. Though Sancho knows that Quixote is crazy, he still thinks that his master might wind up making good on his promise. Then, in part two, it actually happens. A duke and duchess, two of the many characters who entertain themselves by playing along with Quixote's delusions, set up Sancho as a governor, expecting hilarity to ensue.

It does, but not in the way they expect. He turns out to be remarkably competent, so wise in his judgment that he is called a second Solomon. In the end, his decrees are left behind as a constitution for the island. This whole sequence invites interpretive speculation and has duly received it. Some scholars think that Cervantes is making fun of the tradition of utopian fiction inspired by Thomas More.

Others see a more pointed message: the low-born Sancho is a good ruler because he is a good man and a good Christian, which makes him preferable to the morally bankrupt nobles who are usually in charge. The contrast with the duplicitous and manipulative Duke and Duchess lends some plausibility to that proposal. But whatever political point is being made here, we can surely also take Sancho's governorship to be yet another example of the topsy-turvy reversals that are scattered throughout the whole novel.

You may remember that, when looking at Rabelais, I referred to the work of Michael Barthin, who associated the perverse humor of Rabelais with the medieval tradition of the carnival, an exceptional time in which social customs are turned upside down. Barthin mentioned other authors of the period as illustrating the same phenomenon, among them Shakespeare and, of course, Cervantes, with Sancho Panza a leading example. His lust for life, gluttony, and insubordination are carnivalesque in the best spirit.

No wonder that the more conservative Avellaneda wanted to write a version of this story putting Sancho back in his proper place. If fideism and carnivalesque reversal are core themes that make Don Quixote resonate with other literature of the age, historical events of the time also find an echo in the novel. Like Montaigne and Shakespeare, Cervantes could not help reacting to the discovery of the New World and the burgeoning practice of slavery.

De Vantes had attempted to travel to the Indies in 1582, and in another of his writings described them as "a refuge and haven for all the desperate men of Spain." This sounds quite positive, but a more ambiguous attitude may be implicit in Don Quixote. The gifting of the island to Sancho looks like a case of casual colonialism, and even if he winds up governing well, there are disturbing elements in Sancho's earlier fantasies about having a colony to call his very own.

He worries that the island may have a black population, and reassures himself that he can just sell them all off as slaves. That passage comes not long after the adventure in which Don Quixote frees prisoners who are to be sent off to slavery. This is justified on grounds we have seen in the Spanish scholastics, that all humans are free by nature. But that inspiring message is somewhat undercut by the fact that the freed prisoners then go on a rampage, revealing Don Quixote's noble gesture to have been a spectacular mistake.

Speaking of the scholastics, another contemporary development that makes itself felt in the tale is economic theory. The idea that the value of an object depends on its perceived rather than its intrinsic worth appears several times, most entertainingly in the case of the barber's basin that might be a literally priceless magical artifact. It also comes up in the account of the discovery of the manuscript.

Cervantes, in his voice as the editor of the Spanish version, tells us that when he found the Arabic book, it was just being sold as scrap paper. Cannily, he concealed his excitement at finding the work so that he could buy it for next to nothing. It's a lovely example of the dynamics at work in the Scholastic's theory of fair pricing. But it would be reductive to read it as just a nice example, because the vignette captures the broader themes of the novel as a whole.

A stack of paper is one thing to the seller and another thing to the buyer, because they construe the paper in different ways, as scrap in one case and as valuable literature in the other. So, the passage suggests that fiction gets its value in reality through our conviction that it is valuable. To enjoy fiction is not merely to suspend disbelief, but actively to believe in what we know is not true, or perhaps better, to pretend to believe in it.

As Cervantes was arguably among the first to see, or at least to explore profoundly, fiction is pleasurable because of its ambiguous relationship to reality. Not straightforwardly false, like a plain old lie, but not true either. This explains, among other things, why events that would be horrific in real life, like a gentleman going insane and traveling around Spain getting into violent altercations with almost everyone he meets, can be entertaining as a story.

As no less a critic than Lord Byron remarked of Don Quixote, of all tales, tis the saddest, and more sad because it makes us smile. While I can't promise that the books we'll discuss in the next episode are as funny or as sad as Don Quixote, they're still pretty remarkable. We'll be looking at scientific treatises by two women who wrote respectively in Spain and Italy, Oliva Sapuco and Camilla Erculiani.

and believe it or not, one of them does involve giants. So I hope I'm not tilting at windmills when I say that I expect you to join me for the next installment of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.