One of the most popular posts on this blog is Don Quixote’s Influence on Existentialist Philosophy, which is a bit embarrassing because it is not very good. I wrote it very early on in my master’s, and while the idea, the thesis is good, I did not develop it very deeply nor fully. It is mostly my gut feeling, my intuition that comes through.
I have thought and thought about this since 2008, and more importantly, I have read a lot that I would not have had the time to read for that little essay. I have read more Dostoyevsky, Sartre, Kierkegaard, El Quijote desde Rusia with three brilliant essays by Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Merejkowsky, more Unamuno, Graham Greene, and on and on.
For Christmas, Celia gave me José Ortega y Gasset’s Meditaciones del Quijote y otros ensayos, which I had wanted to read for years.
All this reading confirms the theory that Cervantes crystallizes the thoughts of the preceeding centuries, from the ancient Greeks on Liberty to the early Christians on Free Will, where the Self is swimming in the primordial waters of philosophy, floating around until Cervantes’ electric genius gave abiogenesis form to Don Quixote, consciously creating his fortune, bringing about the concept of existentialism. The textbook example of this is the beginning of chapter VIII. Read it carefully, what does Quijote see? He sees them. What are they? Windmills or giants…
Don Quixote is the proverbial Tetrapod fish walking onto earth. It will be up to Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Unamuno, and Ortega before Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre finally come up with the label that puts a nice bow on the Darwinian evolution of thought that delivers Existentialist theory.
Meditaciones has the famous quote “yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo”. So, yes, you are responsible for what you do in life, with life, but you also must deal with the circumstances surrounding your life. But Meditaciones is not what you expect. It is not a direct essay on Ortega’s thoughts on El Quijote -although it is also that- it is that in a meandering, roundabout way. Ortega talks about the Mediterranean culture, compares it to the Germanic culture as he lived in Germany for many years. This is evident when he quotes Nietzsche’s “Live dangerously”, which is, of course, the whole premise of Quijote’s adventures.
As a good philosopher, questioning El Quijote, Ortega ends up asking more questions than answering them. One key observation comes when he compares Cervantes to Shakespeare, something commonly done, as they were, after all, contemporaries. And here is the difference: Shakespeare explains himself, Cervantes not so much. Some of that difference might be due to the difference in genres: Theatre vs the modern novel, but nonetheless, there it is. Another common assumption is the Spanishness of Quijote, which leads Ortega to call Spain the “spiritual promontory of Europe”.
Another of Ortega’s brilliant observations, connections are between two Baroque masterpieces: Quijote and Velazquez’s Meninas, how we can step into each work and see it from the inside. This imaginary stepping into these makes them realistic. That realism is what makes us, and understanding ourselves in that work, that singularity, is what makes us heroes, a full hymn to Existentialism!
So what I wrote 17 years ago, although not the most brilliant, not the best written academic paper, still stands. Cervantes, by creating Don Quijote, is setting the cornerstone of Existentialist philosophy.
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