Don Quixote, a Hero to Himself, an Antihero to Society. Re-thinking the Modern Existential Experience of Don Quixote de la Mancha through Three Contemporary Philosophers

Abstract

José Ortega y Gasset, Georg Lukacs and Michel Foucault have analyzed Cervantes’s Don Quixote in order to apprehend the masterful mixture of reality and fiction present in this novel. They have understood that the philosophical stakes set by this work are extremely important, due to the existential experience of the modern man, essentially antiheroic, that is engaged in it. A man that certainly lives in the world but, at the same time, feels himself exiled from that same world. Starting from this interpretation, this paper proposes to bring into dialogue the critical perspectives about Don Quixote of these three important contemporary European philosophers. I examine how —according to Ortega— Don Quixote, a pioneering work of the modern novel, expresses the highest degree of collective self-consciousness of the Spanish people at a moment of rupture between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. I relate this reading to Lukács's idea, according to which the same work represents the paradigm of the novelistic genre, insofar as it expresses a new “existential dissonance” —namely, a perception characteristic of Western man that corresponds to the end of the Middle Ages. Likewise, we will compare these conceptions with Foucault’s, who sees in Don Quixote the emergence of a new episteme of Western man, marking the beginning of modernity.