I discuss the characters Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and their relationship in order to understand better the place of idealistictheory and realistic practice in business ethics. The realism of Sancho Panza is required to make the idealism of Don Quixote effective.Indeed, the interaction and development of these characters can serve as a model for both the effective communication between andblending of the idealistic moral theoretician and the practical businessperson. Specifically, I argue that a quixotified Sancho Panza,as a (...) combination of theoretical idealism and practical realism, is necessary for managerial statesmanship. I first consider the positionthat this concept is unrealistic. In the final section, however, I show that a number of leadership and business theorists believe thatmanagerial statesmanship requires a quixotified Sancho Panza. I also consider the question, what helps to make a quixotic vision forbusiness ethical, and what is its content? (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo consiste en desentrañar, con base en los elementos proporcionados por la Estética, la constitución irónica de la individualidad en la interiorización de los mitos, tal como ocurre en El Quijote. Para realizar esta tarea nos apoyaremos en dos textos de la Fenomenología del espíritu, a saber, “la ley del corazón y el desvarío de la infatuación” y “la virtud y el curso del mundo”, en los cuales se hará corresponder el despliegue que Hegel ejecuta en (...) ellos a diferentes pasajes del Quijote. (shrink)

In this paper we want to rethink the educational significance of the novel – and particularly of novel-reading – from the perspective of a ‘meta-novelistic’ reading of Don Quixote, often acclaimed as the “first modern novel”. Our point of departure is double: on the one hand, there is the controversial contemporary phenomenon of “de-reading”, and all the educational discussions which it entails; on the other hand, there is the existing tradition of literary education, which, from different angles, has already (...) extensively reflected upon the (moral, epistemological, ontological) relation between novel-reading, education and subjectification, but which also sometimes seems to have exhausted its means for doing so. To problematize this double starting point in a new way, we propose to revisit the ‘origins’ of the novel and novel-reading, at the dawn of modernity. By exploring the differences between the narratives of subjectification represented by the Cartesian cogito and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which were near-contemporaries, we try to argue for an educational-philosophical rehabilitation of the latter, if not against then at least beyond the former. In a first movement, and in dialogue with novelists Milan Kundera and Carlos Fuentes, we do so by focusing on the novel as a particular form, or ‘configuration’, of knowledge – one that is by nature experimental and pluralist. In a second movement, we link this to Jean Baudrillard’s famous distinction between “simulation” and “illusion”, claiming that novel-reading qua subjectification always involves a Quixotic practice of adventurous, ‘playful’ and public negotiation between reality and its more or less ‘illusory’ alternatives. (shrink)

This article describes the role Don Quixote plays as a character and as a novel in Nietzsche’s work. Against the background of German romanticism’s reception of the novel, and by identifying the status of the novel, its characters, its author and its reader, I argue that Don Quixote plays a problematic role in Nietzsche’s writings: his character is at once the paradigm of the metaphysical individual caught in metaphysical illusions, the mocked receptacle of the ressentiment of readers and (...) of Cervantes himself, but Don Quixote also represents the experience of a deep suffering, revealing the world outside the simulacra of metaphysics. This investigation leads us to draw parallels between Don Quixote and Christ, but also Zarathustra, and to rehabilitate a certain form of suffering, inherited from a certain understanding of Christ, in the work of Nietzsche. (shrink)

The subject of this article points beyond a purely literary or literary-historical approach. The question is, whether and how a human being is able to change the (social) conditions of their life by changing himself through transition into another form of existence. In order to overcome established (social) conditions and one’s self, it is necessary to begin with a vision, a utopian dream. Those who pursue the utopian dream of overcoming their current (social) conditions must acknowledge their own good and (...) evil, that is, their position vis-à-vis equality and justice, law and morality. The person itself, and its personality, is revealed in the relation between the utopia of changing its current way of life and its social reality. The ultimate question is: what is the essence of humanity, the ecce homo? Both the transition into a new form of being and the utopian dream differ decisively in Don Quixote and Zarathustra. It is not my concern to compare them as literary figures. (shrink)

How might recognizing the literary influences behind political concepts shift our understanding of their meaning? This article explores how Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote shaped political concepts in the thought of the German jurist and Nazi Carl Schmitt. It does so by tracking Schmitt’s reflections on the Quixote throughout his oeuvre, from his early literary writings to his postwar book on Hamlet. Far from a curiosity, Schmitt’s scattered reflections on the Quixote show the extent to which his (...) foundational political concepts of myth and the public have their roots in literary analysis, challenging Schmitt’s own account of the nonpolitical role of aesthetics in The Concept of the Political. (shrink)

This essay considers the relation between Don Quixote's hunger and the disenchantment (Entzauberung) that Max Weber understood as paradigmatic of the modern condition. Whereas hunger functions within a Hegelian dialectic of desire in Cervantes' novel, literary representations of hunger from later periods (in Kafka and post-Holocaust Polish poetry) acknowledge the cosmic insignificance of human need by substituting the desire for recognition with a desire for self-abdication. While Don Quixote's hunger drives him to seek recognition for his dream world, (...) modern literature's hungry heroes respond to hunger by changing their metaphysical identities. Like desire, hunger functions in the literatures of modernity as an index of psychic wholeness or of its lack, both enabling and resisting the hero's assimilation with the world outside the self. (shrink)

ExcerptCarl Schmitt (1888–1985) is known as the most consequential German legal and political mind of the twentieth century.1 Many crimes of the Nazi regime found support in his conceptual justifications, and Schmitt is called the “Crown Jurist” of the Third Reich with good reason. Historians, political scientists, and sociologists must grapple with the author in order to understand the course of totalitarianism in modernity. Whether literary historians should do so is far less settled, though he was fascinated by their object (...) of study. His writings on literary topics are said to reveal much about Schmitt’s person, politics, and period, but little about literature itself.2 This explains why his “Don Quijote und das Publikum” (“Don Quixote and the Public”), published in the arts and cultural journal Die Rheinlande in 1912, was almost unknown in literary studies for a century.3 Schmitt’s text on the novel by Miguel de Cervantes has not been reprinted, and until recently it had not been translated from the original German. Size has a role too. At under two thousand words, the text has probably escaped notice due to its small scale.4 Recent English and Italian translations in major humanistic journals may signal the end of its obscurity though.5 “Don Quixote and the Public” is at the door of literary studies. The question now is not whether to respond, but how. (shrink)

At first, I explain how Bergmann reads Meinong. As regards his method, Bergmann’s stated aim is to examine Meinong’s thought through all the stages of its development; but he is very selective in choosing exactly what to consider, not just within each of Meinong’s texts, but equally among his texts – indeed he completely ignores Meinong’s mature works. Moreover, he often alters Meinong’s thought by translating it into his foil ontology. As regards the content, Bergmann interprets Meinong as a reist (...) and a nominalist. I try to show that such a view is not correct. I then discuss this interpretation by focusing on which Meinong Bergmann reads, that is, which writings he refers to and at the same time which of Meinong’s theories he criticizes. I sketch the four phases of the development of Meinong’s thought distinguished by Bergmann: his first theory of relations, the theory of the objects of higher order, of objectives, and finally object theory. I present Bergmann’s critique and compare his distinction of different degrees of independence, which establish differences of status among categories of existents, with Meinong’s distinction between kinds of being. Finally, taking into account also Meinong’s mature work, I offer an assessment of Bergmann’s proposal to rethink object theory. Considering Meinong’s theory of incomplete objects, I show that Bergmann would have found in Meinong an ally not only in the battle against representationalism, as he maintains, but also in that against nominalism. (shrink)

Long-established stereotypes tend to dominate the perceptions physicians have of the philosophers and other humanists who serve as medical ethicists. They also alter the views humanists have of physicians, and those that the public have of both. These stereotypes are a formidable barrier to effective working relationships between the two groups of professionals, as well as to public understanding of medical ethics issues. To achieve a better working relationships and to foster more realistic understanding, it is important that the humanists (...) step out of their academic settings, for a time, and become part of the clinical service. (shrink)

This article presents the stance taken by José Ortega y Gasset in the debate that took place in early-twentieth-century Spain regarding the convenience of reading Don Quixote in schools. To this end, we start by describing, albeit briefly, the state of Ortega y Gasset’s thought in 1920, when he writes Biología y pedagogía, the essay with which we shall concern ourselves. According to Ortega y Gasset, Don Quixote must not be read in the classroom because it does not (...) contribute to the development of the students’ spontaneous life, or natura naturans. In order to foster this development, Ortega y Gasset suggests leaving Don Quixote aside and resort to myths such as Odysseus or Heracles because their exploits would excite the students’ vital pulse. However, we suggest several reasons why the aim stated by Ortega y Gasset —and several other highly valuable educational benefits— could be reached resorting to the reading of selected passages of Don Quixote instead of the feats of Odysseus and Heracles. (shrink)

Don Quixote is not only a novel which represents Spanish culture, but a hero that reveals the relation between life and reason. I will compare two interpretations of Don Quixote. The first phenomenological interpreta-tion belongs to Ortega Y Gasset, and the second to Lithuanian philosopher Algis Mickūnas. The interpretations of Don Quixote are related to the question about an ideal. What is the role of ideals in culture? Are ideals principles con-structed by reason? Do these principles deny (...) the reality of life, or are ideals related to the self life-world rationality? Then what does the idealism of Don Quixote mean? Does it represent a utopian rationality or does it seek to show values that are not reduced to circumstance? Ortega criticizes Don Quixote as an idealist, who can’t find any ideal values in the nearest environment. Mickūnas suggests interpreting Don Quixote’s idealism as a phenomenological bracketing, which allows one to doubt the blind dependence on this life-world and question its value.Don Quijote no es únicamente una novela que representa la cultura española, sino también un héroe que revela la relación entre vida y razón. Compararé dos interpretaciones de Don Quijote. La primera interpretación fenomenológica pertenece a Ortega y Gasset y la segunda al filósofo lituano Algis Mickūnas. Las interpretaciones de Don Quijote se relacionan con la cuestión acerca de los ideales. ¿Cuál es el papel de los ideales en la cultura? ¿Son los ideales principios construidos por la razón? ¿Niegan tales ideales la realidad de la vida o bien se encuentran los ideales relacionados con la racionalidad misma del mundo de la vida? ¿Qué significa entonces el idealismo de Don Quijote? ¿Representa acaso una racionalidad utópica o trata más bien de mostrar valores que no se hallan reducidos a la circunstancia? Ortega critica a Don Quijote como un idelista, que no es capaz de encontrar valores ideales en su entorno más próximo. Mickūnas propone inter-pretar el idealismo de Don Quijote como un poner entre paréntesis de tipo fenomenológico, que nos permite dudar de la ciega dependencia del mundo vital y cuestionar su valor. (shrink)

Este trabajo revisa las diferentes recreaciones de don Quijote en los Entremeses del siglo diecisiete. Estas recreaciones tratan, a veces, simples menciones de motivos. Otras veces, sin embargo, funcionan como textos más complejos que señalan la popularidad de la novela y del personaje cervantino desde una perspectiva siempre lúdica y festiva. This paper reviews the different recreations of Don Quixote in the Entremeses of the seventeenth century. These recreations sometimes are treated as very simple motive mentions. However, they also (...) function as complex texts signaling the popularity of the novel of Cervantes and his character always from a playful and festive perspective. (shrink)

Volume Three of the selected works of Unamuno, this is the first of nine projected volumes to appear. It contains the long personal exegesis of Cervantes' Don Quixote, and a group of sixteen essays, several of which also take the Knight as their point of departure. There are essays which are explicitly on the subject of philosophy; a memoir of Ángel Ganivet as philosopher, and musings on why Spain never has had a philosopher. The conclusion reached is that the (...) Spaniard is antimetaphysical; the Spanish soul strives not for a concept of the universe, but for a sense of life. Unamuno finds it suitable, appropriate, and inevitable that the philosophy of Spain must be searched out in the only places in which it can be found, in fictional deeds and carved religious images. Idealism will not be metaphysical idealism, but ethical and practical idealism. Unamuno celebrates the pattern of the antirational, individualistic, anarchistic, action-centered Spanish philosophy of life, in which the seeds of existentialism seem so clearly visible. The book is physically and stylistically appealing, with a very full index, and bibliographical, explanatory, and poetic-linguistic notes, all very scholarly and full.--M. B. M. (shrink)

Volume Three of the selected works of Unamuno, this is the first of nine projected volumes to appear. It contains the long personal exegesis of Cervantes' Don Quixote, and a group of sixteen essays, several of which also take the Knight as their point of departure. There are essays which are explicitly on the subject of philosophy; a memoir of Ángel Ganivet as philosopher, and musings on why Spain never has had a philosopher. The conclusion reached is that the (...) Spaniard is antimetaphysical; the Spanish soul strives not for a concept of the universe, but for a sense of life. Unamuno finds it suitable, appropriate, and inevitable that the philosophy of Spain must be searched out in the only places in which it can be found, in fictional deeds and carved religious images. Idealism will not be metaphysical idealism, but ethical and practical idealism. Unamuno celebrates the pattern of the antirational, individualistic, anarchistic, action-centered Spanish philosophy of life, in which the seeds of existentialism seem so clearly visible. The book is physically and stylistically appealing, with a very full index, and bibliographical, explanatory, and poetic-linguistic notes, all very scholarly and full.--M. B. M. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Descartes’s Demon and the Madness of Don QuixoteSteven NadlerDescartes’s “malicious demon” (genius malignus, le mauvais génie)—the evil deceiver of the Meditations on First Philosophy whose hypothetical existence threatens to undermine radically Descartes’s confidence in his cognitive f aculties—is an artful philosophical and literary device. There is considerable debate over the significance of this powerful and malevolent being within Descartes’s argumentative strategy. Some insist that its role is a substantive (...) one, with Descartes in troducing the deceiver in order to deepen yet further the skeptical doubts of the First Meditation, doubts from which he hopes, by the grace of a benevolent God, eventually to rescue himself. 1 Others claim that its role is merely a rhetorical one, with the demon meant simply to reinforce already philosophically well-established skeptical doubts that, in the face of everyday habit, are difficult to sustain. 2 Either way, there is no underestimating the force of the hypothesis as an epistemological tool for subverting our faith in our reasoning and sensory powers. [End Page 41]It is useful to place the “evil genius” in the context of seventeenth-century intellectual culture 3 not just for our understanding of what may have been the historical origins of this most extreme and “metaphysical” 4 of all skeptical doubts but also for broadening our appreciation of its significance beyond epistemology alone. When we grasp the various practical (moral, legal, and social) problems and the literary and artistic possibilities raised by the demon hypoth esis, we can see why such an improbably hyper-skeptical thesis is nonetheless deserving of general interest. To take just one example, Richard Popkin, in his seminal work on the history of skepticism in early modern thought, describes the knotty problems that are generated in the legal context of a trial when the issue of the demonic is raised (as in the case of someone on trial for witchcraft). 5In the service of this contextualizing project I compare Descartes’s meditator (with his self-assumed skeptical pose) with a near-contemporary literary character of particular fame and importance. What is especially striking—and instructive—in this comp arison are the parallels and resonances between the kind of general, systematic, philosophically-generated hyperbolic doubt that Descartes introduces by way of his deceptor potentissimus et malignus and the initially more particular (but perhaps eq ually systematic) distrust of the faculties that is suggested by Don Quixote’s own “rationalization” of his illusions. 6 In fact precisely the same philosophical problem is raised both in the first major work of modern philosophy and in the first modern novel: in the face of the possibility of ongoing deception by some powerful and malicious being, how can we possibly trus t our sensory and rational faculties to provide us with true and reliable knowledge? Descartes’s philosophical work can even provide us with a key to understanding part of the nature of Don Quixote’s madness, to systematizing it in its epistemological dim ensions. Reciprocally, it may be that Cervantes’s hero gives us a concrete picture of what it would be like to try to live in the radically deceptive world of the skepticism of the First Meditation. [End Page 42]Did Cervantes’s novel have a direct influence on Descartes’s philosophical reflections? The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1604; the second part, written after several pirated editions of Part I had been circulating for a number of year s, appeared in 1614, the year before Cervantes’s death. The novel was immediately and enormously popular and was quickly translated into a number of other languages. The first French translation of Part I (by César Oudin) was published in 1614. In 1618, François de Rosset translated Part II, and these two translations were published together in one volume in 1639, 1646, and 1665. 7 We can be confident that Descartes knew about Cervantes’s works; and while we cannot say with certainty that he read Don Quixote, given his education, social status, interest in novels of chivalry, and the intellectual circles in which he traveled, it would be surprising if he did not. He... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Examples, Stories, and Subjects in Don Quixote and the HeptameronTimothy HamptonI developed a rare and perhaps unique taste. Plutarch became my favorite reading. The pleasure that I took in reading and rereading him endlessly cured me somewhat from reading novels. Ceaselessly occupied with Rome and Athens, living, so to speak, with their great men.... I thought myself Greek or Roman.Rousseau, ConfessionsThe first part of Don Quixote reaches (...) its rambunctious climax when the Don’s neighbors, the curate and the barber, lock him in an ox cart and triumphantly wheel him back to his village. At one point during the journey home Don Quixote engages in a long and famous debate with the Canon of Toledo about the dangers of reading. The Canon attempts to convince Don Quixote to renounce both knight errantry and his passion for romances of chivalry. He also makes the following recommendation:If you are still obsessed by books of adventures and chivalry, read the book of Judges in Holy Scripture, where you will find great and genuine exploits that are as heroic as they are true. Lusitania had its Viriathus, Rome had its Caesar, Carthage its Hannibal, Greece its Alexander, Castille its Count Fernán González, Valencia its Cid, Andalusia its Gonzalo Fernández, Extremadura its Diego García de Paredes, Jérez its Garci Pérez de Vargas, Toledo its Garcilaso, Seville its Manuel de Léon: their doughty deeds will entertain, instruct, delight and amaze the highest intellects that read them. This reading will truly be worthy of your own excellent mind, my dear [End Page 597] Don Quixote, from which you will rise learned in history, enamored of virtue, instructed in goodness, bettered in manners, valiant without rashness, bold without vacillation, and all this to the honor of God, your own profit, and the glory of La Mancha, from where, as I have learned, you derive your birth and origin. 1The Canon proposes to replace one literary genre with another; he condemns the reading of romance and promotes the reading of history. In the process he presumes to substitute one type of exemplarity with another—an exchange that links Don Quixote’s imagination to his status as a political subject. For he suggests that by occupying himself with real exemplars, instead of the perfect knights of romance, Don Quixote will not only turn from a loco back into a cuerdo. He will also be made into a good citizen. The Canon offers a model of reading that links historical truth, moral amelioration, and political subjectivity. The context of this recommendation—a program of reading offered by a representative of authority to a man in a cage—stresses the relationship between reading and imprisonment, between particular uses of language and particular forms of subjection. If he reads the right kinds of exemplary stories, the Canon infers, Don Quixote will lose his desire to practice the profession of chivalry. No longer will he have to be restrained. Instead, he will live within the bounds of reason, inside the borders of mediocritas. History, as Rousseau suggests in my epigraph to this essay, can cure one of the bad habits induced by too much fiction.Yet no less striking in the Canon’s speech is the way he articulates this connection between good citizenship and good books. He links his list of exemplars to a list of geographical and political spaces: Hannibal and Carthage, Garcilaso de la Vega and Toledo, and so on. By associating heroic figures with countries, he underscores the central importance of exemplary images in the definition of group identity. One of the characteristics of the example that makes it so important in early modern intellectual life is that exemplarity defines a point at which group identity interacts with individual identity. The promotion of heroic images is, to be sure, a central feature in techniques of self-fashioning, as defined in humanist discourse from the time of Petrarch. Yet it is no less important in the definition of grouphood, from Erasmus’s exhortation to Christians to imitate the exemplary virtue of Abraham, to the iconography of patriotism. If there is a crisis of the example, then one way... (shrink)

What does it mean to know who you are? Is it a matter of knowing your name? The things that you’ve done? The people you love? Such indispensible knowledge is somehow not enough; I can know all of these things, and still feel puzzled about who I am. “I am not the person I once was,” “I am not myself today,” and “I am learning who I am,” are all commonplace poems of a kind: expressive sentences completely at home both (...) in literature and ordinary life. Such a poem is the sentence “I know who I am.” This last is one of the many grand and emblematic boasts of Miguel de Cervantes’s hilariously self-fashioned knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha, a boast that can seem both impossible and yet utterly sensible, part quixotic and... (shrink)

Kathy Acker’s work has been praised for the way it highlights the transformative potential of the body in contact with the world. Often, however, such contact also reminds us of the danger involved in the use of the body to disrupt social convention. “Bodies at Liberty” mines this tension, considering Acker alongside three contemporary theorists – Michel Serres, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Mari Ruti – whose disparate theories of embodiment each offer accounts of exposure, vulnerability, and relation as strategies for envisioning (...) human frailty as grounds for meaning-making in our lives. Read together, these texts become examples of the body’s ways of guiding our attention toward new paradigms for thriving and bonding in precarious times. (shrink)