Don Quixote and the philosophers : establishing directness

This article traces two lines of philosophical interpretations of the character of Don Quixote. Common to both is the view that Don Quixote should be treated as a paragon of directness, i.e. a subject that strives to attain his ideals - a sphere of sense that is general - without any mediation (in the sense of Vermittlung). For the existentialist Miguel de Unamuno, who in this respect follows Kierkegaard, the individual cannot constitute himself unless he rejects mediation, Quixote is a knight of faith, whose every intervention is an act of heroism analogous to Abraham's leap of faith. For the Hegelian Constantin Noica the opposite is true: any attempt to move from the particular to the general without mediation is a symptom of an existential and ontological disorder. Taking his cue from Hegel's Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit (Phenomenology of Spirit), Noica repudiates Quixote's unswerving commitment as insane folly. These two diametrically opposed assessments - one inspired by Kirkegaard, the other by Hegel - show the significance of Don Quixote as a focus of the modern debate about mediation and its dilemmas.