Renaissance/Early Modern

Miguel de Cervantes

1547–1616

“Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we could have wished.”

Don Quixote, Part I, Ch. 8

Miguel de Cervantes, a Spanish soldier and writer of the late Renaissance, gives the tradition its most searching comic novel. follows a man who arms himself in the old chivalric form after his age has ceased to supply the recognition that form once required. The knight takes honor upon himself when no community will confer it. He is ridiculous and noble at once. Later accounts of honor, opinion, and self-judgment have to reckon with that figure, whether as warning or as moral test.

In the Conversation

3 of the Great Ideas

Ethics

Honor

A man may take honor upon himself by adopting an old and exalted form of life which no one around him any longer recognizes, and the question then becomes whether honor so taken is really honor, or only the shadow of honor kept alive by the solitary will of the one who wears it.

Epistemology

Memory and Imagination

The imagination, when it has been fed steadily on a single kind of reading, acquires the power to reshape the perceptions of a man so thoroughly that he meets the common world as if it were the world his books describe, and the question then becomes whether this reshaping is a defect of his mind or a higher use of it.

Opinion

Two men may look at the same thing and hold, with equal conviction and with equal inability to convince the other, two opinions that have nothing in common, and the question of which is the better informed cannot always be settled by an appeal to the evidence of the senses.