By creating Don Quixote, does Cervantes actually describe the desperation of man in his search for meaning?

Although Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote is interpreted as an ironic look at medieval chivalry at first glance, when a deeper reading is made, it is a philosophical work that exhibits the tragic loneliness and existential despair of man in his search for meaning. The character of Don Quixote represents both the absurdities of a madman and the lonely gait of an idealist in pursuit of truth. In this respect, the work is about man’s search for meaning in an absurd world and reveals the inevitable fragility of this search.

The Collapse of Meaning and Don Quixote’s Reaction

The age in which Don Quixote lived is a transitional period in which the metaphysical and religious world of meaning of the Middle Ages has been dissolved and a new epistemological order has not yet been fully established in its place. Philosophically, this historical ground corresponds to a “crisis of meaning”. This period, which heralds the age of “God is dead” in Nietzsche’s words, represents an existential universe in which truth is no longer given with absolute authority, and the individual is forced to create his own meaning.

Don Quixote tries to cope with this crisis by obsessively clinging to the values of the past, especially the ideals of chivalry. His ideals are based on a system of meaning that is no longer valid. But Cervantes’ sarcastic presentation of this character does not reveal the absurdity of Don Quixote, but the tragedy of the devalued individual of his age. It represents the state of the modern individual caught between the myths inherited from the past and the harsh face of reality.

Confronting the Absurd: Camus and Don Quixote

In the context of Albert Camus’ absurd philosophy, the adventure of Don Quixote resembles man’s confrontation with meaninglessness and his effort to invent meaning in the face of this meaninglessness. In Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, no matter how futile it may seem for Sisyphus to repeatedly roll the rock to the top of the mountain, this action turns into a resistance when he accepts his own fate and gives meaning to it. While Don Quixote fights windmills by mistaking them for giant structures, he actually attributes a meaning to his own existence. In this respect, his madness becomes a form of philosophical courage.

For Camus, the absurdist rebels against the meaninglessness of life, but this rebellion does not turn into a new dogma. Don Quixote’s rebellion does not make him a hero; It isolates. His defeat in the face of reality is the universal tragedy of man in search of meaning.

The Tension Between Dream and Reality

The main conflict that Don Quixote experiences is the mismatch between the imagined world and the real world. This tension is the collapse of the bridge that the individual tries to build between his inner world and external reality. When Don Quixote’s world of meaning contradicts the rules of the outside world, society brands him insane. This, as Foucault describes in The History of Madness, shows how society maintains its own rationality by excluding the abnormal. Don Quixote, then, is not only an individual in search of meaning, but also a philosopher-figure who is outside of normative reason.

Madness or Truth?

Cervantes’ Don Quixote is not only a satire, but also a symbol of profound existential inquiry. His madness is, in fact, the extreme of a search for meaning. In the pursuit of truth, he is detached from reality; But this rupture is an expression of the human power to create meaning and the tragic limitation of this power. Don Quixote is the universal figure of modern man: he is a dream-traveler who has been repeatedly broken by reality, and yet does not lose faith.

In this context, Cervantes describes the desperation of man in his search for meaning through Don Quixote; But at the same time, it shows that in this desperation there is also the possibility of freedom and resistance. The madness of Don Quixote is perhaps the most honest effort of man trying to make sense in a world that has no meaning.