Don Quixote vs. La Palisse (Or: Meaning vs. Truth)

Abstract

This essay follows the shifting interpretations of Don Quixote from Enlightenment satire to romantic idealism, Nietzschean self-mythmaking, and Camus’s absurdism, to track the growth of a tension between truth and meaning. While Enlightenment readers saw Cervantes’ knight as a pitiable fool at odds with reality, early German romantics recast him as a noble idealist resisting a fact-bound, spiritually thinned modernity. Nietzsche, both engaging with and departing from these romantic views, made Quixote both a warning about cruel disillusionment and a model for life-affirming self-creation—a “self-aware Quixotism” that turns fable into reality. Camus distilled this tradition into two absurd archetypes: La Palisse, embodying meaningless lucidity, and Don Quixote, embracing meaningful illusion. Doubting reconciliation, he urged a modest balance between evidence and lyricism. Today, with scientific lucidity racing ahead and meaning fracturing into curated feeds, the tension between romantic meaning-making and Enlightenment truth-telling endures. Confronting it without surrendering either reality or wonder remains a central philosophical challenge.

“But there are more things in heaven and earth too than truth.”

—William Faulkner, Light in August

1. Introduction

Should I kill myself or live? That is the question, said Hamlet and Camus. Hamlet couldn’t make up his mind, and Camus suspected there were “probably but two methods of thought” for doing so: those of La Palisse vs. Don Quixote.

La Palisse was a French nobleman whose epitaph—”if he weren’t dead, he would still be envied” [envie]—was once humorously misread as “if he weren’t dead, he would still be alive” [en vie] and spawned a tradition of “lapalissade” songs featuring comically pointless tautologies: (“two days before his death/he was still quite alive!”). Don Quixote is of course the mad old man of Cervantes’ eponymous novel who insists he’s a knight despite modernity’s every attempt to batter the enchantment out of him. Camus linked one method with “evidence” and “lucidity” (lapalissades’ tautological truths) and the other with “lyricism” and “emotion” (Don Quixote’s romantic quest).

Camus wasn’t the first to boil philosophy down to a choice between two different styles. Coleridge said that “every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist,” William James that we’re all either “tough-” or “tender-minded,” and Isaiah Berlin that there are foxes and there are hedgehogs.1 But Camus’s choices—a dead Frenchman who spawned comic tautologies and a mad Spaniard who jousted with windmills—are absurd choices. And that, of course, is his point. Lapalissades embody meaningless lucidity, stating truths so obvious as to be comically pointless; Don Quixote represents a meaningful lyricism hilariously out of touch with reality. La Palisse represents an absurd lucidity, Don Quixote an absurd lyricism.

Both thus respond to what Camus described as the absurdity of the human experience: “this world in itself is not reasonable,” he wrote, a fact that clashes with the “wild longing for clarity … in the human heart”—a “confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” To decide life’s worth, said Camus, “I must see it squarely” and determine “if thought can live in those deserts,” if I can “adapt my behavior” to the absurd. Don Quixote and La Palisse exemplify two ways of doing so: lapalissades crack jokes about meaningless cold truths—truths deflated of meaning—and quixotism defies truth with a source of meaning divorced from evidence—meaning that flies in the face of truth.

Theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg is among the more eloquent exemplars of the “La Palisse” method when he concludes that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”2 On the Don Quixote method that embraces sources of meaning that may lack a firm foundation in Weinberg’s Cold Truths, so many examples abound—from outright conspiracy theories to political and religious extremism—that a growing body of psychological research wonders if the Don Quixote method may in fact be our mental default, a built-in defense mechanism that evolved to keep the lapalissean Weinbergs out of our head and a sense of purpose in.3

Camus finds both views unsatisfying on their own. “If through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world,” he writes of the La Palisse method, concluding that “all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine.” Galileo thus “did right” when he refused to die for heliocentrism, for “that truth was not worth the stake,” true but meaningless on the question of life’s worth. Conversely, “many people die because they judge that life is not worth living” or like Quixote seem eager to get themselves “killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living.” So when Camus thus concludes that “the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions,” it is precisely because here is where our desire for meaning clashes most absurdly with the truth of a universe that declines to respond.4

2. The Genealogy of Quixote

Whether or not one agrees with Camus’s conclusions, it is undeniable that he seized on a tension which many thinkers have felt since at least the Reformation. Erasmus and Cervantes first sensed it, the Romantics studied it, Nietzsche embraced it, and countless writers from Melville to Beckett to Borges to McCarthy have since dramatized it: the feeling that meaning and truth are no longer in harmony and perhaps even in enmity where it matters most—the question of life’s worth.

In this essay, I bracket the philosophical question of whether this oft-felt tension in fact exists or is nothing but a passing mood, a chimera easily slayed. Instead, I aim to survey the historical growth of the feeling itself. What I find most interesting about this feeling is that it would have flummoxed most humans for most of our history. Until very recently, meaning and truth, if not exactly synonymous, have been imagined to be mostly harmonious. As late as 1733, Pope could confidently urge readers to “Take Nature’s path, and mad opinions leave;/All states can reach it, and all heads conceive;/Obvious her goods, in no extreme they dwell;/There needs but thinking right, and meaning well.” Thinking and meaning were not just harmonious—they were easily and obviously so.

When did we lose this confidence? Much has been written on what I call Camus’s “LaPalisse predicament,” the growing sensation that science was destroying old sources’ meaning as quickly as it was discovering new truths.5 (“We murder to dissect,” wrote Wordsworth.) Conversely, far less has been written on the “Don Quixote” problem, the growing sense that our need for meaning may come at the expense of truth. A simple way to track this growing sensation is to track the readings of Don Quixote itself. From its publication in 1605 to Camus, the novel has been read widely and enthusiastically by many intellectuals. More revealingly, interpretations of the novel have evolved dramatically from Cervantes to Camus. Well into the 18th century, Don Quixote was read as a clear-cut comedy about a laughable madman idiotically at war with a reality that was already meaningful in and of itself (and, per Pope, more or less possible to understand without much difficulty). It would have been unfathomable to most that Camus somewhat admired this madman’s absurdity in daring to make meaning in the face of a meaningless universe.

Perhaps no other book has provoked such a stark shift in interpretation. As a result, reactions to the book function as good barometers for how the intellectual atmosphere shifted from the Enlightenment onward regarding the relationship of meaning and truth. This essay aims to track those changes via two prominent readings of the novel that paved the way for Camus: the early German Romantics and Friedrich Nietzsche, traditions to which Camus was deeply indebted. Here, Don Quixote reveals better than perhaps any single text how humans began to wrestle with this rather new feeling that meaning and truth were pulling apart.

3. The Romantic Quixote

For the first hundred years of its existence, Don Quixote was read and enjoyed largely as a straightforward satire on the silliness of chivalric romances. Its comedy was premised—so went the typical reading—on the absurdity of a medieval mindset in the Enlightenment world.

This isn’t to say that early readers never identified with Don Quixote. Much the opposite. Already by 1700, the English writer Peter Motteaux felt that “every man has something of Don Quixote in his Humour, some darling Dulcinea of his thoughts, that sets him very often upon mad adventures.” Samuel Johnson likewise admitted that “very few readers, amidst their mirth or pity, can deny that they have admitted visions of the same kind … When we pity him, we reflect on our own disappointments; and when we laugh, our hearts inform us that he is not more ridiculous than ourselves.”6 But scholar John J. Allen is wrong to conclude that “all of these comments anticipate” the romantic reading of Don Quixote “by about half a century” (Allen 2006, p. 528). To identify with Don Quixote is not to admire him. Such quotes are confessions, not adulations. They all imply that Enlightenment readers identified with Don Quixote’s weaknesses, failures, and flaws, very much aware that this was against their better judgment. At the end of the day, Quixote remains for them no spiritual exemplar, as he would become for the Romantics, nor a representative of humanity’s absurd predicament, as he would become for Camus, but a poor and pitiable if lovable figure of human foibles and folly.

Such readings were flipped on their heads at the end of the 18th century by a group of young rebels in Jena, deeming their brash new style “romantic.” For these writers, their novel interpretation of Quixote became something of a beacon for the movement’s radicalism, embracing as a hero one whom their predecessors had mocked as a fool. “The German Romantics completely transformed the interpretation handed down to them by eighteenth-century neo-classicism,” writes Anthony Close, “read[ing] Don Quixote as a work of art which directly anticipated the preoccupations and values of Romanticism,” even “regard[ing] Cervantes, whom they idolised almost on a with Shakespeare, as peculiarly modern in spirit and as their precursor”(Close 1978). Cervantes’ protagonist, in turn, became something of a patron saint for romantic artists dissatisfied with their present reality. “Those who have discovered that all is vanity, that all human efforts are in vain,” wrote Heinrich Heine in his retrospective of the romantic movement, “give the novel of Cervantes its due; they see in it a stumbling block to all enthusiasm, and all our present-day knights, who fight and suffer for an idea, appear to them as just so many Don Quixotes” (Heine 1867).

How exactly could the Romantics beatify the plainly idiotic Quixote when their predecessors ridiculed him as a lovable but mad fool? First, while Romantics admitted that Quixote was plainly mad, they countered that he was mad for an ideal, and thus more noble in his madness than many a sane man without an ideal. In the words of Friedrich Schelling, “the novel of Cervantes thus rests on a very imperfect, even mad hero—but one who is at the same time of such noble nature, and who, whenever that one vulnerable point is not touched, displays so much superior understanding, that no humiliation he suffers ever truly demeans him” (Schelling 1856)7. Schiller first paved the way for this interpretation. In 1794, he purchased a copy of Friedrich Justin Bertuch’s widely praised 1775 translation of Don Quixote and celebrated Cervantes as the quintessential proto-romantic the very next year in his On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, soon to become a key theoretical text in the rise of romanticism. Therein, Schiller praised “the truly beautiful soul” who combines “cheerful humour” with “a serious intellect” and “noble seriousness of feeling” that “fights for an ideal.” Schiller singled out Cervantes as the key modern exemplar, able to pivot from cheerful mockery to “a great and noble character” with “a magnificent ideal” (Schiller 1981). No prior reader had ever so unreservedly praised the mad knight for his idealism.8

Conversely, Romantics transformed Quixote’s detachment from reality—his cardinal flaw for Enlightenment readers—into a virtue for his Romantic readers, a rebellion against the supremacy of facticity and realism. Four years after Schiller lauded Quixote’s nobility, Ludwig Tieck read the novel for himself and gushed to Schiller about its “geistreiches Stoff” [spiritually rich stuff], setting to work at once on his own translation of the novel, published to much acclaim in 1803. In his translation, Tieck further developed Schiller’s idealistic interpretation of the novel, inspired by the Idealist philosophy of Ludwig Fichte. Henrik S. Wilberg has shown in detail how Tieck’s translation quite literally puts Fichtean words into Don Quixote’s mouth in revealing ways. Often, when Quixote urges action or speaks of heroic deeds, Tieck chooses to translate the Spanish hazaña (heroic deed, exploit, feat) with the German Thathandlung, a rare word in German but one of the most important concepts in Fichte’s system. For Fichte, Thathandlungen are nothing less than the great deeds by which an “I” asserts its independence and becomes a true and free “I.” Thathandlungen, Fichte explains, achieve this freedom in opposition to the life-denying Tatsachen (facts) of the world beyond the I, what Fichte calls the “non-I” (Fichte 1794–1795). Wilberg convincingly argues that the choice of terms hints at Tieck’s admiration for Don Quixote as something of a Fichtean hero, summoning his free selfhood by rebelling against the dead “facts” of “reality” (Wilberg 2016).

Lest one presume Tieck is mocking Fichte by putting his words into a madman’s mouth, an essay from the same year clarifies his reading of Cervantes—”one of the greatest poets”—as one “who painfully felt how far poetry had strayed from life” and “out of love for poetry and wonder, devised the boldest pain to reconnect poetry and life, even in the awareness of their disharmony” (Tieck 1803a). Where Enlightenment readers felt that Cervantes was comically juxtaposing the incompatibility of antiquated beliefs with more meaningful modern truths, Tieck and his fellow romantics felt that Cervantes was, in fact, partly lamenting the lack of meaning in modern truths, perhaps even lamenting a gap between meaning and truth as such, between “poetry and life.”9

Heinrich Heine went a step further than Schiller and Tieck and argued that Cervantes didn’t merely vent frustrations with reality—he may well have hinted at the inferiority of reality, the way it folded under and followed behind strong idealists who challenged and conquered reality. Exhibit A: Sancho Panza, Quixote’s infamous sidekick, who, despite seeing reality where Quixote only sees delusions, continues to follow Quixote deeper into these delusions despite their cost. “Did [Cervantes] truly intend, in his long, gaunt knight, to parody idealistic enthusiasm in general, and in his stout squire, practical reason?” Heine wrote; “at any rate, the latter certainly plays the more ridiculous role; for practical reason, with all its time-honored, utilitarian proverbs, must still trot along on its placid donkey behind enthusiasm” (Heine 1867).

Perhaps in Sancho, Cervantes was parodying the failures and foibles of realism as much as of idealism. If so, says Heine, Cervantes chose to grant the victory to the foolish idealist more often than the foolish realist. “It is not Sancho Panza who has the deepest relation to the real,” writes Paul Slama, “rather, Sancho Panza is the one who does not have the courage of Tathandlung, who remains stuck in the Tatsache, in an empirical and therefore naïve and simplistic understanding of reality. The struggle between the two is not one between Sancho Panza’s common sense and Don Quixote’s madness, but it is the tension that the reader experiences in the face of Don Quixote’s greatness and ridiculousness, on the one hand, and Sancho Panza’s lack of naïve questioning, on the other” (Slama 2022).

In sum, Romantics flipped traditional readings of Don Quixote on their head by celebrating the noble idealism behind Quixote’s madness that rebelled against a reality they found more wanting than their Enlightenment predecessors. “The theme as a whole,’” wrote Schelling, is “the Real in struggle with the Ideal” (Schelling 1856, pp. 679–80). And with a single sentence, Schelling wrote off a century of Enlightenment readers who sided with the Real: “what, in the limited conception of a lesser mind, might have seemed merely a satire of a particular folly,” Cervantes “transformed into the most universal, meaningful, and picturesque image of life” (Schelling 1859, p. 679)10.

The Romantics already anticipated Camus in sensing that the ideal and real, poetry and life, meaning and truth, were no longer as harmonious as they had been for Christian and Enlightenment thinkers.11 In the words of Tieck, Cervantes, like Shakespeare, “sought, with great purpose and the most delicate grace, to create a firm path and support in life and reality for orphaned poetry … to ground it solidly and, as it were, eternally in the earth.” I emphasize “sought” because it implies that Cervantes did not fully succeed in grounding poetry in life and reality. After all, Don Quixote is, just like Quixote’s beloved chivalric romances, fiction, no matter how badly we fellow Quixotes wish it were real. In the words of Tieck, Cervantes draws “a magical circle of the most painful irony around his fantasies” (Tieck 1803b). And for that reason, “one cannot determine whether the poetry of this work should not be taken entirely as parody,” Tieck confesses, just as “one can hardly ever say with certainty whether one is seeing clearly or is merely dazzled” (Tieck 1803b). Because Cervantes so often pits poetry against life, ideals against reality, meaning against truth, it is hard to say when he is lamenting this clash and when he is laughing at it—and perhaps at himself for being his own Sancho Panza and believing in his Don Quixote.

In highlighting the complex ways in which our sense of “reality” falls short of the fullness and potential of reality, Don Quixote became a patron saint for Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of romantic irony, central to early romanticism. Schlegel pioneered his novel definition of irony by attacking the Enlightenment “idol of the highly praised omniscience”—therein, traditional irony consisted of a wink between speaker and listener, writer and reader, dependent on a shared sense of truth. Instead, Schlegel advocated a bigger, more romantic kind of irony that questioned this very sense of a shared, stable truth. Romantic irony, more self-reflective and self-conscious, was closer to the “Socratic-Platonic sense of irony as configurative, indeterminable, and self-transcending” (Von Schlegel 1828 qtd in Joan S. Picart 1997) and precisely what has led many to see the seeds of postmodernity in early romanticism. Schlegel later described this kind of irony aptly as the “astonishment of the thinking mind about itself … a deeply hidden sense, another higher meaning, and often the most sublime seriousness” (ibid). That is, irony was capable of far more than satire and humor: it could also be “self-conscious and self-reflective poetry defiant of absolute formulation” and “a permanent parabasis” –those moments when an author interrupts a plot to directly address the audience, a mark of “overflowing vitality” and “the most intense agility of life” resulting in a “stimulation of the effect, since it cannot destroy the illusion” (ibid). For romantics, Don Quixote exemplified such ironies better than any other text.

But the Romantics would not have gone so far as Camus in deeming the ironic tensions between the real and poetry as fundamentally irreconcilable, doomed to absurdity. A common goal of romanticism was to do precisely the opposite, to achieve a “universal poesy” that reunited science and poetry, repoeticized all of reality. Romantics thus protested in various ways that Don Quixote did in fact manage to reconnect poetry and reality, meaning and truth. Though Tieck admitted he wasn’t sure where parody ended and poetry began in the novel, he nonetheless maintained that Don Quixote revealed “an unfathomable spirit for whom parody is consistently genuine poetry” (Tieck 1803a, emphasis mine). Tieck here means, I think, that “genuine poetry” triumphs over parody in the end because the novel sublimates its parody into poetry, redirects it toward a higher ideal. As Anthony Close describes it, “poetic qualities predominated over comedy … or to be more precise, the two things fused together, with the second being assimilated to the first.”12 Instead of reading the novel in “the eighteenth-century categories of ‘burlesque’ and ‘satire’” Romantics felt that Cervantes had transcended mere parody for “something more serious,” a kind of “ironic romance.”13 As Schelling concluded on the novel, “in the overall structure, the ideal still triumphs … particularly through the deliberate vulgarity of its opposites” (Schelling 1856, p. 680).

Both Tieck's and Schelling’s comments imply that the novel improves reality by sparking a kind of consciousness-deepening dialectic within its readers, who use it to transform their own “reality” and make new realities. The novel catalyzes a kind of “fortunate fall” within in readers: poetry “falls” into knowledge of its antithesis, so-called reality, in humorous and parodic ways, and yet ultimately Cervantes drives this plot toward a synthesis in which we deepen our experience of the ideal and transform reality by passing through a struggle with existing realities.

The best example of this dialectic is the novel’s ending. After chasing Quixote through countless misadventures, his family and Sancho finally get what they want: Quixote wakes up from his madness, regains his sanity, and rejects his former madness: “all that nonsense … until now has been a reality to my hurt” (IV. 359). But upon this fall into knowledge, Quixote spirals into depression and suddenly begins to die. Just as suddenly, Sancho too finds himself horrified at this unexpected turn. With sad irony, he urges Quixote to reclaim his madness: “The foolishest thing a man can do,” Sancho laments, “is to let himself die without rhyme or reason, without anybody killing him, or any hands but melancholy making an end of him” (IV. 361). Sancho here is a stand-in for readers, suddenly realizing that in reading the entirety of this story, they too have been sucked into an untrue and foolish yet unexpectedly meaningful fantasy, now wishing it wouldn’t have to end and return us to a reality that now seems lesser by comparison. Through experiencing the noble misadventures of Don Quixote and Don Quixote, Sancho and readers pass through a dialectic in which our longing for the Ideal is deepened as we experience its struggle against the Real.

Strictly speaking, I’m putting words into the Romantics’ mouth whenever I equate their use of “ideal” vs. “real” with “meaning” vs. “truth.” They never used the latter dichotomy and instead employed the typical antinomies of German idealism: the “Ideal” v. the “Real,” “poetry” vs. “life,” “Subject” vs. “Object,” “Noumenal” vs. “phenomenal,” “Ich” vs. “nicht-Ich,” or “Freedom” vs. “Necessity.” Each of these antinomies relates to the others within German Idealism, but they are all something different from the antinomy of “meaning” vs. “truth.” Romantics frame the conflict not as a collapse of meaning into meaningless truths, but rather as a metaphysical dualism within a cosmos that, if currently disharmonious, can still be reharmonized.14 The Ideal and the Real may pull in opposite directions, but both remain intelligible and reconcilable through higher synthesis, if only in mystical experience or in art. By contrast, an opposition between “meaning” and “truth” suggests something more terminal: that what is true may no longer offer meaning, and what is meaningful may no longer be verifiable as truth. The former is a dynamic and productive tension within a universe, less static than the Enlightenment’s mechanical view of the cosmos, but still fully capable of achieving harmony. The latter is an existential rift that risks rendering the world either untrue or unlivable.

Jean Paul, the strangest and most postmodern of the Romantics’ contemporaries, and Heinrich Heine, a bridge from the Romantics into the Bismarckian/Victorian era, both seem to have intuited this more modern tension of meaning vs. truth. Both were more skeptical about the question of whether Cervantes ever successfully reharmonized the real and ideal or if he, in fact, amplified their dissonance. Cervantes “carries through” but does not synthesize “the humouristic parallel between Realism and Idealism, Body and Soul,” writes Jean Paul, concluding that “his twins of Folly stand astride the whole human species”15 (emphasis mine). Where most of his romantic contemporaries elevate the Ideal over the Real, Jean Paul deems both a form of irreconcilable folly.

Heine wonders something similar. Within two paragraphs, he moves from the typical Romantic interpretation of the novel—”all our present-day knights who fight and suffer for an idea appear to them as so many Don Quixotes”—to a more skeptical self-questioning of that very interpretation:

Or did the profound Spaniard wish to mock human nature even more deeply? Did he perhaps, in the figure of Don Quixote, allegorize our spirit, and in the figure of Sancho Panza, our body—and the entire novel would then be nothing other than a great mystery play, where the question of spirit and matter is discussed in its most horrifying truth? … Truly, the body often seems to have more insight than the spirit, and man often thinks more rightly with his back and stomach than with his head (Heine 1867)16.

This interpretation would have indeed “horrified” Heine’s romantic predecessors, elevating bodily instinct above the yearnings of spirit.

Ultimately, Heine concludes on one of the most perceptive readings of both Cervantes and his Romantic readers: “But if the old Cervantes only intended, in his Don Quixote, to depict the fools who sought to restore medieval chivalry—who tried to bring a dead past back to life—then it is a comical irony of fate that it was precisely the Romantic school that gave us the best translation of a book in which their own folly is most delightfully ridiculed.” On this front, Jean Paul and Heine anticipate the key figure between the Romantic and absurdist reading of Don Quixote, the thinker who did more than anyone to challenge our sense of meaning, truth, and their harmony: Friedrich Nietzsche.

4. The Nietzschean Quixote

In 1859, at the age of 15, Nietzsche asked his mother specifically for Tieck’s translation of Don Quixote as a birthday gift and toted it on a pilgrimage to Jena that summer. Thus began an important lifelong relationship with both the novel and the Romantics, frequently linked in Nietzsche’s mind.17 Though he often protested too much that he was no romantic, he would return to the novel many summers thereafter as he worked through his relationship with romanticism, as if he had to reckon with one to reckon with the other. With ambivalence toward both, Nietzsche’s wrestling with the novel ultimately led him to partially reject and partially reimagine Romantic hopes of reconciling truth and meaning. With more ambivalence toward the novel, Nietzsche’s Quixote is both a cautionary tale and a model of value creation, an ancestor of the self-aware modern. This shift exposed the cruelty beneath disillusionment and the absurdity of idealism, paving the way for Camus’s vision—lucid, ironic, and defiantly creative.18

Many know the origin story: Nietzsche remained a romantic well into middle age under the influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner; in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) he retains the Romantic sense that existence is split by a fundamental rift which art might heal; in his telling, the split is between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and the healing might come through the art of tragedy. But the next year, in 1873, he began to question his romanticism when he famously concluded that truth was nothing but “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms … illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions.” And I wonder if he had the delusional Quixote in mind already then. There are no clear textual links from that year, but in the next year—and for years thereafter—there would be many.

Nietzsche’s first explicit use of Quixote occurred in “The Use and Abuse of History” (1874) when he argued that “the banishment of instinct by history”—i.e., an excessive contemplation of history that removes us from making history— "has turned men to shades and abstractions: no one ventures to show a personality, but masks himself as a man of culture, a savant, poet or politician.” Such masks are “nothing but rags and coloured streamers,” Nietzsche declares, and so one “must deceive himself no more, but cry aloud, ‘Off with your jackets, or be what you seem!’ A man of the royal stock of seriousness must no longer be Don Quixote, for he has better things to do than to tilt at such pretended realities.”

On the surface, this seems to be a straightforward Enlightenment reading of the novel, “Quixote” shorthand for someone who mistakes their fables for truth.19 But Nietzsche hints at mixed feelings in his double-command to “off with your jackets, or be what you seem!” The first option—”off with your jackets”—is typical Enlightenment stuff: remove your mask, enough with the act, come back to reality. But the second option—”or be what you seem!”—is one which few Enlightenment thinkers would consider: either give up the act or pull it off so well that it becomes real. The latter is Romantic through and through, the aesthetic notion that art is more than artifice, more than simulacra merely mimicking a truer reality, that art can, in fact, become a unique and even superior reality in its own right if done well enough, a reality that can even alter, even improve prior realities.20 Here, like the Romantics and like Camus, Nietzsche hints at mixed feelings on modernity: either “off with your jacket”—go LaPalisse and kill your meanings with truth—or “be what you seem”—go Don Quixote and commit to the bit.

The next year, his mixed feelings deepened. In a fragment from summer 1875, he noted briefly that “one of the most harmful [schädlichsten] books is Don Quixote.” That winter, he explained what he meant to friend and fellow philologist Erwin Rhode:

Perhaps you should read Don Quixote again now—not because it is the most cheerful, but because it is the harshest [herbste] reading I know. I read it during the summer holidays, and all personal suffering seemed greatly diminished to me, indeed worthy of being laughed at … All seriousness and all passion and everything that touches people’s hearts is Don Quixote. It is good to know this, in some cases; otherwise, it is usually better not to know it (Qtd in Slama 2022).

That is, Quixote is “harmful” and “harshest reading” because it cracks through our “cheer” and forces us to ridicule the Quixote within ourselves. Here too, Nietzsche’s interpretation of the novel seems Enlightenment stuff on the surface. He broadens and sharpens Samuel Johnson’s reading—laughing at Quixote’s foibles as his own—and even goes much farther than Johnson ever would stomach when he declares that “everything that touches people’s hearts” (emphasis mine) is a fable worthy of ridicule if we mistake it for truth.

But while Nietzsche extends the Enlightenment interpretation, he seems to do so once more with mixed feelings. When he concludes that “it is usually better not to know” this disturbing truth—that Quixote is harsh stuff—one must decide whether his tone is sincere or ironic. I think he’s hiding sincerity and mixed feelings under ironic performances of machismo, as if to say, “Quixote is harsh stuff, kid. It’ll hurt when Cervantes disillusions you. Not everyone can bear it. But if you can—if you manage to laugh at yourself with aristocratic strength—you’ll see that you and your old fables were ‘indeed worthy of being laughed at’ and you’ll emerge happier, healthier, enlightened.” This is an act that Nietzsche often performs, an acerbity that delights in cruelty as proof of ruthless, tough-minded, illusion-free Enlightenment.

He returns to this notion in a fragment from 1883, where he notes that “the jest and arrogance of other people once bore a horrifying character for us, especially of prisoners of war. Of madmen: even Don Quixote! Laughter is originally the expression of cruelty.” In The Genealogy of Morals, he similarly noted that “we read nowadays the whole of Don Quixote with a bitter taste in the mouth” as its characters and seemingly its author torture Quixote for his illusions, but modern readers’ “sensation of torture … would appear very strange and very incomprehensible to the author and his contemporaries—they read it with the best conscience in the world as the gayest of books; they almost died with laughing at it. The sight of suffering does one good, the infliction of suffering does one more good—this is a hard maxim, but, nonetheless, a fundamental maxim, old, powerful, and ‘human, all-too-human.’”

But whenever Nietzsche performs this song and dance of cruelty-as-health (I do not think he would deny it’s a song and dance), I always sense the song and the dance. He never quite manages to pull off his own advice to “be what you seem.” While plenty of people do delight in cruelty and see in it a sign of strength, with Nietzsche, I’m less convinced. With these kinds of performances, I wonder if they’re attempts to mask his own distaste for cruelty, his attempt to throw it off the last shackle of slave morality. Though he wears the mask of tough Enlightenment iconoclast, there is still something of the romantic underneath who not only feels that illusions and art can give life, but that the loss of this life—the cost of disillusionment—is lamentable.

He hints at these mixed feelings more clearly the very next year (an annual pilgrimage back to Cervantes seems to have become a tradition at this point) when he wrote in a fragment: “Cervantes could have fought the Inquisition, but he preferred to ridicule its victims, i.e., the heretics and idealists of all kinds,” ironically making “all of Spain, including all the idiots, laugh and think themselves wise.” Worse still, Cervantes, “does not even spare his hero that terrible realization about his condition at the end of his life: if it is not cruelty, then it is coldness, hard-heartedness, which makes him create such a final scene, contempt for the readers, who, as he knew, were not disturbed in their laughter by this ending” (Nachlass 1876/77, 23[140], KSA 8.453–4, qtd in Slama 2022). That is, Cervantes is cruel, and in multiple unsavory ways: (1.) he punches down, mocking the delusions of harmless Quixote but not the more potent delusions of his age that grip his clueless readers and perhaps Cervantes himself; (2.) he not only picks on the harmless heretic but strips him of his life-giving delusion to watch him die, like a boy pulling wings from a fly; (3.) lastly, while cruelly disillusioning Quixote, Cervantes lacks the courage to disillusion his own readers, instead content to pull one over on them, watching them laugh at Quixote’s disillusionment while unaware that they too are victims of illusions, whether Cervantes’ or the church’s.21

Nietzsche reveals more of his romantic side here. He still despises the unexamined delusions of society and calls for a broader disillusionment per his Enlightenment ideals, but he seems to pity Quixote, perhaps even admire him much as the romantics did, when he casts him as the heretical rebel against the vast Christian Inquisition. Per his earlier comment, Nietzsche implies that Quixote would have been better off remaining within his illusions, while Cervantes and his readers would have been better off examining their own.

He expanded this notion shortly thereafter in Human, All Too Human (1878) when he concluded that Christians like Cervantes’ readers are ironically much like “Don Quixote, who under-valued his own bravery because his head was full of the marvellous deeds of the heroes … [that] belongs to the domain of fable.” The point is not the old Enlightenment critique that Christianity is a fable and thus false—Nietzsche is clear here and elsewhere that fables are often full of “marvelous deeds”– but rather that these fables can hinder us from living our own original fables. Nietzsche is making the same argument that his early hero, Ralph Waldo Emerson, made some decades prior: to be a Christian is to give up your power to be Christ-like.22 That is, discipleship and dogma are a denial of the inner power that Christ and Quixote reveal. Instead of following their fables, honor them more by writing your own.

Three years later, in The Dawn of Day (1881), Nietzsche deepened his comparison of Quixote and Christ, considering how both experience disillusionment and the mockery of those ignorant of their own fables. Christ and Quixote both gain thereby the tragic “knowledge of the sufferer”:

All those little lying enchantments, by which things are usually surrounded when seen through the eye of a healthy person, have vanished from the sufferer… [If] he has lived in some kind of dangerous fantasy, this extreme disenchantment through pain is the means, and possibly the only means, of extricating him from it. (It is possible that this is what happened to the Founder of Christianity when suspended from the Cross; for the bitterest words ever pronounced,” My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” if understood in their deepest sense, as they ought to be understood, contain the evidence of a complete disillusionment and enlightenment in regard to the deceptions of life: in that moment of supreme suffering Christ obtained a clear insight into Himself, just as in the poet’s narrative did the poor dying Don Quixote.)

Once more, there are mixed feelings here. First, Nietzsche does not completely belittle “those little lying enchantments”—he notes that “a healthy person” is usually surrounded by them. I suspect he means this sincerely, though the point is itself highly ironic: to be happy and healthy, as modern psychology implies, may require that one believes in certain life-giving “lies” (perhaps including the “lie” that there is a hard-and-fast moral distinction between “truth” and “lies”).

Relatedly, Nietzsche is not fully content with this; like Camus, he sees a tragic grandeur and wisdom in Christ and Quixote the moment they’re disillusioned with their myths and encounter a darker truth—but he also sees the result of this truth as meaninglessness and death. This is what Nietzsche meant when he wrote to Rhode that while “all seriousness and all passion and everything that touches people’s hearts is Don Quixote,” only sometimes “it is good to know this … otherwise, it is usually better not to know it.”

This, in particular, is why Nietzsche so hated the ending of Don Quixote, first because Cervantes cruelly disillusions an old man who’s better off illusioned, more so because after disillusioning Quixote, Cervantes forces him to beg God’s forgiveness for his madness, giving up his original life-affirming illusion for a shame-filled life-denying illusion. “When the Don Quixote-like nature of our sense of power becomes conscious and we awaken,” Nietzsche noted in a fragment the year prior, “we crawl to the cross like Don Quixote—a terrible end! Humanity is always threatened by this shameful self-denial at the end of its striving.”23

In sum, as Nietzsche worked through his mixed reactions to Don Quixote, he began to solidify one of his core arguments: perhaps the truth of one’s beliefs matters less than their power, and perhaps there is not even a hard-and-fast distinction between true vs. false by which we can judge our beliefs. Perhaps it is metaphor and fable, supposed “falsehoods” and “illusions,” all the way down, as Nietzsche argued in “Truth and Lies.” If so, the distinction that matters most is: are these “illusions” and fables life-giving or life-denying? When Nietzsche writes of the need for “disillusionment” and “truth,” he does not mean that we return from a clearly delusional illusion to a clearly real reality—he means that we are giving up a life-denying “illusion” for a life-affirming “illusion”—perhaps better to take away the scare quotes as much as one can and speak of life-denying vs. life-affirming metaphors and narratives. Our telos and concomitant moral criteria should not be solely the narrative of “truth” but just as much Nietzsche’s preferred narrative of “life,” or “creativity,” or “originality,” or “will-to-power.” Once more, “off with your jackets, or be what you seem!”

The romantic desire for the latter—to be what one seems, to achieve true art in one’s life—is most evident in The Gay Science (1882). In many ways, it is Nietzsche’s most Quixote-like book, book-ended by poetry and inspired by the joyful Provencal troubadours who sang the very romances that inspired Quixote unto madness.24 Here his negative use of “quixotism” is applied not to Christians but to scientists who ignore that “science also rests on a belief,” often as life-denying as Christian dogma, as when their “will to truth”—at best “a piece of Quixotism, a little enthusiastic craziness,”—becomes at worst “a destructive principle, hostile to life … a concealed Will to Death.”

By comparison, Nietzsche chooses life. “I do not want to wage war with the ugly,” he declares, “I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!” In several passages, this yea-saying echoes his earlier readings of Don Quixote. In “What One Should Learn From Artists,” he embraces artistic “inventions and artifices” that “withdraw from things until one no longer sees much of them, until one has even to see things into them, in order to see them at all” (emphasis original). I’m reminded of Quixote’s withdrawal from reality here, likewise when later he sounds quite like Camus, declaring that “the human being needs to believe, to know, from time to time, why he exists; his species cannot thrive without periodic confidence in life! Without faith in the existence of reason in life!” When Quixote loses his life-giving illusion, he achieves a tragic wisdom and dies. When his readers ignore their own life-denying illusions, they live without wisdom or life.

The concluding “catechism” of The Gay Science ends on his romantic faith in self-creation: “What makes one heroic?—Going out to meet at the same time one’s highest suffering and one’s highest hope … What does your conscience say?—’You shall become the person you are.’” Once more, here we have circled back to his earliest mention of Quixote six years prior: “off with your jackets, or be what you seem!”

To conclude, while Paul Slama has noted the quixotic overtones of Zarathustra, I believe that Quixote’s influence—and in particular romantic readings of the novel—is even more present in his mature thoughts on the will to power.25 Caroline Picart says it best: “Nietzsche’s mature concept of the will to power resonates to a high degree with the romantic moral aesthetic of qualitative potentializing … a way of simultaneously reading the world as if it were a novel, and imagining or writing a book that could be consubstantial with the world” (Joan S. Picart 1997). Put otherwise, the will to power is a kind of self-aware Quixotism, an aesthetic effort to turn your life into a work of art—a story, a novel, a chivalric romance—embracing rather than shunning its fabulous, fantastic, fictional quality. The will to power is in effect “the Don Quixotism of our feeling of power” that “rises one day to the level of consciousness” yet does not “grovel” back to old fables, instead maintains the quixotic act until the end, not “off with the jacket” but “becoming what one seems.” Nietzsche’s Übermensch, in turn, can perhaps best be imagined as a self-aware Quixote. In a sense, Nietzsche in fact radicalizes romanticism by internalizing its irony and turning it toward a self-conscious mythmaking.

Thus Nietzsche concluded that “one had to be willing to be a buffoon if one desired to be a philosopher,” that his best work was “a magnificent example of Don Quixotism,” that this is “what all philology is at best … One imitates a mere chimera …which has never existed” (Qtd in Pérez 2015). For these reasons, Adrian Del Caro concludes, “it is Nietzsche who deserves the epitaph ‘last romanticist’ … the culminator and surpassed of a long and venerable tradition” (Del Caro 1989).

5. Conclusions

Camus discovered Nietzsche as a teenager, and his first published piece was on the German. He later confessed that “I owe to Nietzsche a part of who I am” (Qtd in Zaretsky 2013). By way of Nietzsche, Camus inherited a good deal of romanticism in his sensitivity to the tensions of life, his desire to overcome them, and his suspicion that perhaps we can’t. His theory of Quixote vs. LaPalisse as our only two options is an elaboration of Jean Paul’s remark on the “twins of folly.”

Camus hoped that we might at least achieve some kind of equipoise between these two methods, concluding that “solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity.” Consciously employing both methods of thought might help reveal what the other lacks.

On the other hand, becoming conscious of the insufficiencies in two methods of thought does not necessarily balance, much less eliminate those insufficiencies. It could, in fact, compound them as our minds careen between one and the other, only to grow ever more disoriented, frustrated, and deflated. Were it possible to balance lucidity and lyricism, evidence and emotion, truth and meaning, again, Camus could have picked more complementary representatives. The uniqueness of La Palisse and Don Quixote is that they embody absurd juxtapositions between meaning and truth: our hunger for meaning “confronts” rather than balances out the truth of a universe that doesn’t respond, in Camus’s words. To experience one is to exclude the other.

So when Camus urges us to “balance” the methods of La Palisse and Don Quixote, I suspect that he is, like Nietzsche, of mixed feelings, hoping that we can at least become better aware of each approach’s insufficiencies. Camus himself seems to recognize all this when he admits that in balancing the methods of La Palisse and Don Quixote, the “classical dialectic must yield, one can see, to a more modest attitude of mind.” Perhaps we must accept that synthesis is not possible. Perhaps we must just live with the absurd tension.26

In this regard, despite his own romantic and Nietzschean proclivities, Camus ultimately settles on a less Promethean and more tragic view of the human predicament. Where Sartre embraced Nietzsche’s challenge to “be what you seem,” Camus had more doubts. Any effort to “be what you seem” seems doomed in his framing to flounder on its baselessness—it must go on anyway.

What in all of this still resonates today? Why then are Camus and Nietzsche both in that rare club of philosophers still read outside of academia? Why do the Romantics still stir my students’ interest more than most Enlightenment writers? In an age where scientific lucidity accelerates daily while meaning fractures into curated feeds and algorithmic tribes, the old Romantic hope of reconciling truth and meaning feels both urgent and impossible. Our news cycles teem with La Palisses, reciting obvious facts that inspire no one, and with Quixotes, tilting at digital windmills for causes as hollow as they are intoxicating. Camus’s tragic modesty—acknowledging that that we can only ever balance lucidity and lyricism—may ring truer than the Romantic dream of harmonizing them for good in art, but Nietzsche’s provocation to “be what you seem” still haunts us: if meaning will not come ready-made from truth, then the implication is clear: we must forge it ourselves, knowing full well it will be part fable, part fact. The question is whether we can do so without surrendering either our grip on reality or our capacity for wonder—whether we can live, and live well, as conscious Quixotes.