Does Capitalism Make People Happy?

A few days ago, I talked about Erich Fromm’s psychological critique of Capitalism. People familiar with the thought of Karl Marx might have noticed the similarity of Fromm’s position with Marx’ theme of alienation. As a matter of fact, Fromm was strongly influenced by Marx. Which does not mean that one ought to dismiss Fromm out of hand. Personally I tend to consider Marx’ psychological critique of Capitalism his strongest point, much stronger than his utopian dreams of a revolution by the proletariat.

One may ask, of course, if there is any way to prove or disprove Fromm’s critique. Is there any hard evidence about people within capitalistic societies being less happy than in other societies?

Now as far as I understand Fromm, one cannot reduce his observations merely to the issue of happiness and psychological illness, but if one were to do so, there are in fact several worldwide studies on happiness. Obviously happiness is somewhat difficult to measure, but the studies I have read usually place Denmark at or near the top. And Denmark’s economy is a mix of Capitalism and Socialism.

In North America, Canada consistently outdoes the United States in happiness rankings, and again, Canada has more socialist elements than the more prominent economic powerhouse across its border. The United States, though the biggest economy in the world and one of the highest per-capita income countries, has not made it into the top ten in any happiness rankings I am aware of. It is beaten not only by the semi-socialist Scandinavian countries, but also by much less wealthy places like Costa Rica, Bhutan, The Bahamas, Brunei, Antigua, Malaysia, Saint Kitts, Ireland, and Seychelles. In one study of 2006, it ranked right behind the United Arab Emirates.

Mainland Asian countries in general rank pretty low, whether wealthy or not (Japan ranking lower than China, for instance), and it would be interesting to ask why.

The Psychology of Capitalism

In my last post, I talked about democracy and free-market capitalism. But though I am not uninterested in political systems and economics as such, I am even more interested in the psychological effects of different political and economic systems.

Free-market capitalism has undoubtedly achieved much and continues to do so. Even issues like the environment might ultimately be better solved by a (more or less) free market than any alternative system. At least I’m open to the idea. But what of the human psyche? Does a consumer culture have ill effects on a psychological level?

Some noteworthy psychologists have thematized this. I am thinking, for instance, of Erich Fromm, who talked a lot about the contrast between “having” and “being,” and he asks whether the “having” culture of capitalism produces psychologically healthy individuals. People, according to Fromm, do not exist as independent individuals within a societal framework. Rather, their characters are molded by the socio-economic structure, and it is possible, says Fromm, for that whole structure to be psychologically unhealthy. In the case of capitalism, he believed that it produces a “manipulated personality” that is estranged from the world, from others, and from itself. (See, for instance, Fromm’s book The Sane Society.)

What do you think? Is free-market capitalism better at producing material advances than psychological well-being? Are there inevitable ill effects of capitalism on the human psyche?

Do We Actually Have a Democracy? Do We Actually Have a Free Market?

Considering the economic trouble in the Eurozone at the moment, this is a good opportunity to take a break from my obsession with Immanuel Kant and instead jot down a few thoughts on economics—not specifically the current situation but more generally.

One basic question is what economic system is best. A free-market economy or a more controlled economy?

I suppose something similar may be said about a free-market economy as Churchill said about democracy. It is the worst form of government, except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time. However, Churchill’s witty statement about democracy unwittingly raises an important issue, namely the fact that modern nation states do not actually practice pure democracy.

If an ancient Athenian stepped into a time machine and arrived, say, in modern America, I doubt he would recognize the political system as a democracy. The American people have almost no direct vote on anything, the limited democracy being only representational. Then there are these big power houses of Congress that are modelled on Rome rather than Athens. Furthermore, our hypothetical time traveller would be surprised to see in a supposed democracy such an extremely undemocratic institution as the Supreme Court, in which the justices not only serve for life, but are not even appointed by the people. The President himself appoints them. And speaking of him: What on earth is a President doing in a democracy? Even having something like triumviri (three leaders) would be a stretch on the democratic spirit, but a single person of such immense importance? One, furthermore, who is Commander in Chief? Hail Caesar. To the Athenian democrat, this smacks mightily of a dictatorship, meaning the rule of a single person.

Now, my point is not to say that the United States and other modern states have fallen from the high ideal of pure democracy and need redemption. Quite the opposite: By intentionally mixing in elements from other forms of government such as republics, oligarchies, and yes, even dictatorships, the Founding Fathers of the United States actually improved upon the idea of a democracy. They heeded Plato’s and other people’s critiques of the inherent weaknesses of democracies (see, for instance, Plato’s analogy of the Ship of State in The Republic) and attempted to safeguard against them through these non-democratic elements.

Likewise, only because a free-market economy might be better (or at least less bad) than all the other systems that have been tried from time to time, it might still be possible to improve upon it by mixing in other elements. In fact, one can argue that this has already happened, including in the United States.

Let us again imagine a time traveller, only this time an American Capitalist from the early 20th century being catapulted just a century forward. Would he really recognize the current economic system in the United States – let alone in other countries – as a free-market economy? Would he not rather call it socialism? And I am not talking about Obama’s health-care reform here. I mean, first of all, the changes to the free-market economy through Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930’s: the National Recovery Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the acts regulating credit and stock exchanges, the Glass-Steagall Act for steering bank investments, the empowerment of worker unions through the Wagner Act, the creation of Social Security and income support programs, other acts in support of families and job guarantees, minimum-wage laws, ad almost infinitum.

Then came World War II, which further changed the once free-marked economy. It increased the income tax, multiplied the size of the government to unprecedented proportions, and reshaped the whole economy. Government intervention became the norm, the unions that had been created a decade earlier now gained momentum, government health-care spending expanded, not to mention the economic role played by the United States on the international stage through the Marshall Plan, the International Monetary Fund and other agreements. None of these developments were pure free-market forces, but hands-on interventions of the government in the economy.

I do not now wish to debate whether specific aspects of the New Deal and the changes during World War II were good or bad, but mostly to point out that many of these changes are now seen as normal and quite compatible with a (supposedly) free-market economy. How many people are out on the streets protesting against Social Security nowadays? How many people want to get rid of all government-protected labor unions? How many truly think the government should play no economic role on the world stage? Yet, a Capitalist from the early 20th century would hardly recognize these features as belonging to a free market. He might think we are joking if we claim to be for a free market and yet have no objection to Social Security. Marxists in disguise, that’s what he would probably call us.

But, just like with the non-democratic elements in modern democracies, might not some (certainly not all!) of these “socialist” measures in the free-market have been an improvement upon the system? And might there not be further improvements to be made?

On the other hand, there seems to be plenty of evidence that administering medicine to free-market forces often proves worse in its side effects than the disease it is meant to treat. Increase minimum wage and you increase unemployment. Keep down inflation, and you may also keep down growth. Increase control, and you increase corruption (India, anyone?), because you need people to do the controlling. But who controls the controllers? Sadly, often money does. Prohibit alcohol and you get an Al Capone.

The list could go on. But I think I ought to draw in my reins here, get off my laptop and start implementing some order in our way too free-looking kitchen.

That’s my two cents for now. As always, objections are welcome.

From Pietism to the Critiques: The Development of Kant’s Thoughts

In a previous post, I talked about Immanuel Kant’s autonomy: how he tried to figure things out all by himself.

Lest anyone get a false picture of Kant being a recluse who developed his thoughts in an intellectual vacuum, I would like to use this post to trace the development of his thoughts over the years. My main source of information for this development is Frederick Copleston’s eleven-volume History of Philosophy.

Immanuel Kant was born at Königsberg on April 22, 1724, the son of a saddler who raised him as a Pietist (Pietism was a particularly pious and vigorous form of Lutheranism). At the age of sixteen, he entered university and fell in love with the budding natural sciences, especially Newtonian science. Accordingly, most of Kant’s earliest writings are about the natural sciences, and he never lost his deep interest in them.

Wisely declining a professorial chair of poetry, in 1755 he began working as a private lecturer and tutor. For a time, he also made some extra money as an assistant librarian. During his fifteen years as lecturer, he taught on a wide variety of topics, read a lot, encouraged his students to think for themselves, and frequently engaged in discussions with others. As Copleston says, “Philosophical theorizing in the void was by no means a Kantian ideal, even though a cursory glance at the first Critique might suggest that it was.”

In line with his early interest, his first published works were on natural science, such as A General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755). And in this interest already lies the first component for the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant accepted that Newtonian science described reality accurately, but he also came into contact with Hume’s empiricism that raised questions about knowing causality. Put these two together, and you are inevitably led to think about how to reconcile the two.

Also, writes Copleston, “given his acceptance of the scientific conception of the world and given at the same time his acceptance of the validity of moral experience, Kant found himself compelled in the course of time to discuss the reconciliation of the world of necessity with the world of freedom. Finally, given the facts of scientific advance and of the common acceptance of the classical physics, he found himself driven to ask whether the lack of comparable advance in metaphysics and of a common acceptance of anyone metaphysical system did not demand a radical revision of our ideas of the nature and function of metaphysics.”

In his late thirties, Kant published The Only Possible Ground for a Demonstration of God’s Existence. At the end of this essay, he says that though “it is thoroughly necessary to be convinced of God’s existence, it is not quite so necessary that one should demonstrate it.” Hence, he already had the basic thought that reason drives us to ask questions that reason cannot answer. Nevertheless, he does argue for God’s existence. While he rejects several of the classical arguments for God’s existence (for instance, he says that we cannot demonstrate that a first cause must be what we call God), he embraces the “argument from possibility” as the only possible ground for a demonstration of God’s existence. “There is, he tells us, no intrinsic logical contradiction in denying all existence whatsoever. But what we cannot legitimately do is to affirm possibility and at the same time to deny that there is an existent ground of possibility. And we must admit possibility. For we cannot deny it without thinking, and to think is to affirm implicitly the realm of possibility. And Kant proceeds to argue that this being must be one, simple, immutable, eternal, spiritual and whatever else is included in the meaning of the term ‘God’ as used in metaphysics” (Copleston).

In The Only Possible Ground, Kant speaks of metaphysics as “a bottomless abyss” and as “a dark ocean without shore and without lighthouse.” He further treats the nature of metaphysics in his Enquiry into the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals, published in 1964. In it, he stresses that there is a fundamental difference between mathematics and metaphysics, between “synthetical” and “analytical” constructs of the mind. As an illustration, Kant uses the example of time. Before we even begin an investigation of time, he writes, we already have an idea or knowledge of time. We then look at different instances of experiencing time in order to formulate an abstract concept. “But,” writes Kant, “if I wished to try to arrive synthetically at a definition of time, what a happy chance I should have to meet with, for this concept to be precisely the one which completely expressed the previously given idea.” In mathematics, one begins with definitions; in metaphysics, one begins with ideas one already has and then tries to define them. As Augustine said, he knew very well what time was as long as nobody asked him for a definition. In metaphysics, one may well know some truths about an object of thought and draw valid conclusions without being able to define the object.

Metaphysics is, therefore, fundamentally different from mathematics and “without a doubt the most difficult of all human studies,” writes Kant in his Enquiry. He thought that no real metaphysics had yet been written and that the “genuine method of metaphysics is fundamentally of the same kind as that which Newton introduced into natural science and which was there so fruitful.”

Two years after the Enquiry, Kant published Dreams of a Ghost-seer explained by Dreams of Metaphysics. As the title suggests, this is the most light-hearted of all of Kant’s rather serious work. It discusses the visionary experiences of Immanuel Swedenborg, a scientist and Christian mystic. “But,” Copleston explains, “the main point is not Kant’s discussion of visionary experiences but rather his question whether the theories of speculative metaphysics, so far as they pretend to transcend experience, are in any stronger position than Swedenborg’s visions. And he makes it clear that they are, in his opinion, in a weaker position. It may be that Swedenborg’s visions were caused by contact with a world of spirits, even if this cannot be proved. But metaphysical theories are supposed to be rationally demonstrated; and this is what metaphysical theories about spiritual beings cannot be. We cannot even have positive conceptions of spirits. True, we can try to describe them by the aid of negations. But the possibility of this procedure rests, according to Kant, neither on experience nor on rational inference: it rests on our ignorance, on the limitations of our knowledge.”

Kant’s conclusion is that if metaphysics is to be scientific at all, it must determine “the limits of knowledge which have been set by the nature of human reason.” Here, the influence of Hume is apparent. As Hume suggested, causes and effect can be known only through experience, which is why we cannot use the idea of causality to go beyond sense-experience and attain knowledge of a super-sensible reality.

But Hume was not the only influence on Kant. Leibniz, too, had a big impact on his thinking. In 1768, the Duten’s edition of Leibniz’ writing hit the book market, containing the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence. The result of reading this was Kant’s inaugural dissertation as professor On the Forms and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World (1770).

Leibniz had maintained against Newton and Clarke that space and time cannot be absolute realities or properties of things-in-themselves. Clarke’s position, Kant thought, would get us hopelessly entangled in antimonies, because thinking of space as infinite leads just as much to self-contradiction as thinking of space as finite. Likewise, thinking of time has having a beginning leads just as much to self-contradiction as thinking of time as having no beginning. “Kant accepted, therefore, the view of Leibniz that space and time are phenomenal, and that they are not properties of things-in-themselves. At the same time he was not prepared to accept Leibniz’s notion that they are confused ideas or representations. For in this case geometry, for instance, would not be the exact and certain science which it is. Kant speaks, therefore, of space and time as ‘pure intuitions’” (Copleston).

“Time,” writes Kant, “is not something objective and real; it is neither an accident, nor a substance, nor a relation; it is the subjective condition, necessary because of the nature of the human mind, of coordinating all sensibilia by a certain law, and it is a pure intuition. For we co-ordinate substances and accidents alike, as well according to simultaneity as to succession, only through the concept of time.” Again, “space is not anything objective and real; it is neither a substance nor an accident nor a relation; but it is subjective and ideal and proceeding from the nature of the mind by a stable law, as the scheme (schema) of co ordinating all external sensa.” In order to have any sensitive knowledge whatsoever, we need the pure intuition of time. It is a necessary condition. I cannot even be aware of my internal desires except in time, and the pure intuition of space is the necessary condition for all knowledge of external sense-data.

The function of the mind, then, is to organize the data of the senses. As Kant puts it: “From appearance to experience there is no way except by reflection according to the logical use of the intellect.” Thus, Kant places himself between empiricists like Locke and rationalists like Leibniz. Leibniz had criticized Locke’s empiricism, and Kant agreed with Leibniz that we do not derive all our concepts empirically, but he disagreed with Leibniz that we have innate concepts. “Since, then, in metaphysics we do not find empirical principles, the concepts encountered therein must be sought, not in the senses, but in the very nature of the pure intellect, not as innate (connati) concepts, but as abstracted from the intrinsic laws of the mind (attending to its actions on the occasion of experience), and so as acquired. Of this kind are possibility, existence, necessity, substance, cause, etc., together with their opposites or correlates.”

Kant contrasts the nature of the pure intellect with the natural sciences and mathematics, where “use provides the method.” That is, we only analyzed the method of science after it had already developed a bit, similar to the formulation of grammatical rules in relation to language. People did not first formulate grammatical rules and then begin to talk. Rather, grammar followed the use of language. “But pure philosophy,” writes Kant, “such as is metaphysics, in which the use of the intellect concerning the principles is real, that is, where primitive concepts of things and relations and the very axioms are originally provided by the pure intellect itself, and where, since there are no intuitions, we are not immune from error, method precedes all science; and whatever is undertaken before the precepts of this method have been duly worked out and firmly established, seems to be rashly conceived and fit to be rejected as a vain and ridiculous activity of the mind.”

When we deal with material things, we do not first have to work out a scientific method to come to know about them a great deal. In contrast, when we deal with non-material realities, such as God, or things-in-themselves apart from our sense intuitions, it is imperative to figure out how we can come to know them at all. Where there is no intuition, the problem of method becomes central.

The first rule of this method, says Kant, is to acknowledge that we cannot extent knowledge from sensible to super-sensible realities. We cannot, for instance, apply the concept of cause to God. We might still apply it in a symbolic sense, but not in the sense of scientific knowledge.

Now this does not mean that there are no super-sensible realities. Kant never said that they did not exist. “In the dissertation Kant speaks of the dogmatic use of the intellect as an extension of the general principles of the pure intellect to conceive a perfect noumenon or purely intelligible reality as the measure of all other realities. In the theoretical sphere (that is, in the sphere of being, of what is) this measure or exemplar is God, the supreme being. In the practical sphere (in the sphere of what ought to be effected through free action) it is moral perfection” (Copleston).

During the beginning of his professorship, Kant continued to think about these issues. In June 1771, he wrote to a former pupil of his that he was working on a book which would be entitled The Bounds of Sensibility and Reason. In this work, he wanted to deal with the basic principles and laws in us that are in place before we experience the sensible world, specifically as they relate to the theory of metaphysics, morals, and taste. In other words, he had originally planned to cover in one book what later turned out to be three, namely his three Critiques.

In another letter to the same former pupil, written in February 1772, Kant again talks about his planned book. In this letter, he explains that the pure concepts of the understanding “have their origins in the nature of the soul, yet so that they neither are caused by the object nor bring the object into being.” But he took pains to point out that he had a different concept in mind than previous philosophers. “Plato, says Kant, postulated an intuition of the divinity in a previous existence as the source of the pure concepts and fundamental principles of the understanding. Malebranche postulated a present and continuing intuition of divine ideas. Crusius assumed that God implanted in the soul certain rules of judgment and certain concepts such that they will agree with objects according to a pre-established harmony. But all such theories have recourse to a Deus ex machina and they raise more problems than they solve. Some other explanations of the conformity between concepts and objects must therefore be sought. And Kant informs Herz that his inquiry into ‘transcendental Philosophy’ (namely his attempt to reduce the concepts of the pure reason to a certain number of categories) is now sufficiently advanced for him to offer a Critique of the Pure Reason (eine Kritik der reinen Vernunft), which will deal with the nature both of theoretical and of practical (moral) knowledge” (Copleston).

This critique of pure reason, this analysis of reason not based on experience, finally appeared in 1781. “In this famous work,” Copleston summarizes, “Kant treats of mathematical and scientific knowledge and endeavours to justify the objectivity of this knowledge in the face of the empiricism of David Hume. He does this by proposing his ‘Copernican revolution’, that is, the theory that objects conform to the mind rather than the other way round. Because the structure of human sensibility and of the human mind is constant, objects will always appear to us in certain ways. We are thus enabled to make universal scientific judgments which hold good not only for actual but also for possible experience. The Newtonian science is thus theoretically justified despite the dissolvent tendencies of empiricism. From this position it follows that pure concepts of the understanding do not enable us to apprehend things in themselves, apart from the way in which they appear to us, or supersensible realities. And in the first Critique Kant tries to explain how speculative metaphysics of the traditional type arose and why it is foredoomed.”

He then set out to write his other two Critiques. Just like the first one was meant to isolate and systematically analyze the a priori elements in scientific knowledge, so in his second Critique he tried to isolate and systematically analyze the a priori elements in morality. “But Kant is also concerned in his ethical writings with metaphysics in another sense. For he tries to establish as postulates of the moral law the great truths of freedom, immortality and God. Thus the principal truths which, according to the first Critique, are incapable of scientific demonstration, are later re-introduced as postulates of moral or practical faith.”

Kant does not defend human freedom, immortality and the existence of God as scientifically demonstrable, but “as implications of the moral law, in the sense that recognition of the fact of moral obligation is seen to demand or postulate a practical faith in these truths. Thus Kant still maintains that there is a supersensible sphere; but he finds the key to it, not in dogmatic metaphysics, but in moral experience” (Copleston).

Finally, the third Critique deals with our judgments regarding aesthetics and the purposiveness of Nature. In it, Kant tries to bridge the wide gap between the mechanistic, deterministic world of the physical sciences as opposed to the world of free choice and hence morality and faith. “That is to say, he tries to show how the mind passes from the one to the other; and he attempts the rather difficult task of showing how the transition is reasonable without at the same time going back on what he has already said about the vanity of dogmatic metaphysics and about the position of moral or practical faith as our only means of access to the supersensible world” (Copleston).

I have not covered all of Kant’s writing here—he also has some important pieces on politics and history—but I think Copleston has done a good job showing the gradual development of what we find in the three Critiques. I hope that by shortening what Copleston said, I did not chop up his analysis too much.

The Epistemology of Don Quixote

I just finished another Great Book that could hardly be of a more different character than Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (see my last post), namely Don Quixote, the epoch-making novel written by the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes and published in two volumes in 1605 and 1615. Yet, in spite of their vast differences, they both share an interest in epistemology.

The story centers around a retired country gentleman who becomes obsessed with medieval stories of knightly adventures and chivalrous sentiments. Here is the first epistemological issue: He loves these stories so much that he permanently suspends all disbelief about them and actually considers them to have truly happened. The next step in his delusion is to believe that he, himself, could be a knight-errand and go on similar adventures as the ones he has read about.

The basic message is that books can be dangerous. They can mess with your common-sense perception of the world and make you see the world through the lens of what you have read about. Truth always rises above falsehood as oil above water, one of the fictional narrators says at one point, but certain books seem to have the ability to dunk the truth under—at least temporarily.

Accordingly, the deluded gentleman renames himself “Don Quixote,” puts on an old suit of armor, dedicates his life to the service of an unsuspecting farm girl that he once briefly glimpsed and now christens “Dulcinea del Toboso,” and sets out on his first adventure. As this should make clear, Don Quixote is a parody of books on chivalry, and it would be a mistake to take it too seriously. Nevertheless, epistemological questions and other serious issues keep coming up in the story.

One of them is the question to what degree our passions can distort our perception. The only joke on record that Immanuel Kant has ever made is, “The young man passionately in love with the lady of his choice sees in her no imperfection whatever. This condition of blindness generally clears up about three weeks after marriage.” Kant makes a distinction between our passions and emotions (see his Metaphysics of Morals). Emotions, he says, are an integral part of our personality, while passions come and go rather quickly and severely distort our perception. The unusual thing about Don Quixote is that his passion lasts as long as it does. Perhaps that is due to the fact that he has absolutely no contact with the object of his passion, having taken a girl that he had only briefly glimpsed and turned her in his imagination into a noble lady of incomparable grace and beauty.

A fascinating aspect of Don Quixote’s epistemology is that he never lacks an explanation that fits into his distorted view. In probably the most iconic scene of the book, he attacks windmills that he believes to be vicious giants. He drives his lance-point into the sail, but the wind whirls it around with such force that it shivers the lance to pieces, sweeping with it horse and rider, who goes rolling over on the plain, “in a sorry condition.”

His faithful squire Sancho comes to his aid and says, “God bless me! Did I not tell your worship to mind what you were about, for they were only windmills? and no one could have made any mistake about it but one who had something of the same kind in his head.”

“Hush, friend Sancho,” replies Don Quixote, “the fortunes of war more than any other are liable to frequent fluctuations; and moreover I think, and it is the truth, that that same sage Friston who carried off my study and books, has turned these giants into mills in order to rob me of the glory of vanquishing them, such is the enmity he bears me; but in the end his wicked arts will avail but little against my good sword.”

The problem with this kind of epistemology is that it can be easily turned against you. When Don Quixote asks Sancho to find his lady Dulcinea del Toboso for him, and Sancho is at a loss of what to do, he points at the first woman that comes their way and declares her to be the beauteous and elegant Dulcinea. Don Quixote says in astonishment that he only sees a coarse country wench with cataracts in her eyes and a foul smell in her mouth, but Sancho, feigning equal astonishment, declares that he sees the peerless Dulcinea. It surely must be those malignant magicians again, says Sancho, that always persecute Don Quixote and have now enchanted his perception to see his noble love as an ugly wench. Well, given the frequency with which Don Quixote himself had used this argument to support his beliefs, he cannot really argue against it now.

As fantastical as the story is, I think this still has an application for today. How many devoutly religious people are there who are too eager to believe anything that seems to fit their belief, only to become prey to some money-grabbing faith healer or other questionable people? Surely, whether we have religious beliefs like Kant or no religious beliefs like Hume, we can all use a large dose of their epistemological care not to buy into beliefs too quickly. Otherwise, the end result might be a Quixotian tangle. This, of course, also goes for other beliefs such as the many quick fixes that are sold in our capitalist society. The whole advertising industry has taken on Quixotian proportions.

There are still other epistemological issues in the book. Let me just briefly mention one more before bringing this post to a close. As I said above, the book was published in two volumes with an interval of ten years between the two. Now in the second book, Don Quixote is actually told that a book has been written about his previous adventures. The characters talk about this first book, and Don Quixote questions the veracity of some of its parts. To complicate matters, the second book is narrated by more than one fictional author, and the fictional compiler sometimes adds that he believes a certain story he includes to be apocryphal. Thus, it is not only Don Quixote’s perception that is unreliable, but we, the reader, are forced to question to what degree the stories about Don Quixote himself are reliable.

This additional epistemological element was probably inspired by the fact that, between the publication of the two volumes by Cervantes, an anonymous author had published his own Part Two of Don Quixote.

But enough said. Don Quixote is a very long book, and perhaps it is only my boredom with the repeated parody that makes me turn it into a philosophical work.