Two Kinds of Knowing in Plato, Cervantes, and Aristotle

Abstract

Twice in Don Quixote, Part I, Cervantes alludes to a question that puts Plato in the forefront of our minds. In Chapter 47, the Canon of Toledo launches his famous diatribe against the romances of chivalry, which he describes as "harmful to the republic." Then, two chapters later, Don Quixote introduces his defense of the romances by alluding to the Canon's views of the dangers of fiction: "It seems to me, my dear sir, that what you have sought to persuade me is that knights errant have never existed, and that all books of chivalry are lies and untruths, dangerous as well as useless to our country, and that I've done wrong in reading them, and still worse in believing them, and worst of all in imitating them, taking on myself the harsh profession of knight errantry in which they offer instruction, for you deny that there have been any folk such as Amadís (neither Amadís of Gaul nor Amadís of Greece) nor any of the other knights of whom these books say so much" (I, 49). 1 What, then, is the place of fiction in the civic state? And what is the role of imaginative literature in the formation of those who would aspire to full participation in it?