Alfred Schütz’s philosophical essay, republished in 1964 after its first publication in 1955, interprets Cervantes’s novel through William James’s theory of multiple realities. It asks how a world acquires the accent of reality, withstands contradictory experience, and becomes shareable with others. Don Quixote’s adventures reveal both the resilience of interpretive frameworks and their dependence on interpersonal trust.
Each world, whilst it is attended to, is real after its own fashion, and any relation to our mind at all in the absence of a stronger relation with which it clashes, suffices to make an object real.
This Jamesian premise redirects attention from the falsity of Don Quixote’s beliefs to the conditions sustaining them. Chivalry constitutes an organized world with historical authorities, practical obligations, and distinctive understandings of causality, space, and time. Its credibility rests partly on documentary detail: books supply the histories through which the knight recognizes his vocation.
Furthermore, the books which deal with the life and history of the knights describe in all details the family, time, place, action of this or that knight day by day.
Such specificity gives chivalric narratives the appearance of historical evidence. Within this framework, contrary perceptions need not disprove the knight’s beliefs. They can instead become evidence of powers already recognized by his world.
Enchanters, so we learn, can transform all things and change their natural shapes.
Enchantment is therefore more than an improvised excuse for error. It mediates between incompatible interpretations while preserving the chivalric world’s coherence. The helmet and the barber’s basin can designate divergent realities without compelling Don Quixote to abandon his own. Schütz’s comparison with explanatory frameworks raises the question of how governing assumptions are secured, without simply identifying science with madness.
The three expeditions progressively expose the social conditions of this stability. During the first, others accommodate the solitary knight without seriously challenging his interpretations. The second introduces Sancho and the need for a common universe of discourse. Ordinary communication presupposes sufficiently similar experiences and structures of relevance; knight and squire must negotiate those similarities. Sancho’s qualified acceptance of enchantment, expressed in the “basin-helmet,” makes coexistence possible. Yet the dispute at the inn shows that neither argument, majority agreement, nor force necessarily resolves conflict between distinct realities.
On the third expedition, people familiar with the published adventures anticipate Don Quixote’s behavior. The Duke and Duchess construct situations that appear to confirm his world while treating it as entertainment. Their calculated accommodation differs from shared conviction: apparent agreement conceals manipulation. The knight encounters a counterfeit confirmation that undermines genuine communication.
Dulcinea introduces conflict within Don Quixote’s own experience. When Sancho identifies peasant girls as Dulcinea and her attendants, the knight cannot see what his companion claims to see. Enchantment must now explain a failure of his own perception. The cave of Montesinos further destabilizes distinctions between vision, dream, and reality. Neither chivalry nor common sense is an entirely homogeneous domain; each encounters experiences that strain its boundaries.
The puppet show dramatizes the distinction between aesthetic participation and practical intervention. Don Quixote treats a represented rescue as an event requiring his action and attacks the puppets. The destruction and demand for compensation reveal the collision of theatrical representation, chivalric duty, and everyday consequences. The enchanted-boat episode introduces scientific interpretation, which differs from immediate common sense while remaining connected to empirical verification.
The staged flight on Clavileño brings mutual belief to a crisis. Don Quixote responds to Sancho’s extraordinary account by seeking reciprocal acceptance of their unverifiable experiences. Communication depends on confidence in another person’s truthfulness and capacity to distinguish fantasy from reality. Yet reciprocal assent can no longer restore the knight’s own conviction. His ability to sustain the chivalric world begins to fail from within.
Disenchantment offers no uncomplicated triumph of reason. Returning to everyday reality deprives Don Quixote of the mission that gave his life coherence. Schütz makes this loss philosophically consequential: judgments of wisdom and foolishness themselves arise within particular realities. The essay joins reality to intersubjectivity, showing how even ordinary certainty depends on trust, habitual expectations, and interpretive commitments that cannot be secured by agreement alone.
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