I wrote that book in order to rethink Don Quixote in opposition to the Cervantists and erudite persons, in order to make a living work of what was and still is for the majority a dead letter.  What does it matter to me what Cervantes intended or did not intend to put into it and what he actually did put into it?  What is living in it is what I myself discover in it, whether Cervantes put it there or not, what I myself put into and under and over it, and what we all put into it.  I wanted to hunt down our philosophy in it.

For the conviction continually grows upon me that our philosophy, the Spanish philosophy, is liquescent and diffused in our literature, in our life, in our action, in our mysticism, above all, and not in philosophical systems.  It is concrete.  And is there not perhaps as much philosophy or more in Goethe, for example, as in Hegel?  The poetry of Jorge Manrique, the Romancero, Don Quijote, La Vida es Sueno, the Subida al Monte Carmelo, imply an intuition of the world and a concept of life (Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht).  And it was difficult for this philosophy of ours to formulate itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period that was aphilosophical, positivist, technicist, devoted to pure history and the natural sciences, a period essentially materialist and pessimist.

Our language itself, like every cultured language, contains within itself an implicit philosophy.

A language, in effect, is a potential philosophy.  Platonism is the Greek language which discourses in Plato, unfolding its secular metaphors; scholasticism is the philosophy of the dead Latin of the Middle Ages wrestling with the popular tongues; the French language discourses in Descartes, the German in Kant and in Hegel, and the English in Hume and in Stuart Mill.  For the truth is that the logical starting-point of all philosophical speculation is not the I, neither is it representation (Vorstellung), nor the world as it presents itself immediately to the senses; but it is mediate or historical representation, humanly elaborated and such as it is given to us principally in the language by means of which we know the world; it is not psychical but spiritual representation.  When we think, we are obliged to set out, whether we know it not and whether we will or not, from what has been thought by others who came before us and who environ us.  Thought is an inheritance.  Kant thought in German, and into German he translated Hume and Rousseau, who thought in English and French respectively.  And did not Spinoza think in Judeo-Portuguese, obstructed by and contending with Dutch?

Thought rests upon prejudgements, and prejudgements pass into language.  To language Bacon rightly ascribed not a few of the errors of the idola fori.  But is it possible to philosophize in pure algebra or even in Esperanto?  In order to see the result of such an attempt one has only to read the work of Avenarius on the criticism of pure experience (reine Erfahrung), of this prehuman or inhuman experience.  And even Avenarius, who was obliged to invent a language, invented one that was based upon the Latin tradition, with roots which carry in their metaphorical implications a content of impure experience, of human social experience.