As I have noted previously, Miguel de Cervantes was a leading conspirator in the mold of Leibniz and Franklin for a project that would have overturned the evils of oligarchism. This is no mere accident. For great art, as his Don Quixote assuredly is, by its very nature intervenes upon the psyche of humanity and thereby produces material effects in promoting what Benjamin Franklin adopted as a lifelong commitment from Cotton Mather, i.e. "to do the good."
In particular, I refer here to Cervantes' poetic demonstration that the character of formulaic pragmatism in life is deadening to actual creativity. Reading Don Quixote from the first page to the end there is a consistency of purpose that indeed unifies the entirety of the work (which is a sine qua non of all art of any form.) It is a polemic. However, it is never put into any simplistic propositional form and therein lies the irony of the standard of living art. It is immortal in that sense.
This is why the essence of poetic mentation, qua the creative faculty of higher intelligibility, must guide humanity's necessary mission of space colonization. For what classes of problems will we as a species meet with there? And even the enumeration of poetic devices alone is not sufficient as a roadmap for the type of creative problem solving that we will be called upon to perform once we emerge onto that platform of human history.
But the true aesthetic comprehension of the work of the world historical creative genius Cervantes, or his partner Shakespeare is.
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