The Dream of Reason

I should like to rethink the interpretation of Goya’s title for the work “El sueño de la razón produce monstruous” because the word sueño may be understood to imply a meaning that is not conveyed by the word “sleep” alone. For the word sueño alludes to “sleep” as much as it may invoke a state of “dreaming”, of imagination. I have in mind a specific "dream"-- that of Goya and his contemporaries in the early nineteenth century, the institutionally marginzalized ilustrados in Spain who aspired to reform the Antiguo Régimen and modernize the State to become a democracy. Thereby the context of Goya’s image lends itself to an interpretation of dreams, of the human imaginary and its projects, of a collective aspiration for deliverance from "social ills" by Enlightened ideals. My interpretation of Goya as well is informed by an interpretation of dreams, of temporal fissures, of historical “monsters”, and of the madness depicted in the Caprichos. For the title of Goya’s etching may also be read as the “dream of reason that produces monsters", whereby sueño alludes to a project borne from the collective imaginary, a conjuring up of fantasy or, during the “enlightened” era, the frustrated attempts to dismantle the antiquated institutions of Church and Monarchy. Here I should like to revisit the dreaming subject in Goya’s etching, to turn the Enlightened faith in the reasoning subject, the “moral” of this image, on its head; insomuch as Goya may have wished to exhibit that the sleep of reason produces monsters, therein also lies the possibility of reading the artist’s “Sueño” as the content of the “dream of reason” at its most perverse. The dream or aspiration for modernization as having produced monsters in the name of reason, by a positivist faith in progress, and by means of realizing its projects through violence. The nightmare Goya portrays in his dreaming artist, I will suggest, is not only a conjuring of fantasy from the position of a solitary or mad, dreaming subject, but is as well borne from the very rationale that eradicates the “monsters” left in its wake—the violence and terror produced throughout the struggle for modernity Spain, the horrors that do not correlate within the positivist imaginary of Enlightenened promise. To ask of enlightened man, in retrospect, by invoking the question of philosopher Manuel Cruz, “how is it that this man, who was capable at times of carrying society towards a path to progress, who created the conditions of his wellbeing, would also carry it to (and maintain it at) the very border of catastrophe"?