Philosophical interpretations of La vida es sueño have long since identified the elements of Platonic epistemology in Calderón’s play, and although some of these elements — such as Segismundo’s alleged spiritual awakening through the...
morePhilosophical interpretations of La vida es sueño have long since identified the elements of Platonic epistemology in Calderón’s play, and although some of these elements — such as Segismundo’s alleged spiritual awakening through the contemplation of Rosaura’s beauty — may in fact be more Neoplatonic than Platonic, there can, at least, be little doubt of the relevance of philosophical interpretations. In the present essay, however, I suggest a reevaluation of Calderón’s Platonic heritage, which focuses less on epistemology and more on ethics. After all, at the heart of La vida es sueño’s central inquiry into the problems of freedom and choice there lies a profound ethical preoccupation with the idea of justice, which is not only the main subject of Plato’s Republic, but a central element of Socratic ethos and, hence, of Plato’s entire philosophical project. The philosophical interpretations of Calderón’s play generally remain speculative rather than hermeneutic, neglecting the concrete comparison between the play and its Platonic sources. This way of proceeding, which appears to be the result of the view of Platonism as a body of ideas rather than as a concrete corpus of literary-philosophical dialogues, not only seems quite unsustainable from a scientific point of view. More importantly, it ignores the seminal Platonic relation of aesthetic criticism and ethics, which Calderón, as we shall see, adopted and developed in his most famous play. In La vida es sueño the dramatist conducts a subtle investigation into the relation between tragedy as an aesthetic form and what may be termed the ‘tragic worldview’ or the ‘philosophy of the tragic’, subjecting the latter to a Platonic scrutiny and transfiguring the former into a Baroque comedia. From Aischylos to Shakespeare and beyond, dramatists have of course inquired into the problem of eudaimonia, human happiness, often with an eye to greater metaphysical questions. However, the Spanish Golden Age drama is particularly interesting in this respect. Not only was the period for obvious historical reasons — national bankruptcy, imperial decadence, the Thirty Years’ War, internal upheavals — characterized by a profound feeling of the fragility of human happiness. The Baroque witnessed a quite astonishing ‘ostracism’ of the term ‘tragedy’ from the aesthetic vocabulary and the peculiar triumph of comedia as the common denominator of the serious drama, which a reconsideration of Calderón’s La vida es sueño in the light of the Platonic critique of tragedy may help illuminate. Although no modern critics have taken up the challenge of tracing the influence of Plato’s critique of tragedy on the Spanish comedia, it is certainly worth the effort. In the present essay we shall begin by considering the different philosophical and aesthetic elements of this critique and subsequently move on to a close examination of its resonance in La vida es sueño, arguing that the play’s investigation of the problems of freedom and choice is largely conducted on the background of a critique of tragic fatalism, which finds its emblematic expression in the transfiguration of Sophocles’ famous Oedipus Tyrannos into an ‘Oedipus moralizatus’, ‘Oedipus christianus’, or ‘Oedipus platonicus’. However, we shall also see how La vida es sueño reiteratedly ponders the complexity of this both philosophical and aesthetic transcendence of tragedy. Even if Calderón ultimately decides against the tragic view of life from a moral perspective, he certainly admits the tragic elements of life and ponders the fragility of goodness. The dramatist in fact succeeds in reconciling the inquiry into the complexity of human existence with the moral imperatives of a metaphysical ethics, a reconciliation that may ultimately be seen as the result of his acknowledgement of the need to ‘temper’ the moral imperatives of metaphysical philosophy with the insight gained from practical experience about the complexity of action and judgement.
