The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 1797-9 by Francisco Goya.

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From Wikipedia:

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Spanish: El sueño de la razón produce monstruos) is an etching by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya. Created between 1797 and 1799 for the Diario de Madrid, it is the 43rd of 80 etchings making up the suite of satires Los Caprichos.

Many suggest that the artist Goya depicts himself asleep amidst his drawing tools, his reason dulled by slumber and bedeviled by creatures that prowl in the dark. The work includes owls that may be symbols of folly and bats symbolizing ignorance. Implied in Goya's preparatory inscription, the artist's nightmare reflects his view of Spanish society, which he portrayed in the Caprichos as demented, corrupt, and ripe for ridicule. The work is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and was the gift of M. Knoedler & Co. in 1918.

The full epigraph for capricho No. 43 reads; "Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her (reason), she (fantasy) is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels."

The title of C. P. Snow's The Sleep of Reason, tenth book in his "Strangers and Brothers" series, and the Doctor Who novel The Sleep of Reason are drawn from this print.

Occasionally the title phrase is rendered as "The dream of reason produces monsters", since the Spanish word "sueño" can mean either "sleep" or "dream". However, Goya's epigraph makes it clear that his intended interpretation is "the sleep of reason".

I am in no position to dispute any of this interpretation but I wonder if Goya was not thinking of a broader horizon than the corruption of Spanish society.

It seems such a clear representation of a tension with which we have been living since the French Revolution.

There were five revolutions in human affairs, in roughly the same narrow time span and all directly or indirectly the consequence of the Age of Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason. The scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Romantic Revolution. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Romantic Revolution were all three temporally very proximate to this production in 1799. Goya had seen the twisted perversion of reason in the French Revolution when the dream of prosperity was morphed into the great terror.

If fantasy (or imagination) can be harnessed with reason, we have the promise of progress and prosperity. America is the singular place where this harnessing of imagination and reason has occurred in the greatest harmony. But Goya could not have know that in 1797. We were still an unorganized rabble of unstable states perched perilously on the eastern seaboard, threatened with internal dissension, peril from native Americans and interference from Europe.

France's Revolution had already illustrated the danger of reason and emotion (Monsieur Guillotine). The passion verging on stridency of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, The American Crisis, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason threatened an unseating of stability.

Goya was at the temporal center of revolutions which promised a Hell on Earth as much as an Eden on Earth. Reason was a machine that could pull everything forwards if bound to imagination, or pull everything down if bound to passion.

So I wonder whether The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is not a wider critique than is described.

It seems so pertinent today. We have the great American experiment in diverse civic progress, constantly under threat by the forces of simple unreason as well as by the forces of reason harnessed to emotion rather than imagination. Social justice warriors, freedom repressors, postmodernists, totalitarians, those seeking rule by the purported best rather than a civil treatment of all - these are the default positions when reason and passion marry.

In this reading, The Sleep of Reason produces two monsters - the monster of barbarism where there is no reason at all, and the monster of anarchy where reason is married to emotion. In the 2-300 years since the Age of Enlightenment and the five revolutions which birthed the modern era, the successful marriage of reason and imagination is astoundingly fruitful and progressive, and in most places outside of the US, short-lived.