Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño: Philosophical Crossroads ed. by Andrés Lema-Hincapié and Conxita Domènech

Abstract

Pedro Calderon de la Barca's La vida es sueno: Philosophical Crossroads. Ed. Andres Lema-Hincapie and Conxita Domenech. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2014. 191 ppTheeditors' introduction to this collection of essays lays out the ambitious project of challenging the entrenched perception that rberia's Catholic orthodoxy and geographic isolation prevented the modern philosophical currents of Western Europe from taking root on the peninsula. To confront this contention, an eclectic group of philosophers and Hispanists demonstrates the interaction of philosophy with one symbolic Spanish text, La vida es sueno. As a point of departure, the focus on this play unifies what might otherwise be an incongruent volume in its consideration of philosophy written both on and off the peninsula before, during, and after the time of Calderon.Philosophers will find of great interest those essays that employ the play as a test case to examine modern philosophical arguments. The choice of this emblematic work of literature to evaluate Iberian philosophy immediately engages the book with a question answered valiantly by philosopher Jorge J. E. Gracia: Is La vida es sueno philosophy or literature? (65). His answer (spoiler alert: it is literature) relies on demonstrating the difficulty of adequately translating literary works, exemplified by La vida es sueno. Along similar lines, philosopher C. Ulises Moulines uses Segismundo and his fabricated dream experience as a thought experiment to answer the twentieth-century philosophical question of realism, that is, whether the external world is real (21). While the literary scholar may wish for greater attention to the established body of critical theory, these philosophical studies expand the interpretative possibilities of the play, giving ample food for thought as to its early modern and even modern philosophical undercurrents.The literary scholar will feel more at home in the chapters in which works of post-Calderon philosophy are used in more traditional hermeneutic analysis of the work. Philosopher Daniele Letocha demonstrates that a Hegelian reading of Segismundo distinguishes his character from the oft-compared Don Rodrigue from contemporary French playwright Pierre Corneille's Le Cid. Literary scholar Nelson R. Orringer drawls a comparison between the self-perception of Segismundo and the personal reality of Miguel de Unamuno, both of whom increasingly came to view their lives as dreams.Of particular note are those chapters that examine the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophical underpinnings that may have influenced the composition of the play. Andres Lema-Hincapie, versant in both literary studies and philosophy, investigates the similarities between Calderon's and Descartes's theories of doubt and sleep/wakefulness. Hispanists Conxita Domenech and Jennifer Brady interpret Segismundo as neither the ideal Christian nor the pure Machiavellian ruler, but the perfect Baroque prince according to the ideas of contemporary essayists, among them Baltasar Gracian. …