To summarize the personality and work of Nicolás Gómez Dávila (Bogota, May 18, 1913 - Bogota, May 17, 1994) in a short article, despite the fact that he himself was a lover of synthesis and for this reason chose, in most of his works, the aphoristic style, is an arduous and, in some ways, unfair undertaking. However, thirty years after his death it would also seem unfair to the writer to leave this philosopher and thinker without a brief remembrance.
A witness, not a philosopher
Gómez Dávila, if he were still with us, would first of all blame precisely the definition of philosopher. He conceived of himself rather as a defender and a witness. Of what? An admirer of his would be tempted to answer, albeit offhandedly, by pointing to Tradition as that citadel that the Colombian author intended to defend, witness and preserve, but the term is too nebulously confused with that of custom to be used as an answer to this question. consuetudine per essere utilizzato come risposta a questa domanda.
The object of Gómez Dávila's defense and testimony actually falls outside the boundaries of reason while never trespassing into the realm of irrationality. The author we recall, in fact, stands as a witness to transcendence, to be understood not as a mere perspective that merely glimpses an "invisible behind the visible," but rather of a concrete principle, which is indeed beyond the material world and the reason that Kantianly systematizes it, but is a fully operating component of it. We are not in the realm of the irrational so much as the extrational.
Describing modernity
Gómez Dávila's perspective, despite his admiration for Nietzsche's brutal honesty, does not qualify as nihilistic, it is not a Stirnerian Weltanschauung built on nothingness, it does not stand as a Romantic aesthetic constructivism given the purpose of providing meaning to a world that does not have it. As a religious thinker, Gómez Dávila cannot accept Nietzsche's conclusions nor the immanentist premises of Spinozism that laid its foundations, for if this were true we would be dealing with one of the many authors and philosophers of the twentieth century who ended up converging, albeit through the most diverse contortions, to esteem or at any rate to look upon the various fascisms with initial hope. This is not, however, the case with the South American aphorist.
If this were true then Gómez Dávila might well deserve the appellation of philosopher, lover of erudition though it may be, of reasoning aimed at unveiling a (when even tragic) concealed truth, the reasoner lover of the ticking gears of his own mind. Instead, Gómez Dávila, a pessimistic contemplator of the decay of man and creation, resembled more a botanist and a naturalist. Gómez Dávila lacked the scientific attitude of the sociologist and anthropologist, as well as the interested and calculating attitude of the politician, but he was essentially a great vedutista of the twilight of the West, a Canaletto of culture.
Transcendence as a necessity, inequality as a basis
Specializing in twilight, Gómez Dávila painted in his aphorisms the slow waning and concealment of that transcendent principle, God, which for millennia had been the lintel and cornerstone of any social structure and organized way of life. He was consonant, in this, with De Maistre, who framed the French Revolution and its consequences not as man's sin but as divine punishment, which followed an older sin, the far more serious one, because it pertained to the sphere of the soul, of the Enlightenment philosophes.
Gómez Dávila's thought, like that of Brazil's Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, was not afraid to manifest itself as counterrevolutionary in a continent, South America, and in a historical period, the second half of the Short Century, where revolutions and coups d'état, even in his own country, Colombia, were the order of the day. Loyal to the idea, and even more so to the necessity, of possessing an aristocracy, he returned several times to the ominous consequences of having lost not so much its historical exponents (for never did ours trespass on legitimist nostalgism) but rather the intuitive sensibility of the pressing need to possess one. Necessity that, in Gómez Dávila, qualifies as natural as the total absence of it qualifies as natural in Rousseau. The consonance with Nietzsche, here, is evident, but the aristocratic matrix of Gómez Dávila's thought possesses a mystical and teleological afflatus; it is not, therefore, a concept merely subject to the logics of the will to power: in Davilian thought, aristocracy, and therefore inequality, is a spiritual datitude, not the product of a cold mechanics of conflict caught up in the distressing prospect of eternal return.
A conservative, not a fascist
This is the essential reason why Gómez Dávila cannot and should not be accused of fascism, and although the idea of spiritual aristocracy, a typical Davilian topos, deviates little from the spiritual racism of Evolian matrix, it is clear that brute force, the basis and praxis that reconnects fascisms to their unmentionable Enlightenment origins, plays no role in the Latin American aphorist's thought. If fascism is a philosophy of power Gómez Dávila's is a mystique of authority, that is, the principle of power legitimized ex ante by the consent of divinity, which does not allow constructivist stragglers toward an improbable "new man," the latter the true hallmark of the ideological byproducts of the Enlightenment.
We are far from, though on the same side of the fence, the cautious attitude of Burke and Anglo-Saxon conservatism, and closer instead to the crepuscular pessimism of a De Maistre and a Chateaubriand, but precisely because it is deliberately inapt, Gómez Dávila's thought is never dated, so much as timeless. Because Gómez Dávila continually harkens back to a timeless dimension his thought also has no expiration date. A politician will never be able to apply Dávila's ideas to a reality that, by definition and especially in a democratic regime, is transient and changeable, but this may not necessarily be the case for the one who takes it upon himself to suggest that same politician.
Research fellow at the Machiavelli Center. A philosophy scholar, he has been working for years on the topic of the revaluation of nihilism and the great German Romantic philosophy.
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