Antagonisms and the Fascinating Adversary: Nicolás Gómez Dávila’s Early Readings of Nietzsche, Marx, and Sade

Abstract

In the early 1950s, a piece written in Spanish in a South American country by a South American author had very little chance of being considered philosophy. That chance was even smaller if the piece was not written by an academic and by someone with no titles and no university education. Philosophy was meant to be written by scholars and professors. The writer in question here was none of these things and yet, in time, came to be recognized as one of the few authentic and original Colombian thinkers of his era. But even then, there was another barrier between Nicolás Gómez Dávila and the word ‘philosopher’: he proclaimed himself a religious thinker and didn’t hide his privileged social position, a position that informed his radical opposition to communism, and led him to proudly call himself a Reactionary. In a time when most philosophical heroes assumed the position of the Revolutionary, he made himself the villain. Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913–1992) never pursued the recognition of his work as philosophy inside the academy, and he used to mock those who used the word ‘philosopher’ as the label of a profession (1977, I, 201). Instead, Gómez Dávila thought a philosopher worked on life, and that philosophy was a way of life, in line with the sense Plato gave to philosophia (2013, 241). It is this notion of philosophy as a way of life that guided Nicolás Gómez Dávila’s exercises and practices as they appear in his first book, Notas, published in 1954 by his brother in Mexico. He never accepted it as a proper book and only shared it with very close friends. Notas was re-printed posthumously in 2003 as part of the first commercial edition of his work to appear in Colombia, which culminated in 2005 with the edition of Escolios a un texto Implícito (Scholia to an implicit text), five volumes of brief texts that had previously been published by various Colombian presses (1977, 1986, 1992). The genesis of this work dates to the 1950s, but a closer examination of this early material has only recently been made. Gómez Dávila produced two works that didn’t get any important publicity till after his death, Notas (1954a) and Textos I (1959). This essay focusses on the first of these, a collection of annotations resembling a diary or a series of short meditations on every possible subject.