Nicolás Gómez Dávila

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Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1930)

Nicolás Gómez Dávila (born May 18, 1913 in Bogotá , † May 17, 1994 ibid) was a Colombian philosopher . He expressed his anti-modern attitude predominantly in aphorisms and fragments and has been received especially in Germany since the 1990s.

biography

Nicolás Gómez Dávila was born in Colombia as the son of a wealthy family of textile merchants of Spanish origin. When he reached school age, his parents moved to Paris to give him a humanist education and to introduce him to European culture. He first attended a school of the Benedictine order , until his lessons had to be continued by private tutors - due to two years of bed restraint, caused by a serious lung disease. Dávila learned French, English, Latin and ancient Greek. The autodidact Dávila, who never went to university, also learned Italian, Portuguese, German and - shortly before his death - Danish, the latter language in order to be able to read Søren Kierkegaard in the original. At the age of 23 Dávila returned to Colombia and married Emilia Nieto Ramos, with whom he had two sons and a daughter and remained married until his death. The school years in Paris should have been his only stay abroad, besides a several month trip that took him with his wife through Europe in 1949 (which he then predicted a future as a “mixture of brothel, dungeon and circus”).

Dávila lived extremely secluded as a private scholar in a villa on the outskirts of Bogotá. His library, which at the end of his life had around 30,000 volumes in almost all Western languages, was his true home. He turned down offered political offices, such as that of the presidential adviser (1958) or the Colombian ambassador to London (1974). Visits to the Bogotá Jockey Club were among his rare appearances in public life. There he fell from his shy horse after trying to light a cigar in the saddle. The complicated broken bones resulting from the fall led to a walking disability in old age, which made his claustrophilia even worse. From then on, his social contacts were almost exclusively limited to invitations to Sunday meals within his circle of friends made up of Colombian intellectuals. It was this circle, himself and his family, for whom Dávila wrote; he was never particularly interested in spreading his work. In 1992 the Viennese publisher Peter Weiß traveled to Bogotá to meet Dávila and to negotiate the rights to his work with him. Dávila was initially skeptical, but then agreed on the condition that his work be published in full.

The style of his work is essayistic - aphoristic and can therefore be classified between literature and philosophy . In his books ( Notas , Textos , Escolios a un texto implícíto etc.) terms like “ conservative ” and “ reactionary ” have a positive meaning. Nicolás Gómez Dávila saw himself as a critic of Marxism , democracy , radical liberalism , ideological fascism and a blind belief in progress . In recent years, his thinking has been received mainly in Germany and influenced, among others, Botho Strauss , Martin Mosebach , the Romanian writer Richard Wagner and Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner .

philosophy

No use trying to explain a thought to someone for whom an allusion is not enough.

Dávila's main means of expression are aphorisms or scholia of an “included text” (which one has to think of). “The tactics of conventional polemics”, he justifies this procedure, “fail because of the intrepid dogmatism of contemporary people. To destroy it, we need a guerrilla fighter's lists of war. We are not allowed to confront him with systematic arguments nor methodically come up with alternative solutions. We have to shoot with any weapon from any undergrowth at any modern idea that advances alone on the way. ”He also finds that“ continuous speech ”tends to“ hide the fractures of being . ”Only the“ fragment ”is therefore an“ expression of honest thinking ”,“ the expression of the one who learned that man lives between fragments. ”“ What is not a fragment in philosophy ”is Davilá branding as“ fraud ”. At best, God has a coherent worldview .

reactionary

Dávila describes his thinking as "reactionary", revolting against modernity and striving to bring back to mind what has been carelessly forgotten. For him, this means above all that the world cannot be summed up in a sensible way: “To be reactionary means not to believe in certain solutions, but to have a keen sense for the complexity of the problems.” The reactionary refuses, “the incoherence of rape things ”; he contradicts himself because he "swore allegiance to reality alone". Enlightenment rationalism is by no means the “exercise of reason”, but rather the “result of certain philosophical assumptions that claim” to be “one with reason”. “The reactionary” does not claim against the Enlightenment that there are none universal principles, but denies that the principles proclaimed by the Enlightenment are part of the universal principles. "The reactionary does not strive to go backwards, but to change the direction."

The reactionary prefers to any scientific or systematic view of the world the knowledge of the incoherent but immediately given, which for the reactionary also includes values . Their teaching is even "the only purely empirical science", since the "value ... the only completely autonomous presence " is. Because human life essentially breaks down into decisions for or against certain values. Their objectivity proves itself in the work of art, a "kind of apparatus that incites us to make value judgments." The valuable is never abstract here, but rather grasped in its directly given uniqueness: "The literary intelligence is the intelligence of the concrete." The reactionary recognizes artistic creation as a conspiracy against the disenchantment of the world.

Furthermore, for him the real and immediate is not shown in the outstanding, but in the everyday: “The norm that does not deceive in human science: the commonplaces of Western tradition.” According to Dávila, only thinking through things for granted leads to real wisdom.

Faith, love, hope

“The modern is the person who forgets what man knows about people,” Davilá states in Lost Post . But as far as “the knowledge of man” is concerned, there is “no Christian (assuming he is not a progressive ...) whom anyone could fool anything”. Dávila's reactionary is a Christian and does not believe that there is anything new to learn about people. Man does not develop. What one can read about him in the earliest records still applies today. “The story”, however, “would be much more peaceful if it only contained economics and sex. Man is a far more terrible beast. ”Human nature is sinful and can only be redeemed by living according to God's commandments - to believe , love and hope . "Human nature is not the result of society, but its cause."

According to Dávila, modern attempts to give meaning through developing or living out the personality suffer from naivety with regard to the pathetic in people. “We can never count on someone who does not look at himself with the entomologist's eye .” - “Love can have its erotic spring, but autumn has to be chaste. - Few ideas are more embarrassing than the mating of a forty-year-old by a fifty-year-old. "-" From a certain age we should only look at each other in the semi-darkness. "-" Despite everything that is said nowadays, simple cohabitation does not solve all problems. "-" The problem is neither sexual repression nor sexual satisfaction, but sex . "Drive satisfaction cannot answer the question of meaning. Today "anointing sermons" are being held about sexuality, but no one is concerned "about the education of feelings". As far as this is concerned, modernity no longer has any ideas of how a person can be internally ordered. In place of spiritual harmony, the last meaning of life is "personal experience". “Anyone who” but “boasts that he has 'experienced a lot' should be silent so as not to let us recognize that he has not understood anything.” And let “the experience of a person who has 'lived a lot'” , not "usually reduced to a few trivial anecdotes with which he adorns his incurable nonsense"?

The reactionary remind us of times when life gained meaning as the decent parts of a man evolved against the depraved. "The idea of ​​'free development of personality' seems" excellent "in comparison, as long as one does not come across individuals whose personalities have developed freely."

I only trust a philosophy that confirms elementary religious insights

In Dávila's work On a Lost Post it says on page 130: “Man is only important when God speaks to him and while God speaks to him.” His statement made in Solitude on page 65: “There is no stupidity to which the modern man would not be able to believe if he only evaded faith in Christ ”is based on Dávila's belief that atheism does not make man free, but subordinates him to the most absurd inner-worldly promises of salvation. In the notes of the vanquished , Dávila confirms his statement on page 52: “Except God there is nothing that must be wisely and seriously talked about.” In the same work, however, it also says on page 40: “Thinking can bypass the idea of ​​God if it is limited to meditating on subordinate problems. ”Jens Jessen dealt with what, in his opinion, are“ razor-sharp aphorisms ”in Die Zeit . There it says: "It is not God whom he bears in his grave, but the modern belief that we can do without God."

“Cultures wither when their religious components do not dissolve” is a quotation from Dávila's work Lost Post (page 49). In the notes of the vanquished , it says on page 101: "Where Christianity disappears, greed, envy and lust invent a thousand ideologies to justify" and on page 91: "The modern clergy believes that they are bringing people closer to Christ, when he emphasizes his human nature. - He forgets that we trust Christ not because he is human, but because he is God. "

Dávila's outrage that the failure of the totalitarian large-scale attempts of the 20th century is simply accepted, including the willingness to enslave people for the sake of progress, is for him an indication that there are no differences between capitalism and communism. In his work Solitude , he proclaims on page 25: “The greatest modern error does not consist in the thesis of a dead god, but in the belief that the devil is dead” and on page 105: “If man is not disciplined by the gods can take, the demons discipline him. "

In a Losing Battle states on page 147: "The devil can not do anything without the frivolous collaboration of virtues" and on page 239: "Evil can not prevail where the good has not become stale."

development

The reactionary does not believe in progress. According to it, one does not become aware of an event or relationship in the world by appraising its being ahead or behind with regard to some imagined or announced development, but only by recognizing its incomparability. What "removes from God is not sensuality, but abstraction."

"When you say someone 'belongs to his time' you are simply saying that he agrees with the majority of idiots at a given moment". What no longer appears to be uniquely absorbed in God, passes in fashions or courses that push into the future what they are never able to redeem and thereby destroy the only reality.

democracy

“The reactionary's discussion with the Democrat is sterile because they have nothing in common; on the other hand, the discussion with the liberals may be fruitful because they share different postulates. ”For the reactionary, the state exists to enforce agreements that people have made among themselves; he was "court and judge". So he must not act spontaneously, issue commands of his own accord. God alone could do this. For Dávila, democracy “idolizes” people by granting them, as the bearer of state power, the right to determine their own fate. “To be 'By God's grace' constrained the monarch's power; the 'people's representative' is the representative of absolute absolutism. ”For the reactionary, however, the legitimacy of power does not depend on its origin but on its purposes:“ Nothing is forbidden to power if its origin legitimizes it, as the democrat teaches . "

Vulgarity of modernity

In It is enough that beauty touches our weariness it says on page 18: "What attracts, even sexually, is less a naked body than a soul made flesh."

In Solitude , Dávila explains on page 115: “Civilization will come to an end when agriculture ceases to be a way of life and becomes industry” and on page 137: “Modern man willingly accepts every yoke for so long the hand that imposes it is impersonal. ”In this work you can also read on page 14:“ After virtue, this century has brought vice into disrepute. The perversions have become suburban parks where the crowd moves familiarly. ”The philosopher was convinced that progress would come to a standstill at some point and civilization would run down itself. Dávila called for a return to past times with virtues that have largely been forgotten: “Today the world is flooded with useless, ugly, stupid technical things; every beauty is sacrificed to some supposed comfort, ”it says in It is enough that beauty brushes our weariness on page 158.

The aphorism "Stupidity seizes the invention of science with devilish ease" is taken from the notes of the vanquished (page 35).

On the other hand, however, the philosopher remarks in his work On Lost Post on page 248: "Ecology is the shepherd's version of the strict reactionary text."

reception

The Italian professor Franco Volpi appreciated the work of Gómez Davila and spread the texts of the Colombian philosopher in Europe and Latin America. Dávila became known in German-speaking countries through Botho Strauss and Martin Mosebach as well as through the publications of his writings in Karolinger Verlag and Matthes & Seitz as well as through the selection editions of Eichborn and Reclam.

Voices about Gómez Dávila

The German writer Martin Mosebach said of Dávila: “His thinking reveals itself as a highly compressed emergency baggage for unlimited stay in icy regions.” The playwright Heiner Müller said: “The class enemy uses the most devilish means. But: Greetings over the ditch! "The Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez said:" If I weren't a communist , I would think just like Gómez Dávila. "The German writer and playwright Botho Strauss said:" ... I want that that one and only voice, only convincing one of the astute piety and counter-modernity is heard in our day. One may feel it noticeably what attraction emanates from a thinking that in its densest core consists of unquestioning and piety ... "

Dávila Colloquium 2007

In 2007 the Spanish Instituto Cervantes and the Colombian embassy held a colloquium in Berlin in which the Colombian aphorist was discussed and celebrated as a “critic of modern rationality”. The short-term cancellation of a lecture by Dávila expert Till Kinzel attracted criticism after an article appeared in the socialist daily Junge Welt the day before the event that placed Kinzel among a number of dodgy right-wing thinkers.

Works

The year figures refer to the time of the German language first publication.

Secondary literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Doja Hacker: Disenchanted World. In: Der Spiegel. February 6, 2006; It is enough that beauty brushes our weariness ... aphorisms. Editor's Afterword.
  2. ↑ loneliness. P. 80.
  3. ↑ Lost. P. 254.
  4. ↑ loneliness. P. 83.
  5. ^ Notes of the vanquished. P. 93.
  6. ↑ loneliness. P. 109.
  7. ↑ loneliness. P. 153.
  8. ^ Notes of the vanquished. P. 106.
  9. ↑ See the records of the vanquished. P. 66.
  10. ↑ Lost. P. 172.
  11. ↑ Lost. P. 183.
  12. ↑ loneliness. P. 152.
  13. ^ Notes of the vanquished. P. 29.
  14. ↑ p. 49.
  15. ↑ Lost. P. 99.
  16. ^ Notes of the vanquished. P. 104.
  17. ↑ loneliness. P. 90.
  18. ^ Notes of the vanquished. P. 98.
  19. ↑ Lost. P. 219.
  20. ↑ Lost. P. 249.
  21. ↑ loneliness. P. 148.
  22. ↑ Lost. P. 148.
  23. ↑ loneliness. P. 103.
  24. ↑ loneliness. P. 42.
  25. ↑ Jens Jessen: The last reactionary. Democracy is the taboo in the West. The Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila dares an attack In: Die Zeit , February 26, 2004, No. 10/2004. Retrieved May 26, 2018.
  26. ↑ loneliness. P. 35.
  27. ^ Notes of the vanquished. P. 17.
  28. ^ Notes of the vanquished. P. 67.
  29. ↑ texts. P. 156.
  30. ↑ Lost. P. 139.
  31. ↑ loneliness. P. 38.
  32. ↑ Right corner, bad boy. A Berlin colloquium on Nicolás Gómez Dávila. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . December 7, 2007, No. 285, p. 38.
personal data
SURNAME Gómez Dávila, Nicolás
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gomez Davila, Nicolas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Colombian philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH May 18, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Bogotá
DATE OF DEATH May 17, 1994
Place of death Bogotá