Nicolás Gómez Dávila and the ‘Authentic Reactionary’

Over the life of Musings of an Old Curmudgeon, I have shared many of Gómez Dávila's brilliant aphorisms in my 'Memes of the Day' posts at 00.00 every day.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Matthew Pheneger

“Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God, another who believes he is a god.”

It is fitting that one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th century should also have been one of its most obscure. That thinker —Nicolás Gómez Dávila— was born in 1913 in Bogota, Colombia.

The scion of an affluent and well-connected family, Dávila spent much of his youth in France, where he attended a Parisian school run by Benedictines. While recovering from a lengthy bout of pneumonia, Dávila developed a love of classical literature that he would continue to nurture throughout his life. Indeed, although Dávila never formally enrolled in a university, by young adulthood he could boast of a wide-ranging intellectual virtuosity spanning everything from philosophical and theological inquiries to the myriad problems of art, literature, and history.

Despite his enviable degree of erudition, Dávila never took any great pains to publish his own writings. A private man who preferred the cloistered seclusion of his library to the limelight enjoyed by so-called public intellectuals, Dávila was said to have remarked that “The first step of wisdom is to admit, with good humor, that our ideas have no reason to interest anybody.” At the urging of his brother however, Dávila eventually set about compiling his copious notes, reflections, and essays into a number of short volumes. The most famous of these, Escolios a un Texto Implícito (rendered in English as ‘Annotations on the Margin of an Implicit Text’), consists almost entirely of “scholia,” or “glosses”— succinct aphorisms composed in a literary style reminiscent of ancient works like Diogenes Laërtius’ Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.

Historically, “scholia” refer to grammatical, critical, or otherwise explanatory comments that limn the margins of texts and manuscripts. In many cases (such as the Byzantine Archbishop Eusthasius’ commentaries on Homer, for example) such marginal texts have proven exceedingly important sources of information on various aspects of the ancient and medieval past. Dávila’s escolios follow much the same order of ideas, except that they do not accompany any physical text. Rather, they are reflections on a texto implicito—an unwritten text that exists only within the mind of the author. Despite their brevity, Dávila’s escolios (much like their ancient equivalent) offer the reflective reader a lucid composite that serves to illuminate the political, aesthetic, and spiritual orientation of the modern world.

Though it is not entirely clear why Dávila chose the scholion as his favored medium of expression, one suspects the choice was informed by his long-standing conviction that life could not be reduced to any singular philosophical system or theory. Having borne witness to a century marred by destructive totalitarian ideologies that had brought mankind to the brink of shipwreck, for Dávila the best that could be hoped for was the steady development of an imaginative philosophical patchwork that, although unable to grasp the truth in its entirety, nevertheless offered a glimpse of it.

While Dávila’s skepticism of philosophical systems has rendered him, as one scholar observes, a “thinker in fragments,”^[1] there are nevertheless several recurring themes threaded throughout his work. Of particular significance are the two principal archetypes that Dávila discerned acting on the stage of world history. The first of these, which we might call the “Progressive Utopian,” is (as the name suggests) a champion of the dynamic forces of progress. Convinced that “the best always triumphs, because what triumphs is called the best,” the Progressive Utopian adheres to a teleological view of history. That is to say, he believes that history develops along rational lines until finally culminating in an inevitable end-point, like a river that winds and flows along its course until swallowed up by an implacable sea. As Dávila explains:

“The radical progressive is inclined toward the impending event in order to favor its arrival, because in taking action according to the direction of history individual reason coincides with the reason of the world. For the radical progressive, then, to condemn history is not just a vain undertaking, but also a foolish undertaking. A vain undertaking because history is necessity; a foolish undertaking because history is reason.”^[2]

The Progressive Utopian’s teleological worldview also goes some way in explaining his inherent attraction to messianic ideologies. Whether we speak of the Marxist “World Revolution” or the Neoliberal “End of History,” the Progressive Utopian persists in an enthusiastic belief in mankind’s capacity to both perfect itself and overcome the forces of nature. In doing so, he attempts anew the Promethean aspiration of myth.

Opposite the Progressive Utopian is the Authentic Reactionary. Uprooted and displaced by what the German writer Ernst Jünger characterized as the “great process,”^[3] the Authentic Reactionary is that “fool who takes up the vanity of condemning history and the immorality of resigning himself to it.” Rather than fall in line with the programmatic goals delineated by the Progressive Utopian and his demolition squads, the Authentic Reactionary champions “causes that do not turn up on the notice board of history” and thereby attempts to piece together the fragments of a shattered world. Again, as Dávila explains:

“To be reactionary is not to espouse settled cases, nor to plead for determined conclusions, but rather to submit our will to the necessity that does not constrain, to surrender our freedom to the exigency that does not compel; it is to find sleeping certainties that guide us to the edge of ancient pools. The reactionary is not a nostalgic dreamer of a canceled past, but rather a hunter of sacred shades upon the eternal hills.”^[4]

A reactionary, rather than a conservative, the Authentic Reactionary understands that adopting a conservative position is only worthwhile in those ages that “maintain something worthy of being conserved.” Unlike the sentimental or romantic conservative, the Authentic Reactionary does not entertain illusions about turning back the clock of history. Rather, he understands that the “temporal adventure between man and that which transcends him” is meant to be experienced in the here and now. To borrow a quote from the Austrian scholar Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, the Authentic Reactionary “wants first to find out what is eternally true, eternally valid, and then either to restore or reinstall it.” He possesses a “sovereign,” rather than a “time-bound,” mind.^[5]

It follows that the Authentic Reactionary also tends toward the cyclical view of history, or the belief that the unfolding of history is not, as the Progressive Utopian believes, an inevitable linear development, but an organic process conditioned by nature and subject to the same laws of rise and fall; of birth and decay. As Dávila observes, “The ‘wheel of fortune’ is a better analogy for history than the ‘evolution of humanity.”

That is not to say that the Authentic Reactionary takes no inspiration from the past at all, however. On the contrary, in order to “reconstruct within himself the civilized universe that is disappearing around him,” the Authentic Reactionary depends upon the distilled wisdom of the voices of the past, with whom he maintains an intimate correspondence. For Dávila, this task is chiefly accomplished through the act of reading. Having himself accumulated more than 30,000 books over the course of his life, Dávila well knew the power of “contact with other souls” and their “strange, hard, sharp thoughts” to stir the spirit from its languid slumbers. In accordance with his belief that “Literary texts are incantatory formulas that transport us to various intellectual climates,” Dávila did not see reading as merely a means to the furtherance of one’s own education (though it certainly is that) but rather an essential spiritual exercise:

“Every book we read must leave us richer or poorer, sadder or more happy, safer or more uncertain, but never intact. If, when opening a book, we do not participate in it with disgust or with love, it is better to abandon it until a shadowy need or specific demand awakens in our souls the passion that is illuminated by such a reading. Any book that does not find our secret selves, naked, troubled, and bloody, is a mere temporary refuge.”

If the Authentic Reactionary is aided in his Herculean endeavor by intelligent engagement with the Humanities, the Progressive Utopian relies on the ubiquitous power of technology, which threatens to “technify man” and sever his connection to nature. Asserting that “spiritual destitution pays for industrial prosperity,” Dávila recognized that the increasingly integrated (and therefore vulnerable) world made possible by technological progress will not, as the Progressive Utopian supposes, culminate in human liberation, but rather in a “total despotism.”

Today, the prescience of Dávila’s words are readily apparent. To protect against the chimerical threats posed by everything from global pandemics to destabilizing cyberattacks, modern man is proving all too willing to sacrifice what remains of his sovereignty on the altar of an ever-expanding administrative state premised on technocratic management and control.

Dávila’s observations concerning technology highlight a further difference between the Progressive Utopian and the Authentic Reactionary, namely their diverging conceptions of human liberty. Whereas the Progressive Utopian advances an abstract understanding of liberty that prioritizes freedom from all perceived constraints, the Authentic Reactionary understands that true liberty can only be realized when situated in the particulars of time and place, where individual rights and freedoms are tempered by a sense of duty and responsibility toward one’s community. The liberty prized by the Authentic Reactionary is thus a liberty for something, rather than a liberty from something. “Liberty is not an end, but a means,” Dávila writes. “Whoever mistakes it for an end does not know what to do once he attains it.”

For Dávila, a wise politics would consist of “invigorating society and weakening the state.” By championing an abstract conception of liberty however, the Progressive Utopian turns this formulation on its head, for abstract liberty inevitably comes at the expense of those intermediary institutions, such as family and church, that nourish more complete forms of liberty and stand between individual and state as protective barriers. As Dávila observes:

“A social institution such as the family may not be essential to survival relative to a need like breathing air. Violating this order, however, may involve the destruction of everything that coexists within it. Thus, while the order may not be essential to the basic survival of the organism, it may be essential to the preservation of all that is properly human.”

Implicit in the Progressive Utopian’s conception of liberty is his belief that modern man has overcome the need for God. As suggested by the Biblical story of Eden, should man succeed in shaking off all limitations and constraints, he would become a kind of god all his own. “And then the Lord God said, ‘Look, the human beings have become like us, knowing both good and evil.”^[6]

From a traditional perspective, this is precisely the goal that humanity set for itself during the age of Enlightenment, which sought to replace faith in God with faith in human Reason. In Dávila’s view, the genealogy of this theological error is perpetuated by modern democracy, which completes the overthrow of God by placing man at the center of the universe. As one scholar of Dávila’s work observes:

“The divinity that democracy attributes to man is not only a poetic figure of speech, but brings forth a strictly theological principle. Democracy speaks to us eloquently, and using a vague lexicon, proclaims human dignity, the nobility of one’s origin and destination, intellectual dominance over the universe of matter and instinct. Democratic anthropology is one which agrees with the classic attributes of God.”^[7]

This critique may go some way in explaining why Dávila remains a relatively obscure figure in the English-speaking world. For better or worse, we in the modern West are all children of the Enlightenment in one way or another, and any wholesale abandonment of democratic institutions must seem an unrealistic proposal to the honest observer. As mentioned, however, to construe Dávila as some mad monarchist hankering to restore the divine right of kings is to misapprehend his thought in its entirety. In Dávila’s view, the constant ministration of such dreamy political “solutions” more often than not serves only to compound the very problems their designers set out to solve. “Metaphysical problems do not haunt man so that he will solve them,” Dávila argues, but rather “so that he will live them.”

Indeed, for the Authentic Reactionary, the surest tactic in the continuing contest with the Progressive Utopian is “to pursue in the human wilderness the traces of divine footsteps”— what the ancient philosophers described as the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. If it is true, as Dávila opined, that “the death of God is an interesting opinion, but one that does not affect God,” that may well be enough.

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^[1] Jose Antonio Bielsa Arbiol, Nicolás Gómez Dávila: An Authentic Reactionary’s Critique of Modernity, The Postil Magazine (Oct. 1, 2020).

^[2] Nicolas Gomez Davila, The Authentic Reactionary.

^[3] The reference to the “great process” comes from Jünger’s post-war work The Forest Passage, in which he develops the archetype of the Forest Rebel, an individual who maintains a “primal relationship” to freedom in the face of spreading tyranny. The Authentic Reactionary is a further archetype that could be studied alongside the Forest Rebel.

^[4] Davila, supra.

^[5] This quote is taken from Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s classic work Leftism Revisited: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot.

^[6] Genesis 3:22

^[7] Susana Calderón Vizcarra de Kevans, The Critique of Democracy in the Writings of Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Polish Journal of Political Science Vol. 2, Iss. 2 (2016).