Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Gómez Dávila discussed a vast range of topics, philosophical and theological questions, problems of literature, art, and aesthetics, philosophy of history and the writing of history. He employed a literary method of succinct statements with a great sensibility for matters of style and tone. The literary method he developed is the gloss, the scholion, which he used to comment on the world, particularly in the five volumes of Escolios a un texto implícito (1977; 1986; 1992) that he published from the seventies to the nineties. He created "the reactionary" as his unmistakable literary mask and made it into a distinctive type of thinking about the modern world as such. In his later work he attempted to define the "reactionary" with which he identified in an affirmative way by locating him somewhere beyond the traditional position of left and right. On the basis of a Catholic traditionalism influenced by the intellectual probity of Nietzsche and others he criticized modernity and saw his work as that of a partisan for a "truth that will not die".

After the collapse of the military dictatorship in 1958 Gómez Dávila was offered the post of chief advisor to the state president which he rejected as he did with respect to later offers, in 1974, to become ambassador in London. Though he supported the later president Alberto Lleras Camargo's role in bringing down the dictatorship, he refrained from any political activity himself, a decision he had already reached early on in his practice as a writer.

In 1954, Gómez Dávila's first volume of works was published by his brother, a compilation of notes and aphorisms under the title Notas I – the second volume of which never appeared. The book remained virtually unknown because only 100 copies were printed and these were presented as gifts to his friends. In 1959, he followed this with a small book of essays under the title of Textos I (again, no second volume was published). These essays develop basic concepts of his philosophical anthropology as well as his philosophy of history, often in literary language full of metaphors. In these essays, he first voices his intention to create a "reactionary patchwork" because reality, he said, cannot be represented in a philosophical system.

Gómez Dávila was a Colombian scholar who spent most of his life in the circle of his friends and within the confines of his library. He belonged to the upper circles of Colombian society and was educated in Paris. Due to severe pneumonia, he spent about two years at home where he was taught by private teachers and developed a lifelong love of classical literature. He never, however, attended a university. In the 1930s he went back from Paris to Colombia, never to visit Europe again, except for a six-month stay with his wife in 1948. He built up an immense library containing more than 30,000 volumes around which his literary existence centred. In 1948 he helped found the University of The Andes in Bogotá.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila (locally [nikoˈlaz ˈɡomez ˈdaβila]; 18 May 1913 – 17 May 1994) was a Colombian philosopher.