La idiosincrasia antimoderna de Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyse the peculiar antimodernism of Nicolás Gómez Dávila, a colombian thinker who lived in the 20th century and wrote large series of aphorisms, fragments and notes. He always shied away from all public office, leading a very solitary existence and surrounding himself with all his books, in one of the most important private libraries of South America. Many critics define him as a real reactionary: the truth is that his aversion to all the big metanarratives whereby modernity composed its discourse plays an important role in what we could call his “system in aphorisms”. Franco Volpi, the Italian philosopher who contributed to the translation and the spreading of his work in many countries, defined him “the Nietzsche of Bogotá”, because of his constant denunciation of the ills that afflict the egalitarian, democratic and conformist epoch of modern mass society.