Leftists and rightists merely argue about who is to have possession of industrial society.
The reactionary longs for its death.
Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 354
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Nicolás Gómez Dávila (“Don Colacho”) in his library
English translations of the aphorisms of Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Nicolás Gómez Dávila (“Don Colacho”) in his library
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Epigraphs
“Quel fanatisme!” exclama le pharmacien, en se penchant vers le notaire.
(Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Part 2, Chapter 8)
¡Oh! Pues si no me entienden--respondió Sancho—no es maravilla que mis sentencias sean tenidas por disparates.
(Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part 2, Chapter 19)
ὀλιγόστιχα μέν, δυνάμεως δὲ μεστὰ.
(Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Book VII, Life of Herillus)
A hand, a foot, a leg, a head,
Stood for the whole to be imaginèd.
(Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, ll. 1427-8)
Aux meilleurs esprits
Que d'erreurs promises!
Ni vu ni connu,
Le temps d'un sein nu
Entre deux chemises!
(Paul Valéry, Le Sylphe)
Daß es sich hier um die lange Logik einer ganz bestimmten philosophischen Sensibilität handelt und nicht um ein Durcheinander von hundert beliebigen Paradoxien und Heterodoxien, ich glaube, davon ist auch meinen wohlwollendsten Lesern nichts aufgegangen.
(Nietzsche, Letter to Georg Brandes, 8 January 1888)
Et miraris quod paucis placeo cui cum paucis convenit, cui omnia fere aliter videntur ac vulgo, a quo semper quod longissime abest id penitus rectum iter censeo.
(Petrarch, Epistolae de Rebus Familiaribus, Book XIX, Letter 7)
For a translation and explanation of these epigraphs, click here.
(Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Part 2, Chapter 8)
¡Oh! Pues si no me entienden--respondió Sancho—no es maravilla que mis sentencias sean tenidas por disparates.
(Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part 2, Chapter 19)
ὀλιγόστιχα μέν, δυνάμεως δὲ μεστὰ.
(Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Book VII, Life of Herillus)
A hand, a foot, a leg, a head,
Stood for the whole to be imaginèd.
(Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, ll. 1427-8)
Aux meilleurs esprits
Que d'erreurs promises!
Ni vu ni connu,
Le temps d'un sein nu
Entre deux chemises!
(Paul Valéry, Le Sylphe)
Daß es sich hier um die lange Logik einer ganz bestimmten philosophischen Sensibilität handelt und nicht um ein Durcheinander von hundert beliebigen Paradoxien und Heterodoxien, ich glaube, davon ist auch meinen wohlwollendsten Lesern nichts aufgegangen.
(Nietzsche, Letter to Georg Brandes, 8 January 1888)
Et miraris quod paucis placeo cui cum paucis convenit, cui omnia fere aliter videntur ac vulgo, a quo semper quod longissime abest id penitus rectum iter censeo.
(Petrarch, Epistolae de Rebus Familiaribus, Book XIX, Letter 7)
For a translation and explanation of these epigraphs, click here.
The original Spanish is:
ReplyDeleteIzquierdistas y derechistas meramente se disputan la posesión de la sociedad industrial.
El reaccionario anhela su muerte.
I don't get it... isn't industry a good thing, that provides goods & services to mankind?
ReplyDeleteSylvain,
ReplyDeleteYes, industry does provides goods and services, but industry is not equivalent to the providing of goods and services. After all, people were providing goods and services for each other millennia before the advent of industrial society. What, then, is distinctive about industrial society?
The problem of industrial society, for Gómez Dávila (and for other thinkers), is the victory of the bourgeois ethos: "The bourgeoisie is not so much a social class as the ethos of industrial society itself" (#494). What then are the problems with the bourgeoisie? Aphorism #2,181 shows some of the problems Gómez Dávila associated with the bourgeoisie and industrial society: "the nationalist state, rationalist technology, anonymous urban agglomerations...the mass man, and finally the process in which society wavers between the despotism of the mob and the despotism of the expert."
Hopefully, that gives you some idea of why Gómez Dávila said that the reactionary desires the death of industrial society. If you want to read more aphorisms, there are more here. Another helpful essay is "Catholicism and the Bourgeois Mind" by Christopher Dawson, who concluded all the way back in 1935 that "we are all more or less bourgeois and our civilization is bourgeois from top to bottom," and that "there is a fundamental disharmony between bourgeois and Christian civilization."