The art of intermediate vision

A title, a theme, a dedication

To Erazim Kohák, who awoke me from a dreary slumber of mind and spirit.

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This is the passage for which Science at Dusk is named. It seems a fitting place to begin, and I will not burden it with commentary.

Dusk is the time of philosophy. Daylight, with its individuating brightness and its pressing demands, is the time of technē. In its light, the beings of this world stand out in insistent individuality. Even the forest comes to seem an aggregate of trees and human life an aggregate of discrete acts. Their intricate kinship, the deep rhyme and reason of their being, recede from view much as the stars pale before the sun in the daylight sky. It is a matter-of-fact world whose multiplicity calls for the technē of doing and theorizing to bridge its discontinuities with acts of utility and constructs of causality. By daylights, nothing conjoins the two white planks, planed smooth, unless it be an eight-penny nail or a construct like “lumber,” the hylē of ancient Greeks. In the brightness of daylight, even philosophy becomes a technē, substituting the precision of analysis and the artifice of constructs for the insight of a philosophic vision.

Nighttime, by contrast, is a time of poiēsis. The soft darkness penetrates the soul, fusing all in an intimate unity. The tree trunks, so sharp and distinct by daylight, fuse into the single presence of the forest around the clearing. Only their uppermost branches stand out against the still light sky. Then the sky, too, darkens and the earth and the sky merge under the immensity of the starry heavens. The insistent multiplicity of daylight fades to triviality before the overwhelming vastness of the One. Nothing is left to do, to say: a human can only stand in silent awe and thanking devotion before the immense wonder of it all. Night is the time of poetry when dichten overtakes denken. It is the time of deep dreams.

Philosophy, the daughter of poverty and plenty, is born of neither time. It is, most fundamentally, the art of intermediate vision, of the transition between daylight and darkness when the failing light mutes the insistent individuality of the day but the darkness of the night has not yet fused all in a unity. Certainly, philosophy, like poiēsis, must acknowledge the wonder of Being, lest it become trivial. It must, like technē, remain no less aware of the distinctiveness of beings, lest it become inarticulate. A philosopher insensitive to the vision of a Heidegger and to the rigor of a Quine would run a grave risk. Still, philosophy must do more; true to its birth, it must discern both the unity that structures the multiplicity and the multiplicity which articulates the unity. Its proper object is neither pure meaning nor sheer being but meaningful being—being animated by meaning, meaning incarnate as being. Its domain is the intermediate range between poiēsis and technē, its starting point and the condition of its distinctive possibility is the ability to see and grasp the sense of being. It is, primordially, the act of discerning the moral sense of life suspended between the poles of the speechless wonder of Being and the empirical datum of beings.

That is why dusk is the time of philosophy. The technē of the day can teach us the factual difference between life and death in the order of time and instruct us in the skills of inflicting the one and preserving the other. Poiēsis can teach us the profound indifference of life and death in eternity and give us the wisdom of reconciliation to the one or the other. Philosophy must undertake the far harder task of discerning the rightness of time, of time to live and time to die. For if our choice of living and dying—and all the choices of right and wrong, good and evil—are not to be arbitrary, we must discern more than the empirical difference and the poetic indifference of life and death. We need to grasp their rightness, the moral sense which emerges when the fading daylight no longer blinds us to the deep bond among beings but darkness has not yet obliterated their distinctness. It is at dusk that humans can perceive the moral sense of life and the rightness of the seasons.

~ Kohák E (1984) The Embers and the Stars. University of Chicago Press.