Erazim Kohak

Wow.

So, I mentioned that I had purchased the book The Embers and the Stars. I absolutely love it. I wish I could have met this man.

I have highlighted a lot already (and am only 14% through), but I offer you these lines from a passage on dusk:

Philosophy...is, most fundamentally, the art of the 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....

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.

If Kohak had taught my Masters, I would not have quit.

I love this distinction... no, this area of the indistinct, this place between practicality and poetry where value lies. Nothing I have read previously has made so much sense of this.

In addition, I appreciate that he speaks as a visionary, but without sentimentality; his writing of what is beautiful, enchanted, mysterious, avoids the kitsch and the schmaltzy; his frequent references to God (by which he may mean, er, God) do not offend my anti-religious nature for it feels in the spirit of Spinoza's Deus sive Natura.