Vacation in Northern Michigan with Erazim Kohák, Part II: Dusk

A Time for φιλοσοφία

Picking up where we left off in our series on time, the thought of Erazim Kohák, and my vacation in Northern Michigan, we move from day to dusk. This twilit time between day and night is, for Kohák, the hour of philosophy. He writes:

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.

Philosophy, the daughter of poverty and plenty, is born of neither [night nor day]. It 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 into a unity.

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.

Erazim Kohák, The Embers and The Stars

Kohák’s bringing together of dusk and philosophy naturally brought to mind Hegel’s famous comment about Minerva’s owl:

Philosophy always comes too late to say a word about teaching how the world should be… When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then a figure of life has grown old, and with gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated, only recognized; Minerva's owl only begins its flight as dusk falls.

Hegel, Preface to Philosophy of Right

But it seems that Hegel—living far up in a dreary, cold, northern Germany—failed to notice that dusk is not the simple blurring of white day and black night into a gray haze; nor is philosophy the blending of certainty and uncertainty into a ambiguous miasma of reasoning. Philosophy and dusk aren’t gray. They’re gold.

§ 1. Golden Hour: The Transfiguration of Light

Back on Lake Leelanau, day has become afternoon in an almost imperceptible transformation. Just hours before everything was cast in the contrast of direct sunlight bearing down on the world; every branch shone with highlights and outlined itself with shadows. The light of day is clear. In that white light, we climbed dunes, rode pontoons, visited farmers market, and strolled wineries: everything had a clarity and definition. But now as afternoon matures, we find the light has become something else. In fact, everything else has become something else.

By lowering itself and approaching the horizon, the sun now casts each of its rays at an angle. The lake, which moments ago reflected the clear sky in cool blues, now shimmers with tremulous, gilded waves. Trees that stood as verdant sentinels throughout the day now appear cast in precious metal, their leaves glinting like freshly minted coins. The ivory pages of my book have mellowed into a more eternal, more precious tone. Even our skin—no matter which rosy, pale, or tan hue it bore in the daylight—now shines with a effulgent, somewhat godly glow. All is gold. With the arrival of Golden Hour, our world has transformed into a treasury of light—each object appears crafted in gold for this fleeting, luminous exhibition. Since everything catches our eye, we’ve entered a realm of contemplation. The world has become arrayed with wonder, and as the Greeks pointed out: wonder is the beginning of philosophy.