The Embers and the Stars

On the moral sense of nature à la Erazim Kohák. Plus a poem.

⛰️ Good morning! I don’t know about you, but I tend to undergo a surge of wanderlust this time of year. As the snow melts and robins appear, as it were, out of thin air, I begin to dream of mountains, deserts, oceans… In the meantime, I offer this brief reflection on Erazim Kohák’s profound book The Embers and the Stars, which I commend to all of you, but especially those of you concerned with ongoing discussions about technology’s role in shaping human perception, thought, and action. —C

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Erazim Kohák was a Czech-American philosopher and environmentalist writer who taught at the University of Boston from 1960–1995. His 1984 The Embers and the Stars¹ presents a meditative philosophical case about what Kohák calls the “moral sense of nature.” It’s a fascinating case, in part, because of its mode of inquiry—less like a philosophical treatise than, say, Thoreau’s Walden. In fact, taking after Thoreau, Kohák spent over a decade of his teaching career living by himself in the woods outside Boston, in a house he himself built.

Professor Kohák in 2007.

Many of the reflections of The Embers and the Stars emerged from his encounters with wilderness during those years. Ultimately, it is a work of phenomenology. Kohák believed that, in the modern age, “the moral sense of our humanity is all too easily obscure by the mechanical order of our artifacts” (xi). In the woods, though, far from the neon glow of the city, that moral sense might be more acutely felt. For the moral sense of humanity and of nature are integrally related. 

What is the moral sense of nature? It is the experience of absolute value; the feeling of eternity ingressing in time; the immanent presence of Being. Kohák writes: “For, in lived experience, in the radical brackets of the embers and the stars, the presence of God is so utterly basic, the one theme never absent from all the many configurations of life's rhythm” (183). As Kohák sees it, modernity began to lose touch with the moral sense of nature when it concluded—following Nietzsche, Darwin, Shelley, et al.—that “God is dead.” Without a Creator, nature is not a creation. “It can only be a cosmic accident,” Kohák writes, “dead matter contingently propelled by blind force, ordered by efficient causality” (5).

Except in some brute evolutionary sense, humans cannot be at home in such an inhuman world; we become absurd aliens, cosmic fugitives. And so, having eschewed God, we also lose the moral sense of nature and our place within it. For Kohák, our precious artifacts, from cars to computers, only exacerbate the problem by “creating the illusion of autonomous functioning,” that is, the illusion of being without God (25).

The point is not that nature is good while technology is bad, the mistaken view of Romantics and Transcendentalists alike. For Kohák anyway, the danger lies in how certain technologies conceal nature’s moral sense. Supermarkets, light bulbs, iPhones—our artifacts tend to make us feel autonomous, self-sufficient, even divine in our powers to create. The right kind of exposure to nature, on the other hand, reminds us both of our dependence on the material goods of the planet and of its integral order. 

Here is where Kohák’s book pertains to my thinking on poetry—specifically what has come to be called “nature poetry.” The romantic ideal of a poet wistfully wandering the countryside has mostly fallen out of fashion in contemporary culture. Poetry has in large part been urbanized; from Eliot’s Prufrock to Levine’s Detroit factories and beyond, we’ve gradually traded the rural for the urban center, the natural for the cultural, as settings or foci of our poems.²

Perhaps this only follows from life in the “developed” world. Our material conditions affect our vision; the artifacts we shape shape us in turn. Hence poems about wild daffodils, for example, bore us not only because they feel trite, but also because they no longer speak to modern experience. I can’t imagine Detroit has many wild daffodils. 

But if Kohák’s thesis is correct, we lose more than daffodils when we lose touch with the order of nature; we also risk losing touch with ourselves as moral agents within that order. This seems to be what modern writers like Mary Oliver and Annie Dillard describe in their encounters with nature—a sense of sublime, even transcendence. Perhaps poems about the natural world can help jog the minds of modern writers and readers, reminding us that behind the world we have made hums, always, the world we did not—terrible in grandeur, gratuitously there.

At its best, nature poetry channels the sense of wonder humans have long felt before the natural world. Without wonder, we will never see this place for what it’s always been: home.

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Photo by Kevin Erdvig on Unsplash

Nocturne

—after Erazim Kohák

Our words begin to atrophy
            beside a waning summer fire,
like sparks who would revise the stars

but fizzle out before they reach
            the canyon rim. Cool night descends
like geese upon a lucid lake,

or like a friend who need not speak
            to say, whose company is just
as sweet as solitude, or is

itself a kind of solitude.
            We watch a few last flames die out
across the incandescent coals

until a virgin darkness drapes
            the woods, and day is reconciled
to night, and night to day, and the moon

emits its passive radiance
            that all should come to rest, and sleep
restore the fragile dreams of men.

1. Kohák, Erazim. The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

2. I am aware of writers who still find contemporary poetry too bucolic, advocating for a more urban aesthetic. I suppose it depends on one’s frame of reference, but it does seem like, on the whole, modern poetry has been marked by a shift from the natural to the cultural, from the countryside to the subway.