Discernment is the hard work of peering around us when everything is cloaked in the coming shadow of night. Hegel says as much when, just before noting the owl’s liftoff, he offers a caution on our hunger for instructions on how the world ought to be. Philosophy, he says, “always comes too late to perform this function.” Perhaps there is a discernment that needs to come before philosophy arrives on the scene at dusk. “When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy.”31 But sometimes
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