Abstract

This book, as its title indicates, is put forth as a criticism of our age. The author, who is especially known for his work in the tradition of Husserl and Heidegger, and who has written a book on Aristotle, has often mentioned elements of his own philosophical position in his many essays and books; this volume presents the complete view, of which the others gave only hints. Boehm defines "our age" as determined by science, a science which stems from the Greek understanding of knowledge and contains theological elements from antiquity and the middle ages. Knowledge is taken to be an attempt to overcome the limits of the human condition, and Boehm says that this attempt in turn is based on a desire to escape dying. He examines Hesiod, the Bible, and Lao-Tse to find extra-philosophical statements of the interpretation of death as something that somehow might not be. After these analyses of classical and non-philosophical versions of this theme, Boehm has a chapter to show how the issue is developed in various modern ways: Pascal evades the issue of death by escaping into divertissement, and modern political and economic life becomes a process or a game of its own, cut loose from the ends it was contrived to serve; Fichte and Marx are used here, and so are the satires of Parkinson and Boorstin’s analysis of "image" as replacing real need. Boehm emphasizes the reversal of means and ends in contemporary life and sees it as the consequence of the ancient attempt to replace the human condition by knowledge; an inhuman existence results from the desire to avoid being human. In a final chapter, Boehm studies Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Kant, and others as thinkers who further develop the theme of man as "subject," in the sense of a being that subjects itself to necessity as its only way of surviving; this conception of subjectivity is a condition for the modern subjugation of human needs to the control of the "laws" of economics, production, science, bureaucracy, and the other manifestations of sheer rationality. Human needs are reduced to the needs of rationalistic order and thinking. In conclusion, Boehm observes that philosophy can only criticize the image of the age and its foundations; the return to being human must be accomplished by other means. Boehm’s book is very interesting and puts flesh and blood on many themes we have heard from Heidegger in more abstract form. The main weakness in the book is a failure to analyse virtue, phronesis, and action, which must be seen as a counterpoise even for the understanding of Aristotle’s notion of theory. His criticisms of rationalism, and of gnostic versions of religion which attempt to solve human problems purely by knowledge or by thinking, are accurate, although it is questionable whether he gives a satisfactory picture of Christianity and Judaism in the few passages he cites and interprets; for example, once again the dimension of performance in these religions is not included. Some of his historical remarks, like his interpretation of the events of the thirteenth century, are bold, and one is inclined to read them along with his own remarks on the writing of history. The short description of a conversation with a man of science is pointed and well done. The book is lively and vivid, especially in narrating the reversals of ends and means in our present world.—R.S.