Philosophy Has Become “Technique”

Seeing Bohm say that the word philosophy originally meant the love of wisdom, and that now it has become a kind of technique. I also think that our age is deteriorating into reducing everything to various technologies, stripping every thing of its meaning; I believe people have already fallen into technicism…… (The Ghost in the Atom, p. 118)

I have long known that Bohm inclines toward postmodernist philosophy, but his words still make sense: do the analytic philosophy and logical positivism of the Anglo-American world not amount to turning philosophy into a “technique”? Although they still retain philosophy’s emphasis on “questioning,” the “pursuit” behind the questioning has been muted, especially the search for “meaning.”

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.