At the End of an Age by John Lukacs Yale University Press, 240 pp., $22.95 AN EXAMPLE of the worst type of modern philosophical question is "Are human beings different from meat?" For those among us who have never been invited into Socratic dialogue by, say, a porterhouse, the question is dumb in ways rarely thought possible before. And yet the question reveals the degree to which modern thought has cultivated a disastrous knack for self-deception. Though sometimes entertaining, modern philosophy cannibalizes the values it once sought to foster. Previous generations would not have been surprised that the effort to exalt human dignity, freedom, and purpose without traditional religious supports has led to self-mutilating moral inversions such as: The only truth is that there is no truth; freedom is found in totalitarian obedience; the most authentic art shows beauty's arbitrariness; and so on. In this inside-out world, "Are human beings different from meat?" is the headiest of questions. In his latest book, "At the End of an Age," John Lukacs looks to find the reasons for this confusion. Continuing a set of "meta" questions explored in "Historical Consciousness," "Confessions of an Original Sinner," and "The Passing of the Modern Age," Lukacs here asks about the philosophical underpinnings of science and history. In a series of essays on the nature of knowledge, Lukacs applies his unconnable good sense to the weighty question of man's place in the universe. With typical bluntness, Lukacs begins by stating that we are standing at the end of an age that began some five hundred years ago. The "Bourgeois Age"--with its uncritical beliefs in progress, domestic life, the nation-state, and the individual--is at the brink of exhaustion. Lukacs's outlook is unabashedly "declinist," and brings to mind his close friend Jacques Barzun, whose recent "From Dawn to Decadence" also bid adieu to our lingering bourgeois era. For both men, it is very late in the day. Yet Lukacs has set his sights on something quite different, specifically a "new understanding of consciousness itself" that this upheaval will require. He quotes Owen Barfield's claim that we need to rethink "thinking itself" and that knowledge must be "grasped as something substantial to the being of man, as an 'existential encounter.'" "At the End of an Age" is not a meek book. TO BRING ABOUT this "encounter," Lukacs works to demolish the philosophical folly of modernity, which he calls, perhaps too crudely, "objectivism." This ideology asserts that reality itself is defined by external, material facts that can be empirically discerned and logically ordered only by an impassive observer. Objectivism has taken on wildly different forms in the hard and soft sciences, ranging from the search for "The Key to All Mythologies" to Voltaire's clockwork universe to Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson's dream of a one-page cosmic instruction manual. It, however, remains united by an agreed-upon procedure for finding the truths of man and nature, that is, by observing the canons of scientific inquiry. In charting the triumph of objectivism, Lukacs highlights Descartes's separation of the observer from observed objects and Newton's belief in a mechanical world of cause and effect. What later came to be called the "Enlightenment project" cemented these ideas together. The resulting notion holds that the only proper subject of human inquiry lay in an observer-independent reality--the "world out there" considered apart from human consciousness. This overturned the Western intellectual tradition by setting as a standard for both historical and scientific knowledge the absolute separation of man from what he is studying. Lukacs wisely fastens upon the most disastrous and self-refuting mistake of objectivism. Despite its bold, even brash, humanistic concerns, objectivism came to view mankind as just another detached, passive, inert product of the universe. By eliminating man's central and constitutive role in the act of knowing, it reduced man himself to cosmic folderol. Man is at the center of the universe, objectivism concluded, only in the way a drain is at the center of a sink: It's where the rubbish gathers. The problem with this is very basic, and contains two related mistakes. First, it overlooks the fact that the dream of attaining perfect knowledge is always hindered by the unhappy fact that we human beings, mysterious and quite fallible, are charged with the task. Second, the idea that humans could leverage themselves out of the center of the universe is maddeningly illogical. Etymology shows us how self-contradictory this idea is from the start. As Lukacs notes, in Greek the word for truth, aletheia, also means "not forgetting," and in English and other Germanic languages "world" comes from wer + weld, meaning "man-age" or "age of man." Both imply the self-evident truth that advances in knowledge are unavoidably the story of human history, human imagination, human creation, and the product of human beliefs, feelings, and wills. "There is no such thing as an entirely independent, isolated brute fact. Any fact is inseparable from our association of it with another fact and our statement of it." Since we are unable to jump out of our skin, knowledge will always be emphatically anthropocentric. Lukacs writes: "The known and visible and measurable conditions of the universe are not anterior but consequent to our existence and to our consciousness. The universe is such as it is because in the center of it there exist conscious and participant people who can see it, explore it, study it." Lukacs's argument is in many ways a restatement of the late Oxford philosopher of science Michael Polanyi's seminal book "Personal Knowledge" (1958). This astonishing and too-often overlooked work opened with the statement that man's repeated attempt to place himself on the periphery of the cosmos was a self-refuting effort: "As human beings, we must inevitably see the universe from a centre lying within ourselves. . . . Any attempt to eliminate our human perspective from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity. . . . In a literal sense, therefore, the new Copernican system was as anthropocentric as the Ptolemaic view, the difference being merely that it preferred to satisfy a different human affection." Polanyi could have mentioned the Darwinian perspective as well: They're anthropocentric all the way down. LUKACS and Polanyi join the Jewish and Christian theological traditions in teaching that human activity issues from, and depends on, a religious or "pre-reflective" understanding of the nature of reality. Secular philosophers of mind today say we draw upon a "lifeworld" or "network," which only dresses up Pascal's statement that we believe and understand vastly more than we know. The lesson is the same: We have explicit knowledge of only a fraction of what we implicitly understand, and often what we know is of little or no use compared to what we only dimly believe, hope for, and grapple towards. Agree or disagree with Lukacs's remarkable thesis--and there is certainly much to haggle with--the implications of denying it are not academic. Indeed, Lukacs could have turned his perfect ear for bad notes to the politics of anti-humanism. For the story of man's misguided and mangled attempts to displace himself from the center of the universe has been shadowed by the history of man's repeated degradation at his own hands. That the two go together is not at all coincidental: If man is a plastic plaything of marginal cosmic concern, then what reason can there be to love or respect him? In the anti-human systems of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in their day, as in those of Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Peter Singer in ours, man's ill-fated attempts to erase himself can be seen. Each says that over two millennia of human reflection have made it possible to discard the question "What is man?" For them, the question is meaningless and unanswerable because there is no such thing as man in any enduring sense. But their attempts will fail, as every word that falls from their lips disproves them. Less cunning, but still important, is the degree to which leftist politics generally is still infected by this ideology. To this day, the liberal worldview continues to believe that if only properly enlightened overseers could be entrusted with the bureaucratic-scientific apparatus, the world could be governed almost flawlessly. Their "man" is a trainable trifle. Lukacs is a Catholic, and knows that in his church he will find his deepest support. In a 1968 letter from Cardinal Karol Wojtyla to French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac, the future pope took aim at the signature contribution of modernity to history--the annihilation of the human person. The very same crusade lies near to the heart of Lukacs's work. Wojtyla could have been speaking for Lukacs when he wrote: "[My work is devoted] to the metaphysical sense and mystery of the person. It seems to me that the debate today is being played out on that level. The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person. This evil is even more of the metaphysical order than of the moral order. To this disintegration planned at times by atheistic ideologies we must oppose, rather than sterile polemics, a kind of "recapitulation" of the inviolable mystery of the person." "At the End of an Age" quietly inches towards the realization that with self-knowledge comes a faint awareness of God-knowledge. Thus it is proper that Lukacs closes with a confession of pious unknowingness: "Such an insistence on the centrality, and on the uniqueness, of human beings is a statement not of arrogance but of its very contrary, perhaps even of humility: a recognition of the inevitable limitations of mankind." Matthew Rose is an editorial assistant at First Things.