In praise of instrumentality : philosophy with politics and critique

For centuries, philosophy, politics and critique have been separated. Kant's designation of the theoretical and practical and the aesthetics as separate realms consolidated this separation. By contrast, I hold that a consequence of the rejection of transcendence in secular modernity is a monist metaphysics – what I call monist materialism – that entails the intermeshing of the philosophical, the political and the critical. For this to be possible, however, we need a recognize the pivotal function of instrumentality, not an easy task in an age where the instrumental has a host of negative connotations’.