Belmont Humanities Symposium Journal
Abstract
At first, American pragmatism was not met with an overabundance of understanding or appreciation abroad. Among the early detractors were the social theorists from the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer chief among them who, in “Means and Ends,” criticized pragmatism as instrumentalism at its most cold, calculating, and myopic, reducing all thought to action and all philosophy to selfish, practical pursuits. Instrumentalism, broadly construed, is the deployment of human rational faculties to the sole end of ascertaining the means of achieving goals externally prescribed by the socio-economic milieu (and in the cold confines of advanced capitalism, for these critical theorists, that meant adapting and assimilating into an indoctrinating status quo of commodity fetishism and cut-throat competition). Objective rationality, the converse of instrumentalism, was what they championed: the deployment of human rational faculties first and foremost to the goal of ascertaining the best ends of conduct, namely, freedom, truth, justice, and equality.
Keywords
Humanities Symposium
Recommended Citation
Smith, Clancy
(2013)
"The Unlimited Community A Peircean Analysis of Otherness, Individualism, and Solidarity,"
Belmont Humanities Symposium Journal: Vol. 4, Article 7.
Available at:
https://repository.belmont.edu/humanities_symposium_journal/vol4/iss1/7