Abstract

Max Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason developed a critique of the dominance of instrumental reason in modern philosophy through contrasting its subjective, pragmatic orientation with that of objective reason. While objective reason had a subjective component, its main purpose was to reconcile human purposes with a larger cosmological or historical structure of meaning. He recognized that his own Critical Theory, which develops these categories of historical interpretation, relies on a remnant of objective reason. My argument clarifies this remnant, and its solidarity with the objective aims of philosophy, with reference to the critique of instrumentality in Plato’s Gorgias.