“Hegel’s lack of charity toward the instrument metaphor is not arbitrary. It represents his disenchantment with the assumption that knowledge is power and that method is the means to this end. … Descartes’ conception of method, like Bacon’s, is linked to this idea of knowledge as an instrument of power. … The same could be said of Locke. Hegel can rightly claim that the instrument metaphor pervades the epistemological tradition he is seeking to transcend.”

—  Merold Westphal

Source: History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology (1979), pp. 3-4

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§ 2.6
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