Intellectuals must distinguish durable instrumental values from transient philosophical ones inherited from the past.

Evidence

This is not to say, however, that the whole heritage of the past must be rejected. There are “instrumental values” which cannot but be absorbed in their entirety in order to continue to be elaborated and refined. But how is one to distinguish the instrumental value from the transient philosophical value that has to be rejected outright? It often happens that, because one has accepted a transient philosophical value belonging to a particular past tendency, one then rejects an instrumental value from another tendency because it conflicts with the first, even though this instrumental value could have been useful to express the new historical cultural content. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1609

Categorization

• QUESTION: The paragraph cuts off mid-sentence, but the question Gramsci poses — how to parse instrumental from transient value in the inherited conceptual toolkit — is precisely the methodological move the Islamophobia field must make with colonial-era vocabularies. Worth chasing how he resolves it.
• XREF: connects to: Ethical inquiry must start from the historically conditioned constitution of subjects. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1236