Critique of Rationality: Judgement and Creativity from Benjamin to Merleau-Ponty (Studies in Critical Social Sciences) (Studies in Critical Social Sciences, 99)

Drawing on Walter Benjamin's doctoral thesis on the Early German Romantics and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's apperceptive phenomenology, with his Critique of Rationality, John Eustice O'Brien proposes an original epistemology based on the préobjective energy of aesthetic consciousness of human being in the social world. In his 'Critique of Rationality', John Eustice O'Brien proposes a fascinating rectification for the distortion of technical necessity in Western Society due to unbridled instrumental reason. He begins with a review of this issue first raised by the Early German Romantics as discussed by Isaiah Berlin and Walter Benjamin. Following French social philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's radically different apperceptive epistemology, he explores the possibility of a social world in which each is anchored by a preobjective disposition to meaning based on the intersubjective presence of all. This justifies the postulate of aesthetic-consciousness as the site of socialization in communities of meaning, as a frame for judgment and creativity. The struggle must continue for awakening that consciousness if an open society is to be realized In his Critique of Rationality , John Eustice O'Brien proposes a fascinating rectification for the distortion of technical necessity in Western Society due to unbridled instrumental reason. He begins with a review of this issue first raised by the Early German Romantics as discussed by Isaiah Berlin and Walter Benjamin. Following French social philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's radically different apperceptive epistemology, he explores the possibility of a social world in which each is anchored by a préobjective disposition to meaning based on the intersubjective presence of all. This justifies the postulate of aesthetic-consciousness as the site of socialization in communities of meaning, as a frame for judgment and creativity. The struggle must continue for awakening that consciousness if an open society is to be realized