Critique of Rationality: Judgement and Creativity from Benjamin to Merleau-Ponty

By John E. O'Brien

Book Overview

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 pr?objective 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9004272739
• ISBN13: 9789004272736
• Release Date: September 2016
• Publisher: Brill
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.2" x 9.3"