Rationality in the context of the discourse on the Modern

Victor Levytskyy

In the article an attempt is made to explicate the connection between the change of non-classical
rationality’s types and the transformation of understanding of civilizational models’ development,
which, in turn, also represent paradigms of mind’s understanding. Three variants of the
interpretation of rationality are singled out: Weber’s variant, Foucaults variant and post-truth
discourse, each of which delineates the boundaries of understanding the essence and goals of
modernization. The first of these discourses actually marks the equality between rationalization and
modernization and insists on the universality of the civilizational trajectory of the emergence of
modern reason, the second one asserts the opposite to Webers understanding of the historical
process, according to which the eternal canons of development are denied, progressive teleology and
the universal model of social development are denied, third discourse differs by the fact that the
cultural mind in it is not simply aware of the pluralism of the world, but is also convinced of the
possibility of consciously constructing social reality and of the ability to correct the discourse itself.
It is concluded that unlike the universalism of the Weber s variant of modernization and the
polymorphic modernism of the Foucaults variant, the discourse of post-truth introduces the global
world in the era of value-ideological competition, the heat and uncompromising nature of which, in
the absence of consensus on universally accepted truth criteria and basis of verification, cannot be
overemphasized.