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LIMITS OF RATIONALITY IN POSTWAR EXPERIENCE: A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF DECISION-MAKING UNDER EPISTEMIC AND MORAL UNCERTAINTY
Abstract
This article reconstructs the concept of rationality within the context of postwar experience, where the subject faces epistemic injustice, moral instability, and hermeneutic exclusion. It critically examines the limitations of instrumental and procedural models of rationality under conditions of disrupted norms and fragmented meaning, and proposes an alternative framework — axiological rationality — grounded in the subject’s internal moral discernment rather than external normative systems. The study draws on insights from humanistic philosophy, hermeneutics, critical theory, and social epistemology to interpret rationality as a multidimensional ethical and ontological process of existential positioning. Axiological rationality is understood as a value-oriented mode of meaning-making and moral orientation, emerging not from institutional authority but from the subject’s internal resources and existential positioning, it emphasizes inner responsibility, symbolic recovery, and the affirmation of meaning in contexts of disorientation and normative collapse. Special attention is given to hermeneutic injustice — the inability to articulate traumatic experiences and the structural exclusion of certain voices from public discourse. Rather than rejecting reason, the research expands its conceptual boundaries, reconfiguring rationality as a communicative effort to restore meaning, seek recognition, and sustain agency amid fragmentation and moral destabilization. Postwar rationality thus emerges not as a rejection of logic or scientific thought but as a humanistic expansion of reason that enables the subject to act meaningfully even under conditions of trauma and uncertainty.
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