Article deals with the challenges rationality faces in a postmodern intellectual culture. An argument is provided to base the opinion that an indispensability of rationality is determined by twofold epistemic conditions of human life. The foundations of rationality arc laid in the common components of human experience and they ensure a needed stability and rationality of knowledge as well as of life, the empirical manifestations of which arc marked by a dimension of contingency. Different mechanisms are developed in the pretheoretical experience and theoretical culture to protect the principles of rationality. Concepts, wisdom, scientific and philosophical insights are the most significant among these mechanisms. The essence of their capability to guarantee the rational grounds of human activities manifests itself in a function of understanding and a compensatory function. The gist of the last function is its ability to compensate the limitations and shortcomings peculiar to individual experience as well as different spheres of communal sociocultural experience
