This blog post examines how the discovery of the self and the concept of moral sense emerged within the flow of Western modern philosophy, and what significance this holds for understanding humanity.
Two crucial variables that characterized Western modern philosophy were, above all, the development of natural science and the discovery of the self. The advancement of natural science played a pivotal role in enabling humans to objectively understand nature, thereby cultivating the ability to explore and predict its laws. This marked a significant turning point, shifting humanity away from the medieval, God-centered worldview toward human-centered thinking. Scientific methodology, emphasizing experience and experimentation, solidified the belief that truth could be reached through rational thought. However, what science reveals to us is limited to the world of scientific knowledge—the phenomenal world. While scientific inquiry is a useful tool for explaining and predicting nature, it cannot explain everything. The objective knowledge science provides inevitably focuses on the external aspects of the world, maintaining a certain distance from the inner world of humans—that is, subjective experience or the depths of the self.
At this point, we turn our attention to another variable: the discovery of the self. The discovery of the self is a concept that modern philosophy adopted as another crucial axis alongside natural science. The ‘philosophy of subjectivity,’ originating from Descartes’ proposition “I think, therefore I am,” brought about the separation of the thinking subject (self) and the thought-about object (world). Thus, modern philosophy evolved into an epistemology grappling with the question: “How can the subject know the object as it truly is?” This philosophical shift placed the human self at the center of philosophy, bringing revolutionary changes to how humans perceive themselves and understand the world.
However, this philosophy inevitably contained skepticism and agnosticism from its very inception. This is because epistemology foreshadowed the fate of humanity, expelled from the ‘paradise’ (a state of oneness) where subject and object were not yet separated. In other words, life shifted from a framework where the ‘I’ could not be perceived separately from its relationships with surrounding objects or people, to one where the ‘I’ with independent self-awareness now views the external world of objects through its own eyes. The clearer self-awareness becomes, the more difficult it arguably becomes to understand other beings in some respects. This is also an inevitable consequence of the modern worldview. This epistemological problem has been a subject philosophers have continually grappled with, sparking diverse interpretations and debates throughout the development of modern philosophy. For instance, from the opposition between empiricism and rationalism, to Kant’s critical philosophy, and even to deconstructionism in late modern philosophy, epistemology has remained at the center of philosophical inquiry.
In David Hume, the culminator of modern empiricism, we encounter the skeptical conclusion that “since we are not the subject, we can never know the object as it truly is.” This implies a distrust of the capacity of human reason and a skepticism about the very possibility of human rationality. This skepticism became another defining feature of modern philosophy, raising perpetual questions about human cognitive abilities. This philosophical consciousness was later reinterpreted more radically by thinkers like Nietzsche, contributing to the deconstruction of the modern concept of the subject and the search for new philosophical approaches.
The emergence of the concept of ‘moral sense’ is closely linked to the development of modern epistemology described above. Before the modern era, particularly within the Platonic worldview, moral goodness was understood as emanating from the universe itself—that is, from the perspective of a self-revealing reality. The universe was perceived as a space filled with harmony and order, and humans were believed to find their place within it, living morally according to its laws. However, the mechanistic view of the universe and the concept of the liberated subject, which became aware of its own distinctiveness through the Enlightenment, sharply distinguished between subject and object.
This raised the question of what enables the subject to recognize and aspire to goodness as an object. Thus, the concept of moral sense emerged, positing that it perceives moral objects just as other senses perceive physical objects. All humans possess ‘innate ideas about the good and beautiful’ or ‘some natural sense of value that considers social relevance’. In moral matters too, a moral sense or natural sentiment exists that discerns moral value. This refers to a special capacity inherent in all people, which necessarily operates when we perceive moral objects (human actions and emotions). There cannot be a normal person in this world who lacks this moral sense or natural sentiment. This moral sense forms an essential aspect of human society, enabling us to make moral judgments in our relationships with others. Furthermore, it acts as a crucial element facilitating social harmony and coexistence, providing the foundation upon which human society can be maintained and developed.
