ABSTRACT

Mencius has produced a phenomenological test for the existence of compassion as a basis for ethical consciousness. The phenomenology of compassion - in Mencius’ brilliant example - is a proof of the moral realm of truth. If one is willing to perform Mencius’ feeling/thought experiment in one’s imagination, one then possesses a key to knowing that ethical consciousness is known by the individual subject knower as an absolute truth and no further evidence can controvert this experience of truth. From an epistemological standpoint, the knowledge of ethical truth is exactly similar, in the following respect, to the knowledge of mathematical truth. The knowledge of ethical truth bears a similarity to the knowledge of mathematical truth in another sense as well. Every instance of someone who recognizes the ethical truth that is contained in Mencius’ example constitutes a new discovery of that person and for that person of the ethical truth.