Vygotsky sees that psychology is in the profound crisis in his time. He quotes Brentano’s words, that there exist many psychologies, but not unified psychology. The duality of materialism and idealism, body and mind is one phenomena of this crisis. Piaget tries to escape this fatal duality by strictly remaining in the realms of facts, but Vygotsky claims that he fails. Piaget doesn’t solve the Cartesian dualism. Vygotsky offers social-historical approach.  The problems of thinking and language, thought and world have been basic philosophical problems since the beginning of Western thought. Heidegger is one the most well known philosopher, whose main task is to overcome Cartesian dichotomy. Thinking and language are in essential role especially in his later philosophy. Heidegger’s student Gadamer emphasizes in very Vygotskian manner the role of dialogue in thinking and hermeneutical experience. In our paper we are going to present a Gadamerian-Heideggerian interpretation on Vygotsky from the point of view of moral learning and development.

Vygotsky presents profound critique to Piaget’s theory of development and especially the role of egocentric language in the development of language and thinking. Vygotsky comes to the same conclusion with Wittgenstein and Heidegger concerning the social nature of language. Vygotsky emphasizes that the developmental course of the intellect differ from those of speech, but at certain point the two lines of development meet and speech becomes rational and thought verbal. The primary function of speech is communication and social contact. This goes for children as well as adults. The question is, what kind of the relation there is between speech and thought? Is the inner speech same as thinking? Vygotsky does not give a simple answer and he admits that inner speech is one of the most difficult to investigate.  The question of inner speech is crucial also to the theory of moral development. What is called as conscience is actually our inner moral speech. The genesis of morality is the genesis of our inner moral speech. That is why the theory of genesis of speech is elementary to the theory of morality and moral development.

Vygotsky notion of the zone of proximal development is very important concept for theories of moral learning and moral development. Furthermore notion of ZPD has interesting connection with Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. For Gadamer, experienced persons are individuals who have experienced hermeneutical experiences, which have widened their horizon ea. ZPD. Erfahrener has very wide horizon or ZPD. This concerns also moral learning. In the field of morality there is possibility that person gain what we might call as the Erfahrener-level of moral cognition and sensitivity of moral feelings. Neither Lawrence Kohlberg nor Carol Gilligan has considered this kind of possibility in moral learning. We believe that persons like Socrates, Jesus, Comenius, Loyola, Kant, Adam Smith, Schopenhauer, Gandhi, Russell, Sartre etc. have reached Erfahrener-level in moral learning. The difficult task of moral philosophy and the theory of moral development is to grasp the nature of this higher level moral learning or learning process that precedes it. 

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