Abstract

In this article, I want to understand how Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger understand the social norms for our perceptions and our daily practices, and how they describe the need to go beyond this normativity in favor of another, more “personal” or even more “authentic”. I defend that it is a call of consciousness that breaks the social normativity, and which commits the human being to no longer act mechanically, but to live freely. This break with social normativity is a phenomenological reduction that I call “ethical reduction”. The whole point of the article is to show that such a reduction is in fact based on social normativities as they are the criterion of the call, the environment in which such a call is possible. From this point of view, the reflective subject remains a social subject.