Moral Experience and Critique in für sich: Indications from Thomas Luckmann’s Theory of Morality

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate possibilities in the critiques of everyday life based on individual morality in terms of the phenomenological arguments of Thomas Luckmann. Considering the multiple realities theory of Alfred Schutz, the critique of everyday life needs a finite province of meaning (“the world of morality” against “the world of everyday life”) and “moral experience” within the realm in which one is aware of one’s own way of thinking about morality. The critique needs to be in “für sich,” open to criticizing itself (distinguished from that in “an sich” from a static and taken-for-granted standpoint). The study implies that the moral experience that leads to critiques of everyday life necessarily includes the three processes: 1) an attempt to separate value from obligation; 2) critiques of obligation according to one’s value; 3) constant reflections on whether and how the value is affected by the obligation.