The Ethical Demand

By Knud Ejler Løgstrup, Hans Fink and Alasdair MacIntyre

Knud Ejler Løgstrup’s The Ethical Demand is the most original influential Danish contribution to moral philosophy in this century. This is the first time that the complete text has been available in English translation. Originally published in 1956, it has again become the subject of widespread interest in Europe, now read in the context of the whole of Løgstrup’s work. The Ethical Demand marks a break not only with utilitarianism and with Kantianism but also with Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism and with all forms of subjectivism. Yet Løgstrup’s project is not destructive. Rather, it is a presentation of an alternative understanding of interpersonal life. The ethical demand presupposes that all interaction between human beings involves a basic trust. Its content cannot be derived from any rule. For Løgstrup, there is not Christian morality and secular morality. There is only human morality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 1997
• ISBN: 9780268161262

Knud Ejler Løgstrup

Knud Ejler Løgstrup (1905–1981) was professor of ethics and philosophy of religion at the University of Aarhus until his retirement in 1975. He is the author of numerous books in Danish. English translations of central texts from other ethical works by Løgstrup are available in Beyond the Ethical Demand (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

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INTRODUCTION

The Ethical Demand by K. E. Løgstrup is certainly the most original and influential Danish contribution to moral philosophy in this century. Published in 1956 by a theologian who claimed to be arguing in purely philosophical terms, it immediately attracted the attention of a surprisingly broad public, including politicians, artists and academics from many disciplines and it has remained a central point of reference for the discussion of ethics in Denmark and Scandinavia ever since. It was translated into German in 1959 and into English in 1971. In the last decade it has again become the subject of broad interest, now read in the context of the whole of Løgstrup’s work, much of which was published only after his death in 1981. In the ongoing debates about the possibility of ethics in a modern or postmodern world its insights have gained new importance.

Knud Ejler Løgstrup was born in 1905 in Copenhagen and was brought up in a middle class family with a strong commitment to an evangelical movement within the Lutheran folk church. Throughout his youth he was active within the YMCA. He attended one of the most prestigious schools within the highly egalitarian Danish state school system. In a short and humorous autobiographical sketch from 1966 that was published posthumously he recalled that he was still at 16 playing with tin soldiers together with a classmate (who later became a general), but that he then suddenly gave that up and instead took to reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

He began his study of theology at the University of Copenhagen in 1923. But he was from the beginning mainly attracted to the philosophical disciplines within theology and for many terms he also attended courses in the philosophy department, especially seminars by Prof. Frithiof Brandt on the epistemology of Kant. After two terms Løgstrup realised that he had not so far understood one word, and stubbornly decided to begin all over again, making sure that he understood the text sentence by sentence, no matter how long it would take him. This attitude was characteristic of Løgstrup’s work from then on. He was a very thorough reader, reading relatively few books, but taking extensive notes and carefully formulating his agreement and disagreements as he went along. One of his professors in theology, Eduard Geismar, introduced him to the work of Husserl and the phenomenological movement. During his student days he abandoned the pietism of his youth, inspired to do so by the existential dialectical theology of Rudolf Bultmann and Friedrich Gogarten, a theology opposed to both liberal Protestantism and to Barthian forms of dialectical theology.

After he had completed his degree in theology in 1930, scholarships from the University of Copenhagen allowed him for five years to have periods of study at Strasbourg (Jean Hering), Paris (Henri Bergson), Göttingen (Hans Lipps and Friedrich Gogarten), Freiburg im Breisgau (Martin Heidegger), Vienna (Moritz Schlick) and Tübingen. His time in Göttingen with Hans Lipps in the summer terms of 1931 and 1932 was of crucial importance for the formation of his personal philosophical outlook.

Hans Lipps (1889–1941) was a peripheral member of the phenomenological circle at Göttingen. He had greatly admired Reinach, had been a close and good friend to Edith Stein, but, although Husserl’s pupil, had sometimes had a difficult relationship with him. He had completed his dissertation on the philosophy of mathematics in 1912 and also held degrees in biology and in medicine. In the first World War he had served in the medical corps. From 1921 he was privatdozent and from 1928 professor of philosophy at Göttingen, moving to a professorship at Frankfurt am Main in 1936. He was killed in September 1941 on the Eastern front, where he was serving as a regimental surgeon. His publications include Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis I–II (Bonn: F. Cohen, 1927/28), Untersuchungen zu einer hermeneutischen Logik (Frankfurt a.M.: Frankfurter Wissenschaftliche Beiträge, 1938), Die Menschliche Natur (Frankfurt a.M.: Frankfurter Wissenschaftliche Beiträge, 1941), Die Verbindlichkeit der Sprache (Frankfurt a.M.: V. Klostermann, 1945), Die Wirklichkeit des Menschen (Frankfurt a.M.: V. Klostermann, 1954). The two posthumous volumes are collections of articles and other shorter works. His works have been collected in one edition, Werke I–V (Frankfurt a.M.: V. Klostermann, 1958). Løgstrup writes about him in the autobiographical sketch:

During his four years in the trenches [1914–18] Lipps had been literally living with Husserl’s Ideen zu einer phänomenlogischen Forschung. It never left him, he once told me. But then as a result he arrived at the conclusion that it was no good. Husserl was a master of singular investigations such as those in the Logische Untersuchungen, not of a system as in the Ideen. Lipps kept to himself, went his own ways, loyal and distant, that was my impression. Holidays between terms he spent traveling as a ship’s doctor. Few heard him, no one understood him. I went to all his classes the year I was in Göttingen. The stubbornness Kant had occasioned in me proved an advantage. I understood at least, that the reason why I did not understand him was that I was thinking in schematic terms, whereas he went directly to the phenomenon, unprejudiced and unimpressed by the tradition. He exploded the schematisms, especially the epistemological schematisms, into which my generation had been indoctrinated, and all my difficulties in understanding him stemmed from my inability to get rid of those schematisms. He did not make things easier by writing in a compressed, aphoristic style. But in any case, there is no one I have learned more from than from Hans Lipps. Maybe I am the only one even in Germany, who has learned anything from him. Sometimes I have asked colleagues, theologians and philosophers, why no one is interested in his work, and I have received the answer, that he did not have the will to achieve anything. And in a way that is true, and it is a weakness. But then, it could be left to the rest of us to achieve something, and for that we could find inspiration in his work and what he has uncovered. What Lipps and the later Wittgenstein tried to do is in many ways similar, and it is my frank and considered opinion that Lipps has gone further on some points. But no one realises that, not even the Germans.

This is no longer quite true. In his autobiography Hans Georg Gadamer wrote about Lipps’s work: It would find a good reception even today. For the explorations in the foundations of language undertaken in England in the wake of Wittgenstein, Austin and Searle have not only a predecessor but also a tremendous counterpart in Hans Lipps (H. G. Gadamer: Philosophische Lehrjahre, Frankfurt a.M.: V. Klostermann, 1977, translated by R. R. Sullivan as Philosophical Apprenticeships, Cambridge, Mass: M. I. T. Press, 1985). Otto Bolnow, too, has expressed his great indebtedness to Hans Lipps as a teacher.

The epistemological schematisms that Hans Lipps was trying to explode were first and foremost forms of the subject-object schema that had been dominating philosophy since Descartes onwards and that had made epistemology into the fundamental discipline of philosophy. According to this schema a human being is essentially a subject of consciousness placed outside the world, and the world of objects is essentially constituted by the perceptions of such a subject or even by the imagination of what lies behind the perceptions. Husserl, of course, had avowedly broken away from this scheme, taking the structure of intentionality as his point of departure, but according to Hans Lipps, Husserl was still captive to it, being at the same time the first to break away from it and its last representative. On this he was in agreement with the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit by whom he was influenced, though he had reached somewhat similar conclusions from his own work in mathematical and logical theory. For both of them Husserlian intentionality remained a matter of the relation between an individual consciousness outside the world and its objects, while both of them in contrast saw the human being as always already preintentionally involved with the world in a multitude of different ways, to be characterised in terms of different types of attitude or forms of engagement. Both tried to replace what they saw as the intuitionistic phenomenology of Husserl with an existential phenomenology in which Wesenschau was replaced by accounts of the various attitudes human beings take up unconsciously as a precondition of their practical involvement in the situations of their daily life. For Lipps this was necessarily a matter of accounting for the elements of ordinary language in which these attitudes found expression.

In his approach to language Lipps placed strong emphasis upon the priority of the concrete and particular over the abstract and universal. He held that the universal rules of logic are abstracted from and need to be interpreted by reference to the exigencies of concrete uses of language in concrete situations and to express this idea he used concepts rather similar to Austin’s speech acts and Wittgenstein’s language games. If we try to understand logic as though its universal rules could be adequately understood independently of types of speech act and their typical use in a common social life, we will obscure the nature of logic. Lipps regarded his own philosophical method as a hermeneutic or linguistic phenomenology and he applied it mainly to questions of philosophical anthropology and philosophical psychology in a way that integrated elements from the philosophy of Dilthey into phenomenology. Lipps considered it mistakenly reductive to take intentionality to be the common element of all the types of relation that a human being can have to the world in which she or he lives. As a biologist and physician he emphasized the bodily and natural side of human life more than most phenomenologists. He strongly emphasized the multiple, highly complex and constantly changing interrelations between a human being and the world of which it forms a part. The world thus provides no fixed ground for judgment or action, so it is the task of each individual human being again and again to find his or her own ground. To this extent a subject-object theme remains even in the phenomenology of Hans Lipps. His writings are highly condensed and any attempt to give a brief account of them is bound to distort. According to Løgstrup they can be explicated or unfolded, but no précis can be given, and one can never be quite sure that one is faithful to Lipps’s intentions in such interpretations. A further difficulty is the apparently systematic form of his writings which is in stark contrast with their antisystematic and antitheoretical content.

Løgstrup began his academic career in 1931 by writing a prize essay on Max Scheler’s Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik which was awarded a gold medal by the University of Copenhagen. Here he was criticising Scheler’s attempt to supply a phenomenological basis for a scientific ethics, because of the subjectivist and anthropocentric character of this basis. In the following year at Göttingen he wrote a manuscript that he submitted as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Copenhagen, in which he—following Lipps—set out to destroy the epistemology of subject and object. The focus of his attack was Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen, which he criticised in the light of Lipps’s Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis and Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit as being an insufficiently radical break with traditional epistemology. He argued that the characteristic illusion of all modern epistemology is that the subject has appropriated for itself the properties of sovereignty, freedom from engagement and transcendence, properties traditionally attributed to God only.

His manuscript was sent back for revision by the faculty board in Copenhagen, one theology professor complaining that it did not contain one word of theology, and a philosophy professor complaining that its philosophical argument was much too sweeping and insufficiently founded in a knowledge of modern epistemology. His teacher Eduard Geismar, however, saw great qualities in the work, and made sure that it was not simply rejected. Even he complained, however, that it was written in complicated language and that the word order of sentences was not Danish. This criticism has often been repeated, and Løgstrup’s prose style is indeed idiosyncratic. It has strong archaic, sometimes even Old Testament, features but is nevertheless wholly without affectation or pretension and most of all deeply personal. His writings are full of memorable phrases and captivating images, sometimes expressed in tortuous sentences that bear witness to the sheer labour of thinking.

In 1935 Løgstrup married Rosalie Maria Pauly, a German philosophy student whom he had met at Freiburg, and in 1936 they settled down in a small parish in the countryside on the island of Funen, where he had taken a job as vicar. Here he was able to continue his philosophical work, submitting completely rewritten versions of his thesis in 1938 and 1940, and each time getting it back for further revision, until finally at the fourth attempt it was accepted in 1942. (It is one of the ironies of academic life that the content of Løgstrup’s failed attempts to write a dissertation has now been the subject of several successful dissertations.) The title of the final version was Den erkendelsesteoretiske konflikt mellem den transcendentalfilosofiske idealisme og teologien (The Epistemological Conflict between Transcendental Idealism and Theology). Here the opponent is no longer Husserl, but instead transcendental idealism, which, he argued, was the culturally dominant philosophy of the epoch, and which he found not only in Kant and the neo-Kantians, but also in positivist philosophy. He even included what he identified as transcendental elements in Heidegger as yet another expression of this form of philosophy. What all these philosophies had in common was an understanding of the subject as the producer or supplier of the categories with which it understands the given. For all of them understanding is necessarily an act of creation. Consciousness or culture is seen as the activity of giving form and order to what is otherwise formless and without order, a creation of order out of chaos. It is thus man or culture that gives to life whatever structure and meaning it has. The ‘I’ is seen as separated from both its life and its world and made into the sovereign subject of the activity of giving form to everything. This isolation of the subject from life and world is also its isolation from other subjects. The I-Thou relationship is reduced to an I-It relationship in transcendental philosophy, because the subject is assigned the task of presenting to itself as an object whatever is not the subject, even if that object is another subject. According to the alternative outlined by Løgstrup, understanding is indeed in part a matter of creation and of giving form, but it is important to realize both that, insofar as what understanding creates is nothing but itself, it is an impotent creator and that understanding itself is an expression of life that has already been created with forms and laws of its own. Life has been given to us and it is a precondition of any cultural ordering that the basic expression of life is both to receive and to give. Life, thus, is necessarily interpersonal and involves that basic trust which informs all communication. In his earlier attempts to write a dissertation Løgstrup had remained close to the existential phenomenology of Lipps and even to that of Heidegger, but here he had begun a movement towards a phenomenology of life in which the theme of existence and thrownness into a meaningless world had been replaced by a conception of life as structured by given and interpersonal forms. In some respects he had been influenced by the philosophy of Martin Buber and Ferdinand Ebner.

Theologically he was still close to dialectical theology. Like other dialectical theologians he accepted the conditions of modernity as an indisputable point of departure, but he was at the same time constantly concerned about the limits and preconditions of human powers in general and of science and philosophy in particular. The theological background for his attacks on forms of humanism such as transcendental idealism was always the project of making room for something more fundamental than human understanding and ordering. For a period he was close to a Danish movement within existential theology centered round the periodical Tidehverv which was influenced by Kierkegaard and strongly antipietist, but he appears never to have been comfortable with its dialectics of the eternal and the temporal, a dialectics which so emphasized the importance of the contrast between the eternal and the temporal that it precluded the making of important ethical distinctions within the temporal. The Old Testament emphasis on life as created and Luther’s preaching of an ethics of the orders of secular life were influential in Løgstrup’s opposition to those forms of contemporary Protestant theology inspired by either Kant or Kierkegaard. Here he was also under the influence of the Danish theologian and nationalist politician, N. F. S. Grundtvig. For Løgstrup as for Grundtvig it was a deep conviction that Christianity exists for the sake of human beings, not the other way round. Human first, and Christian next (or Christian accordingly) as Grundtvig famously formulated it. Løgstrup expressed this attitude by almost always talking about the historical Jesus of Nazareth rather than Jesus Christ or Our Lord Jesus Christ. Whether Jesus is Christ is a matter of faith and not something we can know. But even without the belief that Jesus is Christ his life and words exemplify human possibilities that articulate a fundamental demand, because they speak to something basic in human life.

In 1943 Løgstrup became professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the newly formed faculty of Theology at the University of Aarhus which had been established in 1928. Here he worked until his retirement in 1975, greatly influencing a generation of theologians and philosophers and, together with some prominent colleagues, for a time making Aarhus the center of Danish theology.

His new appointment at Aarhus began in the middle of the German occupation of Denmark. During the German invasion in April 1940 the Danish government, with the support of the great majority of the population, had protested but not resisted the occupation, and had agreed to continue to govern, in order that the population should not come under direct German rule. Unlike Norway, which had engaged in armed resistance from the beginning, Denmark, thus, was not at war with the occupying power and accepted such German dictates as those involved in joining the Anticomintern pact and arresting communists. Løgstrup was among those who from an early date believed that, whatever the consequences to the Danish population, the only honourable course was to seek Norwegian conditions. Others who believed that the Germans might well win the war and that it was essential to organize on a nationalist, democratic and antifascist, but explicitly nonviolent basis, argued in favor of preparing for a long occupation and of supporting the government, by not challenging the Germans by illegal means. Among the proponents of this policy was Hal Koch, a school friend of Løgstrup’s, who was by then a professor of theology in Copenhagen and the coordinator of all youth organizations in the country. In the summer of 1943 Løgstrup published an article attacking the policy of Hal Koch and thereby also that of the government, a government which was increasingly compromised in the eyes of larger and larger sections of the population by its collaboration with the German occupiers, who were becoming more and more demanding, and that at a time when it had begun to seem that they might well lose the war. In August 1943 the Danish government finally refused to follow German orders and resigned, and a resistance movement developed which succeeded in having Denmark recognized by the Allied powers as being at war with Germany. By then Løgstrup had already been involved with the resistance movement for some time, so that when he began his professorship in September 1943, along with his teaching he was also working as a courier and his house was used for radio transmissions to England. For several months he had to go underground. After the liberation in 1945 there was a strong public reaction against all those who, with the initial agreement and support of the government, had collaborated with the Germans, and the Danish parliament passed ex post facto legislation against such collaborators, a policy which Løgstrup opposed as strongly as he had earlier opposed collaboration with the Germans. And on this he now found himself in agreement with Hal Koch. (The correspondence between Løgstrup and Hal Koch during the war was published in 1992.) Even during the war Løgstrup, because of his marriage and his own strong connections to Germany, was always careful to distinguish between Germans and Nazis, and after the war he made strenuous efforts to improve cultural relations between Denmark and Germany.

During his first years at Aarhus, Løgstrup had published introductory works on Kant and Heidegger. In 1956 The Ethical Demand was published as a long awaited major work. Here many themes from the dissertation reappeared. All those forms of philosophy which make human beings the sovereign source of order and form are still the target, but now Løgstrup’s project is not the destruction of epistemological schemes, but rather the destruction of traditional moral schemes, together with a more elaborate presentation of an alternative understanding of interpersonal life. Løgstrup tries to show that the difference between good and evil is of an ontological character and prior to all human decisions and conventions. In doing this he insists upon arguing as a philosopher and declares himself prepared to accept and to meet philosophical criticism without taking refuge in religious certitude or in appeals to revelation or to any other theological form of supposedly higher insight. He is, however, attempting to take purely philosophical argument to its limits in trying to show that our lives are such that they presuppose facts not of our own making and prior to reason, emotion and will, facts that invite a religious interpretation, although they do not necessitate it. This is of course too much of a religious basis for many philosophers and too little for many theologians.

Among what is new is an explicit criticism of Kierkegaard, one which is perhaps more of a criticism of his former companions within the Tidehverv movement and especially of its leading spokesman, K. Olesen Larsen, than it is of Kierkegaard himself. Løgstrup had been able to join forces with the existentialists against neo-Kantians and positivists, but he had already broken with existentialism and existential phenomenology in the early fifties, because he increasingly believed that their emphasis on the different forms of human engagement and radical choice was one more version of the misconception of the human subject as sovereign of its otherwise formless life. His own ontological approach in some respects brought him closer to Catholic theology and to the natural law tradition than was comfortable for most of his colleagues, a theme which he explicitly addressed at a meeting with Heidegger and German theologians in 1959, where Løgstrup had read a version of Ethik und Ontologie. In a later discussion at that meeting Løgstrup insisted that Where Catholicism has a philosophy, evangelical theology cannot leave an empty space. The Ethical Demand is his attempt to provide a philosophy which, without presupposing or necessitating faith, leaves a place open for it.

New also is the extensive use of literary examples to introduce and explain moral distinctions. This reflects Løgstrup’s fear that he himself should be taken captive by his own abstractions. To him the point of engaging in moral philosophy is to attend to the moral content of life as it is actually lived, not to develop a system of moral philosophy, and good novelists often display a much keener moral sensitivity than most moral philosophers. Of course, it is not the task of moral philosophers to write literature, but they could at least try to avoid the flatness and artificiality of the examples that they themselves are able to construct and also the circularity involved in relying on such examples, and a means of avoiding this would be to use examples from literature that more vividly convey some of the complexities and subtleties of moral problems in real life.

Løgstrup’s use of literary examples was not, however, merely a device for keeping moral philosophy closer to the moral life. He had a lifelong interest in art and developed his philosophy and theology as much in a dialogue with artists as with other philosophers and theologians. He was a member of the Danish Academy and a close friend of some of the best authors of his time. Aesthetics holds a central place in his whole philosophy because it provides yet another context for trying to bring out the implicit understanding which is present in sensation and feeling prior to and as a condition for all explicit conceptual understanding.

Many features of The Ethical Demand are explained and developed further in Løgstrup’s later writings and much in the book can now be better appreciated in the light of what comes after it. The aesthetic dimension and the philosophy of art are addressed more directly in the collection of essays Kunst og etik (Art and Ethics), 1961. It contains also a reply to some of the critics of the earlier book. In 1968 Løgstrup published Opgør med Kierkegaard (Settling Accounts with Kierkegaard). Here he returned to the theses of the polemical postscript of the earlier work and provided a more thorough and extended critique of Kierkegaard (though Kierkegaard scholars are still likely to argue that he misses the point). In this discussion he introduced a distinction between what he called sovereign expressions of life and what he called recurrent or obsessive expressions of life. Examples of the latter are attitudes and actions expressive of jealousy, hatred, envy, self-righteousness, betrayal. These are not so much feelings as fixated and obsessive thoughts with a negative emotional quality. Held in a string by the I and under its whip the thoughts go round and round in the I’s own ring. Examples of the former are attitudes and actions expressive of trust, charity, frankness, fidelity, solidarity, love. These are given to us as possibilities which the I cannot make use of for its own individual purposes but through which it can realize itself. They receive their content from the situation in which they arise and at the same time transform that situation, because in and through them the person is active, open and spontaneous. I am not the cause of such sovereign expressions of my life. They are not my achievement, but through them I can achieve what will be of genuine help to other people. They are sovereign because in them My life has taken me over before I have taken my life over.

According to Løgstrup, there would be no room for such a distinction within the thought of Kierkegaard and the existentialists. For them there is an absolute incommensurability between the eternal and the temporal. The eternal is present in human existence as a demand, a demand for a decision to take over one’s existence in authenticity. Prior to that decision there is no application for any important ethical distinction within our earthly, temporal life. Without that decision morality can be nothing but convention and conformity. In itself ordinary life is nothingness, and what is important is to realize this. The great temptation is to take something temporal to be eternal, to make a divinity out of something earthly. That is what evil is taken to be. By this standard everything in natural life stands condemned as at best a mere temptation, and it is an illusion that I can ever achieve anything worthwhile on that level, whether by worldly success or by helping others. For Løgstrup the Kierkegaardian demand is not only radical, but also cruel. It is a demand to sacrifice not only the self, but everything in ordinary life. It is both a self-denial and a denial of life. On Kierkegaard’s view the demand is there to reveal the evil in all our deeds, not in order to demand life fulfilling deeds. Negativity and ethics are united in Kierkegaard’s thinking.

In contrast to this the positive content of Løgstrup’s ethics stands out. By shifting the emphasis from the ethical demand itself to those sovereign expressions of life which are the fulfillment of the demand, Løgstrup makes the difference between his own position and that of the existentialists clearer. A radical, unfulfillable ethical demand could be understood as a standard by which everything we could do would stand condemned. And in The Ethical Demand at certain points he himself had come close to seeing even natural love as an imaginary entity (p. 138). Now it is made clearer that though we cannot will to perform those actions and exhibit those attitudes which are sovereign expressions of life, because they are not at our disposal, we cannot prevent them from finding expression in our life. Evil is never so complete that it has the power to eradicate everything good from a life. Evil, unlike goodness, is of our own making, but even in evil we are not sovereign. The demand is a demand that we should let those sovereign expressions of life that we know to be good be sovereign in our own lives. The demand is still radical and in another way unfulfillable, however, because it is a demand that demands should become superfluous. Demands formulated as moral rules, principles and ideals may be of some help, better than nothing as things are, but basically the demands of maxims requiring moral duty and virtue provide no more than substitute motives for substitute actions.

For Kierkegaard Jesus is the supreme paradox, being both man and God. For Løgstrup Jesus is not at all the paradox that Kierkegaard supposes him to be. What is paradoxical and mysterious is rather how the rest of us manage to live with the illusion that we are the sovereigns of our lives. Kierkegaard can humbly admit that he is not a Christian, that he cannot do what he believes is demanded of him. And Løgstrup could in some way respect this, since Kierkegaard had an existential basis for this admission. He had after all made serious sacrifices in his personal life. What Løgstrup could not respect was that his contemporaries should live comfortable family lives in idyllic vicarages or enjoy prestigious university careers, while following Kierkegaard in declaring earthly life to be nothingness.

In 1972 Løgstrup published Norm og spontaneitet (Norm and Spontaneity with the subtitle: Ethics and politics between technocracy and dilettantocracy). Here he gives his clearest account of his conception of the sovereign expressions of life and of the ethical demand, formulating his views in opposition to positions in English moral philosophy (Moore, Stevenson, Toulmin, Hare and Nowell-Smith), but also in opposition to situation ethics and to French existentialism. This leads him to a discussion of such particular ethical concepts as those of guilt, destiny, character, and power, and also of economics, the population explosion and the balance of terror. Løgstrup was here intervening directly in a number of political debates, developing strong criticisms of both capitalism and dogmatic socialism, while defending some form of democratic socialism. At the same time he was deeply hostile to the student movement of the period, and in his last years as a university teacher the number of students attending his lectures and seminars dropped dramatically.

In the same period he was planning a major work in four volumes, Metafysik I–IV (partially translated as Metaphysics, ed. Russell Dees, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994), drawing together his philosophical views. These four volumes collect his philosophy of language, philosophy of art, philosophy of history and nature, and philosophy of religion. The four titles are Vidde og prægnans (Breadth and Concision) 1976, Kunst og erkendelse (Art and Knowledge) 1983, Ophav og omgivelse (Source and Surroundings) 1984, Skabelse og tilintetgørelse (Creation and Annihilation) 1978. The second and third of these were published after his sudden death in 1981. It is far beyond the scope of this introduction to give an account of the content of these works, but it is worth noting that he returned to his earlier project of criticising all epistemological schemes which construe the subject as transcendent and the object as formless, but he did so now in terms of a positive account of what he called a cosmo-phenomenological kind. His theories of ethics were thereby placed in the broad scope of no less than a full metaphysics, however unsystematic and idiosyncratic it may appear.

At his retirement in 1976 he gave a lecture with an autobiographical content called Min tids tre fromhedsbølger. En smule subjektivt set (The three waves of piety in my time. Somewhat subjectively seen). The three waves were the Christian movements of pietistic revival of his youth in the 1920s, the existentialist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, and the student movement of the 1970s. He was touched and influenced by all three, but refused to identify with any of them. He himself regarded it as almost an accident that he was not carried away by the first two, but perhaps it was his being a philosopher that protected him from theological fervor, just as his being a theologian protected him from that philosophical dogmatism of which philosophers themselves are too often unaware.

Even so summary an account of Løgstrup’s intellectual development as this makes it abundantly clear that his central theses and arguments are eccentric, not only to what have been the dominant positions in English-speaking analytic moral philosophy in recent decades, but also to those movements in European philosophy with which philosophers in Britain and America are most familiar. And it would be all too easy in consequence for Løgstrup’s work to be treated dismissively. Yet it is precisely because it represents an alternative way of conceiving of the moral life that we do well—whatever our own point of view—to take it seriously. To do so we will need first to recognize Løgstrup’s suspicion of and distaste for what he took to be the conventional and many take to be the standard idioms of morality, including at times the word ‘morality’ itself. It is no accident that he speaks of the ethical demand rather than the moral demand. Secondly, although Løgstrup’s work is informed by what he had learned from phenomenology, he insisted on his positions being understood in their own distinctive terms and used his idiosyncratic prose style to separate himself from conventional philosophical vocabularies as much as from conventional moral idioms. But he did so with the purpose of enabling his readers to recognize something of fundamental importance about their relationships with others.

The background to morality rightly discerned and understood is the fact that all interaction between human beings involves or presupposes a basic trust. However widespread mistrust may be under certain circumstances, social life would not exist if trust was not more fundamental than mistrust. There must be some reason, even if unwarranted, for mistrust. Trust needs no reason. In my transactions with others I cannot help being dependent on them to some extent, and similarly it is inescapably up to me what I do with those parts of the other persons’ lives that are in my power. I can take care of and help the other to the best of my ability or else ignore or even destroy what has been delivered into my hands. But in all this I cannot help knowing that it is good to take care and evil not to take care of that in the life of the other for which it is up to me to take care. I am thus under the demand that I do what is for the best of the other. What the more specific content of that demand is I have to conclude for my self, making use of all my knowledge and imagination. The demand itself is prior to and independent of my response to it or my conclusions about it. It is in fact common for us to disregard or misconstrue what is demanded of us, but the demand remains what it is.

Notice that it is not the other person in the situation who makes the demand. The demand, so to speak, makes itself and does so impersonally. And our response to the demand depends in key part upon our understanding of a second, closely related fact. Our life is not of our own making. We did not create it. Something is given prior to and as a precondition of all that we may think and do. Løgstrup believes that this givenness can best be interpreted in theological terms and many of his formulations take this for granted, but, philosophically speaking, his argument presupposes no more than that there are given conditions for all human life and that among these conditions is the difference in ontological status between trust and mistrust. It is Løgstrup’s claim that this understanding of trust and of the ethical demand is in fact recognized at some level by all of us, although impoverished or obsessive passions and distorting philosophical or theological accounts of ourselves may prevent us from acknowledging it.

Hans Lipps had argued that we would obscure the nature of logic if we took it to consist in a system of universal rules that could be understood without regard to their place and use in the contexts of intellectual, social and natural life. In like fashion Løgstrup argued that we will obscure the nature of ethics if we pay exclusive or even primary attention to rules and principles. This point of view put him at odds—and we have already noticed that he himself well understood this—with three sets of positions that have been of importance in recent English-speaking philosophy and with one that has been similarly important in French philosophy. Løgstrup is first of all in conflict with those who have made some conception of reciprocity the fundamental moral reality. What the ethical demand requires of us cannot be spelled out in terms of mutual expectations or agreements or understandings. It is not that I am to be responsive to others on the understanding that or even in the hope that they will then be likewise responsive to me. Hence Løgstrup was committed to the rejection of any version of contractarianism. Løgstrup of course would not at all have denied that social life is pervasively informed by reciprocal attitudes and reciprocal relationships. Nor did he see anything illegitimate in such relationships. What he insisted upon was the differences between these and anything that can be accounted openness to the ethical demand.

A second set of disagreements is generated over the particularity of the ethical demand. The ethical demand is always addressed to this particular person in this particular situation concerning this particular other. It cannot ever be truly or truthfully represented as the application of a universal and general rule to a particular situation. And therefore any moral philosophy which treats as central to a genuine understanding of morality the nature, status and application of universal and general rules involves, from Løgstrup’s point of view, a fundamental misconception. Hence Løgstrup is at odds with the adherents of both Kantian and utilitarian accounts of morality and the quarrel between these rivals, hinging as it does on issues concerning what are taken to be moral rules, must itself be, from Løgstrup’s point of view, based on a shared misunderstanding.

Some of Løgstrup’s criticisms of Kantian and

Reviews for The Ethical Demand

[nikkles_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Well written and informative.