K. E. Løgstrup

Works

• 1956The Ethical Demand

  Starting from the trust with which people meet each other, the book shows that in every encounter we hold something of the other’s life in our hands; from this follows a radical, unspoken and one-sided demand to take care of it, which no rule can spell out.

• 1968A Reckoning with Kierkegaard

  Critique of Kierkegaard’s religious individualism: by setting the individual alone before God, Kierkegaard devalued the spontaneous expressions of life such as trust and love, which already carry the ethical within them.

Position

Løgstrup is on the map as a leading Danish ethicist of the twentieth century and an independent voice beside Levinas. “The Ethical Demand” (1956) starts from a phenomenon that comes before morality: we meet each other with a natural trust, and in doing so we deliver something of our life into the other’s hands. From this interdependence arises a demand to take care of the other’s life that is radical (it asks everything), silent (it does not say what to do), one-sided (it permits no claim in return) and unfulfillable. Later he spoke of sovereign manifestations of life – trust, mercy, openness of speech – which are given before any decision and which morality only replaces when they fail. Against Kierkegaard he argued that setting the individual alone before God devalues these natural relations, from which ethics already arises; “A Reckoning with Kierkegaard” (1968) set this out in full. In his later work he turned to metaphysics, nature and art. In English-speaking philosophy he was long little known; the translation of “The Ethical Demand” with an introduction by Hans Fink and Alasdair MacIntyre (1997), Zygmunt Bauman’s “Postmodern Ethics” and the work of Robert Stern have made him a reference point in debates on care, trust and the foundations of morality.

Life & context

Knud Ejler Løgstrup was born on 2 August 1905 in Copenhagen. He studied theology at the University of Copenhagen and in the early 1930s continued his studies in Strasbourg, Paris, Freiburg and Göttingen, where he came into contact with phenomenology. From 1936 to 1943 he was a parish pastor on the island of Funen. In 1943 he became professor of ethics and philosophy of religion at the theological faculty of Aarhus University, where he taught until 1975; during the last years of the German occupation he supported the resistance and had to go into hiding. His wife, the philologist Rosemarie Løgstrup, born Pauly, translated his works into German. He died on 20 October 1981.

Further main works

• Kunst og etik (1961)
• Opgør med Kierkegaard (1968)
• Norm og spontaneitet (1972)
• Metafysik (4 vols., 1976–84)