World Famous in Denmark:
The Thought of K E Løgstrup
and Its Place in the History of
Philosophy
Robert Stern
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Løgstrup: World Famous in
Denmark
• Løgstrup very well known in his native Denmark, with major
influence on philosophy, theology and broader culture there
• But virtually unknown outside Scandinavia
• Why?
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Will explain his life and work
Will explain his place in Danish thought and culture
Will try to explain why he is not better known elsewhere
Will try to suggest why he should be better known elsewhere
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Løgstrup?
• 1905-1981
• Early reading influenced by Kant and phenomenological
movement (Husserl, Scheler, Hans Lipps, Heidegger) and
Kierkegaard, as well as Lutheran theology
• Spent most of his academic life at the University of Aarhus
• Lived through Nazi occupation of Denmark
• Publishes The Ethical Demand in 1956 (Eng trans NDUP, 1997)
• Publishes several later books and articles in ethics, theology
and metaphysics
• (some of the later ethical writings translated in Beyond the
Ethical Demand, University of Notre Dame Press, 2007, and
extracts from his 4 volume Metaphysics translated by
Marquette University Press, 1995)
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The Ethical Demand
• Key idea: ‘the ethical demand’
• What does Løgstrup mean by ‘the ethical demand’?
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The ethical demand
• Thinks it is the key idea underlying Jesus’s ‘proclamation’:
‘Love they neighbour as thyself’
• But says he wants to make sense of this in a non-religious
framework:
‘If a religious proclamation is not understandable in the sense that
it answers to decisive features of our existence, then accepting it is
tantamount to letting ourselves be coerced – whether by others or
by ourselves – for faith without understanding is not faith by
coercion’ (p. 2)
‘We took the proclamation of Jesus as the point of departure for
our reflection on the ethical demand… [and] we have tried to
account [for it] in a purely human manner’ (p. 207)
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The ethical demand
Two questions:
• What ethical outlook does the proclamation embody? What
does it require of us?
• What are the implications of taking it seriously, that make
sense of the proclamation?
• And subsidiary question: what is the nature of these implications?
•
•
•
•
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factual?
phenomenological?
metaphysical/ontological?
transcendental?
religious?
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Features of the ethical demand
Radical demand:
‘The radical demand says that we are to care for the other person in a
way that best serves his or her interests’ (p. 55)
Has certain key features:
(1) It is unspoken or silent, in two senses:
• (i) what I am called upon to do may not be what I have been asked
to do by the neighbour – up to me to determine what is really
required (pp. 21-22)
• (ii) I cannot consult the content of prevailing norms or laws to
determine what I should do, as there is a difference between the
radical demand and these norms or laws, so must use my own
judgment (pp. 56-63)
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Features of the ethical demand
(2) It is radical, where this radicality ‘consists’ in two features:
• (i) because it is silent = must determine for oneself what is
required in the specific situation, and take responsibility for
that (cf. morality and law, where this is largely settled
already)(pp. 44, pp. 119-20, p. 243)
• (ii) it can only be fulfilled unselfishly and may well ask me to
do things that are against my own good, so that it ‘intrudes
disturbingly into my own existence’ (p. 45); but this should not
be confused with limitlessness (pp. 46-52)
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Features of the ethical demand
And this radicality ‘manifests’ itself in various other ways:
• it is isolating: can’t lose one’s identity by just following what
the other wants, but must remain distinct from them, and
determine for oneself what is required (p. 44)
• the person has no right to make the demand, and it is noncontractual (cf. morality and law) (pp. 45-46)
• it does not involve reciprocity, but is one-sided (p. 115)
• a person’s relation to the demand is invisible: can’t know
whether someone has followed it, and been correctly
motivated by it, as only have their actions to go on (pp. 105108)
• it is unfulfillable (though again, this should not be confused
with limitlessness: just that if you are following it as a
demand, then not acting for the sake of the other)
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The basis of the ethical
demand?
Løgstrup hopes we will recognize that the ethical demand has the features he has
suggested
But: thinks we can only make sense of these features give a certain ’understanding of the
world’ or ‘ontology’
What ‘ontology’ does the ethical demand require, if we are to make sense of it?
• One answer: we are dependent on one another (cf. MacIntyre’s ‘dependent rational
animals’):
‘If human beings were so independent of one another that the words and deeds of one were
only a dispensable luxury in the life of another and my failure in the life of the neighbour
could easily be made up later, then God’s relation to me would not be as intimately tied up
with my relation to the neighbour as the proclamation of Jesus declares it to be. In short, the
intimate connection in which Jesus places our relation to God and our relation to the
neighbour presupposes that we are, as Luther expressed it, “daily bread” in the life of one
another. And this presupposition for the intimate connection in the proclamation of Jesus
between the two great commandments in the law can indeed be described in strictly human
terms’ (p. 5)
• But more to it than this, as need to explain the particular character of the ethical
demand (e.g. Hobbesian could accept our inter-dependence, but still see ethical
demand differently)
• So what else do we need to make sense of it?
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Life is a gift
Answer: ‘life is a gift’
‘The ethical demand consists of two elements. First, it receives its content from
a fact that, from a person to person relationship which can be demonstrated
empirically, namely that one person’s life is involved with the life of another
person. The point of the demand is that one is to care for whatever in the other
person’s life that involvement delivers into his or her hands. Second, the
demand receives its one-sidedness from the understanding that a person’s life is
an ongoing gift, so that we will never be in a position to demand something in
return for what we do. That life has been given to us is something that cannot
be demonstrated empirically; it can only be accepted in faith – or else denied.’
(p. 123)
Cf. also p. 171 note:
‘To use the classical philosophical designation: The one-sided demand contains
an ontology, a fundamental and constitutive definition of being, namely, that
human life and the world that goes with it have been given to human beings as
a gift’.
But what does seeing ‘life as a gift’ mean?
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Life as a gift
• Most obvious interpretation:
• Life is gift from God, as our creator
• Cf. ED, p. 171:
The demand which sets reciprocity aside cannot exist in the place to
which it is assigned by antimetaphysical philosophy. Its onesidedness presupposes a power which has given a person her life
and her world and which at the same time presents itself as the
ultimate authority of the demand. This power is invisible, and as
ultimate authority it is silent because it is transcendent.
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Life as a gift
• However, while Løgstrup happy to accept this as a religious
gloss on a metaphysical claim, he doesn’t think we have to
take it this way
• For, if the metaphysics requires this religious gloss, then how
can his ethics be secular/humanistic – how can this be an
ethics that operates in a ‘purely human manner’?
• But how else can ‘life is a gift’ be taken, if not in religious
terms?
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Life as a gift
What work does Løgstrup need the idea of ‘life as a gift’ to do?
Two main jobs:
(1) To explain the ‘one-sidedness’ of the demand: I can’t expect
anything in return, or demand anything back from you
‘In view of the fact that we possess nothing which we have not
received, we cannot make counterdemands… [T]he demand which
makes void protest from the viewpoint of reciprocity does not arise
exclusively from the fact that the one person is delivered over to
the other. This demand makes sense only on the presupposition
that the person to whom the demand is addressed possesses
nothing which he or she has not received as a gift. Given that
presupposition, the demand is the only thing which makes sense’
(p. 116).
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Life as a gift
(2) To explain why no one has the right to make the demand:
‘The radical character [of the demand] manifests itself also in the
fact that the other person has no right herself to make the demand,
even though it has to do with the care of her life… The fact out of
which the demand arises, namely that her life is more or less in my
hands, is a fact which has come into being independently of either
her or me. Therefore, she cannot identify herself with this fact and
assume that its demand is her own.’ (p. 46)
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Life as a gift
• Seeing life as a gift contrasted with seeing oneself as
‘sovereign’ over one’s life
• What does ‘sovereign’ here mean?
• Self-created individual, who enters into contractual relations
with others from which norms derive
• Contrast ‘life as a gift’:
• See oneself on part of an always already existing world and set
of norms, on which one is dependent and must rely
• So
(1) Have no right to make counterdemands, because one is
already indebted for what one possesses
(2) Have no right to make demands oneself, as this is not a
contractual situation in which one goes in with certain rights and
entitlements, or prior authority
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Life as a gift
Cf. the following passages from ED:
Trust is not of our own making; it is given. Our life is so constituted
that it cannot be lived except as one person lays herself open to
another person and puts herself into that person’s hands either by
showing or claiming trust. (ED, p. 18)
Or, in spite of the fact that natural love has been received as a gift and
that here more clearly than anywhere else life is seen to be a gift, we
nevertheless regard natural love as our own achievement. We try to
make ourselves masters of our own lives, and we live and reason as
though we ourselves had produced our natural love./But the more
natural love is viewed as testifying to our own superiority, the more it
is in danger of being destroyed. The more that a sense of our own
merits causes us to take credit for the works of natural love, the more
externalized the relationship becomes. (ED, p. 132)
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Life as a gift
We are not sovereign individuals who willfully chose to make ourselves
dependent on others, or to make demands on them based on our
authority over them; rather, the form of life with its norms, into which we
are always already ‘given’, itself makes us dependent on others and put us
in their power, where the obligation on others to help arises from the
norms that govern life; so while on the one hand this demand is not based
on our claim over them, on the other hand precisely because we have not
made ourselves vulnerable they cannot ignore us
Cf. the suggestion of Hans Fink and Alasdair MacIntyre that Løgstrup’s
argument relies on the idea of ‘life being something given in the ordinary
philosophical sense of being prior to and a precondition of all we may
think and do’ (Hans Fink and Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Introduction’, ED, p.
xxxv)
So now have a secular reading of both ‘life as a gift’ and ‘sovereign
expressions of life’, which gives life and our place within life a crucial
normative role
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The ethical demand
• So, two questions to ask re the ethical demand:
(1) Has Løgstrup characterised the ethical demand correctly?
i.e. is there this one-sided, silent etc ethical relation
between individuals?
(2) If there is, does it require the commitments Løgstrup says it
does, of life as a gift? And what kind of commitment is
this? Is it something we have proved, or just shown we
must accept if we are to accept the ethical demand, or
just something we actually assume without realizing it?
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Løgstrup
Now want to briefly consider Løgstrup’s place in Danish culture,
focusing on three aspects:
• Løgstrup’s early influence on the Tidehverv moment (‘turn of
the time’ or ‘epoch’)
• Influence in education
• Influence in nursing ethics
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Tidehverv
• Tidehverv is a journal and social and theological movement,
begun in 1926
• It was inspired by the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann
and the Swiss theologian Karl Barth
• Emphasized the absolute divide between God and man as the
core of Christianity
• Let to a revival of interest in Kierkegaard, and his battle with
‘Christendom’, the absolute paradox etc
• Like Kierkegaard, it is directed against Grundtvigianism
• Leading followers were the priest and Kierkegaard interpreter
Kristoffer Olesen Larsen (1899-1964) and Aarhus professor
Johannes Sløk (1916-2001)
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Tidehverv
• Løgstrup was part of the movement early on in 1930s
• But in the 1950s became more critical of Kierkegaard and Larsen, who in
turn responded to Løgstrup
• Løgstrup seen as taking philosophy in a more humanistic, ultimately
anti-religious direction
• Cf. Larsen’s reponse to Løgstrup’s ethics:
• If there is no question other than the ethical one, then Jesus’s
proclamation makes no sense. For Jesus, the crucial question is not what
a person is to do, but why he is to do what he is to do, and the only
reason is the one inherent in the command. Jesus did not radicalize the
demand in the sense that he made it infinite, but in the sense that he
denied any purpose to fulfilling it, every ‘in addition’, every ‘both-and’.
Therefore he demanded that man should renounce his own life,
abandon seeking his own, give up every desire to have anything other
than God as his god, any desire to be anything other than being God's
creature and servant. This of course means that Jesus wants to liberate
man from the world, from his life, from his achievements, from his
desires and concerns by binding him to God's demand on him.
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Heretica
• After break with Tidehverv, Løgstrup became associated with
the journal Heretica, with which he published work in 1950s
• Heretica was a literary journal, which attracted writers and
artists looking for a new direction for cultural values after the
war
• Løgstrup wrote widely on art and the importance of art, and
championed the use of literary examples in his work
• In 1961 was elected to Danish Academy
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Education
• Some of Løgstrup’s key ideas have a relation to education and
educational policy (and cf. also tradition from Grundtvig)
• He himself was interested in psychological studies of
education, and e.g. the role of discipline in upbringing
• And his idea of ‘life as a gift’ and of our fundamental
interdependence (especially involving trust) has implications
for education:
• To see ‘life as a gift’ is to see life as good, and so to have a ‘zest
for life’ or ‘courage to be’: and one aspect of the ethical demand
is that one not take this away from people
• Children naturally have this zest for life, but it can be destroyed
through the wrong upbringing
• Children also naturally trust, which is part of this positive view of
life, and which we can destroy
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Education
• Løgstrup wrote explicitly about education:
1972: ‘Opdragelse og etik’ [Upbringing and Ethics], Pædagogik,
2, pp. 9-27
1981: ‘Skolens formål’ [The Purpose of School], in his Solidaritet
og kærlighed
‘To the school belongs enlightenment of the existence we have
with and against each other, education about the way society is
organised, and the course of history, and about the nature we
are put into with our breath and metabolism, about the universe
we are put in with our senses.’
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Education
• Løgstrup’s ideas have had an influence on subsequent discussion
and policy, particularly in RE
• Has also led to some criticism for use in educational setting:
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too tied to Christianity/Lutheranism
too tied to religious presuppositions
too ‘anti-enlightenment’
anti-scientific/naturalist
• But more positively, provides a corrective to ‘value free’ purely
instrumentalist view of education, while tying this to broader social
issues?
• Issue raises fundamental questions for interpretations of Løgstrup’s
thought itself, as we have seen – e.g. over relation to religion, life as
a gift etc
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Health care
• Løgstrup’s ideas have also had an influence on medical ethics
and training, particularly in nursing
• Connection is made through the ethical demand, and the
requirement to ‘care for the other person in a way that best
serves his or her interests’
• Cf. ‘care ethics’?
• Løgstrup himself didn’t write explicitly on medical issues, but
he has exercised an influence through the work of Kari
Martinsen (1943-), who is widely read in Norway and
Denmark and has published a lot of material that draws on
Løgstrup’s ideas, and she is frequently cited in textbooks and
training manuals
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Health care
• This appropriation of Løgstrup also raises interesting
interpretative and critical issues:
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Religious question again
Generality/vagueness of the ethical demand
How can it be applied?
Ethical demand only between two people, no good in more
complex social setting like hospital etc?
• Clash with central issues in health care, such as patient rights and
autonomy: for Løgstrup, have no right to make the demand, and
also must respond with what is best for the other, and not
necessarily what they want – so paternalistic?
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Why just Denmark?
• So, have briefly looked at Løgstrup’s main ideas, and how they
have had a significant influence in Scandinavian context
• But why not elsewhere?
• In fact, not quite true: some uptake in Germany, helped by
early translations by Løgstrup’s German wife, Rosemarie
• But still impact relatively meager – made all the more
surprising by his similarities to Levinas?
• But Levinas also a relatively recent discovery, initially
overshadowed by existentialism, marxism and
Heideggerianism
• Anglo-American world particularly slow to catch on:
• Ethical Demand first partially translated in 1971
• Some mention in work by MacIntrye, Bauman, Critchley
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Why just Denmark?
• Answer is that Løgstrup work was untimely:
• When he was writing his main works in 1950s and 60s, many of his
key ideas were completely out of favour in Anglo-American
philosophy:
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•
•
•
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Fact/value distinction – is/ought distinction
‘Queerness’ of morality
Reductive naturalism
Kantian universalism or utilitarianism
Secularism
Anti-phenomenology, and general suspicion of ‘continental’
philosophy
• Cf. marginal philosophical status of other thinkers at the time who
did not work with these assumptions, such as Iris Murdoch and
Simone Weil
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Why just Denmark?
• But all these assumptions would be questioned by prominent
contemporary philosophers, such as Bernard Williams,
Alasdair MacIntyre, Philippa Foot, Michael Thompson, John
McDowell and many others
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Løgstrup now?!
• So perhaps Løgstrup’s views are due for a revival in AngloAmerican philosophy, and more broadly?
• We shall see…..
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