World Famous in Denmark: The Thought of K E Løgstrup and Its Place in the History of PhilosophyRobert 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?

• 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) 6

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?• factual? • phenomenological? • metaphysical/ontological? • transcendental?• religious?

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Features of the ethical demandRadical 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 demandAnd 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 non-contractual (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. 105-108)

• 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) 10

The basis of the ethical demand?

Løgstrup hopes we will recognize that the ethical demand has the features he has suggestedBut: 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 giftAnswer: ‘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? 12

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 one-sidedness 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 giftWhat 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 giftCf. 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 giftWe 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) 22

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. 9-271981: ‘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.’ 26

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:• 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:• 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:• 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 Anglo-

American philosophy, and more broadly?

• We shall see…..

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