Concern for the Other: Perspectives on the Ethics of K. E. Løgstrup

The Conception of Ethics and the Ethical in K. E. L

The Conception of Ethics and the Ethical in K.E. Løgstrup’s The Ethical Demand Hans Fink The Ethical Demand is the most important work of moral philosophy written in Danish in the twentieth century, and it remains the central work by its author, K. E. Løgstrup. The Ethical Demand is not an easy book to read, and a university education in moral philosophy is no guarantee that the task will be any easier. In this work Løgstrup seeks to explicate a fact about human life, a fact that he takes to underlie everything ethical, and that he claims is so elementary that it tends to be systematically overlooked in ordinary schools of moral inquiry, whether they focus on philosophy or theology, and whether they are rooted in Anglo-American or Continental traditions. Løgstrup seeks to articulate a conception of the ethical that is unlike any other I know of, being at once extremely simple and extremely complex. I believe he is after something quite important that deserves to be taken into account and discussed by moral philosophers in general. In this essay I shall try to defend this claim, organizing my discussion into five sections. In the first four sections I extract what I consider to be the main argument of the book. In the fifth and final section I place Løgstrup’s conception of ethics and the ethical in a wider perspective by comparing it with other, better known, conceptions, and by trying to spell out what it 9 C H A P T E R O N E Andersen-01 10/19/07 1:42 PM Page 9 is I believe we could all learn from Løgstrup, even if we may not agree with him. ETHICS, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY Løgstrup was educated as a theologian, and before becoming a professor of ethics and philosophy of religion he worked for a time as a pastor in the Lutheran Church of Denmark. There is no doubt about his Christian commitment. But Løgstrup was also a philosopher, and well aware that philosophy should not be dogmatically committed. In The Ethical Demand he makes an attempt “to give a definition in strictly human terms of the relation to the other person which is contained in the religious proclamation of Jesus of Nazareth” (Løgstrup 1997, 1). This task is clearly set within a theological framework, but the task is equally clearly presented in such a form that it must be performed in purely secular and philosophically acceptable terms. Why should a Christian theologian be interested in setting himself this purely philosophical task? Løgstrup offers two reasons. First, if we want to understand the proclamation of Jesus of Nazareth, it is necessary that we understand what it is saying in strictly human terms, since no other form of understanding is open to human beings. And “faith without understanding is not faith but coercion” (ibid., 2). Second, the believer needs a purely secular understanding in order to understand why and how the proclamation is more than a mere philosophy of life, to understand why and how Jesus of Nazareth for the Christian believer is to be taken to be more than a moral reformer like Socrates. I believe we can rely on Løgstrup when he says he is trying to argue as a philosopher, and that he himself would regard it as a failure if his argument could be shown to hinge on his religious commitments.1 On the other hand, he also makes it quite clear that he is confident the readers who have followed his philosophical argument will feel invited, though not logically forced, to step beyond philosophy and into the realm of faith. Why should a philosopher like me, who is not a member of any church, be interested in studying Løgstrup’s theologically motivated attempt to limit himself to the philosophical? Ever since my student days I have been impressed by Løgstrup’s seriousness and deeply personal way of thinking, and I am convinced that his philosophical argument Hans Fink 10 Andersen-01 10/19/07 1:42 PM Page 10 can, in fact, stand on its own without any specifically Christian presuppositions , and that it is quite possible to accept its central tenets without being forced or inclined to embrace any views that go beyond what should be perfectly acceptable in philosophical terms—which...