-
Principles and Situations: K. E. L
- University of Notre Dame Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Principles and Situations K.E. Løgstrup and British Moral Philosophy of the Twentieth Century Brenda Almond INTRODUCTORY REMARKS: THE PHILOSOPHICAL CONTEXT OF LØGSTRUP’S WRITING The year that Løgstrup’s The Ethical Demand was published, 1956, was, as it happens, the year in which I began my own philosophical studies in England, and Løgstrup’s remarks on British moral philosophy strike many familiar notes. The writers he is interested in were the ones who provided the focus for undergraduate courses in British universities at the time, and these were very much in the analytic, empiricist, indeed logical positivist tradition. The moral philosophers studied and on whom Løgstrup also comments included Bertrand Russell , G.E. Moore, C.L. Stevenson, and P.H. Nowell-Smith, but there was little interest in England at the time in the philosophers who had influenced Løgstrup’s own early philosophical studies—existentialists and phenomenologists. Theology, too, was very much a separate study, detached from philosophy, apart from some—mainly skeptical—discussion of the historical proofs of the existence of God. But despite these differences between Løgstrup and those teaching and writing on the subject in British universities, Løgstrup saw a certain unity of purpose in English and Scandinavian approaches on the one hand, 85 C H A P T E R F O U R Andersen-04 10/19/07 2:00 PM Page 85 as contrasted with German and French traditions on the other. He writes: “Each of these philosophical traditions has its own world and lives in it as if the other did not exist.” But he goes on to say: “One of the most pressing philosophical tasks is thus to connect these two philosophical worlds” (Løgstrup 1997, 281). In pursuing this goal, he hoped that his own work might be a mediating influence, and this is indeed the way in which his remarks on British philosophy are best construed. Nevertheless, in many ways, the philosophical world as Løgstrup saw it does provide a contrast to the way in which moral philosophy was viewed from England at that time. In its richness and in its constant references to human needs and experience, Løgstrup’s writing contrasts with the somewhat arid approach of mid-twentieth-century English, and more particularly Oxford, philosophy. And, although in The Ethical Demand, as Kees van Kooten Niekerk points out, Løgstrup does indeed offer a philosophical ethic rather than a religious or theological one, since the ethical demand is to be understood in terms of agape—“love of neighbor”—it remains an essentially Christian ethic (see Niekerk 1999, 415–426). To my mind, it is also suggestive of some more recent trends in moral philosophy , especially the so-called feminist ethic of care, for Løgstrup’s interpretation of neighbor-love in terms of care and responsibility for particular others who are dependent on us—who are, in a sense, in our power—remarkably anticipates the theories developed as a consequence of Carol Gilligan’s empirical findings about the way in which many women approach morality in terms of context and personal responsibility for particular others (see Gilligan 1993). It is worth noting, too, that Løgstrup is also very much an applied philosopher, in today’s terminology. He writes on human love and relationships , on sexuality, war, politics, economics, and science. He is also disposed to appeal to literature and to illustrate his views by reference to literary examples such as incidents from Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus, E.M. Forster’s Howards End, or the plays and novels of Sartre. All this is a world away from British philosophy of the 1950s, so it is not surprising that references to British philosophers in The Ethical Demand are few and fleeting. We meet Russell, Moore, Nowell-Smith, and the American emotivist C. L. Stevenson (for the latter, Løgstrup 1997, 168 n. 1). However, in his later work Norm und Spontaneität (Løgstrup Brenda Almond 86 Andersen-04 10/19/07 2:00 PM Page 86 [18.217.144.32] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 19:19 GMT) 1989), the cast is expanded and Løgstrup describes the course of British twentieth-century moral philosophy in more detail. He sees it as beginning with a revolt against naturalism and, following Blegvad (1959), identifies the stages it passed through as the following: Stage 1: moral intuitionism. For Løgstrup, this was represented by G...