Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and Its Relation to Proclamation by K. E. Løgstrup (review)

—In January 1950, the Danish philosopher and theologian K. E. Løgstrup delivered a series of lectures at the Freie University in West Berlin. Originally published in German at the time, and now here appearing in English as part of a four-volume series of his key works translated by Robert Stern and others, the result is one of the finest comparative studies of Kierkegaard and Heidegger ever written.

The central problem animating Løgstrup’s text is one of existential philosophy’s defining questions: What is it to be oneself, to be authentic? Kierkegaard and Heidegger, whose thought revolves around this question, answer it, first, by telling us what it is to lose oneself, to not be a self who is an individual, but to be a carbon-copy “everyone” existing without definition, plunged anonymously into the “crowd.” For Kierkegaard, to live such a conformist existence, one of despair, is to exist completely immersed in the temporal affairs of the world, swallowed up by the daily order of things. It is to live in the denial of one’s relation to eternity, in short, to live a wholly finitized life spent trying to accomplish the relative ends to which the development of one’s natural inclinations and talents leads. For Heidegger, to live inauthentically is to live immersed within the realm of realizable possibilities, without any explicit recognition of one’s ownmost possibility, the “pure possibility” of death.

These themes are by now familiar to any reader of either Kierkegaard or Heidegger, or the voluminous secondary literature on them. What sets Løgstrup’s contribution to the discussion apart from those of others, and to such a remarkable extent that it deserves to be read not just as a commentary on Kierkegaard and Heidegger but as an original work deserving of the right to be read alongside them, is the nuanced light it sheds on the their underlying disagreements after having so thoroughly and perceptively explicated their extensive agreement.

According to both Kierkegaard and Heidegger, “[e]xisting is always a continuous becoming,” says Løgstrup. For Kierkegaard, “existence is movement” precisely insofar as finite human beings stand in time and outside eternity. For this same reason, we accordingly live under a radical ethical demand, as to whether we will live before God by taking over our existence in relation to eternity, or whether instead, “forgetting the relation to eternity,” we live “wholly imprisoned by temporal and worldly interests,” held hostage to how others see us, rather than by what we are called by God to be. For Heidegger, in contrast, while the task remains with Kierkegaard one of how the individual can remain true to his existence in becoming, the advice about how to do so differs. Here, the “negativity” underpinning our finite human existence is neither infinity nor eternity but death. Taking over the ground of one’s existence, hence, no longer amounts to a matter of reconciling the temporal with the eternal through a concrete existence guided by an inward relation to God. Rather, “called upon before myself” in conscience, being oneself amounts to accepting one’s abandonment to anxiety in the face of nothingness.

As Løgstrup notes, for both Kierkegaard and Heidegger something about the structure of existence itself is said to demand a break with the immediacy of life in the crowd. But there is disagreement over what the individual in turn is called to become, and by what or whom one is being so called (God for Kierkegaard, death for Heidegger). After turning to an analysis of the role that the concept of guilt plays in Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s accounts of the demand, Løgstrup’s following chapters develop a criticism of their respective analyses of existence: Kierkegaard’s infinite demand and Heidegger’s call of...