Кнуд Лёгструп: Жизнь, Мысль и Этика

Knud Ejler Løgstrup (2 September 1905 – 20 November 1981) was a Danish philosopher and theologian. His work, which combines elements of phenomenology, ethics and theology, has exerted considerable influence in postwar Nordic thought. More recently, his work has been discussed by prominent figures in anglophone philosophy and sociology such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Stern, Simon Critchley and Zygmunt Bauman.

Løgstrup studied theology at the University of Copenhagen between 1923 and 1930, though his interests tended towards the philosophical aspects of the discipline. He subsequently studied under a number of prominent teachers in Strasbourg (Jean Hering), Paris (Henri Bergson), Göttingen (Hans Lipps and Friedrich Gogarten), Freiburg im Breisgau (Martin Heidegger), Vienna (Moritz Schlick) and Tübingen. Lipps, in particular, would have a particularly marked influence on Løgstrup's thinking. Though Løgstrup was at Strasbourg when Emmanuel Levinas – to whom his work is often compared – was a student there, there is no evidence to suggest he and Levinas encountered one another. In Freiburg, he met Rosalie Maria (Rosemarie) Pauly (1914–2005), a German fellow student whom he married in 1935. The following year he took up a position as a parish priest in Funen and continued to work on his dissertation, a critique of idealist epistemology. The dissertation was finally accepted in 1942 after several submissions. In 1943, he was appointed Professor of Ethics and Philosophy at the University of Aarhus. Shortly thereafter, however, Løgstrup was forced to go underground due to his activities in support of the Danish resistance. From the 1930s, Løgstrup was a member of Tidehverv, a strongly anti pietist movement within the Danish Church which at the time espoused a dialectical theology heavily influenced by Kierkegaard. However he drifted increasingly further from the group (and from its interpretation of Kierkegaard, particularly as espoused by Kristoffer Olesen Larsen) and broke with the movement in the early 1950s. Løgstrup retired from the University of Aarhus in 1975 but continued writing a four volume work, Metaphysics. Two volumes had been published by the time of his sudden death from a heart attack in 1981.

In the decades following The Ethical Demand Løgstrup continued to develop his 'ontological ethics' as an alternative to the standard deontic, utilitarian and virtue ethics frameworks. He continued to insist that while virtues, character traits, and duties could usefully provide 'substitute' motives for moral action, these were always secondary: the ethical demand requires a spontaneous loving response to the other. Systems of norms only come into play in moral action when this spontaneous response has already failed. Consequently, Løgstrup is critical of the emphasis on rule following and universal principles in most anglophone moral theory. As an example, Løgstrup mentions Stephen Toulmin's example of an everyday situation: 'I have borrowed a book from John and the question is now, why should I give it back today as I promised him?' According to Toulmin, this question will push us to reflect on principles of ever higher levels of abstraction: "I should always keep my promises," "I should never lie" etc. For Løgstrup, this increasing universalisation leads to a 'moralism' that abstracts from the concrete situation and the needs of the actual person. Instead, moral reflection should remain on the level of the given situation: 'Because my friend needs the book back!'

One of the early criticisms of The Ethical Demand was that it endorsed a form of naturalist fallacy: it inferred a (normative) responsibility to act for the sake of the other from the (descriptive) fact that the other is in our power. Partly in response to this objection, Løgstrup would go on to develop an account of the "sovereign expressions of life" (suværene livsytringer),which first appear in his 1968 book Opgør med Kierkegaard ('Settling Accounts with Kierkegaard' or 'Confronting Kierkegaard') and are further developed in Norm og Spontaneitet (“Norm and Spontaneity,” 1972). This category includes phenomena such as trust, openness of speech, and mercy. These phenomena present themselves to us, according to Løgstrup, as intrinsically good, rather than as neutral phenomena we need to evaluate against an external standard. They do not emanate from the agent, but from life itself, and demand submission rather than application (as with principles) or cultivation (as with virtues).

K. E. Løgstrup. Metaphysics. Marquette University, Milwaukee, 1995. translated and with an introduction by Russell L. Dees. K. E. Løgstrup. The Ethical Demand. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1997. 1st Translation, 3rd edition, Introduction by Hans Fink and Alasdair MacIntyre. K. E. Løgstrup. The Ethical Demand. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2020, 2nd Translation and Introduction by Robert Stern and Bjørn Rabjerg
K. E. Løgstrup. Beyond the Ethical Demand. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 2007, Translation by Susan Dew and Introduction by Kees van Kooten Niekerk
K. E. Løgstrup. Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's Analysis of Existence and its Relation to Proclamation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2020, Translation, Introduction and Notes by Robert Stern
K. E. Løgstrup. Ethical Concepts and Problems. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2020, Translation by Kees van Kooten Niekerk and Kristian Alberto Lykke Cobos, Introduction by Hans Fink and Notes by Robert Stern and Bjørn Rabjerg