Spontaneity and Perfection: Løgstrup’s Moral Psychology

Dr Patrick Stokes (Deakin University )

Abstract: Despite recently attracting the notice of figures such as MacIntyre and Critchley, the work of K.E. Løgstrup (1905-81) remains largely unknown outside the Nordic countries. Yet Løgstrup is a thinker who develops a fascinating and provocative phenomenologically-driven asymmetrical ethics, one that is at once strikingly reminiscent of Levinas and interestingly different. I offer an overview of the key elements of Løgstrup’s thought, particularly his conceptions of the radical, one-sided and unfulfillable ethical demand and the ‘sovereign expressions of life’ such as trust, compassion and sincerity. I then consider objections made by MacIntyre against Løgstrup’s vision of spontaneous, unreflective ethical action. Against MacIntyre’s claim that Løgstrup’s ‘ethical demand’ for spontaneous mercy is merely what remains of the Thomist virtue of misericordia after a particular form of ethical life has collapsed, I argue that Løgstrup instead offers a very different form of moral perfectionism, one that can be illuminated through reference to Daoist, mystical and Kierkegaardian moral psychology.