Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.2007, Side 25

Svend Andersen
Is There a Social-ethical Demand?
A Question to Logstrups Classic
In 2006 the 50th anniversary of K.E. Logstrup’s Den etiske fordring was cel-
ebrated. My opinion of the book is by no means unbiased. But I think that
also more neutral scholars would agree that it can be regarded as a classic in
Nordic theological ethics. Apart from its academic merits the book has had a
unique fate in so far as it is still on the market, more than half a century after
its first appearance.
In the book, Logstrup makes the following claim:
... the demand has the effect of making the person to whom the demand is
directed a singular person. Ethically speaking the demand isolates him or her.
(Logstrup 1997, 45).
“A singular person”: Logstrup’s own Danish expression is “den enkelte i
udtrykkelig forstand”. This is without any doubt an echo of Soren Kierke-
gaard’s ‘individual’ (den enkelte). Thus Logstrup’s very terminology gives
the impression that the ethics of the demand is an ethics for the individual’s
dealing with the individual other. The demand would not seem to have any
relevance for acting in a collective context; it would be socially irrelevant.
Other formulations support this impression. If, Logstrup says, we only had
to respond to
... the other person’s expressed request, our life together would consist in
abandoning ourselves to the crowd. And the crowd can very well consist of
only one person. (22).
Logstrup’s individual, like Kierkegaard’s, is conceived in opposition to the
crowd. The context in which the demand arises is interpersonal, not social.
Logstrup says:
The radical character of the demand prevents the encounter in which the