Ontology and Ethics: Løgstrup between Heidegger and Levinas

Abstract

This paper provides an exposition and critical assessment of a fundamental disagreement between Løgstrup’s and Levinas’s otherwise closely aligned ethical phenomenologies. The disagreement concerns the putative (in)compatibility of ethics and ontology, where in stark contrast to Levinas’s ethics, which proceeds from a critique of the ‘primacy of ontology’ in Western thought, Løgstrup brands his own ethical project as ‘ontological ethics’. First, I provide an interpretation of Løgstrup’s ontological ethics, clarifying in particular the influence of hermeneutic and existential analysis on Løgstrup’s methodology. Second, I bring Løgstrup’s ontological ethics into critical dialogue with Levinas’s thought. Here, I home in on two Levinas-style worries that appear to have traction against Løgstrup’s ontological ethics. However, ultimately, I argue that both can be defused.

The oughtness of existence: Living and suffering by what we ought

“…One does not first make an epistemic judgment of the drowning child to evaluate if one ought to help; the oughtness of the situation is directly experienced. Thus, Løgstrup renders the ethical demand to be prereflectively intelligible to us, why his ethic is an “ontological ethics” (Thornton, 2020, p. 117). Fortunately, a drowning child is not part of most people’s everyday lives.…”