Realising Unfulfillable and Impossible Ethical Demands: Løgstrup and Levinas on Trust and Love, Hospitality and Friendship (uncorrected proof)

Abstract

Based on a reading of K. E. Løgstrup’s The Ethical Demand and Emmanuel Levinas’ Totality and Infinity, the paper aims to show that it is respectively through trust and love, hospitality and friendship that the two thinkers envisage humans as being capable of realising unfulfillable and impossible ethical demands. It will be argued that they develop their ethical thinking along similar lines, yet, even when they come closest to each other conceptually, a difference in their phenomenological analysis of the I and the other remains, which it is paramount to keep in mind in order to assess what they may contribute to each other’s thinking