The Ethical Demand and the Failure of Love

Abstract

This chapter covers Chapters 7 to 9 of The Ethical Demand. In these chapters, Løgstrup considers how it is that the demand enters our life as a demand, which happens when natural love fails, and we therefore come to feel under some obligation to do what we would have done, had we loved the other person properly. The demand is thus characterized as unfulfillable, as once it arises, we have already failed to love and so to respond to the other in the right way. Nonetheless, Løgstrup argues, we cannot use this unfulfillability to claim that the demand no longer applies to us, as the failure to love is our fault, while any goodness must be attributed to life and not ourselves. This failure is reflected in the many and various ways which we find to wriggle out of facing up to the demand and what it requires of us.