Controverting Kierkegaard

Abstract In this book, Danish theologian K. E. Løgstrup (1905–81) engages in a critique of Kierkegaard’s understanding of human existence and Christianity, especially Kierkegaard’s understanding of life in finitude and of human existence as a state of despair, where the individual needs to become themselves through reflection and decision. Løgstrup criticizes Kierkegaard’s Christology and his view on suffering, and he also argues that Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity and human existence is rooted in Platonism. Furthermore, Løgstrup here introduces the idea of ‘the sovereign expressions of life’ (such as trust, compassion, and the openness of speech), which came to take up a central position in his ethics and ontology. He understands these sovereign expressions of life as part of life’s own structure, where human inadequacies and self-obsession can be overcome, effectively releasing the individual from their existence in untruth so that they can become themselves without Kierkegaardian reflection and the so-called ‘double movement of faith’. The book was the culmination of a long-standing debate between Løgstrup and contemporary existentialist Kierkegaardians (especially the Danish Tidehverv movement, which was based in Kierkegaardian theological existentialism), and which had begun twenty years prior and had also been a theme in the ‘Polemical Epilogue’ in Løgstrup’s main work The Ethical Demand (1956).