Stages on Life's Way

Stages on Life's Way
First edition, titlepage.
AuthorSøren Kierkegaard
Original titleStadier paa Livets Vei
TranslatorWalter Lowrie, 1940; Howard V. Hong, 1988
LanguageDanish
SeriesFirst authorship (Pseudonymous)
GenreChristianity, philosophy
PublisherBianco Luno Press
Publication date
April 30, 1845
Publication placeDenmark
Published in English
1940 – first translation
Media typePaperback
Pages465
ISBN0691020493
Preceded byThree Discourses on Imagined Occasions 
Followed byConcluding Unscientific Postscript 

Stages on Life's Way (Danish: Stadier på Livets Vej; historical orthography: Stadier paa Livets Vej) is a philosophical work by Søren Kierkegaard written in 1845. The book was written as a continuation of Kierkegaard's prior work Either/Or. While Either/Or is about the aesthetic and ethical realms, Stages continues onward to the consideration of the religious realms. Kierkegaard's "concern was to present the various stages of existence in one work if possible."[1] His father Michael Pedersen read Christian Wolff, and Søren himself was influenced by both Wolff and Kant to the point of using the structure and philosophical content of the three special metaphysics as the scheme or blueprint for building the ideas for this book.[2]

But Kierkegaard wasn't satisfied until the completion of Concluding Unscientific Postscript in 1846. Here he wrote: "When my Philosophical Fragments had come out and I was considering a postscript to “clothe the issue in its historical costume,” yet another pseudonymous book appeared: Stages on Life’s Way, a book that has attracted the attention of only a few (as it itself predicts) perhaps also because it did not, like Either/Or, have The Seducer’s Diary, for quite certainly that was read most and of course contributed especially to the sensation. That Stages has a relation to Either/Or is clear enough and is definitely indicated by the use in the first two sections of familiar names."[3] Later in the same book he said,

In Either/Or, I am just as little, precisely just as little, the editor Victor Eremita as I am the Seducer or the Judge. He is a poetically actual subjective thinker who is found again in “In Vino Veritas”. In Fear and Trembling, I am just as little, precisely just as little, Johannes de Silentio as the knight of faith he depicts, and in turn just as little the author of the preface to the book, which is the individuality-lines of a poetically actual subjective thinker. In the story of suffering (Guilty?/’Not Guilty), I am just as remote from being Quidam of the imaginary construction as from being the imaginative constructor, just as remote, since the imaginative constructor is a poetically actual subjective thinker and what is imaginatively constructed is his psychologically consistent production. Concluding Unscientific Postscript 1846, Hong pp. 625—626.

David F. Swenson cited this book when discussing Kierkegaard's melancholy which was corroborated by Kierkegaard's older brother Peter Christian Kierkegaard. However, Kierkegaard could have been writing about Jonathan Swift.[4][5][6] The background is the giving of a banquet yet it seems so difficult; Constantine, from Repetition says he would never risk putting one on. Kierkegaard says, "repetition that involved good luck and inspiration is always a daring venture because of the ensuing comparison, an absolute requirement of richness of expression is made, since it is not difficult to repeat one's own words or to repeat a felicitously chosen phrase word for word. Consequently, to repeat the same also means to change under conditions made difficult by the precedent. By taking the risk, the pseudonymous author (Hilarius Bookbinder) has won an indirect victory over the inquisitive public. That is, when this reading public peers into the book and sees the familiar names Victor Eremita and Constantin Constantius, etc., it tosses the book aside and says wearily: It is just the same as Either/Or." But Kierkegaard maintains it is the author's job to make it "the same, and yet changed, and yet the same".[7] He continued writing for 494 pages in Hong's translation and in his "Concluding Word" says, "My dear reader-but to whom am I speaking? Perhaps no one at all is left."[8]

  1. ^ Journals of Søren Kierkegaard VIIA 106
  2. ^ Klempe, Sven Hroar (2017) [2014]. Kierkegaard and the Rise of Modern Psychology. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge. p. 74. ISBN 978-1-35151022-6.
  3. ^ Concluding Unscientific Postscript p. 284 Hong. See also pp. 322-323, 625.
  4. ^ The melancholy which was the common heritage of father and son can be described by citing a single characteristic trait. One day while herding sheep on the bare Jutland heath, embittered by his privations and oppressed by loneliness, the elder Kierkegaard, who was then a boy of eleven or twelve, had mounted a hill and assailed with curses the God who had condemned him to so wretched an existence. In Kierkegaard's journal for 1846 there is a reference to this incident in the following terms: "The terrible fate of the man who had once in childhood mounted a hill and cursed God, because he was hungry and cold, and had to endure privations while herding his sheep and who was unable to forget it even at the age of eighty-two." When after Kierkegaard's death this passage was shown to his surviving elder brother, Bishop Peder Christian Kierkegaard, he burst into tears and said: "That is just the story of our father, and of his sons as well." Elsewhere, in Stages on the Way of Life, Kierkegaard suggests that these dark moods served to link the father and the son in a fellowship of secret and unexpressed sympathy. Scandinavian studies and Notes 1921 p. 3
  5. ^ Journals 71A5
  6. ^ This is what Kierkegaard wrote in Stages on Life's Way p. 199-200 Hong:

    When Swift became an old man, he was committed to the insane asylum he himself had established when he was young. Here, it is related, he often stood in front of a mirror with the perseverance of a vain and lascivious woman, if not exactly with her thoughts. he looked at himself and said: Poor old man! Once upon a time there were a father and a son. A son is like a mirror in which the father sees himself, and for the son in turn the father is like a mirror in which he sees himself in the time to come. Yet they seldom looked at each other in that way, for the cheerfulness of high-spirited, lively conversation was their daily round. Only a few times did it happen that the father stopped, faced the son with a sorrowful countenance, looked at him and said: Poor child, you are in a quiet despair. Nothing more was ever said about it, how it was to be understood, how true it was. And the father believed that he was responsible for his son’s depression, and the son believe that it was he who caused the father sorrow-but never a word was exchanged about this. Then the father died. And the son saw much, heard much, experienced much, and was tried in various temptations, but he longed for only one thing, only one thing moved him-it was that word and it was the voice of the father when he said it. Then the son became an old man; but just as love devised everything, so longing and loss taught him-not, of course, to wrest any communication from the silence of eternity-but it taught him to imitate his father’s voice until the likeness satisfied him. Then he did not look at himself in the mirror, as did the aged Swift, for the mirror was no more, but in loneliness he comforted himself by listening to his father’s voice: Poor child, you are in a quiet despair. For the father was the only one who understood him, and yet he did not know whether he had understood him; and the father was the only intimate he had had, but the intimacy was of such a nature that it remained the same whether the father was alive or dead.
  7. ^ Concluding Unscientific Postscript p. 286.
  8. ^ Stages on Life's Way, Hong p. 485.