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Stages on Life's Way

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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 considers the religious. Kierkegaard's "concern was to present the various stages of existence in one work if possible".[1] Kierkegaard was influenced by both Christian Wolff and Immanuel 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]

David F. Swenson cited this book when discussing Kierkegaard's melancholy, which was corroborated by Kierkegaard's older brother Peter Kierkegaard, though he could have been writing about Jonathan Swift.[3][4]

Criticism

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Georg Brandes is credited with introducing Kierkegaard to the reading public with his 1879 biography about him; he also wrote an analysis of the works of Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson in which he made many comparisons between their works and Kierkegaard's. He considered Stages on Life's Way in relation to Either/Or and the works of Ibsen:

I wonder whether Henrick Ibsen did not feel a little uncomfortable, when Letters from Hell, (by Valdemar Adolph Thisted), seized the opportunity, and sailed forth in the wake of Brand? They both stand in direct relation to the thinker, who, here in Scandinavia, has had the greatest share in the intellectual education of the younger generation, namely, Søren Kierkegaard. Love's Comedy, although its tendency is in the opposite direction, finds its point of departure in what Kierkegaard, in Either-Or and Stages on the Path of Life, has said for and against marriage. And yet the connection in this case is very much slighter than in the case of Brand. Almost every cardinal idea in this poem is to be found in Kierkegaard, and its hero’s life has its prototype in his. Ibsen shares with Kierkegaard the conviction that in every human being there slumbers a mighty soul, an unconquerable power, but he differs from Kierkegaard in holding this essence of individuality to be human, while Kierkegaard looks upon it as something supernatural.

— Henrik Ibsen. Björnstjerne Björnson. Critical studies (1899), by Georg Brandes, 20-21, 61-62, 99[5]

Julia Watkin says the bulk of Stages was composed between September 1844 and March 1845. And that Quidam's diary is the counterpart of the seducer's diary.[6]

Walter Lowrie notes that Kierkegaard wrote a "repetition of Either/Or" because it stopped with the ethical.[7]

In 1988 Mary Elizabeth Moore discusses Kierkegaard's method of indirect communication in this book.[8]

References

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  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. ^ 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
  4. ^ Journals 71A5
  5. ^ Henrik Ibsen. Björnstjerne Björnson. Critical studies (1899), by Georg Brandes at archive.org
  6. ^ Julia Watkin, Historical Dictionary of Kierkegaard's Philosophy, p. 241.
  7. ^ A Short Life of Kierkegaard, Lowrie, 1942, 1970 p. 164-165
  8. ^ Moore, Mary Elizabeth (Winter 1988). "Narrative Teaching: An Organic Methodology". Process Studies. 17 (4): 248–261. doi:10.5840/process198817415. S2CID 155841867.
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