Stages on Life's Way

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]

Stages on Life's Way

First edition, titlepage.
Author	Søren Kierkegaard
Original title	Stadier paa Livets Vei
Translator	Walter Lowrie, 1940; Howard V. Hong, 1988
Language	Danish
Series	First authorship (Pseudonymous)
Genre	Christianity, philosophy
Publisher	Bianco Luno Press
Publication date	April 30, 1845
Publication place	Denmark
Published in English	1940 – first translation
Media type	Paperback
Pages	465
ISBN	0691020493
Preceded by	Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions
Followed by	Concluding Unscientific Postscript

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

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]