Stages on Life’s Way: Studies by Various Persons

by Soren Kierkegaard

Publisher:

Princeton University Press

, 1988

Overview

Stages on Life’s Way, the sequel to Either/Or, is an intensely poetic example of Kierkegaard’s vision of the three stages, or spheres, of existence: the esthetic, the ethical, and the religious. With characteristic love for mystification, he presents the work as a bundle of documents fallen by chance into the hands of “Hilarius Bookbinder,” who prepared them for printing. The book begins with a banquet scene patterned on Plato’s Symposium. (George Brandes maintained that “one must recognize with amazement that it holds its own in this comparison.”) Next is a discourse by “Judge William” in praise of marriage “in answer to objections.” The remainder of the volume, almost two-thirds of the whole, is the diary of a young man, discovered by “Frater Taciturnus,” who was deeply in love but felt compelled to break his engagement. The work closes with a letter to the reader from Taciturnus on the three “existence-spheres” represented by the three parts of the book. Stages on Life’s Way not only repeats themes, characters, and pseudonymous authors of the earlier works but also goes beyond them and points to further development of central ideas in Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

Product Details

• Title: Stages on Life’s Way: Studies by Various Persons
• Author: Soren Kierkegaard
• Series: Kierkegaard’s Writings
• Volume: XI
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Print Publication Date: 1988
• Logos Release Date: 2018
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Subjects: Philosophy; Christianity › Philosophy
• ISBNs: 9781400846986, 9780691020495, 0691020493, 9780691073231, 0691073236, 1400846986
• Resource ID: LLS:KKGWRTGS11
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-04T23:35:26Z

About Soren Kierkegaard

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danish Christian philosopher, theologian and religious author. He was a critic of idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel; he was also critical of the state and practice of Christianity in his lifetime, primarily that of The Church of Denmark. He is widely considered to be the first existentialist.