# 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". 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.
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.

## 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.
Douglas V. Steere translated part of Kierkegaard's Edifying Discourses in Diverse Spirits and wrote an introduction to David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson's translation of Works of Love. He wrote the following in his introduction to Works of Love:
   For Kierkegaard in both his Either/Or and his Stages on Life's Way has depicted the strictly ethical category and has done it almost wholly in Kantian terms. But like the aesthetic category which is also depicted there, he has then shown its basic instability and shown how it may collapse and compel the individual to seek a deeper existence sphere (the religious) in which to live. The critical point in the ethical category Kierkegaard insists is its inability to get over the hiatus or chasm between recognized duty and its performance, when performance involves pain to our pride or our inclination or the defiance of the momentary way of the crowd. This failure to follow duty in old-fashioned terms is called sin, and Kierkegaard has shown the ethical category shattering on that rock of sin, and no ethical appeal to reason or duty or ultimate pleasure is sufficient to stay the condition where "I do those things which I ought not to do and leave undone those things which I ought to do, and there is no health in me."
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.
Walter Lowrie notes that Kierkegaard wrote a "repetition of Either/Or" because it stopped with the ethical.
In 1988 Mary Elizabeth Moore discusses Kierkegaard's method of indirect communication in this book.
   In his Stages on Life's Way (SLW), Kierkegaard speaks of irony as the means by which persons make the transition between aesthetic and ethical awareness, and humor as the means for making the transition between ethical and religious awareness. Through irony persons realize that they cannot settle the tension between possibility and necessity, but must live with the tension. Humor offers a means for responding to contradiction and suffering with it. An example of Kierkegaard’s humor of contradiction is the story of the shipmates who frenetically try to make their ship orderly, all the while their ship is sinking. For Kierkegaard, humor is an important avenue for human growth, precisely because it is able to communicate something of the human condition that cannot be communicated adequately in other ways.