Stages on Life's Way#Section 3

{{Short description|1845 philosophical work by Søren Kierkegaard}}

{{Infobox books

| name = Stages on Life's Way

| title_orig = Stadier paa Livets Vei

| translator = Walter Lowrie, 1940; Howard V. Hong, 1988

| image = Stages on Life's Way.jpeg

| caption = First edition, titlepage.

| author = Søren Kierkegaard

| illustrator =

| cover_artist =

| country = Denmark

| language = Danish

| series = First authorship (Pseudonymous)

| genre = Christianity, philosophy

| publisher = Bianco Luno Press

| release_date = April 30, 1845

| english_release_date = 1940 – first translation

| media_type = Paperback

| pages = 465

| isbn = 0691020493

| preceded_by = Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions

| followed_by = Concluding Unscientific Postscript

}}

Stages on Life's Way ({{langx|da|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".Journals of Søren Kierkegaard VIIA 106 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.{{cite book|first=Sven Hroar|last=Klempe|title=Kierkegaard and the Rise of Modern Psychology|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=kTgrDwAAQBAJ|year=2017| orig-date=2014|publisher=Routledge|location=Abingdon-on-Thames|isbn=978-1-35151022-6|page=[https://books.google.com/books?id=kTgrDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA74&dq=%22Michael+Pedersen%22%22especially+interested+in+Christian+Wolff%22%22with+his+father+so+often+explicitly+referring+to+Wolff,+it+is+no+surprise+that+there+was+an+effect+on+Søren.+Note%22%22Kierkegaard's+reference%22%22in+Stages%22 74]}}

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.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. [https://archive.org/stream/scandinavianstu06sociuoft#page/2/mode/1up Scandinavian studies and Notes 1921 p. 3][http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Kierkegaard,Soren/JournPapers/VII_1_A.html Journals 71A5]