STAGES ON LIFE’S WAY
KIERKEGAARD’S WRITINGS, XI
STAGES ON LIFE’S WAY
STUDIES BY VARIOUS PERSONS
by Søren Kierkegaard
Edited and Translated
with Introduction and Notes by
Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Copyright © 1988 by Howard V. Hong
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data
Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813-1855.
[Stadier paa livets vej. English]
Stages on life’s way: studies by various persons / by Søren, Kierkegaard; edited and translated with introduction and notes by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong.
p. cm.—(Kierkegaard’s writings ; 11)
Translation of: Stadier paa livets vej.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-691-07323-6 (cloth) ISBN 0-691-02049-3 (pbk.)
I. Hong, Howard Vincent, 1912- . II. Hong, Edna Hatlestad, 1913- . III. Title. IV. Series: Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813-1855.
Works. English. 1918 ; 11.
B4313.S832E5 1988
198’.9—dcl9
Second printing, with corrections, 1991
5 7 9 10 8 6
Preparation of this volume has been made possible in part by a grant from the Division of Research Programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency
Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources
Designed by Frank Mahood
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-02049-5 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 0-691-02049-3 (pbk.)
CONTENTS
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
Stages on Life’s Way Studies by Various Persons
LECTORI BENEVOLO!
“IN VINO VERITAS”
A RECOLLECTION RELATED BY WILLIAM AFHAM
SOME REFLECTIONS ON MARRIAGE
IN ANSWER TO OBJECTIONS
BY A MARRIED MAN
“GUILTY?”/“NOT GUILTY?”
A STORY OF SUFFERING
AN IMAGINARY PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION
BY FRATER TACITURNUS
SUPPLEMENT
Key to References
Original Title Page of Stages on Life’s Way
Selected Entries from Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers Pertaining to Stages on Life’s Way
EDITORIAL APPENDIX
Acknowledgments
Collation of Stages on Life’s Way in the Danish Editions of Kierkegaard’s Collected Works
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
INDEX
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
On the front flyleaf of the newly published work Either/Or (February 20, 1843), Kierkegaard wrote:
Some think that Either/Or is a collection of loose papers I had lying in my desk. Bravo! —As a matter of fact, it was the reverse. The only thing this work lacks is a narrative, which I did begin but omitted, just as Aladdin left a window incomplete. It was to be called “Unhappy Love.” It was to form a contrast to the Seducer.1
He later wrote in his journal:
Even while I was writing Either/Or I had it [the narrative] in mind and frequently dashed off a lyrical suggestion.2
How much of the narrative was written is not known. What Kierkegaard had in mind did, however, eventuate as Stages on Life’s Way. During the first half of 1843, even though Kierkegaard was immersed in the writing of Two Upbuilding Discourses, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, and Three Upbuilding Discourses (the first published on May 6 and the remaining three on October 16, 1843), the journal entries of that time contain seeds of most of the special interpolations3 in the second half of Stages, “‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’”
In a letter (May 25, 1843) from Berlin4 to his friend Emil Boesen, Kierkegaard mentions having finished a work, presumably Repetition, and then goes on to describe his usual day.
I have never worked as hard as now. I go for a brief walk in the morning. Then I come home and sit in my room without interruption until about three o’clock. My eyes can barely see. Then with my walking stick in hand I sneak off to the restaurant, but am so weak that I believe that if somebody were to call out my name, I would keel over and die. Then I go home and begin again. In my indolence during the past months I had pumped up a veritable shower bath, and now I have pulled the string and the ideas are cascading down upon me: healthy, happy, merry, gay, blessed children born with ease and yet all of them with the birthmark of my personality.5
Among the cascading ideas was the beginning of “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ ”6 Therefore, it appears that, like Part II of Either/Or, the second half of Stages was begun, and most likely written, first. It was not, however, intended as the second half of Stages. At the last minute, two separate works, “The Wrong and the Right”7 (consisting of “ ‘In Vino Veritas’ ” and the pseudonymous Judge William’s piece on marriage) and “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’” were placed together (ostensibly by Hilarius, a bookbinder, not one of the authors or an editor) in one volume under the title Stages on Life’s Way, and the title “The Wrong and the Right” was omitted. Indeed, each of the two final manuscripts (transcribed by Israel Levin8) has its own pagination.9 The preface to “The Wrong and the Right”10 was ready but was omitted. The use of the singular “manuscript” by William Afham11 may also be a token of the original independent character of the first half of Stages, a view confirmed by Hilarius Bookbinder’s statement about publishing not one book but several.12 The initial section of Stages was the last to be completed and was difficult to write, as Kierkegaard discloses in a journal entry titled Report.13
“‘In vino veritas’” is not going well. I am constantly rewriting parts of it,14 but it does not satisfy me. On the whole I feel that I have given far too much thought to the matter and thereby have gotten into an unproductive mood. I cannot write it here in the city; so I must take a journey.15 But perhaps it is hardly worth finishing. The idea of the comic as the erotic is hinted at in The Concept of Anxiety. The Fashion Designer is a very good figure, but the problem is whether by writing such things I am not deferring more important writing. In any case it must be written in a hurry. If such a moment does not come, I will not do it. At present the productivity has miscarried and makes me constantly write more than I want to write.
August 27, 1844
The relation of Stages to the earlier pseudonymous works16 is one of continuity and contrast, epitomized in the title itself. Either/Or presents two qualitatively distinguished stages of life, the immediate or esthetic (that by which one is what one immediately is) and the ethical (that by which one becomes what one becomes17), and an intimation of the third stage, the religious, in the concluding “Ultimatum [A Final Word].” Both Fear and Trembling and Repetition center on the question of a justified exception to the ethical. In turn, Stages embodies the esthetic and the ethical and the exception to the ethical, and in the reflections of Frater Taciturnus the work delineates more expressly the religious in relation to the esthetic and the ethical.
It may seem curious, therefore, that the term “stages” is almost never used in the text of Stages. The terms “sphere” an
d “existence-sphere”18 are more frequent, and they are an aid to an understanding of the concept. “Stage” and “stages” may predispose one to the notion of an unbroken line of development from level to level, like childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. “Sphere” and “existence-sphere” more readily denote qualitative possibilities involving the discontinuity of a leap, reflection, and an act in freedom. Furthermore, the spheres are not discrete logical categories, and therefore the lower qualitative sphere is not annihilated but is caught up and transformed. If to a reader this understanding of “stage” and “sphere” is not clear in Stages (the diary writer in “‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’” is “in the direction of the religious”19), it becomes manifest in the next pseudonymous work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which uses “sphere” and “existence-sphere” more frequently than “stage” and proceeds further in distinguishing between religiousness A and religiousness B.
The most illuminating relation of Stages to the earlier signed works is to the work that appeared (April 29, 1845) just one day before the publication of Stages. Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions comprises “On the Occasion of a Confession,” “On the Occasion of a Wedding,” and “At a Graveside”—three parts, just as Stages has three parts. That the second part of each work (Judge William on marriage and the discourse at a wedding) is a counterpart of the other is readily seen. At first, Kierkegaard scholar Emanuel Hirsch considered the other parts to be related in serial order, but later he discerned that the substance in each of the others indicates a relation in reverse order of first and third: “‘Guilty?/‘Not Guilty?’” and “Confession,” and “‘In Vino Veritas’” and the discourse “At a Graveside.”20 Viewed in this way, each of the three discourses is seen to clarify and interpret the contents of the counterparts in Stages.
If the projected narrative “Unhappy Love,” which became “‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’” of Stages, is a contrast in substance to “The Seducer’s Diary,” there is also a difference in form and tone.21 Quidam’s diary is an epistolary novel, or, as Kierkegaard called it, an imaginary psychological construction [Experiment].22 An unincorporated note for Postscript states: “This imaginary construction (“ ‘Guilty?/‘Not Guilty?’ ”) is the first attempt in all the pseudonymous writings at an existential dialectic in double-reflection. It is not the communication that is in the form of double-reflection (for all the pseudonymous works are that), but the existing person himself exists in this. Thus he does not give up immediacy, but he keeps it and yet gives it up, keeps erotic love’s desire and yet gives it up.”23
In the unpublished “The Book on Adler,” Kierkegaard expands his view of the imaginary construction with reference not only to the characters but to the imaginary constructor (Frater Taciturnus) and to the intended result for the reader.
The art in all communication is to come as close as possible to actuality, to contemporaries in the role of readers, and yet at the same time to have the distance of a point of view, the reassuring, infinite distance of ideality from them. Permit me to illustrate this by an example from a later work. In the imaginary psychological construction [psychologiske Experiment] “‘Guilty?/‘Not Guilty?’” (in Stages on Life’s Way), there is depicted a character in tension in the most extreme mortal danger of the spirit to the point of despair, and the whole thing is done as though it could have occurred yesterday. In this respect the production is placed as close as possible to actuality: the person struggling religiously in despair hovers, so to speak, right over the head of the contemporaries. If the imaginary construction has made any impression, it might be like that which happens when wing strokes of the wild bird, in being heard overhead by the tame birds of the same kind who live securely in the certainty of actuality, prompt these to beat their wings, because those wing strokes simultaneously are unsettling and yet have something that fascinates. But now comes what is reassuring, that the whole thing is an imaginary construction, and that an imaginary constructor [Experimentator] stands by. Spiritually understood, the imaginatively constructed character is in a civic sense a highly dangerous character, and such people are usually not allowed to walk along without being accompanied by a pair of policemen—for the sake of public security. Thus, for the reassurance of public security, in that work an imaginary constructor is along also (he calls himself a street inspector) who very quietly shows how the whole thing hangs together, theoretically educes a life-view that he completes and rounds out, while he points interpretively to the imaginatively constructed character in order to indicate how he makes the movements according to the drawing of the strings. If this were not an imaginary construction, if no imaginary constructor were along, if no life-view were represented—then such a work, regardless of the talent it could display, would merely be debilitating.24
Inasmuch as “A First and Last Explanation” was appended in unnumbered pages to Concluding Unscientific Postscript25 and acknowledgment was thereby made of Kierkegaard’s poetic relation to the “pseudonymity or polyonymity”26 of the earlier works, Stages was the last of the works published under the veil of pseudonymity. Kierkegaard regarded Either/Or as the beginning of his authorship27 and Postscript as the concluding of his authorship. The surrounding or the accompanying of the pseudonymous works by signed works is readily apparent in the publication schedule culminating in Postscript and its appendix.
Pseudonymous Works
1843
Signed Works
1843
Feb. 20
Either/Or, I-II
edited by Victor Eremita
May 16
Two Upbuilding Discourses
Oct. 16
Repetition by Constantin Constantius Fear and Trembling by Johannes de Silentio
Oct. 16
Three Upbuilding Discourses
Dec. 6
Four Upbuilding Discourses
1844
1844
March 5
Two Upbuilding Discourses
June 8
Three Upbuilding Discourses
June 13
Philosophical Fragments by Johannes Climacus
June 17
The Concept of Anxiety by Vigilius Haufniensis Prefaces by Nicolaus Notabene
Aug. 31
Four Upbuilding Discourses
1845
1845
April 30
Stages on Life’s Way published by Hilarius Bookbinder
April 29
Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions
1846
Feb. 27 Concluding Unscientific Postscript by Johannes Climacus, with the appended “A First and Last Explanation” by S. Kierkegaard
Even if Stages were not a pseudonymous work and a heightened example of Kierkegaard’s “indirect method,” his conception of the relation of a writer to his work and to his own experience would still apply. “An author certainly must have his private personality as everyone else has, but this must be his ἄδῡτον [inner sanctum], and just as the entrance to a house is barred by stationing two soldiers with crossed bayonets, so by means of the dialectical cross of qualitative opposites the equality of ideality forms the barrier that prevents all access.”28
No writer can totally expunge his experience from his writing, but, as Paul Sponheim observes, it would be an error to regard Stages “as an exercise in biography”29 or autobiography. Just as the creative writer transmutes whatever leaden elements of experience enter into his imaginative work, the assiduous hunter after autobiographical data tends to reverse the process from gold to lead. A better approach is given by Emanuel Hirsch, who points out that Stages is the work of one who, out of his suffering and thought, seeks to guide a reader to a personal understanding of penitence and faith.30 The distinction between recollection and memory, so splendidly and insightfully developed in the beginning of Stages (pp. 9-15), applies to the experiential element in the entire work.
In one of the few contemporary reviews of Stages (and Three Discourses on Imagined Occa
sions), the veil of pseudonymity was publicly drawn aside for the first time. “One would think that Mag[ister] Kierkegaard possessed a kind of magic wand by which he instantaneously conjures up his books, so incredible has his literary activity been in recent years, if we dare believe the rumor that presumably is correct in claiming him to be the author of Either/Or and the series of books that apparently comes from the same hand.”31 Kierkegaard responded obliquely by denying a rumor that attributed to him the sermon at the end of Either/Or, II, on the basis of his having once delivered a sermon at the theological seminary.32 Thereupon The Corsair [Corsaren] printed a fictional report of a fictional court case brought by Kierkegaard against the Berlingske Tidende because the latter had “respectfully praised one of the plaintiff’s unwritten books.”33
The main review of Stages, by Peder Ludvig Møller, appeared in his annual, Gæa.34 Cleverly written and marked by a polemic stance toward the writer and by a skewed perception consciously calculated to provoke, the review did achieve that purpose, and more, in Kierkegaard’s response, “The Activity of a Traveling Esthetician and How He Still Happened to Pay for the Dinner,” by Frater Taciturnus.35 The end of the piece contains the sting: Frater Taciturnus complains that he had not been abused in The Corsair, as others had, that Hilarius Bookbinder had been flattered and Victor Eremita immortalized by The Corsair—followed by the declaration: ubi P. L. Møller, ibi The Corsair [where P. L. Møller is, there is The Corsair]. This was the beginning of the most famous literary controversy in Danish history, with very important consequences for P. L. Møller, for Mei’r Goldschmidt, the editor and owner of Corsaren, and for Kierkegaard.36
Despite the unexpected publicity given to Stages, public interest in the book, as indicated by sales, was not spectacular. After twenty-six months, about 245 copies had been sold (at five rix-dollars, approximately $25.00 in 1973 money), and 280 copies were then remaindered.37 In a journal entry, Kierkegaard repeated the prediction of scant response made at the end of Stages:
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