Stages on Life's Way Author:Soren Kierkegaard Kierkegaard really ought to be read, not merely respected. He has not yet penetrated deeply enought into even the student mind, despite all the fashionable implications of his name--and despite the multiple debts owed him by figures as diverse as Karl Barth, Sartre, and all the lesser writers of the Absurd. — "Stages on Life's Way" belongs among... more » the supremely useful works of the Kierkegaard canon, not far behind (and easier to read than) its next of kin, "Either/Or." It is a work of genius. Kierkegaard dramatizes, as few riters since Plato have been able to do, the personality of knowledge, the knower as intensively as what is known. This book will help the reader reach up toward that inwardness from which men work out their own salvations.
Each of the three parts of the book explicitly addresses the reader in ways that involve him not only in the act of reading, but, more important, in coping with his own life. Kierkegaard intended the "Stages" to be taken as a personal experience, therapeutic, not merely an intellectual or aestheic exercise. The book needs the reader's close attention. That attention will be repaid. Such repayment is what a rare book, like the "Stages," guarantees.« less