Stages on Life's Way

Stages on Life's Way is a philosophical work by Søren Kierkegaard, written in 1845 as a continuation of his earlier book Either/Or. Where Either/Or deals with the aesthetic and ethical spheres, Stages turns to the religious, and Kierkegaard aimed to present the various stages of existence within a single work where possible.

The text belongs to the aesthetic writings of the Danish thinker and is structured as a banquet at which five characters, among them the young man, the fashion merchant, Johannes the Seducer, Constantin Constantius and Victor Eremita, the last three recurring figures in Kierkegaard's work, deliver speeches on love and women. The Latin proverb «In wine there is truth» gives the work its title, since the speeches are imagined as delivered under the influence of alcohol. The book bears a formal and thematic resemblance to Plato's Symposium, which gave rise to the symposiac literary tradition.