Maggs Bros.

A key work by the Danish existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions was published simultaneously with the autobiographical work Stages on Life’s Day with which the present work forms somewhat of a pair.

‘Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions was the product of Kierkegaard’s idea to write edifying discourses for various occasions or ‘situations’ in life. In other words, they are imaginative re-creations of settings that, in turn, highlight the existential questions pertaining to them. After considering a number of possibilities for this work, Kierkegaard settled on three such occasions - a confessions, a wedding, and a funeral. Each of these setting serves as a counterbalance to backdrops in Stages on Life’s Way. For example, the book’s first discourse, ‘On the Occasion of a Confession’, commends quiet and solitude in order to nourish the religious life, while the first major part of Stages on Life’s Way takes place at a lavish aesthetic banquet. Though Kierkegaard was clearly enthusiastic about this material - a number of the reflections on silence, marriage, and death in Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions would turn up elsewhere in his authorship - the book did not sell even half of its original print run. Perhaps the most notable contemporary review of the work was issued pseudonymously by the journalist Mendel Levin Nathanson, who printed a rumour that had been circulating among the Danish literati - that Kierkegaard was responsible for the spate of pseudonymous works that began with Either/Or’ (Barnett, Historical Dictionary of Kierkegaard’s Philosophy, p. 253).

Himmelstrup, 76.