ABSTRACT
Stephen Northrup Dunning’s work finds a deep Hegelian dialectic not only in the ironic places where Kierkegaard may have intended a snide parody of Hegel, but also throughout his life’s work as an overall project for the entire theory of the stages. Dunning reads the Hegelian structure as a continuity through Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. The charts outline much of Dunning’s argument and give the larger sense of how he sees the movement of Kierkegaard’s system. Dunning shows his work throughout the book enhancing the power of his understanding of the Hegelian dialectic by plotting it out in diagram form. In Dunning’s analysis, the ethical stage takes up the least space of the stages. The majority of the book frames the aesthetic and religious stages, though this is also due to the major pseudonymous works, which focus less on the ethical than the religious and aesthetic.
