THE POSITION OF RELIGION IN HEGEL’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT – AFTERTHOUGHTS
THE POSITION OF RELIGION IN HEGEL’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT – AFTERTHOUGHTS

Summary/Abstract: In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit religion is an important part of a grand conversation that we, human beings, conduct between ourselves in an ever expanding attempt to tell and re-tell ourselves a story of who we are, where we have come from, and where we should be heading – a story of our self-understanding as self-articulation within a current social context. Beyond this philosophical significance, religion has a very important emancipatory dimension in the development of Spirit. Kojève points out that “with his belief in God – the Absolute Master before whom all men are equal in their absolute slavery – the slave has emancipated himself from dependence on a human Master” (Kojève, 1964: 176). The narrative of monotheistic religion thus plays a very important formative role in articulating our emancipatory vocabulary, since it deprives future ideological and political narratives of the power elites – would-be human masters – of any epistemological priority. Thus, one can plausibly speak about the contribution of religious emancipatory narrative to overall democratization of culture. However, Kojève warns us of another different dimension of religious discourse, namely, that the slave remains a slave in himself and for himself. [...]

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