Hegel's Master Slave Dialectic and The Relationship between God and Believer
In his Phenomenology, Hegel characterizes self conscious ness as desire and gives an account of master slave relationship as an example of how consciousness is brought to the level of self cons ciousness as a result of the interaction of two consciousnesses. In this paper, I will firstly try to explain masterslave dialectic, and then to analyze whether it can be useful to understand the relations between God and believer man. Second, if this dialectic turns out to be useless in such an endeavour, I will try to explain why this is so. It should be said that Hegelian master slave dialectic is very influential for an understanding of the nature of self consciousness. It is also very help ful in engaging with the difficult questions both of religion and of philosophy: how is one related to many or how does divine interact with the world and human beings? However, Hegel's master slave dialectic proposes an answer which has certain deficiencies, especially, in ex plicating the nature of the relation between God and believer. I will to demonstrate why this dialectic can mislead us in understanding how God and believr interact.