rom Play to Universal Ethics: Reflections on Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution

Abstract

The article discusses the main ideas of Robert Bellah’s “Religion in Human Evolu­tion: from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age”, which recently has been published in Russian. The meaning of the book’s basic concepts – “religion”, “evolution”, and “axial time” – is analyzed. The main principle of the definition of religion by con­trasting the world of everyday life to alternative realities is highlighted. Bellah demonstrates connection between the unital, enactive, symbolic, and conceptual ways of representation, which are consistently developed in the history of mankind, and correspond to four historical stages of human culture: episodic, mimetic, mythic (narrative) and speculative (theoretic). The article shows that Bellah associates the emergence and evolution of religion with the evolution of human capacities in the course of the biological and cultural development. The methodological foun­dations of Bella’s study are considered: firstly, the principle that “nothing is ever lost” in the course of the development of human society; secondly, interdisciplinary ap­proach, and dialogue with representatives of various disciplines concerning the stud­ied areas. The author of the article makes the following conclusion: despite the fact that Bellah’s book describes the distant past of the mankind, it is very up-to-date due to its main thesis: the preserving in a transformed form of all the types of representa­tion, and all previous stages of culture. In addition, Bellah stresses ​​the enormous sig­nificance of universal ethics, which is traced back to the axial age and remains the basis of the global cooperation of contemporary humanity.