Menu
Zeitgeist
Last update: Monday 06th of September 2010
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Zeitgeist is originally a German expression that means "the spirit (Geist) of the time (Zeit)". It denotes the intellectual and cultural climate of an era. The German pronunciation of the word is (IPA).
The concept of Zeitgeist goes back to Johann Gottfried Herder and other German Romantics, but is best known in relation to Hegel's philosophy of history. In 1769 Herder wrote a critique of the work Genius seculi by the philologist Christian Adolph Klotz (German Wikipedia article) and introduced the word Zeitgeist into German as a translation of genius seculi (Latin: genius - "guardian spirit" and saeculi - "of the century"). The German Romantics, habitually tempted to reduce the past to essences, treated the Zeitgeist as a historical character in its own right, rather than a mere conceptual instrument.
Zeitgeist has achieved a unique status among German loanwords in other tongues, having found an entrance into English, Spanish, Dutch and even Japanese.
It is a term that refers to the ethos of a cohort of people, that spans one or more subsequent generations, who despite their diverse age and socio-economic background experience a certain world view, which is prevalent at a particular period of socio-cultural progression. Zeitgeist is the experience of a dominant cultural climate that defines, particularly in Hegelian thinking, an era in the dialectical progression of a people or the world at large. Hegel's main contribution to the formulation of the concept of Volksgeist is the attribution of a historical character to the concept. The spirit of a nation is one of the manifestations of World Spirit (Weltgeist). That Spirit is essentially alive and active throughout mankind's history. Now, the spirit of a nation is an intermediate stage of world history as the history of the World Spirit. The World Spirit gives impetus to the realization of the historical spirits of various nations (Volksgeister). The spirits of individual nations are both the articulations (Gliederungen) of an organization and its realization. The spirits of individual nations represent a segment of the World Spirit out of which emerges the unlimited universal spirit. A comparison is introduced here between the status of an individual and that of a nation's spirit. In the process of his formation the individual undergoes various changes without, however, losing his identity. As a part of world history, a nation—exhibiting a certain trend expressed in its Volksgeist— plays its part in the total process of world history. But once it contributes its share to world history it can no longer play a role in the process of world history. The submersion in the total process prevents a people's cultural rebirth, because it has exhausted its creativity in the historical growth of its guiding spirit. It is for this reason that one of Hegel's disciples, Michelet, considered the idea of a renaissance of the Jewish people as philosophically impossible.
A palavra mais buscada no Zeitgeist do Google nesta semana é Ann Coulter. Conhece?
It’s only a certain type of person who blogs so using the blogsphere as a measure of general consciousness is flawed. Nevertheless, there are a lot of bloggers out there, and when you look at what they are saying over a given period of time you can get a useful measure of how an idea is spreading.
The competition on American Idol is just starting to warm up, but the real heat may not coming from the performances. As evidenced in last week’s Zeitgeist, Google searchers have American Idol contestant Antonella Barba on the brain, and I daresay it isn’t because of her singing voice.
This thing is very cool. It's a project with DayLife.com to track the mentions of certain key phrases in the press and online media. It trends them up and down as if they were stocks. Not completely flawless, but does give you some need ideas!
From Micropersuasion - Steve Rubel has created a very cool search engine for Twitter -- What Robert Scoble and Chris Heuer have called the next big thing in social media. It's an addictive, fun, service and Steve's handy app makes it useful, too. The Zeitgeist idea is really cool, too.