Geist

Geist (German pronun­cia­tion: [ˈɡaɪst]) is a German word. Depending on context it can be translated as the English words mind, spirit, or ghost, covering the semantic field of these three English nouns. Some English translators resort to using "spirit/mind" or "spirit (mind)" to help convey the meaning of the term.

Geist is a central concept in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes).

Edmund Spenser's usage of the English-language word 'ghost', in his 1590 The Faerie Queene, demonstrates the former, broader meaning of the English-language term. In this context, the term describes the sleeping mind of a living person, rather than a ghost, or spirit of the dead. The word Geist is etymologically identical to the English ghost (from a Common Germanic ) but has retained its full range of meanings, while some applications of the English word ghost had become obsolete by the 17th century, replaced with the Latinate spirit. For this reason, English-language translators of the term from the German language face some difficulty in rendering the term, and often disagree as to the best translation in a given context.

Analogous terms in other languages include the Ancient Greek word (pneuma), the Latin , the French and the Sanskrit प्राण prana.

Geist is a central concept in Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes). According to Hegel, the Weltgeist ("world spirit") is not an actual object or a transcendental, Godlike thing, but a means of philosophizing about history.Weltgeist is effected in history through the mediation of various Volksgeister ("national spirits"), the great men of history, such as Napoleon, are the "concrete universal".

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