Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist (English: spirit of the age) is the way of thinking and feeling (mentality) of an age or era. It describes the characteristics or Geist (philosophical concept of "spirit") of a particular epoch or the attempt to encapsulate them. The German word "Zeitgeist" has been borrowed by numerous other languages. The English adjective "zeitgeisty" is also derived from it. The philosophical term is usually associated with Georg W. F. Hegel, contrasting with Hegel's use of Volksgeist "national spirit" of the Volk and Weltgeist "world-spirit".

The term is considered to be coined by the poet and philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who first used the term "Zeitgeist" in his 1769 Riga-based work "Kritische Wälder oder Betrachtungen, die Wissenschaft und Kunst des Schönen betreffend, nach Maßgabe neuerer Schriften". Arthur Schopenhauer used the term "Zeitgeist-Servant" to describe an opportunistic literary attitude that immediately adapts to the spirit of the times without prior intellectual examination.

Already Johann Caspar Lavater speaks, for example, of the “frivolous world and Zeitgeist”, and Goethe (in Faust, 577) in a disparaging context of the “Geist der Zeiten” or spirit of the times.