Talk:Geist

Untitled
I've removed an entry pertaining to a band called "Geist". This band does not appear to meet the notability inclusion criteria (see WP:BAND). As an aside, it's considered bad form to write articles about oneself, one's corporation, one's band etc., see WP:BAI and WP:VAIN. -- Sandstein 16:40, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

=Guest/ghost=
 * Early Germanic tribes, like other pagan tribes around the world, had customs of consulting dead ancestors at feasts. The English words "ghost" and "guest" are said to have descended from the German Geist due to the Northern pagan custom in which the ancestral spirits were invited as honored guests.

Ghost is not related to guest, and neither one is "descended from the German Geist," althought ghost is cognate with Geist. See and, under "etymology." 24.159.255.29 05:16, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

More aspects
I'd be hard-pressed to find a source for the following, but this is coming from a native German here. (I would have one for translating Geist as "knowledge", which does make sense within early 19th century idealist philosophy, and as opposed to Wissenschaft as a different kind of "knowledge", but see the following.)

Firstly, the notion of Geist also includes aspects of mind as intellect (as man's agency of mental penetration, cognition, logical analysis, judgment/evaluation, and, especially in idealist philosophy, even imagination) and intellectual. For example, there's the concept of Geistfeindschaft or Geistfeindlichkeit, denoting militant anti-intellectualism, and there's the common term of Geistesleben which could be loosely translated as communion/association/company of minds/spirits and refers to "the intellectual class", "intellectual circles", an "intellectual climate", as well as the (public) sphere where the debates of the day among intellectuals take place. For example, you can say that the Geistesleben of a city or country is active, and it means that there's a buzzing intellectual scene engaging in healthy and productive debate.

And speaking of debates "of the day", it's lucid that somebody mentioned Zeitgeist as the spirit (or atmosphere) of an age, but they forgot perusing that concept for shedding light on Hegel's Weltgeist or how Germans have often used the term after him. Both Geistesleben and Zeitgeist comprise of a certain social or cultural element, and the same goes for Weltgeist. It's basically a global "culture" that all human minds partake in, ideally advancing it thereby, and snapshots of the Weltgeist at a given time in history are, basically, the contemporary Zeitgeist of that era. And if you combine the individual mind as "that which knows" with interpersonal society or culture as "that which informs/communicates information" or "that which forms/mirrors/incarnates a spirit/atmosphere that can be known", I see how The Guardian above got the idea as to translate Geist as a certain type of knowledge.

And once you've soaked in how Geist, Geistesleben, Zeitgeist, and Weltgeist relate to each other in the German mind, you may begin fathoming what a big deal our Geisteswissenschaft is for us Germans, which is usually translated as "humanities", including sociology, history, philosophy (especially of the mind), culture, linguistics, and many other disciplines which in the Anglo-Saxon system are denigrated as but "soft" sciences or just "arts" (as in "Master of Arts", etc.), however they all mean serious business with us.

It's also part of the key to how we mean serious business whenever we say Kultur, a concept much broader than its common translations of "culture" and (similarly glorified) "civilization". Due to the formation of the idea of a tangible German nation under Napoleonic occupation, Kultur quickly gained overtones of national superiority from the early 19th century onwards. Firstly due to supposedly "superior" German philosophy and the German intellectual class in the early part of the century when idealism (the philosophy of Geist as in mind, intellect, and spirit that was closely allied with German Romanticism, also see Romantic nationalism and Romanticism in general) was still the paradigm of the day. But as the century progressed and the paradigm shifted towards materialism, neurology, and biology, racial aspects were emphasized whenever spelling Kultur while retaining the original moral, intellectual, and overall immaterial notions of romantizized (or glamorized) Geist, resulting in a eugenic and racist ideology which held that a high intellect and morality would be causally related to the right anatomy and the right "blood". As towards the end of the 20th century, Western culture again shifted towards the materialistic (or essentialist) rather than the constructivist (or social, or educational) pole, genes, hormones, and neurology are all the rage today in the behavioral sciences (including forensics), just as "blood" and phrenology were in the same fields within 19th century German ideology. --93.232.176.151 (talk) 21:09, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

Volksgeist
I don't have any sources that I could cite except my own personal experience as a native German speaker, but I really want to point out that NO ONE in modern German would ever use that word, unless they are a Neo-Nazi. And that is not any political bias of mine expressing itself, it is quite simply the case. The word is incredibly negatively connotated, just as many other terms from early 20th century nationalist rhetoric (Endlösung, Judenfrage, Weltjudentum, völkisch, Reich). I really think that should be pointed out somewhere. 2001:4CF0:282:30:0:0:4:FDE (talk) 16:16, 28 February 2023 (UTC)