Volksgeist

The term folk spirit of the community of a people writes to a common soul. He is a similar general term like Zeitgeist or spirit world and thus belongs in the mental world of the 19th century.

As one of the first of the jurist Friedrich Carl von Savigny used at the beginning of the 19th century, the term by which he refers to the sense of justice developed by the people (see Historical School ). Savigny was based among other things on Montesquieu and Voltaire's conceptions of esprit. Voltaire spoke of an esprit des nations ( "Spirit of the Nations " ) as a character trait of Nations ( Essai sur les mœurs et l' esprit des nations, 1756 ) and Montesquieu held a esprit général ( " general spirit ") for the basis of social coexistence which should not ignore a ruler ( the Spirit of Laws, 1748). Savigny, in turn, tried to return the right to a shared history and culture dependent consciousness that he called national spirit.

By Hegel's idea of ​​a supra-personal " objective spirit " was the popular mind a philosophical foundation. Wilhelm Wundt, Moritz Lazarus and Heymann stone valley founded in the mid- 19th century, the science of folk psychology, the one per various national spirit "peoples" pursued as a characteristic of. The approach was soon out of date, but had some influence on psychology and anthropology.

The idealistic conceptions of the national spirit were inflated as a result of spiritualism. A positive meaning of the terms national spirit or soul of the people in the esoteric, such as Rudolf Steiner, who in 1910 brought in Oslo in eleven lectures "The mission of individual people souls " for display. He believes that every nation is assigned an archangel whose moral dignity is manifest in the constitution of the people.

The term folk Spirit came on the other hand the nationalist movements of the late 19th century located. The racist simplifications in National Socialism tried to take as biological property of the " national spirit ".

Peter Sloterdijk has the spirit of the people diagnosed in 1998 as a medieninszenierte " arousal community" and perceived a dark side. But also speaks for Sloterdijk by the poet " a good, albeit weak reason for our being together in national coherence ".

To date, the term national spirit in legal philosophy, used in esoteric and the nationalist sense.

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