Let us start with Hegel and move on to German romanticism and finish with Husserl. Preliminarily, let me attempt to offer a basic definition of culture which is: continuous praxis that embodies established meaning, and that is grasped intuitively, and without the need for renewed processes to establish intuitive meaning (until it becomes taboo, confronted, or replaced). German philosophy, including art and literature, has changed my mindset as to my idea of the word spirit applied in everyday use and technical use. It profoundly shapes my conception of spirit in relation to applicable words and topics from other languages and traditions such as Greek and Arabic. We must keep in mind that this German iteration has been influenced over the ages from Ancient Greek and Roman ideas, Christianity, and significant influences from Islamic and Far East traditions, especially mysticism. I believe this German conception of Geist is more humanistic (in the classical sense; not secular) than what we have in contemporary English.
Hegel and Geist
Geist is the whole of human conscious awareness unfolding and revealing its contemplative reflection. That is the best sense of self-consciousness in all potentiality. The unself-consciousness is unreflective and instinctual and intuitive (see Seele). Reflective self-consciousness contributes to more human freedom, and the unreflective has the opposite effect. Infantilism, childishness, and superstitiousness is primitive and lacking self-consciousness; unaware of the contemplative ability to change ideas. Geist projects itself onto the spheres of human life, such as society, institutions, and law. The highest Geist is absolute Geist, or the spirit’s absolute self-understanding. For Hegel, this is especially constituted by philosophy as understanding the historical development of spirit from rudimentary to absolute, from unreflective to reflective, from immaturity to maturity, from lacking freedom to having more freedom. Spirit is capable of attaining awareness of the world and human nature (including the self); unreflective to more reflective of the fundamental categories of existence. There are three levels of spirit: subjective (expressed as unconscious or preconscious self), objective (expressed as social forms), absolute (expressed as consciousness and confronting of self; becoming self-aware). Absolute spirit further distinguishes into three: art, religion, and philosophy. Art and religion are sensuous through imagination and metaphor; philosophy is the highest because it deals with absolute knowing. Absolute knowing is towards the absolute idea; the idea of idea, or idea of itself, and purely self-related, which is enigmatically being as beyond the subject-object distinction, and from which the union of subject-object is absolute idea. From the starting point of being and absolute idea, all ideas flow in the dialectic.
German Romanticism
In romanticism, Geist is the discursive reasoning aspect that imposes form on the sensuous world. The human is often thematized as divided self, between internal and external phenomena. This divided self is distinguished between rational Geist and a sensual Seele (soul). The Geist attempts to regulate the Seele, and the Seele is more integrated to imagination, experience, and the world; the artist mind. However, themes of German romantic stories are often the tension and resolution of wedding this artist mind with the ordering intellect, or Geist. This a theme, often a moral lesson, in the works of Novalis, Hölderlin, Schiller, and in the 20th century, Hermann Hesse. For Hesse, the characters often grapple with life’s double melody of the artist’s productive (creative) sensuous and intuitive Seele and the regulative and ordering Geist to an integrated, higher transcendental soul. Regulation and confronting the self is key to transcendence here, as was the case even with Nietzsche’s philosophy; the self must confront the self to free the spirit (though Nietzsche’s idea is quite different from Hegel, romanticism, and the following accounts). For romanticism, the Seele transfers from worldly psychic modes and motivations to a metaphysical, transcendent plane; from chaos the artist resolves oppositions and finds integration of self and world. This theme is like the unities in mysticism; the mirrored, isomorphic dialectic of opposites. Again, though this time in poetics rather than Hegelian philosophy, we find the theme of an insight towards the absolute.
Husserl and Geist
Like Hegel and the usual German meaning since him, Husserl broadly uses Geist in the meaning of mind, spirit, and consciousness, and the human products that spring forth from it; also intersubjective consciousness. Geist is therefore related to art, religion, culture, and politics, and all sciences (human sciences, or Geisteswissenschaften). However, Husserl’s newly developed philosophy, called phenomenology, further expands the horizon of meaning and application. Geist is correlated with the world, and culture has a broad meaning of subject’s world-constitutedness. For humans specifically, spirit interacts intersubjectively, and thus, we may speak of “spiritual battles”, “spirit of the age”, or “spirit of a culture”, etc. This is not too far from Hegel; but there is a new and arguably deeper level in Husserl’s phenomenology. The distinctions of specific subject-object awarenesses, and the level of self-awareness, will vary by which attitude they are situated in; that is, the stance or consciousness towards world or self. Awareness distinguishes further by varieties of horizons and worlds, such as lifeworld (horizon of experience), homeworld (familiarity), and alienworld (unfamiliarity), and so on.
“It can be said that every individual carries within himself, by disposition and vocation, a purely ideal man, the great task of his existence being to reconcile all his shifts and changes with its immutable unity. This pure man, visible more or less clearly in every subject, is represented by the state: the objective and also canonical form in which the diversity of subjects seeks unity.”
— On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller
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