Folk spirit

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The term Volksgeist ascribes a common soul to the community of a people . It is a general term similar to Zeitgeist or Weltgeist and thus belongs to the spirit world of the 19th century. The term people's soul is often used, which means something like soul, mind, consciousness of a people.

Origins

Justus Möser and Johann Gottfried Herder mention a “national spirit ” in the 1760s, although the term nation was not yet used in the sense of statehood. The term people did not become popular until after 1800. For Herder, the individuality of the people was “not yet culturally determined”; as an anticipation of later conceptions of the national spirit, its national spirit cannot necessarily count.

Legal philosophy

At the beginning of the 19th century , the lawyer Friedrich Carl von Savigny was one of the first to use the term with which he described the sense of justice developed by the people (see Historical School of Law ). Savigny relied, among other things, on Montesquieu and Voltaire's conceptions of esprit . Voltaire spoke of an esprit des nations ("spirit of nations") as a characteristic of nations ( Essai sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations , 1756) and Montesquieu considered an esprit général ("general spirit") to be the basis of social coexistence that a ruler should not ignore ( Vom Geist der Gesetz , 1748). Savigny, in turn, tried to reduce the right to a common culture and history dependent consciousness, which he called the people's spirit.

Ethnic Psychology

By Hegel's idea of a supra-personal "objective spirit " of the spirit of the people was given a philosophical foundation. Wilhelm Wundt , Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal founded the science of ethnic psychology around the middle of the 19th century , which pursued a different folk spirit as a characteristic of the "peoples". Accompanied by multiple references to Wilhelm von Humboldt, Lazarus and Steinthal present a list of the elements of the Volksgeist. Language comes first, followed by "religion, custom, constitution, etc." The approach was soon out of date, but had some impact on psychology and ethnology .

Esoteric

The idealistic concepts of the folk spirit were subsequently elevated to spiritualism . The terms folk spirit or folk soul have a meaning in esotericism , for example with Rudolf Steiner , who in 1910 in Kristiania (Oslo) presented the "mission of individual people's souls" in eleven lectures. He thinks that every people is assigned an archangel whose moral dignity is revealed in the people's constitution.

nationalism

On the other hand, the term Volksgeist suited the nationalist movements of the late 19th century. In 1915 Otto Friedrich Gierke conjured up a “German national spirit in war”. The racist simplifications under National Socialism tried to grasp the “people's spirit” as a biological property, as Karl Larenz did with his formulation “blood must spirit, spirit must become blood”. Karl Peters brought the folk spirit into connection with the conception of a “ healthy people's feeling ”, which should make it possible to relativize applicable law.

Peter Sloterdijk diagnosed the Volksgeist in 1998 as a media-staged “community of excitement” and perceived a dark side. But what speaks for Sloterdijk through the poets is "a good, albeit weak, reason for our being together in national coherence."

To this day, the term Volksgeist is used in the legal-philosophical, esoteric and nationalistic sense.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Volksseele in duden.de, accessed on September 9, 2015
  2. ^ Christoph Mährlein: Volksgeist and Law. Hegel's philosophy of unity and its meaning in law, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, pp. 17-18. ISBN 3-8260-1906-7
  3. ^ Mährlein: Volksgeist und Recht , p. 127.
  4. ↑ Benjamin Lahusen: Everything right comes from the people's spirit. Friedrich Carl von Savigny and modern law, Nicolai, Berlin 2012. ISBN 978-3894797263
  5. ^ Moritz Lazarus, Herman Steinthal: Introductory remarks on ethnic psychology and linguistics . In: Journal for Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft . tape 1 , 1860, p. 1-73 .
  6. ↑ Extensive in Egbert Klautke: The Mind of the Nation. Völkerpsychologie in Germany 1851–1955, Berghahn, Oxford, New York 2013. ISBN 9781782380207
  7. ^ Otto von Gierke: The German People's Spirit in War, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart, Berlin 1915.
  8. ^ Karl Larenz: Volksgeist und Recht, in: Zeitschrift für deutsche Kulturphilosophie, Vol. 1 (1934/35), p. 40.
  9. ^ Karl Peters: The healthy people's feeling. A contribution to the doctrine of legal sources of the 19th and 20th centuries, DStR 1938, pp. 337-350.

literature

  • Joxe Azurmendi : Folk Spirit. Donostia: Elkar. 2007 ISBN 978-84-9783-404-9 .
  • George W. Stocking (Ed.): Volksgeist as Method and Ethic. Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition , Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press 1996. ISBN 978-0-299-14550-7
  • Andreas Großmann: “Volksgeist - the reason for a practical world or a metaphysical ghost? Notes on the problem history of a not only Hegelian theorem ”, in: A. Großmann, C. Jamme (Ed.): Metaphysics of the practical world. Perspectives following Hegel and Heidegger , Amsterdam: Rodopi 2000, p. 60ff. ISBN 90-420-0699-4
  • Peter Sloterdijk: The strong reason to be together. Memories of the invention of the people. Frankfurt am Main 1998.
  • Rudolf Steiner. The mission of individual folk souls in the context of Germanic-Nordic mythology. Dornach / Switzerland. 1974 u. a.