ZeitGeist

Zeit is time. Geist is harder. It can mean mind, spirit, wit, or the thing that haunts a house, and it shares a root with the English word ghost. When Hegel’s great book reached English, one translator called it the phenomenology of Mind and a later one of Spirit. Neither is wrong, and neither is enough.

Join the two and you get a phrase that sounds ancient but is not. Johann Gottfried Herder put the compound into German in 1769, in a quarrel with the philologist Christian Adolph Klotz, as a rendering of Klotz’s Latin genius seculi: the guardian spirit of a century.

The Latin carried a small idea, a prevailing taste. The German would grow into a large one: that an age might have a single mind, that the mind might be going somewhere, and that you, reading this, might be one of its thoughts.

The idea had been gathering for a while. Montesquieu wrote of the general spirit of a nation in 1748, and Voltaire wrote histories of manners and minds rather than kings. By the end of the century educated Europeans talked freely about what their times were like, which was itself new.

The first great put-down arrived almost at once. In Faust, the eager student Wagner rhapsodises about entering into the spirit of past ages. Faust cuts him off:

Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heißt, das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist, in dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln.

What you call the spirit of the ages is at bottom the gentlemen’s own spirit, with the ages reflected in it. Keep that sentence. Everything that follows is an argument with it.

Then the times became impossible to ignore. Within a decade France abolished its feudal order, its monarchy and its king, and briefly its God. People who lived through it felt that history, which had always been a slow background, had come indoors.

Goethe rode with the Prussian army to Valmy, where the revolutionary guns held on 20 September 1792. Thirty years later he recalled telling his companions that a new epoch of world history began here, that day, and that they could say they had been there. The Republic was declared the next day.

Ten years, in tabular figures so the columns hold still

14 Jul 1789	The Bastille falls, holding seven prisoners
26 Aug 1789	Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
20 Sep 1792	Valmy
21 Sep 1792	Monarchy abolished
21 Jan 1793	Louis XVI guillotined
05 Sep 1793	Terror becomes the order of the day
27 Jul 1794	Robespierre falls, on 9 Thermidor
09 Nov 1799	Bonaparte’s coup, on 18 Brumaire

So they abolished time as well. In autumn 1793 the Convention replaced the Christian calendar with a rational one, counted from the founding of the Republic. Year I had already begun, retroactively, on 22 September 1792.

The mathematician Gilbert Romme did the structure. The poet Fabre d’Églantine named the months after the weather and the harvest, with a rhyme for each season, as this page’s contents show. There were twelve months of thirty days, each split into three ten-day (décades), which also did away with Sunday.

┌────┬────┬────┬────┬────┬────┬────┬────┬────┬────┐
│  1 │  2 │  3 │  4 │  5 │  6 │  7 │  8 │  9 │ 10 │
├────┼────┼────┼────┼────┼────┼────┼────┼────┼────┤
│ 11 │ 12 │ 13 │ 14 │ 15 │ 16 │ 17 │ 18 │ 19 │ 20 │
├────┼────┼────┼────┼────┼────┼────┼────┼────┼────┤
│ 21 │ 22 │ 23 │ 24 │ 25 │ 26 │ 27 │ 28 │ 29 │ 30 │
╘════╧════╧════╧════╧════╧════╧════╧════╧════╧════╛

The day went decimal too: ten hours, each of a hundred minutes, each of a hundred seconds. One new hour lasted 12/5 of an old one and one new minute about 36/25 of an old minute. Watchmakers built dials with both. Decimal time became compulsory in 1794 and was suspended in April 1795, after about 1/2 a year. Napoleon abolished the calendar on 1 January 1806.

This page runs on it anyway. Right now it is 0:00:00, and ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ of today has gone.

While this was going on, three students shared a room at the Protestant seminary in Tübingen: Hölderlin, who became the great poet; Schelling, the prodigy; and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, born in Stuttgart in 1770, who was eighteen when the Bastille fell and was known to his friends as the old man.

They read the French newspapers and argued about Rousseau. They are said to have planted a liberty tree in a meadow, though the story is better loved than documented, and the sources cannot agree on the year.

The better-attested story comes from the other end of his life. In 1826, by then the most famous philosopher in Prussia and a servant of the Prussian state, Hegel told a visitor that he always drank a toast on 14 July. He said so in a kingdom that had gone to war to reverse it.

His verdict, delivered from a Berlin lectern, is the warmest passage he ever wrote. Since the sun had stood in the heavens, he said, no one had seen that humanity could stand on its head, that is, on thought, and build the world from there. He called it a glorious mental dawn.

Then the dawn went badly, and Hegel’s real achievement was refusing to look away from that while refusing to give up the dawn.

Many of Germany’s early enthusiasts recanted when the Terror began. Hegel asked a harder question: why did it happen? His answer, in a short chapter called “Absolute Freedom and Terror”, is that it was not a betrayal of the idea of freedom. It was what that idea does when nothing limits it.

A freedom that recognises no institutions and no differences between people cannot build anything, because everything built would be a restriction. It can only destroy, and when it runs out of old things it turns on the people who might be plotting against it. Suspicion becomes the crime. The only act left is killing, and killing with nothing behind it. Death under the guillotine, he wrote, has

The Revolution had to pass through that, in his account, and come out knowing something. Freedom needs institutions to live in. This is where Hegel stops being a cheerleader and starts being a philosopher of history.

On 13 October 1806 Hegel was in Jena, short of money, a barely paid lecturer finishing a very long manuscript. French troops were in the town and the decisive battle was a day off. He saw Napoleon ride out to reconnoitre, and wrote to his friend Niethammer that he had seen the Emperor, diese Weltseele, this world-soul, concentrated at a single point, astride a horse, reaching out over the world.

The next day Prussia was crushed. Hegel’s lodgings were looted, and he hurried the last pages of the Phenomenology of Spirit to the printer. Its preface says what he thought he was living through:

Es ist übrigens nicht schwer zu sehen, daß unsere Zeit eine Zeit der Geburt und des Übergangs zu einer neuen Periode ist.

It is not hard to see that our time is a time of birth and of transition to a new period. That same year, on the losing side, Ernst Moritz Arndt published a furious anti-Napoleon book called Geist der Zeit. Both men had the same phrase in mind, and they drew opposite conclusions.

A note of precision: Hegel is the name everyone attaches to Zeitgeist, but he rarely used the word. He wrote of Weltgeist, world spirit; of Volksgeist, the spirit of a people; and, in the Phenomenology, of Geist der Zeiten. The compound was Herder’s, and the attribution to Hegel came from everyone else.

First, a correction. Hegel did not say thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The formula belongs to Fichte and to a popular summary by Chalybäus, and it makes the process sound like a filing system.

What Hegel describes is less tidy. A way of living and understanding, which he calls a shape of spirit, takes itself to be complete. Then it runs into something it cannot account for, usually a consequence of its own commitments. It breaks. What comes next is not a compromise. It remembers the failure and is built out of it. His word for this is aufheben, an ordinary German verb that means to cancel, to keep and to lift up, all at once.

// aufheben, if Hegel had shipped it
const geist = (age) => {
  if (age.contradiction !== null) {
    age.cancel();    // abolish it
    age.preserve();  // keep what it taught
    age.lift();      // carry it higher
  }
  return age.next ?? "the owl flies";
};

The famous example is the lord and the bondsman. Two consciousnesses struggle for recognition, and one submits. The winner has a problem, because recognition from someone you have enslaved is worth nothing. The loser, working on the world and seeing himself in what he makes, slowly becomes the freer of the two.

Susan Buck-Morss has argued that this was not only an abstraction. As Hegel wrote, enslaved people in Saint-Domingue had made a real revolution in the name of the French one, and journals he read reported it. Haiti declared independence in 1804. If she is right, the most influential passage in modern philosophy has a source that its readers left out for nearly two centuries.

In the Berlin lectures Hegel put the whole of history into one sentence: die Weltgeschichte ist der Fortschritt im Bewußtsein der Freiheit, world history is the progress in the consciousness of freedom. In his telling, despotic Asia knew that one person was free ①, the ancient Greeks and Romans that some were ②, and the modern world that all are ③.

That scheme is parochial, it is shamelessly convenient for Prussia, and it has rightly been attacked. It also contains an idea nobody has quite got rid of. The claim that all people are free was not always available to be thought. It had to arrive.

• Les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et égaux en droits.
• Alle Menschen sind frei und gleich an Würde und Rechten geboren.
• Bütün insanlar özgür, onur ve haklar bakımından eşit doğarlar.
• Toate fiinţele umane se nasc libere şi egale în demnitate şi în drepturi.
• Все люди рождаются свободными и равными в своём достоинстве и правах.
• Tất cả mọi người sinh ra đều được tự do và bình đẳng về nhân phẩm và quyền.

The first line above is Article 1 of the 1789 Declaration. The others are Article 1 of its descendant, the 1948 Universal Declaration. The claim travelled.

But Hegel would not predict where it went next. Philosophy, he wrote in 1820, is ihre Zeit in Gedanken erfaßt, its own time grasped in thought, and it can no more leap beyond that time than a person can jump over Rhodes. It always arrives too late to give instructions. The owl of Minerva, he says, takes flight only as dusk is falling.

Britain got the phrase and left the metaphysics behind. William Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age (1825) is a set of sketches of famous contemporaries. In 1831 the young John Stuart Mill wrote a series under the same title, and noticed the strange thing about it:

The “spirit of the age” is in some measure a novel expression. I do not believe that it is to be met with in any work exceeding fifty years in antiquity.

Mill saw that the phrase was itself the symptom. People had always compared their times with the past, he says, but it had never before been the dominant idea of any age. Matthew Arnold, writing to a friend in the late 1840s, tried to anglicise the word as Time-Spirit. It didn’t catch.

Hegel died in Berlin on 14 November 1831, in the year of Mill’s essays, probably of cholera. His pupils split at once into a respectable right wing and a dangerous left one, and from the left came the most famous correction in philosophy. Marx said he had found Hegel standing on his head and set him on his feet. It was not spirit that moved history but the way people fed themselves.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

That is Marx in 1852, on the coup of Napoleon’s nephew. He titled the pamphlet The Eighteenth Brumaire, after a date in a calendar that had been abolished for forty-six years. No one needed it explained.

Thermidor is the month Robespierre fell, and it gave its name to every reaction since. The Zeitgeist had its own.

First came its triumph. In the twentieth century the idea moved into art and design, where it did real work. Mies van der Rohe wrote in 1924 that architecture was the will of an epoch translated into space. Modernists said they weren’t choosing a style at all, only obeying the age. It was a wonderfully convenient position, because anyone who disagreed was not wrong but late.

Then came the charges. Karl Popper, writing in exile during the war, treated Hegel’s history as a machine for telling people that resistance was futile, and blamed it for a good deal of what he was exiled from. Ernst Gombrich, the great art historian, argued in 1967 that the whole method was a circle: you decide what the spirit of an age is, then find it in its buildings and poems, and call them proof. The Gothic arch and the scholastic argument do not express one mind just because someone has set them side by side.

Which is Goethe’s objection, 160 years on. What you call the spirit of the ages is the gentlemen’s own spirit. It also has a political edge: the phrase names one mood and quietly drops the rest. In 1793 the people of the Vendée were living in the same age as the Jacobins, and so were the people of Saint-Domingue.

And yet we can’t stop. Google called its annual report of rising searches Zeitgeist from 2001, which is the concept at its smallest and most literal: what everyone typed. Alexandre Kojève’s Paris lectures on Hegel turned, by way of Francis Fukuyama, into the claim in 1989 that liberal democracy was the end of history, and the claim has aged about as well as you would expect.

Gombrich was right that you can’t read an age’s mind from its objects. But objects keep the date in ways that can’t be faked, because no one thought to fake them. So here is a last piece of evidence, and you have been reading it.

The typeface on this page is called Geist. Vercel, a company that hosts websites, released it in 2023. It comes as a sans, a mono built for programmers, and later a pixel and a serif. Its name is a borrowed German word that came through Herder and Hegel, and no one involved was thinking about the guillotine.

Open its tables and you find what its makers took for granted. There are arrows, because interfaces need them: -> ->. There is a stylistic set called contextual brand styles, whose job is to give v0, one of the company’s products, a slashed zero. And among the old fi and fl that printers cut for metal, there are two new ligatures, for the two letter pairs its designers needed to look right:

In the pixel cut, the AI ligature is switched on by default. Every font is a theory of what people will need to say, and this one was finished in a year when people would mostly need to say that.

Is that the spirit of the age? It might just be the gentlemen’s own spirit, with the age reflected in it. That’s Goethe’s objection, and it still stands. But Hegel’s owl is also still out there at dusk, and it only ever sees what has already happened. Whatever this age turns out to have been, we won’t be the ones who get to name it.