Weltanschauung or Zeitgeist?

When thinking of the English language then we inevitably think of internationality. When walking through London we hear loads of different languages and might tend to presume that the British are open minded for other cultures and consequently other languages. However I do believe that they’re mainly not.

Fortunately I have to admit that I am wrong from time to time. Happened this week. I was reflecting about ‘foreign’ words used in the English language, words from the Latin, French, Italian languages and even words from German. We might think of words like rucksack, kindergarten, blitz, schadenfreude, gemuetlich or gestalt (I really like the word ‘gestalt’ used in English). And there are even more, for instance weltanschauung and zeitgeist. Two quite good ringing words, not? But what do these two words mean? Asking the mighty Duden it says that Weltanschauung is the ‘subjective imagination/association/perception/idea of the world’ but also the ‘collectivity/universe of opinions and views’. So that’s not quite clear, is it? What about zeitgeist? Surprisingly the definition is a more specific one: ‘For a specific time in history the characteristic universal attitude, mindset’. So there are two main differences: the time dimension and the perspective. Weltanschauung seems to be individual and constant over time whereas zeitgeist is more universal and obviously changes from time to time. But is that true? Does the individual weltanschauung not change over time? Is it not true that certain factors, events in life change the way we perceive the universe? And the zeitgeist? Would zeitgeist then be the same all over the world or would there be different regional zeigeister? And even if we would be facing regional zeitgeister could we really define one kind of universal mindset for all people in a specific region? I don’t think so! Nowadays people tend to value their individuality more than they did in the 18th century when Herder used this word for the first time ever. We still might have a common attitude towards the current age but I do believe that this couldn’t be used for describing how people perceive world and time because there are too many different perceptions.

Update 9th August 2010:

Who would have thought that the Zeitgeist lives south of the river Thames? I'm wondering what other surprises I could find in Clapham.