Zeitgeist and the Individual

A major proponent of individual mental liberty was John Stuart Mill, whose treatise On Liberty advocates the freedom of man to think what he will think in addition to act how he will act as long as society is not threatened by his thoughts or actions (117). Reasonable self-interest, therefore, is the guiding light for moral interaction with others. Yet for Mill, it is not enough to guarantee freedom of action; a society must balance social control with the freedom of the people to express their opinions and hold the opinions that suit them.

The treatment of the zeitgeist gained more attention after World War II and the horrific brainwashing of the German people by National Socialism. Philosophers and writers began to view the zeitgeist as a negative force because of its capacity to rob an individual of his or her own motive to think. Robert Waller describes the lack of individual freedom to think that characterized 1930s Germany: "We speak scornfully of the crowd, undisciplined and unaware of its own motives (or disciplined and unaware of its own motives, as in the case of Hitler's stage-managed bloodthirsty carnivals)" (

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thinking (66). So if individual thinking is chaotic, a disordered zeitgeist is produced. For Broch, the zeitgeist is healthy when it encourages the production universal works of art, not war (67). Once the zeitgeist is understood as a temporary, but real experience, whose origins stem from us, its power on individual thinking becomes clearer. Literally, when it is properly understood, it is seen as a mirror of individual thinking. But we should be hesitant to believe that we can understand the zeitgeist while in it. For a given zeitgeist can only be fully plumbed and exhaustively known when the spirit has left the people. According to Broch, this "is due simply and solely to the sort of anticipatory reality which strikes contemporaries with organic blindness" (68). In the best of occasions, a poet will be misunderstood until after his death; in the worst case, a whole people will be blinded by their inhumane acts. One factor that influences the zeitgeist is the extent to which a culture's past influences its present. To inverse Broch's order, whether a zeitgeist will produce citizens who think clearly and artistically depends on the past cultural spirit. For Broch, the Germans' tendency to isolate themselves linguist
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Approximate Word count = 2464
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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