own way of thinking. In his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. strongly advocates creating tension in the mind "so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal" (2). Dr. King's statement, though provocative, was not original. In fact, advocates for personal freedom of thought existed long before philosophers coined the term zeitgeist in bureaucratic 19th century Germany. Historical figures like Jesus implored their followers to think differently. Even his suggestion for the individual to challenge his or her own earthly ideas--and not follow the general tendencies of the society--descended intellectually from Socrates.
Paul Weiss has added another page in the history of the zeitgeist, defining it as one of a series of moments that makes up a society and relations between its individuals. "The time of a society is its own, produced then and there," he writes in Privacy. "Each moment is a limited region in that time" (117). Weiss' definition of the zeitgeist as a particular moment in a society, whose function is to condition "a particular interlinked set of men," introduces the idea of spontaneous collective thinking to the discussion of the zeitgeist (110). Yet for Weiss "thinking is and always remains private" so individuals create a zeitgeist by acting upon their private thoughts, which then become collective, and establishing rules for each other in public (124). "Outside a society," he writes, "many moments may pass away while the society's moment remains. That moment will be followed by another only when its interlinked men are differently related" (117). An individual zeitgeist boils down to a set of rules for people relating with each other.
Thus, the heritage of the influence of the zeitgeist on thinking has existed as long as people have lived together but philosophy's focus on the individual's own...