Zergeisterung

The term »Zergeisterung« means a specific process of spiritual and mental development. The word is a chiffre, that is ideal for those cases of speaking - for example - about schizophrenia, dissociation or borderline, using these termini technici for diseases merely in a metaphoric sense, placed in a context of changes in whole society and substracted the definite allocation into a pathological area.

Zergeisterung means therewith first and foremost an intellectual attitude of ambivalence, accepting a certain relativity of all truth. A symbol for Zergeisterung is the head of the Roman god Janus; furthermore the eye, the spiral and the labyrinth.

In addition to it Zergeisterung reflects a special quality of that attitude, indicatable with terms like desillusion or with speaking about an open, that means: non-self-contained system.

Finally Zergeisterung responds to the development of ideas generally, scriptured in the European enlightenment and globalized to date. The term has a relation to spiritedness and enthusiasm, but it is not antagonistical.

The German word Zergeisterung is not translatable.