The World Spirit () is a concept in German philosophy. It posits that the whole of reality is the process of a rational and intelligible process: the World Spirit. It is most closely associated with the tradition of German Idealism, particularly the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and has been extensively reinterpreted by later thinkers.
The concept of the World Spirit () as a metaphysical principle is primarily known as a central concept in Hegel's speculative philosophy: for him, the entire historical reality, the totality, is the process of the world spirit. Through this, the âÂÂultimate goalâ in world history is realized, namely âÂÂreason in history.â With this view, he followed on from the world spirit theory first published by Schelling.
He saw Napoleon, for example, as the epitome of this. Hegel saw Napoleon as the âÂÂworld soul on horseback,â () a phrase that was later often changed to âÂÂworld spirit on horseback.âÂÂ
Marx and Engels made rather cryptic references to Hegel's definition of the world spirit. In The German Ideology, they use the term in a materialistic and critical way: the chicanery of the world spirit or the âÂÂcunning of reasonâ ultimately reveals itself to be the global market. The early socialist Moses Hess, who was associated with them, on the other hand, advocated a kind of messianism, arguing that the French Revolution had ushered in a new world era.