Gestalt is a German word meaning shape or form. The word also bears connotations to creativity (Gestaltung). In English gestalt refers to the concept where an entity's properties cannot be discovered from the total properties of its parts. The more general English equivalents are synergy, holism, emergence, and variations on the phrase "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts".
Look up gestalt in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.In psychology, Gestalt can refer to:
Gestalt psychology (Gestalt theory), and Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy
Gestalt therapy
The Gestalt effect
Gestalt was also the name of an environment-query function in Mac OS.
Gestalt is also a term used in Dungeons and Dragons to represent a warrior/arcane mage multiclass combination or character concept, although the term can be more generally used to describe when the features of two or more classes are combined to create a 'mixed' class at first level (also known as taking apprentice levels). In Dungeons and Dragons v3.5, gestalt is a variant rule from the sourcebook Unearthed Arcana which allows a character to simultaneously take two classes at once, gaining the abilities and strengths of both.
Fans of the Transformers (and to some degree Hasbro) use the term gestalt to refer to teams of robots which can combine together to form one large robot which is "stronger than the sum of its parts".
Author Theodore Sturgeon (February 26, 1918 - May 8, 1985) referred to the term gestalt in his book More Than Human (Farrar & Straus, 1953. International Fantasy Award) to describe a series of characters that together created "a greater being", also implying that this was the next stage in human evolution. Nonetheless the different people that formed the gestalt could be changed for another person with similar characteristics (for example, a person that performed as a "head" could be exchanged for another person as long as he was able to be a "head" and was accepted in the gestalt).
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(disambiguation).
Look up Zeitgeist in Wiktionary, the free dictionaryZeitgeist is originally a German expression that means "the spirit (Geist) of the time (Zeit)". It denotes the intellectual and cultural climate of an era. Volksgeist has similar meaning. Zeitgeist is still used in German, while Volksgeist is not.
The concept of Zeitgeist goes back to the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. In 1769 he wrote a critique of the work Genius seculi by the philologist Christian Adolph Klotz (German Wikipedia article) and introduced the word Zeitgeist into German as a translation of genius seculi (Latin: genius - "guardian spirit" and saeculi - "of the century").
Zeitgeist has achieved a unique status among German loanwords in other tongues, having found an entrance into English, Spanish, Dutch and even Japanese.
It is a term that refers to the ethos of a cohort of people, that spans one or more subsequent generations, who despite their diverse age and socio-economic background experience a certain worldview, which is prevalent at a particular period of socio-cultural progression. Zeitgeist is the experience of a dominant cultural climate that defines, particularly in Hegelian thinking, an era in the dialectical progression of a people or the world at large.
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Quotations
Whoever marries the zeitgeist will be a widower soon. - August Everding (German Wikipedia