Is there such a thing as a "spirit of the age"?

This is not necessarily an abstract question, considering how we rallied around our televisions, radios and mobile devices, plugged into the recent events in Egypt.

But is this spirit one of increasing freedom and democracy? Or is it something else entirely?

As one responder to our website wrote when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned: "Internet ROCKS!!! People Power! Congrats EGYPT."

And further down: "Good! Egyptians did what Chinese couldn't. Proud of you people."

Of course it is possible what we are witnessing is a momentarily ecstatic feeling, an historical whoosh — to borrow the not-so technical term from a couple of contemporary philosophers — from which history will awaken, cold and sober?

We are all Egyptians now. Pro-Egypt demonstrators take to the streets of Lima, Peru, after Hosni Mubarak resigns. (Enrique Castro-Mendivil/Reuters)

The other technical term for the spirit of the age is zeitgeist, a reasonably familiar one (geist being German for spirit).

A progressive Canadian magazine, Geist, even borrows the name. But the notion itself goes back several centuries and was prominantly adopted by the German Romantics, who placed a particular emphasis on grand feelings.

Today it is mostly used by writers, artists and journalists when describing fashionable cultural trends.

But as an historical description, zeitgeist can have a more profound meaning, albeit, one that is very slippery as it is often employed to describe matters of great political and social transformation.

At one time we thought of history as a costume drama of singular personalities acting amid the languid masses (think Napoleon, Alexander the Great or Hitler).

Then along came other writers and theorists (think Tolstoy or Marx) who argued that history is also a tidal wave of everyday activity, with ordinary people among the chief proponents.

Today, in this world of web 2.0, individuals anywhere on the planet can almost insert themselves into an historical drama, electronically streaming into Tahrir Square in Cairo.

Hegel's complicated thoughts

All told, the spirit of the age, if we can believe the Twitter feeds and TV interviews is one of renewed agency — ordinary people feeling that, at last, they can gather power unto themselves.

It has to be a beguiling and ecstatic feeling, when the poor and downtrodden become the chief actors in their own history, while the rich and privileged are left as mere spectators.

In the realm of ideas, the chief philosopher of the zeitgeist was that notoriously difficult to read German, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831).

His geist was a philosophical system, a moving, universal consciousness that dwells in history and progresses ever upward, not unlike the crowd in Cairo plugged into their cellphones.

Hegel's almost mystical sense of "spirit" has been repeatedly raided and adapted by others ever since he wrote about it in the early 19th century.

The chief raider, of course, was Karl Marx, who replaced Hegel's ideas with notions of material reality, like the means of production and economics.

In this way, the spirit of the age became entwined with revolutionary class conflict.

The progress of freedom

But Hegel's idealized whoosh still has considerable reach and power. It appeals to both personal and hard-to-define sentiments and longings, as well as to the belief that ideas themselves can move history.

This latter thought animated the American writers Allan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama as well as other, including religious theorists.

When history moves. The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statute in Baghdad in 2003. (Associated Press)

In the religious context it is not hard to substitute some form of supernatural agency for the geist of revolution. Ideas that descend on masses of people and move them to topple governments can be seen as a form of Holy Spirit, moving across the waters of history.

If you are uncomfortable with that kind of religiosity, substitute anything you like in its place: people power, or the spirit of human freedom.

That's what Robert Wright does in his 2009 book, The Evolution of God. He sees, in the movement of history, a spirit of liberation. He doesn't care if you call it God, or human betterment. What's important is the upward drive, the whoosh of freedom.

As a concept, it seems a little philosophically sloppy, but at the same time immensely and emotionally satisfying.

To see people taking the future into their own hands creates a giddy sense of jubiliation.

Yes, wariness always lurks. The history of revolution is one that is permanently marked by disappointment and failed hopes, as so many of the current Egypt watchers remind us.

Disastrous events followed the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad those years ago; much blood and treasure was wasted.

Still, there appears something magical about these events, no matter how you want to define them.

For Hegel, as complicated as his thinking can be, his universal spirit involved something seemingly simple: "The history of the world is none other than the progress of freedom."

But it is important to note that Hegel's idea of freedom is a freedom that, crucially, becomes conscious of itself — a way of memorializing an event and preserving it for the future, so we can return to it when the idea of freedom needs replenishing.

In this age we live in, when our sense of progress is so routinely disappointed, events like we just witnessed in Egypt can restore something to the heart.

Disappointments may well come (are they not inevitable?). But these moments are not just guilty-bystander pleasures, they can be the guardians of possibility, emblems of a promising present and future in the great whoosh of history.