Ghost

摘要

What is a ghost? Georg Hegel’s “Geist,” clumsily translated to “spirit,” is other tothe self-consciousness that provides an outer world for the phenomenologicalinner world, a mystic mirror that proves our self exists (Sinnerbrink, 2007). InGerman, the phoneme “Geist” can attach itself to an epochal moment (Zeitgeist)or a people (Volksgeist) in a magical way that first emanates from and then transcendsthat moment or people (Sinnerbrink, 2007). The term “ghost” in Englishoften refers to entities that act through mythos as a function of memory. A nineteenth-century religious sect of the Lakota Sioux danced the Ghost Dance to bringthe world back into pre-colonial balance. A dead person’s ghost haunts the livingso as not to be forgotten. Ghosts of soldiers haunt battlefields; ghost dogs guardtheir masters’ graves. In other contexts, the ghost is something that is theorizedbut unperceived. Physicists use ghosts to stand in for unmeasured or unprovenphenomena in the place where the math says a phenomenon should be. Peoplewith amputations may feel an itch on a ghost limb.