is a

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) ** Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...

term, literally meaning ''"finger tips feeling"'' and meaning intuitive flair or instinct, which has been adopted by the

English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the is ...

as a

loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because th ...

. It describes a great

situational awareness Situational awareness or situation awareness (SA) is the perception of environmental elements and events with respect to time or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their future status. An alternative definition is tha ...

, and the ability to respond most appropriately and tactfully. It can also be applied to diplomats, bearers of bad news, or to describe a superior ability to respond to an escalated situation. The term is sometimes used to describe the instinctive play of certain

football Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word ''football'' normally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly c ...

players.

Social context

In social context, suggests a combination of "tact, diplomacy and a certain amount of sensitivity to the feelings of others". It is a quality that can enable a person to "negotiate tricky social situations". In literal terms, it means a physical skill appearing to be controlled by the nerves in the extremities, as in a machinist hand lathing steel to micrometer tolerances.

Military context

In military terminology, it is used for the stated ability of some military commanders, such as Field-Marshal

Erwin Rommel Johannes Erwin Eugen Rommel () (15 November 1891 – 14 October 1944) was a German field marshal during World War II. Popularly known as the Desert Fox (, ), he served in the ''Wehrmacht'' (armed forces) of Nazi Germany, as well as servi ...

,, Prologue to describe "the instinctive and immediate response to battle situations", a quality needed to maintain, with great accuracy and attention to detail, an ever-changing

operational An operational definition specifies concrete, replicable procedures designed to represent a construct. In the words of American psychologist S.S. Stevens (1935), "An operation is the performance which we execute in order to make known a concept." F ...

and

tactical Tactic(s) or Tactical may refer to: * Tactic (method), a conceptual action implemented as one or more specific tasks ** Military tactics, the disposition and maneuver of units on a particular sea or battlefield ** Chess tactics ** Political tacti ...

situation by maintaining a mental map of the battlefield. The idiom is intended to evoke a military commander who is in such intimate communication with the battlefield that it is as though he has a fingertip on each critical point. In this sense the term is synonymous with the English expression of "keeping one's finger on the pulse", and was expressed in the 18th and 19th centuries as "having a feel for combat". The term is only figurative, and cannot in itself give a realistic picture of the ability being described. It is cognitively related to personal possession of

multiple intelligences The theory of multiple intelligences proposes the differentiation of human intelligence into specific modalities of intelligence, rather than defining intelligence as a single, general ability. The theory has been criticized by mainstream psycho ...

, notably those pertinent to visual and spatial data processing. The term suggests that in addition to any discursive processing of information that the commander may be conducting (such as mentally considering a specific plan), the commander is automatically establishing cognitive relationships between disparate pieces of information as they arrive, and is able to immediately re-synthesise their mental model of the battlefield. Even though there is no physical connection between the commander and his troops, other than conduits for discursive information such as radio signals, it is ''as if'' the commander had their own sensitive presence in each spot. One of the functions of a static map is to allow a traveler to decide upon a course of action suitable for getting from one point to another. In times of war, the terrain and the troops and weapons deployed upon it can be changed much more rapidly than cartographers can change their maps. A commander with would hold such a map in their mind, and adjust it by incorporating any significant information that was received. Colonel

Mehta Basti Ram Mehta Basti Ram was a Dogra officer and commander of the Fateh Shibji battalion under Raja Gulab Singh of Jammu (later Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir). Basti Ram later served as the governor (''thanadar'') of Leh in Ladakh between 1847 and 1861. Ba ...

was said to have .

Related concepts

The concept may be compared to ideas about

intuition Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning. Different fields use the word "intuition" in very different ways, including but not limited to: direct access to unconscious knowledge; unconscious cognition; ...

and neural net programming. The same phenomenon, but conceptualized in a radically different way, seems to be described by

D.T. Suzuki , self-rendered in 1894 as "Daisetz", was a Japanese-American Buddhist monk, essayist, philosopher, religious scholar, translator, and writer. He was a scholar and author of books and essays on Buddhism, Zen and Shin that were instrumental in s ...

in swordsmanship teaching stories recounted in his ''Zen and Japanese Culture,'' and given in analytical detail in ''

Zen Buddhism Zen ( zh, t=禪, p=Chán; ja, text= 禅, translit=zen; ko, text=선, translit=Seon; vi, text=Thiền) is a school of Mahayana Buddhism that originated in China during the Tang dynasty, known as the Chan School (''Chánzong'' 禪宗), and ...

and

Psychoanalysis PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might b ...

''.Fromm, Suzuki and De Martino

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fingerspitzengefuhl Military terminology Command and control Strategy German words and phrases Words and phrases with no direct English translation

Social context

Military context

Related concepts

See also

References