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When the gods are expelled from the cosmos, the world they have left becomes boring. In the seventeenth century, the ennui explored by Pascal was still the mood of a man who had lost his faith and must protect himself from the blackness of anxiety by divertissements; after the French Revolution, the ennui was recognized by Hegel as the syndrome of an age in history. It had taken a century-and-a-half for the lostness in a world without God to develop from a personal malaise of existence to a social disease.¹

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-65387-2_30

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