On Hegel — a study in sorcery
pp. 418-451
in: Fraser, Francis C. Haber, Gert H. Müller (eds), The study of time, Berlin, Springer, 1972Abstract
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
