This is what I see and what troubles me. I look around in every direction and all I see is darkness. Nature has nothing to offer me that does not give rise to doubt and anxiety. If I saw no sign there of a Divinity I should decide on a negative solution: if I saw signs of a Creator everywhere I should peacefully settle down in the faith. But, seeing too much to deny and not enough to affirm, I am in a pitiful state. … The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread. (1995, 201, 429)
With Pascal we see the Janus face of modern science. On one hand, it frees human beings from the prejudices and superstitions of religion. On the other hand, this freedom means we are now abandoned and forlorn in a cold and meaningless universe.
A second important development in the formation of the modern worldview was the emergence of a new form of Christianity, Protestantism, that reconfigured the self by privileging the inner states of the soul. Although the emphasis on subjective inwardness is present in the Western tradition as early as Augustine's Confessions (397–398 ad), the cultural shift to religious individualism was officially inaugurated with Martin Luther's (1483–1546) famous protest against the Catholic Church in Wittenberg, Germany, in 1517. Luther rejected the Catholic notion of salvation by means of sacraments or rituals, buying indulgences, or by doing ‘good works,’ and focused exclusively on the moral content of one's intentions — one's inner feelings, desires, and thoughts. The Protestant turn inward revealed a sharp distinction between the ‘inner’ self that was genuine and true and the transient and corruptible ‘outer’ self that is engaged in superficial worldly affairs. This shift also made it possible to disown one's actions in the world, seeing them as separate and distinct from one's real self because it is one's intentions, not one's actions, that are essential to who one is. In this way, Protestantism fortified the Christian attitude of contemptus mundi or ‘contempt for the world’ that contributed to a growing sense that we do not belong to it (Guignon 2004a, 30). And, like the new science, this contempt played a key role in the demystification of nature, regarding it as a domain of hostile objects to be mastered through self-discipline and an industrious work ethic.
The third major development in the formation of the modern worldview was a new picture of society, where human beings no longer understood themselves in terms of their social roles, relationships, and functions that were preordained by the divine order of things. Society, rather, came to be viewed as something artificial, an aggregate of disconnected individuals that was held together by instrumental social contracts and monetary exchanges. Public life begins to emerge as something unnatural, where one is compelled to adopt a number of fake personae or social ‘masks’ that are foreign to one's real self (Guignon 2004a, 33–36). As a result, an older way of being that was rooted in close-knit feudal societies, where one's identity was shaped by a deep sense of belonging to one's place and to one's role within a community, gave way to an increasingly rationalistic, impersonal, and alienating social order, the birth of the centralized state. This new version of society reduced human beings to calculable resources or commodities that, in turn, required the creation of a class of technical bureaucrats and administrators to manage and control these resources in factories, schools, hospitals, and office buildings. The nightmarish experience of having one's public life monitored and regulated by a cadre of anonymous bureaucrats heightened the modern experience of alienation and confusion and became a central theme in existentialist literature, notably in the writings of Franz Kafka (1883–1924). In his posthumously published novel The Castle (1926), for instance, the main character, known only as ‘K,’ arrives at a village in the winter and spends his time desperately trying to understand and communicate with the inaccessible bureaucrats of the castle who have control over all aspects of life in the village. The castle is a symbol of bureaucratic authority that, through endless paperwork, permits, and administrative procedures, stifles any expression of individual freedom and undermines the possibility for genuine human interaction, leaving ‘K’ feeling forlorn and isolated. The castle destroys what Kafka sees as the most basic of human needs, which, in the words of Max Brod, was “the need to be rooted in a home and calling, and to become a member of a community” (cited in May 1950, 7).
The impersonal and dehumanizing characteristics of the bureaucratic state were magnified by the Industrial Revolution with its wrenching pace, numbing repetitiveness, and alienating working conditions that became commonplace in the massive factories of Western Europe and the United States. A number of existentialists engaged the problem of alienation rising from the standardization and collectivization of the human being in the machine age. In his Notes from the Underground (1864), for instance, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) mockingly described this form of mechanized social engineering in terms of a ‘Crystal Palace,’ a reference to the huge glass and cast-iron building that housed the Great Exhibition in London and displayed the latest scientific and technological breakthroughs of the industrial age. For Dostoevsky, the Crystal Palace was not a sign of rational progress but a nightmare, symbolizing lifeless conformism, loneliness, excessive pride, and the mutilation of human existence. After personally vising the building in London in 1862, he wrote:
The Crystal Palace … you sense that here something has been achieved, that here there is victory and triumph. You even begin to fear something. However independent you may be, for some reason you become terrified. ‘For isn't this the achievement of perfection?’ you think. ‘Isn't this the ultimate?’ … People come with a single thought, quietly, relentlessly, mutely thronging into this colossal palace, and you feel that something has come to an end. It is like a Biblical picture, something out of Babylon, a prophecy from the Apocalypse coming to pass before your eyes. … In the presence of such hugeness, of the colossal pride of the sovereign spirit, of the triumphant finality of the creations of that spirit, even the hungry soul takes flight; it bows down, it submits, it seeks salvation in gin and debauchery and believes that everything is as it ought to be. The fact lies heavy; the masses become insensible and zombie-like. (2009, 92)
Given these wrenching social upheavals that characterized the modern age, it is no surprise that by the turn of the century, literary and philosophical references to inchoate feelings of anxiety, boredom, and suicide were becoming increasingly common. Indeed, in 1881, the American physician George M. Beard introduced the term ‘neurasthenia’ to the medical lexicon, referring to feelings of profound nervous exhaustion and anxiety that were becoming an epidemic in the industrialized cities of Germany, England, and the United States. According to Beard, “The chief and primary cause of this development and the very rapid increase of nervousness is modern civilization [itself]’ (1881, vi). With these conditions in place, the seeds of existentialism were sown.
No philosopher was more tuned into the upheavals of modernity than Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). His words vividly convey the frightening sense of abandonment and forlornness in the modern age, where moral absolutes can no longer serve as a source of security and meaning for our lives. This experience is powerfully captured in The Gay Science with his famous account of the ‘madman’ who descends into the marketplace to announce to the world that ‘God is dead!’: