Weltschmerz
TIL: Weltschmerz. I suspect that the following observation is also deeply connected to Cartesian Duality:
Miles Groth, an existential therapist, expert on continental European philosophy, and professor emeritus in psychology at Wagner College in New York City, suggests that the idea of Weltschmerz arose at a very specific time: when “religious feelings that suffering is inevitable disappeared from the West.”
Indeed, where people from the devoutly Christian Europe of the Middle Ages are thought to have accepted and found comfort in the fact that everything—including evil—was part of God’s divine plan, those born in later centuries tended to operate according to a different set of expectations. Where faith gave way to science, the evils of pain, suffering, and injustice came to be regarded as avoidable, unnecessary, and by extension intolerable.
