This new paradigm introduces a radical separation of fact and value. The world becomes an inert, value-neutral expanse: nature is no longer the locus of the sacred, but mere material. The consequences are profound—a deepening psychological alienation, loss of spiritual meaning, and persistent cultural impoverishment—traceable to the ongoing dominance of Cartesian–Newtonian rationality, powerfully critiqued and amplified by Hume’s empiricism.

Friedrich Schiller, in his poem “The Gods of Greece” (Die Götter Griechenlandes, 1788), offers an early and poetic lament for this loss—describing, in stirring language, the “disenchantment” of the world as the withdrawal of the gods and the end of sacred participation in reality. Schiller’s elegiac verses mourn a vanished era in which nature, humanity, and divinity were harmoniously united, and he coins the term “entgötterte Natur” (de-divinized nature) to describe the emergence of a world emptied of living gods and deeper meaning.

Max Weber later develops and universalizes this theme in his seminal lecture “Science as a Vocation” (Wissenschaft als Beruf, delivered in 1917; published 1919). Drawing directly on Schiller’s motif, Weber uses the term Entzauberung der Welt—the “disenchantment of the world”—to characterize the fate of modernity: a world increasingly mastered by calculation, rationalization, and scientific reason, in which traditional structures of meaning (magic, ritual, myth, and participatory experience) are systematically eroded. Weber’s account distills the cumulative effects of philosophical, scientific, and social developments into a single diagnosis of the modern condition—a spiritually dry and alienated age in which “one can, in principle, master all things by calculation,” yet is left longing for the rich sense of membership in a world once animated by gods and mystery.

By formulating and popularizing “disenchantment,” Weber becomes the primary modern source whose insights serve as a focal point and reference for subsequent reactions—Romantic, existential, and aesthetic—that seek to understand, critique, and ultimately respond to the loss of magic and meaning in modern culture.