William Barrett concluded his masterful 1958 study and interpretation of existentialist philosophy, Irrational Man, with words that still give me a shiver of recognition whenever I revisit them. What he says marked me as deeply when I first read it in the early/mid-1990s as the discovery of Ligotti’s fiction did a couple of years later. And it played into exactly the same piercingly personal concerns that gripped me at the time and underwrote the conception and creation of my first (and later) horror stories. I also binged on Greek tragedy during the same period, which locked hands with Barrett’s concerns:
Nowadays there is much glib talk, particularly in this country [i.e., the United States], about “the whole man,” or “the well-rounded individual,” the terms evoking, in this context, only the pleasant prospect of graciously enlarging the Self by taking extension courses, developing constructive hobbies, or taking an active part in social movements. But the whole man is not whole without such unpleasant things as death, anxiety, guilt, fear and trembling, and despair, even though journalists and the populace have shown what they think of these things by labeling any philosophy that looks at such aspects of human life as “gloomy” or “merely a mood of despair.” We are still so rooted in the Enlightenment—or uprooted in it—that these unpleasant aspects of life are like the Furies for us: hostile forces from which we would escape. And of course the easiest way to escape the Furies, we think, is to deny that they exist. It seems to me no accident at all that modern depth psychology has come into prominence in the same period as Existentialism and for the same reason: namely, that certain unpleasant things the Enlightenment had dropped into the limbo of the unconscious have begun to backfire and have forced themselves finally upon the attention of modern man. . . .
The Furies are really to be revered and not simply bought off; in fact, they cannot be bought off (not even by our modern tranquilizers and sleeping pills) but are to be placated only through being given their just and due respect. They are the darker side of life, but in their own way as holy as the rest. Indeed, without them there would be no experience of the holy at all. Without the shudder of fear or the trembling of dread man would never be brought to stand face to face with himself or his life; he would only drift aimlessly off into the insubstantial realm of Laputa. . . .
We are the children of an enlightenment, one by which we would like to preserve; but we can do so only by making a pact with the old goddesses. . . .
[Do] we really need to be persuaded now, after all that has happened in this twentieth century, how precariously situated these reasonable ideals are in relation to the subterranean forces of life, and how small a segment of the whole and concrete man they really represent? We have to establish a working pact between that segment and the whole of us; but a pact requires a compromise, in which both sides concede something, and in this case particularly the rationalism of the Enlightenment will have to recognize that at the very heart of its light there is also a darkness. . . .
Nothing can be accomplished by denying that man is an essentially troubled being, except to make more trouble. We may, of course, be able to buy off the Furies for a while; being of the earth and ancient, they have been around much longer than the rational consciousness that would entirely supplant them, and so they can afford to wait. And when they strike, more likely than not it will be through the offending faculty itself. It is notorious that brilliant people are often the most dense about their own human blind spot, precisely because their intelligence, so clever in other things, conceals it from them; multiply the situation a thousandfold, and you have a brilliant scientific and technological civilization that could run amok out of its own sheer uprooted cleverness. The situation proposed by Greek tragic wisdom through the drama of Aeschylus may not, then, be as frightening as we imagine: in giving the Furies their place, we may come to recognize that they are not such alien presences as we think in our moments of evading them. In fact, far from being alien, they are part of ourselves, like all gods and demons. The conspiracy to forget them, or to deny that they exist, thus turns out to be only one more contrivance in that vast and organized effort by modern society to flee from the self.
William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existentialist Philosophy (New York: Anchor Books, 1990) 276, 278-280
Incidentally, when I wrote my short story “Prometheus Possessed”—some 15 or 16 years after reading Barrett’s book—I was dimly but definitely aware that I was channeling some of my deep responsiveness to the words above. Equally incidentally, I was also channeling my obsession with the thematically parallel daemonic aspects of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which emerged as several direct but encoded references to her novel in the story’s text.