The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him—or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head—there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful.

Again, one should not be blinded by the poetic power of this description, bu read it precisely.  The first thing to note is how the objects which freely float around in this ‘night of the world’ are membra disiecta, partial objects, objects detached from their organic Whole —is there not a strange echo between this description and Hegel’s description of the negative power of Understanding which is able to abstract an entity (a process, a property) from its substantial context and treat it as if it has an existence of its own? — “that the accidental as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom —this is the tremendous power of the negative.”  It is thus as if, in the ghastly scenery of the ‘night of the world,’ we encounter something like the power of Understanding in its natural state, spirit in the guise of a proto-spirit —this , perhaps, is the most precise definition of horror: when a higher state of development violently inscribes itself in the lower state, in its ground/presupposition, where it cannot but appear as a monstrous mess, a disintegration of order, a terrifying unnatural combination of natural elements.  With regards to today’s science, where do we encounter its horror at its purest? When genetic manipulations go awry and generate objects never seen in nature, freaks like goats with a gigantic ear instead of a head or a head with one ey, meaningless accidents which nonetheless touch our deeply repressed fantasies and thus trigger wild interpretations.