🜏 The Anti-Enlightenment Project

Unlearning reason’s religion. Examining the ghosts modernity mistook for gods.

About the Project

The Anti-Enlightenment Project is an ongoing philosophical initiative by Bry Willis, exploring the failures, limits, and afterlives of Enlightenment rationality. It gathers essays, preprints, and speculative analyses tracing how Western modernity built its institutions – law, markets, democracy, even morality – on fictions of autonomy, coherence, and progress that no longer hold.

Where the Enlightenment sought light, this project studies the burn marks. It argues that the same rational architecture that promised emancipation also produced surveillance, extraction, and the moral machinery of blame. Each essay interrogates one of reason’s sacred premises – agency, consent, progress, or truth – and offers dis-integrative alternatives grounded in relation, responsiveness, and maintenance rather than control.

The project is archived and published through Zenodo as an open repository of post-Enlightenment thought.

Mission Statement

To curate a living archive of thought beyond the Enlightenment paradigm – neither nostalgic nor nihilistic, but diagnostic. To map what remains when ‘reason’ loses its monopoly. To build a vocabulary fit for the ruins.

Orientation

The Anti-Enlightenment Project does not seek to destroy the Enlightenment, but to perform its archaeology. It treats reason as an artefact – once divine, now bureaucratic – and excavates the strata of its persistence in modern forms of governance, identity, and care. Each essay isolates a different residue of this architecture:

• Objectivity Is Illusion exposes truth as consensus scaffolding.
• Rational Ghosts and Temporal Ghosts trace the metaphysical defects in democracy’s design.
• Against Agency dismantles the myth of autonomy.
• The Discipline of Dis-Integration reframes philosophy as maintenance rather than salvation.
• The Myth of Homo Normalis closes the circuit, revealing legibility itself as the final faith of modernity.
• The Will to Be Ruled shows how totalitarianism is a predictable outgrowth of Enlightenment thinking.
• The Great Substitution: From Metaphysics to Metaphysics shows how Enlightenment critique never escaped metaphysics at all, merely replacing older gods with newer, shinier abstractions and mistaking substitution for emancipation.
• Moral Universality and Its Discontents: A Critical Examination of Normative Ethics’ Conceptual Foundations exposes moral universality as a rhetorical convenience, revealing “universal” ethics to be historically freighted norms posing as timeless necessity.

Together they map an intellectual terrain after the collapse of reason’s empire – a landscape where ethics begins not in certainty but in attention.

Roadmap, and What’s Missing

Before we continue, I’d like to also share ideas I haven’t yet expressed but hope to eventually.

Core Essays

9. Moral Universality and Its Discontents: A Critical Examination of Normative Ethics’ Conceptual Foundation

Published December 2025

Normative ethics struts about like a toga-clad orator on the steps of some imagined agora, banging on about moral universals as if they’re carved on tablets by the Platonic gods. This essay rips the toga off, points out the stench of historical contingency and parochial assumption, and then sets fire to the entire stage. It dismantles the smug architecture of universality – utilitarian, deontological, virtue-theoretic – and shows how each pretends to transcend context while smuggling in their own culturally buffered norms through the back door. The result isn’t neat relativism sold with a bow; it’s an unsettling rumination on why moral universals are less cosmic law and more rhetorical prosthesis. There’s no comforting certitude at the end, just an invitation to acknowledge moral life as messy, situated, and forever haunted by its own aspirational fantasies.

→ Read on Zenodo

8. The Great Substitution: From Metaphysics to Metaphysics

Published November 2025

A gleefully unhinged exposé on how modernity never actually exorcised its metaphysical demons – it merely swapped their altars for server racks and algorithmic fetishism. This essay tracks the grand recursive deception: Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Harari, each proclaiming emancipation while erecting new temples of belief. Progress doesn’t kill gods; it industrialises them. What we call liberation is just automation with better branding. The piece unfurls through ten blistering sections – from epistemic limits to linguistic legerdemain to the cults of dataism and scientism – and closes not with redemption but Dis-Integration – maintenance over mastery, looking away from the blinding light of Enlightenment certainty long enough to notice the shadows it casts.

→ Read on Zenodo

7. The Will to Be Ruled: Totalitarianism and the Fantasy of Freedom

Published October 2025

This essay examines how the Enlightenment’s ideal of autonomy contains the seed of its undoing. The rational, self-governing subject – celebrated as the triumph of modernity – proves unable to bear the solitude it creates. As freedom collapses into exhaustion, the desire for direction re-emerges as devotion. Drawing on Fromm, Arendt, Adorno, Reich, Han, and Desmet, The Will to Be Ruled traces the psychological gradient from fear to obedience, showing how submission is moralised as virtue and even experienced as pleasure. It concludes that totalitarianism is not a deviation from reason but its consummation, and that only through Dis-Integrationism – an ethic of maintenance rather than mastery – can thought remain responsive as the light fades.

→ Read on Zenodo

6. The Myth of Homo Normalis: Archaeology of the Legible Human

Published October 2025

Modernity’s most persistent myth is the “normal” human. This essay excavates how legibility – the drive to measure, categorise, and care – became a form of control. From Quetelet’s statistical man to Foucault’s biopower and today’s quantified emotion, Homo Normalis reveals the moral machinery behind normalisation. It ends with an ethics of variance: lucidity without repair, refusal without despair.

→ Read on Zenodo

5. The Discipline of Dis-Integration: Philosophy Without Redemption

Published October 2025

This essay formalises Dis-Integrationism – a philosophical method that refuses synthesis, closure, and the compulsive need to “make whole.” It traces how Enlightenment reason, deconstruction, and therapy culture all share a faith in reintegration: the promise that what’s fractured can be restored. Against this, Dis-Integrationism proposes care without cure, attention without resolution – a discipline of maintaining the broken as broken. It closes the Anti-Enlightenment loop by turning critique into a sustained practice rather than a path to redemption.

→ Read on Zenodo

4. Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self

Published October 2025
“Agency” is not a metaphysical faculty – it’s an alibi. This essay dismantles the myth of the autonomous self and reframes freedom as differential responsiveness: a gradient of conditions rather than a binary of will. Drawing on philosophy, neuroscience, and decolonial thought, it argues for ethics as maintenance, not judgment, and politics as condition-stewardship.
→ Read on Zenodo

3. Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present

Published October 2025
Modern democracies worship the now. This essay examines presentism – the systemic bias toward immediacy – as a structural flaw of Enlightenment thinking. By enthroning rational individuals in perpetual “decision time,” modernity erased the unborn from politics. What remains is a political theology of the short term, collapsing both memory and imagination.
→ Read on Zenodo

2. Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail

Published October 2025
The Enlightenment built democracy for rational ghosts – imagined citizens who never existed. This essay dissects six contradictions at the foundation of “rational” governance and shows why democracy’s collapse was prewritten in its metaphysics. From mathematical impossibility to sociological blindness, it charts the crisis of coherence that modern politics still calls freedom.
→ Read on Zenodo

1. Objectivity Is Illusion: An Operating Model of Social and Moral Reasoning

Published September 2025

Objectivity, in the social and moral sense, is a performance – a consensus mechanism mistaken for truth. This essay maps how “objectivity” operates as a scaffold for Enlightenment rationality, masking moral preference as neutral judgment. It introduces a five-premise model showing that what we call objectivity is merely sustained agreement under shared illusions of coherence. The argument reframes moral reasoning as provisional and participatory rather than universal or fixed.

→ Read on Zenodo

SEO Metadata

Anti-Enlightenment, Enlightenment critique, post-rational philosophy, dis-integrationism, decolonial philosophy, free will, agency, democracy, reason, Michel Foucault, Freiderich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, care ethics, posthumanism, neuroscience, modernity, philosophy of mind, ethics of maintenance