Tag: book

Book Announcement: Illusion of Light

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2–3 minutes

I’ve just released a new book, The Illusion of Light: Thinking After the Enlightenment, now available in paperback through KDP and distributed via Amazon. In November, a clothbound edition will follow through IngramSpark, extending availability to libraries and independent bookstores worldwide, including Barnes & Noble in the United States.

The Illusion of Light introduces the Anti-Enlightenment Essays series, which includes Objectivity Is Illusion, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency, The Myth of Homo Normalis, and The Discipline of Dis-Integration. Together, these works explore how the Enlightenment’s promise of illumination became the architecture of modern control – and how to think, live, and care in the half-light it left behind.

Image: Front cover of The Illusion of Light. Links to Amazon for purchase.
The ‘Free Preview’ claim is untrue, as there is no Kindle version available. An ebook will be available presently.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

About the Book

The Illusion of Light opens where the Enlightenment’s glare begins to fade. It asks what happens after reason exhausts itself – after the promise of illumination gives way to overexposure. These essays trace how modernity’s metaphors of light and progress became instruments of management: how objectivity hardened into ritual, agency into alibi, normality into control.

Rather than rejecting the Enlightenment outright, the book lingers in its afterimage. It argues for a philosophy practiced in the half-light – a mode of thought that values nuance over certainty, care over mastery, and maintenance over redemption. To read by residual light, as the preface suggests, is to learn to see again when the world stops pretending to be illuminated.

The preface is available on this prior post, written and audio versions.

The Broader Project

The Illusion of Light forms the threshold of the Anti-Enlightenment Project, a series examining the afterlives of modern reason – how its ideals of progress, agency, objectivity, and normality continue to govern our politics, sciences, and selves long after their foundations have cracked. Each volume approaches the same question from a different room in the old House of Reason: Objectivity Is Illusion, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency, The Myth of Homo Normalis, and The Discipline of Dis-Integration.

Taken together, they offer not a manifesto but a practice: philosophy as maintenance work, care as critique, and composure as the only honest response to the ruins of certainty. More to follow.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Waiting for a New Book: Illusions of Light

Posted in Audio, modernism, philosophy, quote, updateTagged , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
2–3 minutes

This is not the announcement of a new book – The Illusion of Light: Thinking after the Enlightenment.

“Have the courage to use your own understanding.”

— Immanuel Kant, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ (1784)

I hate the business of business. I am wrapping up another book project, but it’s been delayed by the government shutdown in the United States. I want a Library of Congress number (LCCN), but submissions must wait for an employed person to assign it.

Too clever by half and smarter than the average bear, I thought I could release an audiobook version first; audiobooks don’t need an LCCN. To be honest, neither do books. As some do with ‘Patent Pending’, I could follow suit. The book receives an LCCN, but it isn’t printed on the copyright page with the other administrivia.

My idea worked – partially. I rendered an audio version and published it – though it won’t be available until the start of November. Even so, I need distributors. It’s always something.

Meanwhile, I’m sharing an excerpt for your listening pleasure. Read along if you please.

Audio: The Illusion of Light: Thinking after the Enlightenment; Preface — Reading by Residual Light

Preface – Reading by Residual Light

To read these essays is to move slowly from the glare into the dimmer spaces where things regain texture. The Enlightenment taught us to equate light with truth, but illumination has always been double-edged: it clarifies outlines whilst erasing depth. What disappears in the brightness are the gradients – the in-between shades where thought and feeling meet, where contradiction still breathes.

The half-light is not a retreat from knowledge; it is where knowledge stops mistaking itself for salvation. It is the hour before dawn and after dusk, when perception is most alert, and everything seems both clearer and less certain. That is the discipline these essays practice: a sustained attentiveness to what persists when certainty burns away.

This project does not ask readers to abandon reason, only to notice what it has excluded. It invites a kind of intellectual night vision – the patience to see without spotlight, the willingness to sit with what does not resolve. In the half-light, the world no longer arranges itself around the human gaze; it reveals itself as unmastered, partial, alive. Here, we will learn to dwell in that half-light – not as a retreat from knowledge, but as a discipline of seeing what the Enlightenment’s glare erased.

The Enlightenment promised that truth would make us free. Perhaps it made us efficient instead. What these pages attempt is smaller and slower: a freedom measured not in control but in composure – the ability to live with what cannot be fixed, to keep tending meaning after its foundations have collapsed.

If there is light here, it is not the triumphant blaze of discovery but the ambient glow that remains after something ends. It’s the light of screens left on overnight, of cities at rest, of the mind still thinking long after certainty has gone to sleep.

Step carefully. Let your eyes adjust. The world looks different when it stops pretending to be illuminated.

The rest of the story…

I consider The Illusion of Light to be a sort of capstone project to the Anti-Enlightenment Project. It provides both a perspective and insights into the essays that constitute it.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Meditations On Nothing: Notes Before Existence

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Meditations on Nothing has finally been published after an administrative glitch.

The core of this book consists of six “books” of aphorisms, each book comprising a single page, totalling 24 in all.

Why only 24 pages?

Couldn’t this have been a blog post? An email?

Fair enough, and yes, of course it could have. It could have been six – three sheets, front and back – but I wanted to share in the tradition of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as well as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. The content is not similar, but the format is shared.

Honestly, I printed a draft copy for myself on A4 paper, folded it to A5, and stapled it at the spine with a long stapler – sans a fancy cover. Perhaps, I’ll share the source PDF in future.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I was inspired by the aphorisms of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Pascale, Debord, and others. To be fair, I disliked Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, but I was still inspired by it for the two or three things I got from it – each of which slips my mind as I write this.

Why a Companion Guide?

Twenty-four pages – really, only six that matter; why would someone want that?

You got me there, too. No, so Notes Before Existence is not a casual read. It’s logical and coherent, but it’s not standard exposition. It’s meant as a thinking tool. Also, the ideas are supported by those who came before me – Newton’s ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ quip pertains.

The main body of the book comprises the same six books as Notes Before Existence, each printed on its own verso, opposite a recto page for personal annotation.

Whilst Meditations on Nothing: A Critical Companion does provide supporting context for Notes Before Existence, it doesn’t fully break it down. I expect to provide this context in a more comprehensive volume, both online and offline, primarily on this platform and on YouTube.

I Wonder what’s Next?

I’m putting the final touches on my next project. The Illusion of Light: Thinking after the Enlightenment is a sort of capstone to my Anti-Enlightenment Project. It provides context around this project as well as details about the underlying essays available on Zenodo at no cost.

And so it goes…

What I really came here for is to share the reason this book was hung up in queue. On the surface, everything checked. I uploaded the source files, entered the required metadata, and chose appropriate price points – which, for the record, is $4.99 USD for Notes*.

Other Prices as of 16/10/25

  • UK: £3.99
  • EU: €4.99 (except Belgium, €4.39)
  • Canada: $6.99 (CAD)
  • Australia: $10.99
  • Japan: ¥1000

As it turns out, this publishing business is data-driven, and some of the systems and validation rules, let’s say, are remnants of the 1970s. Some companies are better than others, but in the US, Bowker controls the ISBN numbers. The US is one – if not the only – of the countries to charge for these identifiers, because: Capitalism. Unfortunately, the printers need to access Bowker’s antiquated system to validate the pairing of the ISBN and the publishing organisation.

I publish under Microglyphics, an entity through which I published my first book in 2001. In 2025, I started using Philosophics Press as an imprint for philosophy materials. This created a snag. I had entered Philosophics Press, but it was expecting Microglyphics – even though I’d used Philosophics Press previously. Unfortunately, the error was not thrown on the page where this information had been entered and validated – that was passed – but on the last page, I was informed that something was wrong on that page.

In any case, after a couple of days of trying, I updated the Bowker record (just to be sure) and eventually entered Microglyphics. Voilà. It worked.

Since then, I’ve also secured a second printer and distributor, IngramSpark, so I’m interested to discover what they’re like.

#PSA

Pre-Meditations on Nothing

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Meditations on Nothing

The proofs have arrived. Two small volumes, both titled Meditations on Nothing: one subtitled Notes Before Existence, the other A Critical Companion.

They are, in some sense, twins—one aphoristic, one expository. The first speaks in fragments; the second replies, with slightly more patience. Together they form the quiet beginning of what I now call The Anti-Enlightenment Project—a long experiment in writing without faith in reason’s permanence.

Image (Link): Instagram announcement of the received proofs.

This is not yet an announcement. The books aren’t public, and I haven’t decided whether to call their eventual release a publication, a disclosure, or a mistake. For now, they simply exist, bound and silent, sitting on the table where the idea of meaning once lived.

When they are released, I’ll post details here. Until then, consider this the sound a thought makes before it commits to paper.

—BW

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The Myth of the Rational Base: Le Bon and the Crowd Revisited

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2–3 minutes

Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) has had the half-life of uranium. His thesis is simple and disturbing: rational individuals become irrational when they merge into a crowd. The crowd hypnotises, contagion spreads, and reason dissolves in the swell of collective emotion.

It’s neat. It’s elegant. It’s also far too flattering.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Le Bon assumes that the default state of the human being is rational, some Enlightenment holdover where citizens, left to their own devices, behave like tidy mini-Kants. Then, and only then, do they lose their reason in the mob. The trouble is that a century of behavioural science has made it painfully clear that “rational man” is a fairy tale.

Daniel Kahneman mapped our cognitive machinery in Thinking, Fast and Slow: System 1 (fast, intuitive, emotional) is running the show while System 2 (slow, deliberate, logical) is mostly hired as the PR manager after the fact. Dan Ariely built a career documenting just how predictably irrational we are – anchoring, framing, sunk-cost fallacies, you name it. Add in Tversky, Thaler, Gigerenzer, and the usual suspects, and the picture is clear: we don’t need a crowd to become irrational. We start irrational, and then the crowd amplifies it.

In that sense, Le Bon wasn’t wrong about crowds being dangerous, but he may have missed the darker point. A crowd doesn’t corrupt a rational base – it accelerates the irrational baseline. It’s not Jekyll turning into Hyde; it’s Hyde on a megaphone.

This matters because if you take Le Bon literally, the problem is situational: avoid crowds and you’ll preserve reason. But if you take Kahneman seriously, the problem is structural: crowds only reveal what was already there. The positive feedback loop of group psychology doesn’t replace rationality; it feeds on the biases, illusions, and shortcuts already baked into the individual mind.

Le Bon handed us the stage directions for mass manipulation. Modern behavioural economics shows us that the script was already written in our heads before we ever left the house. Put the two together and you have the perfect recipe for political spectacle, advertising, and algorithmic nudges.

Which makes Le Bon’s century-old observations correct – but not nearly bleak enough.

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The Morality We Can’t Stop Wanting

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1–2 minutes

Humans can’t seem to stop clawing after morality. The primates among us chuck cucumbers when their neighbours get grapes, and the rest of us grumble about fairness on social media. The impulse is practically universal, an evolutionary quirk that kept us from throttling each other long enough to raise children and build cities.

Image: A seemingly perturbed capuchin monkey.

But universality is not objectivity. Just because every ape howls about fairness doesn’t mean “Justice” floats somewhere in Platonic space, waiting to be downloaded. It only means we’re the kind of animal that survives by narrating rules and enforcing them with shunning, shame, or, when necessary, cudgels.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

This is where Alasdair MacIntyre trips over his own robes. After Virtue skewers Enlightenment rationalists who tried to prop morality on reason, it then dismisses Nietzsche for being “irrational.” MacIntyre’s fix? Resurrect Aristotle’s teleology. If reason can’t save morality, maybe an ancient oak tree can. But this is wish-thinking with a Greek accent. He’s still arguing by reason that reason can’t do the job, then sneaking back in through Aristotle’s back door with a “firmer ground.” Firmer only because he says so.

Nietzsche, at least, had the decency to call the bluff: no telos, no floor, no cosmic anchor. Just will, style, and the abyss. Uncomfortable? Absolutely. Honest? Yes.

Deleuze went further. He pointed out that morality, like culture, doesn’t look like a tree at all. It’s a rhizome: tangled, proliferating, hybridising, never grounded in a single root. The fragments MacIntyre despairs over aren’t evidence of collapse. They’re evidence of how moral life actually grows—messy, contingent, interconnected. The only reason it looks chaotic is that we keep demanding a trunk where only tubers exist.

So here we are, apes with a craving for rules, building cities and philosophies on scaffolds of habit, language, and mutual illusion. We are supported as surely as the Earth is supported – by nothing. And yet, we go on living.

The need for morality is real. The yearning for telos is real. The floor is not.

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Butler versus Butler (on a bed of Beauvoir)

Posted in agency, fiction, identity, language, modernism, perception, podcast, politics, psychology, sexuality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
2–3 minutes

I’ve been reading Octavia Butler’s Dawn and find myself restless. The book is often lauded as a classic of feminist science fiction, but I struggle with it. My problem isn’t with aliens, or even with science fiction tropes; it’s with the form itself, the Modernist project embedded in the genre, which insists on posing questions and then supplying answers, like a catechism for progress. Sci-Fi rarely leaves ambiguity alone; it instructs.

Find the companion piece on my Ridley Park blog.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast summarising this topic.

Beauvoir’s Ground

Simone de Beauvoir understood “woman” as the Other – defined in relation to men, consigned to roles of reproduction, care, and passivity. Her point was not that these roles were natural, but that they were imposed, and that liberation required stripping them away.

Octavia Butler’s Lilith

Lilith Iyapo, the protagonist of Dawn, should be radical. She is the first human awakened after Earth’s destruction, a Black woman given the impossible role of mediating between humans and aliens. Yet she is not allowed to resist her role so much as to embody it. She becomes the dutiful mother, the reluctant carer, the compliant negotiator. Butler’s narration frequently tells us what Lilith thinks and feels, as though to pre-empt the reader’s interpretation. She is less a character than an archetype: the “reasonable woman,” performing the script of liberal Western femininity circa the 1980s.

Judith Butler’s Lens

Judith Butler would have a field day with this. For her, gender is performative: not an essence but a repetition of norms. Agency, in her view, is never sovereign; it emerges, if at all, in the slippages of those repetitions. Read through this lens, Octavia Butler’s Lilith is not destabilising gender; she is repeating it almost too faithfully. The novel makes her into an allegory, a vessel for explaining and reassuring. She performs the role assigned and is praised for her compliance – which is precisely how power inscribes itself.

Why Sci-Fi Leaves Me Cold

This helps me understand why science fiction so often fails to resonate with me. The problem isn’t the speculative element; I like the idea of estrangement, of encountering the alien. The problem is the Modernist scaffolding that underwrites so much of the genre: the drive to solve problems, to instruct the reader, to present archetypes as universal stand-ins. I don’t identify with that project. I prefer literature that unsettles rather than reassures, that leaves questions open rather than connecting the dots.

So, Butler versus Butler on the bedrock of Beauvoir: one Butler scripting a woman into an archetype, another Butler reminding us that archetypes are scripts. And me, somewhere between them, realising that my discomfort with Dawn is not just with the book but with a genre that still carries the DNA of the very Modernism it sometimes claims to resist.

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On Agency, Suicide, and the Moving Train

Posted in agency, fiction, identity, intelligence, language, modernism, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, power, psychology, quote, science, sexuality, society, technologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I’ve been working through the opening chapters of Octavia Butler’s Dawn. At one point, the alien Jdahya tells Lilith, “We watched you commit mass suicide.”*

The line unsettles not because of the apocalypse itself, but because of what it presumes: that “humanity” acted as one, as if billions of disparate lives could be collapsed into a single decision. A few pulled triggers, a few applauded, some resisted despite the odds, and most simply endured. From the alien vantage, nuance vanishes. A species is judged by its outcome, not by the uneven distribution of responsibility that produced it.

This is hardly foreign to us. Nationalism thrives on the same flattening. We won the war. We lost the match. A handful act; the many claim the glory or swallow the shame by association. Sartre takes it further with his “no excuses” dictum, even to do nothing is to choose. Howard Zinn’s “You can’t remain neutral on a moving train” makes the same move, cloaked in the borrowed authority of physics. Yet relativity undermines it: on the train, you are still; on the ground, you are moving. Whether neutrality is possible depends entirely on your frame of reference.

What all these formulations share is a kind of metaphysical inflation. “Agency” is treated as a universal essence, something evenly spread across the human condition. But in practice, it is anything but. Most people are not shaping history; they are being dragged along by it.

One might sketch the orientations toward the collective “apple cart” like this:

  • Tippers with a vision: the revolutionaries, ideologues, or would-be prophets who claim to know how the cart should be overturned.
  • Sycophants: clinging to the side, riding the momentum of others’ power, hoping for crumbs.
  • Egoists: indifferent to the cart’s fate, focused on personal comfort, advantage, or escape.
  • Stabilisers: most people, clinging to the cart as it wobbles, preferring continuity to upheaval.
  • Survivors: those who endure, waiting out storms, not out of “agency” but necessity.

The Stabilisers and Survivors blur into the same crowd, the former still half-convinced their vote between arsenic and cyanide matters, the latter no longer believing the story at all. They resemble Seligman’s shocked dogs, conditioned to sit through pain because movement feels futile.

And so “humanity” never truly acts as one. Agency is uneven, fragile, and often absent. Yet whether in Sartre’s philosophy, Zinn’s slogans, or Jdahya’s extraterrestrial indictment, the temptation is always to collapse plurality into a single will; you chose this, all of you. It is neat, rhetorically satisfying, and yet wrong.

Perhaps Butler’s aliens, clinical in their judgment, are simply holding up a mirror to the fictions we already tell about ourselves.

As an aside, this version of the book cover is risible. Not to devolve into identity politics, but Lilith is a dark-skinned woman, not a pale ginger. I can only assume that some target science fiction readers have a propensity to prefer white, sapphic adjacent characters.

I won’t even comment further on the faux 3D title treatment, relic of 1980s marketing.

* Spoiler Alert: As this statement about mass suicide is a Chapter 2 event, I am not inclined to consider it a spoiler. False alarm.

Sustenance Novella free on Kindle

Posted in fiction, identity, language, philosophy, sexuality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

On 7–8 September 2025, the Kindle version of my Ridley Park novella Sustenance will be available free to everyone on Amazon. (It’s always free if you’re a KindleUnlimited member, but these two days open it up to all readers.)

👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F9PTK9N2

So what is Sustenance?

It’s a novella that begins with the dust and grit of rural Iowa – soybean fields, rusted trucks, a small town where everyone knows your name (and your secrets). At first glance, it reads like plainspoken realism, narrated by a local mechanic who insists he’s just a “regular guy.” But then the ground literally shifts. A crash. Figures glimpsed by firelight in the woods. Naked, violet-skinned beings who don’t laugh, don’t sleep, don’t even breathe.

What follows is not your usual alien-invasion story. It’s quieter, stranger, and more unsettling. The encounters with the visitors aren’t about lasers or spaceships – they’re about language, culture, and the limits of human understanding. What happens when concepts like property, law, or even woman and man don’t translate? What does it mean when intimacy itself becomes a site of misunderstanding?

Sustenance is for readers who:

  • Gravitate toward literary fiction with a speculative edge rather than straight genre beats
  • Appreciate the mix of the banal and the uncanny – the smell of corn dust giving way to the shock of alien otherness
  • Are interested in themes of language, power, misunderstanding, and human self-deception
  • Enjoy writers like Jeff VanderMeer, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, or Denis Johnson – voices that blur realism, philosophy, and estrangement

This isn’t a story that offers tidy answers. It lingers, provokes, and resists easy moral closure. Think of it less as a sci-fi romp and more as a philosophical fable wrapped in small-town dust and cicada-song.

This version of the book is available in these Kindle storefronts:
United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and India

For more details, visit the Sustenance page.

📚 Grab your free Kindle copy on 7–8 September 2025

Why a Free Copy of Sustenance?

I made this Kindle version available for free to get some reviews. This promotion is all or nothing, so take advantage of the opportunity. If you want to leave a review, please do.

Boab’s God: Latent Agency in Welsh’s Kafkaesque Metamorphosis

Posted in agency, consciousness, fiction, free will, identity, language, modernism, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, postmodernism, psychology, sexuality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I just read The Granton Star Cause in Irvine Welsh’s short story collection, The Acid House, and couldn’t help but reflect it off of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Kafka gave us Gregor Samsa: a man who wakes up as vermin, stripped of usefulness, abandoned by family, slowly rotting in a godless universe. His tragedy is inertia; his metamorphosis grants him no agency, only deeper alienation.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Welsh replies with Boab Coyle, a lad who is likewise cast off, rejected by his football mates, scorned by his parents, dumped by his girlfriend, and discarded by his job. Boab is surplus to every domain: civic, familial, erotic, and economic. Then he undergoes his own metamorphosis. And here Welsh swerves from Kafka.

Boab meets his “god.” But the god is nothing transcendent. It is simply Boab’s latent agency, given a mask – a projection of his bitterness and thwarted desires. God looks like him, speaks like him, and tells him to act on impulses long repressed. Where Kafka leaves Gregor to die in silence, Welsh gives Boab a grotesque theology of vengeance.

Through a Critical Theory lens, the contrast is stark:

  • Marx: Both men are surplus. Gregor is disposable labour; Boab is Thatcher’s lumpen. Alienated, both become vermin.
  • Nietzsche: Gregor has no god, only the absurd. Boab makes one in his own image, not an Übermensch, but an Über-fly – quite literally a Superfly – a petty deity of spite.
  • Foucault: Gregor is disciplined into passivity by the family gaze. Boab flips it: as a fly, he surveils and annoys, becoming the pest-panopticon.
  • Bataille/Kristeva: Gregor embodies the abjection of his family’s shame. Boab revels in abjection, weaponising filth as his new mode of agency.

The punchline? Boab’s new god-agency leads straight to destruction. His rage is cathartic, but impotent. The lumpen are permitted vengeance only when it consumes themselves.

So Kafka gave us the tragedy of stasis; Welsh provides us with the tragedy of spite. Both are bleak parables of alienation, but Welsh injects a theology of bad attitude: a god who licenses action only long enough to destroy the actor.

Gregor rots. Boab rages. Both end the same way.