I maintain this blog for two primary reasons: as an archive, and as a forum for engagement.
Philosophy isnât a mass-market pursuit. Most people are content simply to make it through the day without undue turbulence, and I can hardly blame them. Thinking deeply is not an act of leisure; itâs a luxury product, one that Capitalism would rather you didnât afford. Even when Iâve been employed, Iâve noticed how wage labour chokes the capacity for art and thought. Warhol may have monetised the tension, but most of us merely survive it.
Video: Sprouting seed. (No audio)
Thatâs why I value engagement â not the digital pantomime of ‘likes’ or ‘shares’, but genuine dialogue. The majority will scroll past without seeing. A few will skim. Fewer still will respond. Those who do â whether to agree, dissent, or reframe â remind me why this space exists at all.
To Jason, Julien, Jim, Lance, Nick, and especially Homo Hortus, who has been conversing beneath the recent Freedom post: your engagement matters. You help me think differently, sometimes introducing writers or ideas I hadnât encountered. We may share only fragments of perspective, but difference is the point. It widens the aperture of thought â provided I can avoid tumbling into the Dunning-Kruger pit.
And now, a note of quiet satisfaction. A Romanian scholar recently cited my earlier essay, the Metanarrative Problem, in a piece titled Despre cum metanaraÈiunile construiesc paradigma Èi influenÈeazÄ rÄspunsurile emoÈionale â translation: On How Grand Narratives Shape Paradigms and Condition Our Emotional Responses. That someone, somewhere, found my reflections useful enough to reference tells me this exercise in public thinking is doing what it should: planting seeds in unpredictable soil.
Rather, how to optimise your time commitment to reading.
I came across a digital copy of The Intellectual Origins of Modernity by David Ohana as I was purusing titles on PhilArchive. The title piqued my interest, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to commit to reading it. What’s a bloke to do? Feed it to ChatGPT, of course.
Let’s just say, M. GPT was not amused.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
My first question: Is this at least tangential to my work?
Yes, it wanders. He tends to smuggle in parallel intellectual developments (Kantian autonomy, Cartesian doubt, social contract theory) even when theyâre only indirectly related to his main thread. Itâs a common sin in âorigins of modernityâ texts: the net gets cast so wide that causation and correlation start swapping costumes.
If youâre looking for the through-line, itâs probably his effort to show how early modern conceptions of reason metastasised into a moral and political framework, not just an epistemic one. But, yes â tangential is fair.
Is it more of a superficial survey with some connective tissue?
Thatâs a precise way to put it. Ohanavâs book reads like a well-informed synthesisâcompetent, even elegantâbut not a deep excavation. Heâs stitching together recognizable figures (Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Hume) into a narrative arc about âmodernityâ rather than uncovering new terrain. The connective tissue is mostly thematic rather than argumentative: reason â autonomy â secular moral order â political liberalism.
Itâs a survey that flatters the reader into thinking theyâre tracing the genealogy of modern thought, but it rarely descends into the messy underlayersâsay, the theological anxieties, material conditions, or institutional contexts that actually gave those ideas traction. In short: wide lens, thin soil.
Wow. Not a rousing endorsement.
So in a world of publish or perish, he’s publishing something more approachable than academic?
Exactly. Itâs the kind of book that keeps tenure committees content and undergrads awake. Respectable citations, accessible prose, and a digestible thesis that flatters modernity while hinting at critique.
Heâs not trying to break groundâheâs curating a gallery of the usual suspects and arranging them under good lighting. The prose carries that faint aroma of Routledge house style: serious but safe, just speculative enough to appear bold without alienating reviewers.
In the âpublish or perishâ economy, itâs survival by synthesis.
So closer to an undergraduate project than a grad school thesis?
Pretty much. Itâs polished enough to pass for advanced scholarship if you donât poke too hard, but structurally itâs more akin to a well-executed upper-level survey paperâambitious in scope, cautious in depth.
He gestures toward big philosophical debates without really committing to any. The text moves like a docent through a museum: âHere we have Descartes, note his influence on Kant; over here, the Enlightenmentâs moral optimism, soon to be critiqued by Nietzscheâmoving onâŠâ
You can tell heâs read widely, but the apparatus of argumentâarchival work, textual analysis, theoretical riskâis minimal. Itâs competent, not adventurous.
Freedom is a word so overused itâs practically anaemic. Everyone wants it; no one agrees on what it means. Itâs been weaponised by tyrants and revolutionaries alike, invoked to justify both the breaking of chains and their reforging in a different metal.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
As I write this, I have just finished Erich Fromm’s A Sane Society. Without derailing this post, he cited a scenario â a description of work communities given in All Things Common, by Claire Huchet Bishop â where in post-WW2 France, a group formed a sort of workers’ coöperative â but it was more than that; it was an anarchosyndicalist experiment. As I read it, I had to cringe at the power ‘voluntary’ transfers that immediately got me thinking of Foucault’s biopower â as I often do. Saving this for a separate post.
Image: Freedom: The Chains That Bind Us Together Card 006 from the Postmodern Set â Philosophics.blog
This Critical Theory parody card, Freedom, draws its lineage from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose paradox still haunts the modern condition: âMan is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.â The card re-enchants that contradiction â an Enchantment â Social Contract that reminds us liberty isnât a state but a negotiation.
The card reads:
At the beginning of each playerâs upkeep, that player may remove a Binding counter from a permanent they control. Creatures you control canât be tapped or sacrificed by spells or abilities your opponent controls.
This is Rousseauâs dilemma made mechanical. Freedom is not absolute; itâs procedural. The upkeep represents the maintenance of the social contractâan ongoing renewal, not a one-time event. Every player begins their turn by negotiating what freedom costs. You may remove one Binding counter, but only if you recognise that binding exists.
The flavour text underlines Rousseauâs plea:
âTo renounce liberty is to renounce being a man.â
Freedom, for Rousseau, wasnât about doing whatever one pleased. It was about participating in the moral and civic order that gives action meaning. To exist outside that order is not liberty; itâs anarchy, the tyranny of impulse.
The card, therefore, resists the naĂŻve libertarian reading of freedom as the absence of restraint. It instead depicts freedom as the capacity to act within and through shared constraints.
Freedom, then, is not the absence of chains, but the power to choose which ones we wear.
â Philosophics.blog
The art shows a ring of robed figures, hand in hand, their chains forming a circle beneath a clearing sky. Itâs a haunting image: freedom through fellowship, bondage through unity. The circle symbolises Rousseauâs idea that true liberty emerges only when individuals subordinate selfish will to the general will â the common interest formed through collective agreement.
Yet thereâs also a postmodern irony here: circles can be prisons too. The social contract can emancipate or suffocate, depending on who wrote its terms. The same chains that protect can also bind.
The monochrome aesthetic amplifies the ambiguity â freedom rendered in greyscale, neither utopia nor despair, but the space in between.
Rousseauâs notion of the social contract was revolutionary, but its dissonance still resonates: how can one be free and bound at the same time? He answered that only through the voluntary participation in a collective moral order can humans transcend mere instinct.
We might say that todayâs democracies still operate under Freedom (Enchantment â Social Contract). We maintain our rights at the cost of constant negotiation: legal, social, linguistic. Every âBinding counterâ removed is the product of civic upkeep. Stop maintaining it, and the enchantment fades.
The card hints at the price of this enchantment: creatures (citizens) canât be tapped or sacrificed by opponentsâ control. In other words, autonomy is secured only when the system prevents external domination. But systems fail, and when they do, the illusion of freedom collapses into coercion.
Rousseau earns a complicated respect in my philosophical canon. Heâs not in my top five, but heâs unavoidable. His concept of freedom through the social contract anticipates both modern liberalism and its critique. He believed that genuine liberty required moral community â a notion now eroded by hyper-individualism.
Freedom, as Iâve rendered it here, isnât celebration. Itâs lamentation. The card is about the fragility of the social spell that keeps chaos at bay. We remove one binding at a time, hoping not to unbind ourselves entirely.
Erich Frommâs The Sane Society turns seventy this year, and like a ghost of reason past, it refuses to leave. His target was Capitalismâą â not merely as an economic system, but as a psychic infection. Replace the word factory with Zoom call, and his diagnosis reads like yesterdayâs corporate newsletter. Weâve upgraded our machines but not our misery.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Aside from its psychobabble, The Sane Society, published in 1954, reads almost like it could have been written in 2024. I’d go out on a limb and claim it will still be relevant in 2054 â because Capitalismâą and the relationship it creates between humans and machines, and humans and other humans. It’s a divisive ideology. I’ve read a lot of content on employee engagement in the past decade. I’d been exposed to it in my Organisational Behaviour courses in the late ’80s. Things were going to change. We’d plotted a future.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Only nothing material has changed. We pretended to notice the problem and fix it, but the people reporting the issue and the people in charge did not share a worldview. And the young managers who were taught about the challenge were either not promoted or changed their tune to facilitate their own promotion. Funny how the selection process favours groupthink over diversity of opinion.
Video: Apathetic Office Worker
On balance, most people tend to hate or be otherwise dissatisfied with their jobs. This is nothing new. It was true before Fromm’s book, and it is true now. I published a series of posts on prostitutionin 2018 and discovered that escorts had better job satisfaction than the larger population. Let that sink in.
‘âŠthe vast majority of the population work as employees with little skill required, and with almost no chance to develop any particular talents, or to show any outstanding achievements. While the managerial or professional groups have at least considerable interest in achieving something more or less personal, the vast majority sell their physical, or an exceedingly small part of their intellectual capacity to an employer to be used for purposes of profit in which they have no share, for things in which they have no interest, with the only purpose of making a living, and for some chance to satisfy their consumer’s greed.
‘Dissatisfaction, apathy, boredom, lack of joy and happiness, a sense of futility and a vague feeling that life is meaningless, are the unavoidable results of this situation. This socially patterned syndrome of pathology may not be in the awareness of people; it may be covered by a frantic flight into escape activities, or by a craving for more money, power, prestige. But the weight of the latter motivations is so great only because the alienated person cannot help seeking for such compensations for his inner vacuity, not because these desires are the “natural” or most important incentives for work.‘
Fromm, ever the optimist, thought alienation might be cured through self-awareness and communal values. The twentieth century politely ignored him, opting instead for mindfulness apps and performance reviews.
Weâve upgraded our machines but not our misery.
I’ve excised the psychobabble, but he continuesâŠ
‘But even the data on conscious job satisfaction are rather telling. In a study about job satisfaction on a national scale, satisfaction with and enjoyment of their job was expressed by 85 per cent of the professionals and executives, by 64 per cent of whitecollar people, and by 41 per cent of the factory workers. In another study, we find a similar picture: 86 per cent of the professionals, 74 per cent of the managerial, 42 per cent of the commercial employees, 56 per cent of the skilled, and 48 per cent of the semi-skilled workers expressed satisfaction.
‘We find in these figures a significant discrepancy between professionals and executives on the one hand, workers and clerks on the other. Among the former only a minority is dissatisfiedâamong the latter, more than half. Regarding the total population, this means, roughly, that over half of the total employed population is consciously dissatisfied with their work, and do not enjoy it. If we consider the unconscious dissatisfaction, the percentage would be considerably higher. Taking the 85 per cent of “satisfied” professionals and executives, we would have to examine how many of them suffer from psychologically determined high blood pressure, ulcers, insomnia, nervous tension and fatigue. Although there are no exact data on this, there can be no doubt that, considering these symptoms, the number of really satisfied persons who enjoy their work would be much smaller than the above figures indicate.
‘As far as factory workers and office clerks are concerned, even the percentage of consciously dissatisfied people is remarkably high. Undoubtedly the number of unconsciously dissatisfied workers and clerks is much higher. This is indicated by several studies which show that neurosis and psychogenic illnesses are the main reasons for absenteeism (the estimates for the presence of neurotic symptoms among factory workers go up to about 50 per cent). Fatigue and high labor turnover are other symptoms of dissatisfaction and resentment.’
In the twenty-first century, job dissatisfaction has increased even more. To me, it’s interesting to consider how many people harken back to the ‘good old days’, yet there is little evidence to support the view. Almost schizophrenically, others look to the promise of the future and technology, yet this is simply another narrative with no basis in fact.
The irony is that weâve automated everything except fulfilment. Even our dissatisfaction has become efficient â streamlined, quantified, and monetised. Fromm warned that the sickness of society was its sanity. On that front, weâre positively thriving.
If philosophy were a game, Wittgenstein rewrote the rulebook. Then he tore it up halfway through and told us the game was the thing itself.
âDonât ask for the meaning; ask for the use.â
â Ludwig Wittgenstein
Language Game, the third card in my Critical Theory parody set, isnât just homage; itâs confession. Wittgenstein is among my top five philosophers, and this card embodies why. His idea that ‘meaning is use’ unhooked language from metaphysics and tethered it to life â to the messy, unpredictable business of how humans actually speak.
The cardâs text reads: Choose one: Counter target statement; or reframe it as metaphor.
At first glance, it sounds like a standard spell from Magic: The Gathering â a blue card, naturally, since blue is the colour of intellect, deceit, and control. But beneath the parody is an epistemic mirror.
To âcounterâ a statement is to engage in the analytic impulse â to negate, clarify, define. To âreframe it as metaphorâ is the continental alternative â reinterpret, play, deconstruct. These are not two distinct acts of philosophy but the alternating heartbeat of all discourse. Every argument, every essay, every tweet oscillates between contradiction and reframing.
The sorcery lies in recognising that both are linguistic manoeuvres within the same game. Meaning is not fixed in the words themselves but in how theyâre used â by whom, in what context, and to what end. Wittgensteinâs point was brutally simple: thereâs no hidden substance behind language, only a living practice of moves and counter-moves.
The Shattered Face
The artwork visualises this idea: speech breaking into shards, thought fragmenting as it leaves the mouth. Meaning disintegrates even as itâs formed. Every utterance is an act of creation and destruction, coherence and collapse.
I wanted the card to look like a concept tearing itself apart whilst trying to communicate, a perfect visual for the paradox of language. The cubist angles hint at structure, but the open mouth betrays chaos. Itâs communication as combustion.
Wittgensteinâs Echo
Wittgenstein once wrote, ‘Philosophy leaves everything as it is’. It sounds passive, almost nihilistic, until one realises what he meant: philosophy doesnât change the world by building new systems; it changes how we see whatâs already there.
He was the great anti-system builder, a man suspicious of his own intellect, who saw in language both the limits of thought and the infinite playground of meaning. He dismantled metaphysics not through scepticism but through observation: watch how words behave, and theyâll tell you what they mean.
In that spirit, Language Game is less an argument than an invitation â to watch the mechanics of speech, to see how our statements perform rather than merely represent.
Personal Reflection
Wittgenstein earns a place in my top five because he dissolves the boundaries that most philosophers erect. He offers no comforting totalities, no grand narratives, no moral architectures. Just language, and us inside it, flailing beautifully.
His work aligns with my larger project on the insufficiency of language â its inability to capture the real, yet its irresistible compulsion to try. Wittgenstein knew that words are our most sophisticated form of failure, and he loved them anyway.
To play Language Game is to remember that communication isnât about arriving at truth but about keeping meaning in motion. Every conversation is a temporary alliance against silence.
The cardâs instruction remains both playful and tragic: Counter target statement; or reframe it as metaphor.
I created a “Book Club Edition” of Propensity, a Ridley Park book of fiction primarily for the European market â specifically in the UK â though it’s available elsewhere. I altered the cover art. As an author, I also wanted to compare KDP and IngramSpark as printers and distributors.
I find the cover texture on this version interesting, but I don’t have a word to describe it. I like it. There’s a certain je ne sais quoi about it â the texture. I reworked the art to track the second section of the book. The original cover tracks the first section.
Image: Propensity by Ridley Park; original book cover
At least in this proof version, the black ink is not 100% and is streaky. The KDP version is 100% K and solid black. I mightn’t have noticed except that some section division pages were mostly black, and it is quite evident. I don’t discern a difference in the quality of the text itself.
Illusion of Light
The Illusion of Light is a cloth version of a book also available in paperback. I like the cloth-bound. There is a nostalgic elegance about it. It feels durable â more so than a paperback for sure. I’m not sure about versus the case laminate versions. They come off like textbooks to me â not the vibe I am aiming for.
Itâs almost endearing, really how the intellectuals of mid-century Europe mistook the trembling of their own cage for the dawn chorus of freedom. Reading Erich Frommâs The Sane Society today feels like being handed a telegram from Modernismâs last bright morning, written in the earnest conviction that history had finally grown up. The war was over, the worker was unionised, the child was unspanked, and the libido â good heavens â was finally allowed to breathe. What could possibly go wrong?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Fromm beams:
âIn the twentieth century, such capitalistic exploitation as was customary in the nineteenth century has largely disappeared. This must not, however, becloud the insight into the fact that twentieth-century as well as nineteenth-century Capitalism is based on the principle that is to be found in all class societies: the use of man by man.â
The sleight of hand is marvellous. He spots the continuation of exploitation but calls it progress. The worker has become a ‘partner’, the manager a ‘team leader’, and the whip has been replaced by a time card. No one bows anymore, he writes. No, they just smile through performance reviews and motivational posters.
Frommâs optimism borders on metaphysical comedy.
âAfter the First World War, a sexual revolution took place in which old inhibitions and principles were thrown overboard. The idea of not satisfying a sexual wish was supposed to be old-fashioned or unhealthy.â
Beauvoir, at least, sensed the trap: every gesture toward freedom was refracted through patriarchal fantasy, every ‘choice’ conditioned by the invisible grammar of domination. Fromm, bless him, still believed in a sane society â as if sanity were something history could deliver by instalment.
Meanwhile, the Existentialists were in the next room, chain-smoking and muttering that existence precedes essence. Freedom, they insisted, wasnât something achieved through social reform but endured as nausea. Post-war Paris reeked of it â half despair, half Gauloises. And within a decade, the French schools would dismantle the very scaffolding that held Frommâs optimism together: truth, progress, human nature, the subject.
The Modernists thought they were curing civilisation; the Post-Moderns knew it was terminal and just tried to describe the symptoms with better adjectives.
So yes, Frommâs Sane Society reads now like a time capsule of liberal humanist faith â this touching belief that the twentieth century would fix what the nineteenth broke. Beauvoir already knew better, though even she couldnât see the coming avalanche of irony, the final revelation that emancipation was just another product line.
Liberation became a brand, equality a slogan, sanity a statistical average. Frommâs dream of psychological health looks quaint now, like a health spa brochure left in the ruins of a shopping mall.
And yet, perhaps itâs precisely that naivety thatâs worth cherishing. For a moment, they believed the world could be cured with reason and compassion â before history reminded them, as it always does, that man is still using man, only now with friendlier UX design and better lighting.
I finished Mattias Desmetâs The Psychology of Totalitarianism, which I mentioned the other day. Unfortunately, my initial optimism was premature. Everything I enjoyed was front-loaded: the first four chapters set up a promising critique of mechanistic rationality and the collapse of shared meaning. Then the book turned into a long, therapeutic sermon. I should have stopped at Chapter 4 and saved myself the sunk-cost regret.
It isnât that nothing follows; itâs just that what follows is so thin that the cost-benefit ratio goes negative. Once Desmet moves from diagnosis to prescription, the argument collapses into a psychologistâs worldview: an entire civilisation explained through mass neurosis and healed through better intuition. He builds his case on straw versions of reason, science, and modernity, so his ‘cure’ can look revelatory.
The trouble is familiar. Having dismantled rationalism, Desmet then installs intuition as its replacement â an epistemic monarchy by another name. His appeal to empathy and connection reads less like philosophy and more like professional self-promotion. The therapist canât stop therapising; he privileges the psychological lens over every other possibility.
The result is a reductionist parascience dressed as social theory. The totalitarian mind, in Desmetâs telling, isnât political or structural but psychological â a patient waiting for insight. I donât doubt his sincerity, only his scope. Itâs what happens when a discipline mistakes its vocabulary for the world.
Desmetâs project ultimately re-enchants what it claims to critique. He wants rationalism redeemed through feeling, order reborn through connection. Dis-Integrationism stops short of that impulse. It accepts fracture as the permanent condition â no higher synthesis, no therapeutic finale. Where Desmet sees totalitarianism as a collective pathology awaiting treatment, I see it as reasonâs own reflection in the mirror: a system trying to cure itself of the only disease it knows, the need to be whole.
Iâve 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.
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 Enlightenmentâs glare begins to fade. It asks what happens after reason exhausts itself â after the promise of illumination gives way to overexposure. These essays trace how modernityâs 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 â 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 â 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.
This is not the announcement of a new book â The Illusion of Light: Thinking after the Enlightenment.
“Have the courage to use your own understanding.”
â Immanuel Kant, âWhat Is Enlightenment?â (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 â partially. I rendered an audio version and published it â 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 â Reading by Residual Light
Preface â 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 â 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 â 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 â not as a retreat from knowledge, but as a discipline of seeing what the Enlightenmentâs 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 â 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. Itâs 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.
Philosophics 