Telos is humanity’s most persistent delusion – the idea that existence is crawling toward some luminous conclusion. From Aristotle’s perfect forms to Nietzsche’s Will to Power to Silicon Valley’s AI salvation, the story barely changes: history, we are told, has direction. But direction is not destiny; it is momentum misinterpreted as meaning. Much of my Anti-Enlightenment attention – and my drive toward Dis-Integration – centres on this notion.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Progress is the Enlightenment’s secular gospel. Its promise – that every change is improvement – keeps the engine of exploitation humming. But change is inevitable; progress is propaganda. The arrow of time doesn’t point toward justice or enlightenment; it just points forward, indifferent to who’s crushed under it.
The Myth of Self-Correcting Systems
We are taught to place faith in systems: markets, democracies, algorithms. If they falter, it’s because of bad actors, not bad architecture. Replace the managers, swap the politicians, tweak the code. But the rot is structural, not moral.
These systems aren’t misfiring; they’re functioning exactly as designed – to preserve their own inertia while leaking meaning, resources, and compassion. The obsession with fixing individuals while sparing the machine is moral sleight of hand. At some point, tightening bolts on a burning engine becomes absurd. What we need is not a tune-up but a renovation.
This is where the philosophy of care and maintenance enters – not as sentimental housekeeping, but as radical engineering. Care is not complacent; it’s insurgent. It means facing the filth under the hood and admitting that the design itself is faulty.
Feminism and the Forgotten Labour of Repair
For centuries, the labour of care has been feminised, dismissed, and exploited – a quiet background hum while men congratulated themselves for building civilisation. Yet it is care, not conquest, that prevents collapse.
Philosophical feminists like Carol Gilligan, Joan Tronto, and María Puig de la Bellacasa saw this long before innovation culture learned to rebrand it as sustainability. They argued that ethical life is not about fulfilment or growth but about tending to fragile systems, material and social. Their revolution is not cosmic; it’s custodial.
The so-called masculine ethos – endless expansion, disruption, will to power – has delivered us burnout disguised as achievement. Its gods are metrics, its sacraments quarterly reports, its apocalypse deferred until after the IPO.
The Maintenance Ethic
Abandon the myth of natural or supernatural telos, and what remains is the duty of upkeep: a civic, psychological, and planetary responsibility. Maintenance is not stagnation; it’s resistance to decay through conscious intervention. It recognises that the world does not move toward betterment but toward breakdown – and that care is the only counter-force we possess.
Progress, as we’ve sold it, is the fever dream of a species mistaking acceleration for evolution. Maintenance is what happens when the dream fades and the mechanic steps in with a wrench.
Societies and cultures are constructs. As with twelve-step programmes, once we recognise this, we can move on to the next step. This is a notion of progress I can endorse: not the myth of inevitable improvement, but the humble acknowledgement that we built these machines and we can rebuild them differently.
The Workshop, Not the Temple
Civilisation doesn’t need another prophet or disruptor. It needs a caretaker with dirty hands. Meaning is not discovered; it is serviced. Systems are not sacred; they are rebuilt.
We can keep worshipping progress and watch the engine seize again, or we can accept the more humbling task of renovation – not of souls or nations, but of the machinery we ourselves assembled. The future, if it exists, will not be a miracle of purpose but a triumph of maintenance.
The Enlightenment promised liberation through reason – that if we could think clearly enough, we could act freely enough. Agency, it claimed, was the defining trait of the rational individual: a sovereign chooser, self-contained and self-determining.
But this was always a fiction.
Not an innocent one, either.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing the essay, Against Agency
Agency became the moral infrastructure of modernity – the premise behind law, punishment, merit, guilt, and even political participation. To say “I chose” was not simply to describe behaviour; it was to perform belonging within a metaphysical system that made individuals the unit of responsibility. The fiction worked, for a while, because it kept the machinery running.
Against Agency argues that this story has collapsed – not metaphorically but structurally. Cognitive science, postcolonial thought, and relational philosophies all point to the same conclusion: there is no autonomous agent, only differential responsiveness – a system’s fluctuating capacity to register and transmit influence.
Copper sings under current; rubber resists. Humans, likewise, respond within the constraints of biology, fatigue, trauma, and social design. What we call “freedom” is merely a condition in which responsiveness remains broad and protected.
This reframing dismantles the binary of “free” and “unfree.” There is no metaphysical threshold where agency appears. Instead, responsiveness scales – widened by safety, narrowed by coercion, eroded by exhaustion. Politics becomes engineering: the maintenance of conditions that sustain responsiveness, rather than the worship of choice.
Ethics, too, must shift.
Not “Who is to blame?” but “Where did the circuit break?”
The essay proposes a gradient model of conduct grounded in relation and feedback, rather than autonomy and will. Responsibility becomes less about moral worth and more about bandwidth – a physics of care.
It’s an uncomfortable vision for a culture addicted to outrage and repentance. The loss of agency removes our favourite alibi: the chooser who could have done otherwise. But it also opens the possibility of a more honest ethics – one that replaces judgment with maintenance, retribution with repair.
This is not nihilism. It’s realism.
Systems appear stable only from a distance. Up close, everything is process – bodies, institutions, meanings – held together by temporary alignments of responsiveness. Against Agency names this collapse not as tragedy, but as opportunity: a clearing from which to think and act without the fictions that sustained modernity.
The essay forms the foundation for what comes next in the Anti-Enlightenment Project – Dis-Integration, a philosophical sequel that explores what remains once coherence, control, and autonomy have been decommissioned.
I’ve just published Objectivity Is Illusion: An Operating Model of Social and Moral Reasoning, an essay that began as this blog post. I’m sharing the ‘official’ link and this first draft. As the essay matured, I added additional support, but I focused primarily on refuting the anticipated opposing arguments. Rather than regurgitate the final version here, I felt showing the genesis would be more instructive. Of course, the essay didn’t spring fully formed; I’ve pruned and expanded from earlier notes still sitting on my hard drive.
Every so often, I’m told I’m too slippery with words, that I treat truth as if it were just another game of persuasion, that I reduce morality to chalk lines on a playing field. The objection usually comes with force: ‘But surely you believe some things are objectively true?‘
I don’t. Or more precisely, I don’t see how ‘objectivity’ in the metaphysical sense can be defended without lapsing into stagecraft. Granite foundations have always turned out to be scaffolding with the paint touched up. Priests once told us their gods guaranteed truth; scientists later promised the lab would serve as granite; politicians assure us democracy is the stone pillar. But in each case the creaks remain.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
This essay is written with an academic readership in mind. It assumes familiarity with figures like Nietzsche, Foucault, Rorty, and Ayer, and with the long quarrel over subjectivity, relativity, and objectivity. My aim is not to retell those arguments from the ground up, but to position my own framework within that ongoing dispute.
Scope
Before proceeding, some guardrails. When I say ‘objectivity is illusion,’ I mean in the social and moral domain. I’m not denying quarks or mathematics. My claim is narrower: in human discourse, no truth escapes subjectivity or contingency.
This dovetails with my broader Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: that even our words are leaky vessels, prone to misfire and misunderstanding. If language itself is unstable ground, then objectivity built upon it can hardly be granite. My claim here is not that nothing exists outside us, but that in the social world we inhabit together, every ‘truth’ rests on creaking boards.
One more note: just because social administration requires appeals to objectivity doesn’t mean objectivity exists. Courts, laboratories, and parliaments invoke it to secure trust, and it works well enough as theater. But necessity is not proof. And it is not my responsibility to conjure a granite replacement. What follows is an operating model, not a new altar.
Thesis
Objectivity is an illusion. Truth is rhetorical. Morality is prescriptive, not propositional. Our ethic is not granite but care: tending the planks we walk on, knowing they creak.
Operating Model: Five Premises
This framework is not a foundation. It is an operating model – contingent, provisional, subject to revision as circumstances change. Like any model, it can (and should) be updated to fit the culture and times.
Premise 1: Subjectivity is the baseline. Every claim originates in a perspective. No statement is free of the lens through which it is made. Even to deny subjectivity is to speak from a subject.
Premise 2: Relativity is emergent. What we call ‘relative truth’ is not a separate category but the convergence of individual subjectivities into provisional consensus. Consensus is never neutral: it is formed rhetorically – through persuasion, cultural resonance, and power [1]. MacIntyre made a similar point in After Virtue. The moral consensus of the Ancients was not grounded in objectivity but in a shared tradition – a thick account of human flourishing that gave coherence to their claims. When that scaffolding collapsed, consensus fractured, leaving modern moral discourse in fragments. Critics accused MacIntyre of relativism, since different traditions yield different ‘truths’, but his point reinforces mine: what looks like objectivity is in fact the temporary overlap of subjectivities sustained by tradition [2].
Premise 3: Objectivity is illusion. Claims presented as objective are relative norms hardened by repetition and forgotten as contingent scaffolding. ‘Objectivity’ is consensus disguised as granite. Its invocation in courts or parliaments may be useful, but usefulness is not existence. The burden of proof belongs to anyone insisting on an independent, metaphysical anchor for moral or social truths (Nietzsche’s ‘mobile army of metaphors’ [3], Kuhn’s paradigms [4], Latour’s laboratories [5]).
Even if one concedes, with Weber (as MacIntyre reminds us), that objective moral truths might exist in principle, they remain inaccessible in practice. What cannot be accessed cannot guide us; reconciliation of values and virtues must therefore take place within traditions and rhetoric, not in appeal to unreachable granite [13].
Premise 4: Rhetoric establishes truth. What counts as ‘true’ in the social and moral domain is established rhetorically – through coherence, resonance, utility, or force. This does not mean truth is ‘mere spin’. It means truth is never metaphysical; it is enacted and enforced through persuasion. If a metaphysical claim convinces, it does so rhetorically. If a scientific claim holds, it does so because it persuades peers, fits the evidence, and survives testing. In short: rhetoric is the medium through which truths endure [6].
Premise 5: Non-Cognitivism, Stated Plainly. I take moral utterances to be prescriptions, not propositions. When someone says ‘X is wrong’, they are not reporting an objective fact but prescribing a stance, a rule, a line in chalk. This is my operating position: non-cognitivism (Ayer [7], Stevenson [8]).
That said, I know the term feels alien. Many prefer the dialect of subjectivism – ‘X is true-for-me but not-for-you’ – or the quasi-realist stance that moral language behaves like truth-talk without cosmic backing (Blackburn [9]). I have no quarrel with these translations. They name the same scaffolding in different accents. I am not defending any school as such; I am simply stating my plank: morality prescribes rather than describes.
Ethic: Care. Since scaffolding is all we have, the obligation is not to pretend it is stone but to keep it usable. By ‘care’, I do not mean politeness or quietism. I mean maintenance – deliberation, repair, mutual aid, even revolt – so long as they acknowledge the scaffolding we share. Care is not optional: stomp hard enough and the floor collapses beneath us all.
Examples clarify: peer review in science is care in action, patching leaky vessels rather than proving granite. Civil rights movements practiced care by repairing rotten planks of law, sometimes with revolt. Communities rebuilding after disaster embody care by reconstructing scaffolding, not pretending it was indestructible. Care is maintenance, reciprocity, and survival.
Bridge: These five premises do not add up to a system or a foundation. They form an operating model: subjectivity as baseline, relativity as emergent, objectivity as illusion, rhetoric as truth, morality as prescription. Together they outline a practice: walk the planks with care, admit the creaks, patch where needed, and stop pretending we live in marble halls.
Rationale
Why prefer scaffolding to granite? Because granite has always been a mirage. The history of philosophy and politics is a history of crumbling temples and collapsing empires. The promises of permanence never survive the weather.
Think of Nietzsche, who called truths ‘a mobile army of metaphors’ [3]. Think of Foucault, who showed that what counts as ‘truth’ is always bound up with power [1]. Think of Rorty, who reduced truth to what our peers let us get away with saying [6]. These are not nihilists but diagnosticians: they exposed the creaks in the floorboards and the wizard behind the curtain.
Metaphors drive the point home:
Scaffolding and granite: What holds is temporary, not eternal. Granite is an illusion painted on timber.
Chalk lines: Rules of play – binding, real, but contingent. They can be redrawn.
Shoreline houses: Rome, the USSR, the British Empire – each built like beachfront villas with a fine view and bad footing. Storms came, sand eroded, and down they went.
Bias as framing: Kahneman himself admitted ‘bias’ is not a thing in the world [10], only a deviation from a chosen model. Gigerenzer [11] and Jared Peterson [12] remind us heuristics are adaptive. To call them ‘biases’ is not neutral – it’s allegiance to a standard of rationality.
The point is simple: what holds today is scaffolding, and pretending otherwise is self-deception.
Counterarguments and Refutations
Objection: Moral Paralysis. Without objective morality, why abolish slavery or defend rights?
Refutation: Chalk lines still bind. Speed limits aren’t cosmic, but they regulate conduct. Abolition endured not because it tapped a cosmic truth but because it persuaded, resonated, and took root. Slavery was once ‘in bounds’. Now it is ‘offsides’. That shift was rhetorical, emotional, political – but no less binding.
Objection: Problem of Dissent. If all is subjective, the lone dissenter is ‘just another voice’.
Refutation: Dissent gains traction through coherence, predictive success, or resonance. Galileo, abolitionists, suffragists – none relied on metaphysical granite. They persuaded, they resonated, they moved chalk lines. Truth was made through rhetoric, not uncovered in stone.
Objection: Performative Dependency. Even to say ‘subjective’ assumes the subject/object split. Aren’t you still inside the house?
Refutation: Of course. But I’m the one pointing at the slippery boards: ‘Mind the dust’. Yes, I’m in the house. But I refuse to pretend it’s marble. And even the category ‘subject’ is not eternal – it’s porous, dynamic, and leaky, just like language itself.
Objection: Infinite Regress. Why stop at subjectivity? Why not de-integrate further?
Refutation: Subjectivity is not granite, but it is the last plank before void. Peel it back and you erase the possibility of claims altogether. If tomorrow we discover that the ‘subject’ is a swarm of quarks or circuits, fine – but the claim still emerges from some locus. Regression refines; it doesn’t disprove.
Conclusion: The Ethic of Care
This is not reintegration. It is dis-integration: naming the creaks, stripping polyvinyl from rotten boards, refusing granite illusions.
If you wish to build here, build. But know the ground shifts, the storms come, the shoreline erodes. The ethic is not certainty but care: to tend the scaffolding we share, to patch without pretending it is stone, and to let dissent itself become part of the maintenance.
Philosophics 