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.
“Don’t ask for the meaning; ask for the use.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
Language Game, the third card in my Critical Theory parody set, isn’t just homage; it’s 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 – to the messy, unpredictable business of how humans actually speak.
The card’s 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 – a blue card, naturally, since blue is the colour of intellect, deceit, and control. But beneath the parody is an epistemic mirror.
To “counter” a statement is to engage in the analytic impulse – to negate, clarify, define. To “reframe it as metaphor” is the continental alternative – 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 they’re used – by whom, in what context, and to what end. Wittgenstein’s point was brutally simple: there’s 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 it’s 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. It’s communication as combustion.
Wittgenstein’s Echo
Wittgenstein once wrote, ‘Philosophy leaves everything as it is’. It sounds passive, almost nihilistic, until one realises what he meant: philosophy doesn’t change the world by building new systems; it changes how we see what’s 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 they’ll tell you what they mean.
In that spirit, Language Game is less an argument than an invitation – 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 – 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 isn’t about arriving at truth but about keeping meaning in motion. Every conversation is a temporary alliance against silence.
The card’s instruction remains both playful and tragic: Counter target statement; or reframe it as metaphor.
This Magic: The Gathering parody trading card was the first in my Critical Theory series.
It’s an important card for me. As with sex and gender, creating a taxonomic or ontological dichotomy poses categorical challenges. Despite the insufficiency of language, it’s still all I have to attempt to classify the world. In the case of articulating the perception of reality, we can choose between idealism and realism. The problem is that it’s not either; it’s both. Reality cannot be realised without both.
Reality, we’re told, exists. That confident noun has carried a great deal of human arrogance. It has underwritten empires, sciences, and sermons. Yet somewhere between Plato’s cave and the latest TED Talk, we forgot to ask a simpler question: for whom does reality exist, and from where is it seen?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this topic.
The parody trading card Perspectival Realism was born from that unease. Its mechanic is simple but cruel: at the beginning of each player’s draw step, they must describe the card they drew. The enchantment persists until two players describe a card in the same way—at which point the spell collapses. In other words, consensus kills magic.
Reality is always viewed from somewhere.
—Johannes Jaeger
That rule is the metaphysics of the thing.
When a player ‘describes’ a card, they are not transmitting information; they are constructing the object in linguistic space. The moment the description leaves their mouth, the card ceases to be a piece of paper and becomes a conceptual artefact.
This mirrors the insight of Kant, Nietzsche, and every post-structuralist who ever smoked too much Gauloises: perception isn’t passive. We don’t see reality; we compose it. Language isn’t a mirror but a paintbrush. The thing we call truth is not correspondence but coherence – a temporary truce among competing metaphors.
So the card’s enchantment dramatises this process. So long as multiple descriptions circulate, reality remains vibrant, contested, alive. Once everyone agrees, it dies the death of certainty.
Philosophers have spent centuries arguing whether the world is fundamentally real (existing independent of mind) or ideal (a projection of mind). Both sides are equally tiresome.
Realism, the old bulldog of metaphysics, insists that perception is transparent: language merely reports what’s already there. Idealism, its mirror adversary, claims the opposite – that what’s “there” is mind-stuff all along. Both mistakes are symmetrical. Realism forgets the perceiver; Idealism forgets the world.
Perspectival realism refuses the divorce. It begins from the premise that world and mind are inseparable aspects of a single event: knowing. Reality is not a photograph waiting to be developed, nor a hallucination spun from neurons – it’s a relation, a constant negotiation between perceiver and perceived.
For years, I called myself a Realist™ with an asterisk. That asterisk meant I understood the observer problem: that every ‘fact’ is perspective-laden. Then I became an Idealist™ with an asterisk, meaning I recognised that mind requires matter to dream upon.
The asterisk is everything. It’s the epistemic scar left by perspectival humility – the tacit admission that every claim about the world carries a hidden coordinate: said from here. It is not relativism, but situatedness. It is the philosophical equivalent of depth perception: without the offset, there’s no vision at all.
The card’s rule – sacrifice Perspectival Realism when two players describe a card identically – captures the tragedy of modernity. The Enlightenment taught us to chase consensus, to flatten multiplicity into “objective truth.” We became addicted to sameness, mistaking agreement for understanding.
But agreement is anaesthetic. When all perspectives converge, the world ceases to shimmer; it becomes measurable, predictable, dead. The card’s enchantment disappears the moment reality is stabilised, precisely as our cultural enchantment did under the fluorescent light of ‘reason’.
To live under perspectival realism is to acknowledge that reality is not what is drawn but what is described. And the description is never neutral. It is always written from somewhere – by someone, with a vocabulary inherited from history and stained by desire.
As long as multiple descriptions coexist, the game remains alive. The moment they fuse into one, the spell is broken, and the world returns to grey.
Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism reminded me that consciousness might be primary, but perspectival realism refuses to pledge allegiance. It keeps both flags tattered but flying. The world exists, yes, but only ever for someone.
The enchantment, then, is not belief but perspective itself. So long as difference endures, the game continues.
When drawn, this card alters perception itself. It reminds the player that truth is not something one finds under a rock but something one polishes into shape. Each metaphor becomes a spell; each keyword a crutch thrown aside.
Those who wield the Constructivist Lens see not “facts,” but fictions so useful they forgot to call them that. Reality wobbles politely to accommodate belief.
“Knowledge is not a copy of reality but a tool for coping with it.” — Richard Rorty
In game terms: Tap to reframe existence as interpretation. Duration: until the next disagreement.
I finished Mattias Desmet’s 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 isn’t that nothing follows; it’s 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 psychologist’s 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 – an epistemic monarchy by another name. His appeal to empathy and connection reads less like philosophy and more like professional self-promotion. The therapist can’t 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 Desmet’s telling, isn’t political or structural but psychological – a patient waiting for insight. I don’t doubt his sincerity, only his scope. It’s what happens when a discipline mistakes its vocabulary for the world.
Desmet’s 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 – no higher synthesis, no therapeutic finale. Where Desmet sees totalitarianism as a collective pathology awaiting treatment, I see it as reason’s own reflection in the mirror: a system trying to cure itself of the only disease it knows, the need to be whole.
Je travaille à la traduction de The Illusion of Light : Thinking After the Enlightenment (L’Illusion de la lumière : Penser après les Lumières) en français, avec l’aide de quelques outils linguistiques et d’un peu d’intelligence artificielle. J’ai bon espoir que le processus sera fructueux. Souhaitez-moi bonne chance.
Je dois beaucoup aux penseurs français, d’hier comme d’aujourd’hui. Traduire ce texte est donc, à ma manière, une forme de reconnaissance. Mon plus grand défi sera de préserver un français à la fois contemporain et fidèle à ma voix – moins prosaïque que poétique. Mes excuses d’avance aux Québécois.
Image: “We have confused the act of exposure with the act of understanding.”
In English, I am translating The Illusion of Light into French, so I’m leaving just this short note today.
I don’t know any other languages well enough to attempt a translation myself, but with a few capable software partners, I’m confident the process will end well.
For the record, I’m using these tools:
Reverso — I’ve used it for years and still find it helpful. It provides plenty of contextual examples, which helps ensure I’ve captured the right nuance.
ChatGPT — My go-to AI partner; it gets the second pass.
Claude — I’m consistently impressed with its suggested amendments. Where Reverso is precise, Claude tends to catch idiomatic usage better.
Mistral — It’s French, after all. What can I say? A bit pedantic, perhaps, but another set of virtual eyes can’t hurt—can they?
Whilst I’m sure these tools could manage other languages, I want to be able to evaluate what they’re doing. In French, even if I don’t know a particular word, I can verify it, and I understand the grammar. With other languages, I’d simply be trusting a black box.
Besides, French culture and philosophy have influenced me so deeply that the least I can do is offer something back. As this translation is an overview of my English-language essays, I hope it provides some in-language context.
I know how difficult translated works can be to read, so if I’m overseeing the process, at least there’s one fewer filter between my thoughts and the reader.
I’ve just added a new entry to my Anti-Enlightenment corpus, bringing the total to seven – not counting my latest book, The Illusion of Light, that summarises the first six essays and places them in context. This got me thinking about what aspects of critique I might be missing. Given this, what else might I be missing?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussion of this topic.
So far, I’ve touched on the areas in the top green table and am considering topics in the bottom red/pink table:
Summary Schema – The Anti-Enlightenment Project – Published Essays
Axis
Core Question
Representative Essay(s)
Epistemic
What counts as “truth”?
Objectivity Is Illusion: An Operating Model of Social and Moral Reasoning
Political
What holds power together?
Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail; Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present
Psychological
Why do subjects crave rule?
Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self; The Will to Be Ruled: Totalitarianism and the Fantasy of Freedom
Anthropological
What makes a “normal” human?
The Myth of Homo Normalis: Archaeology of the Legible Human
Ethical
How to live after disillusionment?
The Discipline of Dis-Integration: Philosophy Without Redemption
Summary Schema – The Anti-Enlightenment Project – Unpublished Essays
Axis
Core Question
Representative Essay
Theological (Metaphysical)
What remains sacred once transcendence is dismantled?
The Absent God: Metaphysics After Meaning
Aesthetic (Affective)
How did beauty become moral instruction?
The Aesthetic Contract: Beauty as Compliance
Ecological (Post-Human)
What happens when the world refuses to remain in the background?
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Axis: Theological / Metaphysical Core Question: What remains sacred once transcendence is dismantled?
Concept: This essay would trace how Enlightenment humanism replaced God with reason, only to inherit theology’s structure without its grace. It might read Spinoza, Kant’s moral law, and modern technocracy as secularised metaphysics – systems that still crave universal order. Goal: To show that disenchantment never erased faith; it simply redirected worship toward cognition and control. Possible subtitle:The Enlightenment’s Unconfessed Religion.
9. The Aesthetic Contract: Beauty as Compliance
Axis: Aesthetic / Affective Core Question: How did beauty become moral instruction?
Concept: From Kant’s Critique of Judgment to algorithmic taste cultures, aesthetic judgment serves social order by rewarding harmony and punishing dissonance. This essay would expose the politics of form – how beauty trains attention and regulates emotion. Goal: To reclaim aesthetics as resistance, not refinement. Possible subtitle:Why Modernity Needed the Beautiful to Behave.
10. The Uncounted World: Ecology and the Non-Human
Axis: Ecological / Post-Human Core Question: What happens when the world refuses to remain background?
Concept: Here you dismantle the Enlightenment split between subject and nature. From Cartesian mechanism to industrial rationalism, the natural world was cast as resource. This essay would align Dis-Integrationism with ecological thinking – care without mastery extended beyond the human. Goal: To reframe ethics as co-maintenance within an unstable biosphere. Possible subtitle:Beyond Stewardship: Ethics Without Anthropos.
11. The Fractured Tongue: Language Against Itself
Axis: Linguistic / Semiotic Core Question: How does language betray the clarity it promises?
Concept: Every Anti-Enlightenment text already hints at this: language as both the instrument and failure of reason. Drawing on Nietzsche, Derrida, Wittgenstein, and modern semiotics, this essay could chart the entropy of meaning – the collapse of reference that makes ideology possible. Goal: To formalise the linguistic fragility underlying every rational system. Possible subtitle:The Grammar of Collapse.
12. The Vanished Commons: Between Isolation and Herd
Axis: Communal / Social Ontology Core Question: Can there be community without conformity?
Concept: This would return to the psychological and political threads of The Will to Be Ruled, seeking a space between atomised autonomy and synchronized obedience. It might turn to Arendt’s notion of the world between us or to indigenous and feminist relational models. Goal: To imagine a non-totalitarian togetherness – a responsive collective rather than a collective response. Possible subtitle:The Ethics of the Incomplete We.
* These essays may never be published, but I share this here as a template to further advance the Anti-Enlightenment project and fill out the corpus.
Modern liberal democracies still chant the Enlightenment’s refrain: the rational, self-governing individual acting freely within a moral order of their own design. It’s an elegant myth – until the self begins to wobble. Under economic, cultural, and epistemic strain, autonomy curdles into exhaustion, and exhaustion seeks relief in obedience.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this essay. Please note that this audio summarises the entire essay. As such, it’s also longer than most, coming in at just under 40 minutes. I listened to it, and I feel it does a good job of capturing the essences of the essay. Of course, you could read the essay more quickly, but the perspective may still be helpful.
This essay traces that drift – from the Enlightenment’s causa sui complex to the ecstatic submission that defines modern authoritarianism. Drawing on Fromm, Arendt, Adorno, Reich, Han, and Desmet, it explores how freedom’s rhetoric becomes its opposite: obedience moralised as virtue, conformity sold as courage, submission experienced as pleasure.
At its core, The Will to Be Ruled argues that totalitarianism is not the antithesis of Enlightenment reason but its fulfilment. Once the world is rendered intelligible only through rational mastery, the subject inevitably longs to be mastered in return.
The closing section introduces Dis-Integrationism – a philosophical stance that declines redemption, preferring maintenance over mastery. It offers no cure, only the small ethic of attentiveness: keeping the field responsive while the light fades.
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.
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.
I’m no fan of labels, yet I accumulate them like a cheap suit:
Post-modern. Post-human. Post-enlightenment.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Apparently, I’m so far post that I may soon loop back into prehistoric.
But what’s with the “post” in post? A prefix with delusions of grandeur. A small syllable that believes it can close an epoch. Surely, it’s a declaration – the end of modernity, humanity, enlightenment. The final curtain, with the stagehands already sweeping the Enlightenment’s broken props into the wings.
Sort of. More like the hangover. Post marks the morning after – when the wine’s gone, the ideals have curdled, and the party’s guests insist they had a marvellous time. It’s not the end of the thing, merely the end of believing in it.
Have we ever been modern? Latour asked the same question, though most readers nodded sagely and went back to their iPhones. Modernity was supposed to liberate us from superstition, hierarchy, and bad lighting. Instead, we built glass temples for algorithms and called it progress. We’re not post-modern – we’re meta-medieval, complete with priestly influencers and algorithmic indulgences.
Can a human even be post-human? Only if the machines have the decency to notice. We talk about transcending biology while still incapable of transcending breakfast. We’ve built silicon mirrors and called them salvation, though what stares back is just the same old hunger – quantised, gamified, and monetised.
And post-enlightenment – how does that work? The light didn’t go out; it just got privatised. The Enlightenment’s sun still shines, but now you need a subscription to bask in it. Its universal reason has become a paywalled blog with “premium truth” for discerning subscribers.
The tragedy of post is that it always flatters the speaker. To call oneself post-anything is to smuggle in the claim of awareness: I have seen through the illusion; I am after it. Yet here I am, a serial offender, parading my prefixes like medals for wars never fought.
So, what other posts might I be missing?
Post-truth. The phrase itself a confession that truth was a brief, ill-fated experiment. We don’t reject it so much as outsource it.
Post-ideological. Usually said by someone with a very loud ideology and a very short memory.
Post-colonial. A hopeful label, but the empires still collect rent—digitally, algorithmically, politely.
Post-gender. Another mirage: we declared the binary dead and then resurrected it for sport.
Post-capitalist. Spoken mostly by people tweeting from iPhones about the end of money.
Post-ironic. The point where irony becomes sincerity again out of sheer exhaustion.
We could go on: post-religious, post-political, post-work, post-language, post-reality. Eventually, we’ll arrive at post-post, the Möbius strip of intellectual despair, where each prefix feeds upon the previous until nothing remains but the syntax of self-importance.
Perhaps it’s time to drop the “post” altogether and admit we’re not beyond anything. We’re stuck within—inside the compost heap of our own unfinished projects. Every “post” is a failed obituary. The modern keeps dying but refuses to stay dead, haunting us through progress reports and TED talks.
Maybe what we need isn’t post but inter: inter-modern, inter-human, inter-light—something that acknowledges the mess of entanglement rather than the fantasy of departure.
Because if there’s one thing the “post” reveals, it’s our pathological need for closure. We crave the comfort of endings, the illusion of progress, the satisfaction of having “moved on.” But culture doesn’t move on; it metastasises. The prefix is just morphine for the modern condition—a linguistic palliative to ease the pain of continuity.
So yes, I’m guilty. I’ve worn these risible labels. I’ve brandished post like a scholar’s rosary, invoking it to ward off the naïveté of belief. Yet beneath the cynicism lies a quiet longing—for an actual after, for the possibility that one day something might really end, leaving room for whatever comes next.
Until then, we keep prefixing the apocalypse, hoping to stay ahead of it by one small syllable.
Now live on the Anti-Enlightenment Project (Zenodo | PhilArchive)
Modernity’s most enduring fiction is that somewhere among us walks the normal human. This essay digs up that fossil. Beginning with Quetelet’s statistical conjuring trick – l’homme moyen, the “average man” –and ending in our age of wearable psychometrics and algorithmic empathy, it traces how normality became both the instrument and the idol of Western governance.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this essay.
Along the way it dissects:
The arithmetic imagination that turned virtue into a mean value.
Psychology™ as the church of the diagnostic self, where confession comes with CPT codes.
Sociological scale as the machinery that converts persons into populations.
Critical theory’s recursion, where resistance becomes a management style.
The palliative society, in which every emotion is tracked, graphed, and monetised.
Audio: ElevenLabs reading of the whole essay (minus citations, references, and metacontent). NB: The audio is split into chapters on Spotify to facilitate reading in sections.
What begins as a genealogy of statistics ends as an autopsy of care. The normal is revealed not as a condition, but as an administrative fantasy – the state’s dream of perfect legibility. Against this, the essay proposes an ethics of variance: a refusal of wholeness, a discipline of remaining unsynthesised.
Lucidity, not liberation, may be the only virtue left to us – knowing the apparatus intimately enough to refuse its metaphysics while continuing to breathe within it.
The Myth of Homo Normalis is the sixth instalment in the Anti-Enlightenment Project, joining Objectivity Is Illusion, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency, and The Discipline of Dis-Integration. Together they map the slow disassembly of reason’s empire – from epistemology to ethics, from governance to affect.
Read or cite: 🔗 Zenodo DOI 🔗 PhilArchive page – forthcoming link
Philosophics 