Another faux Magic: The Gathering trading card. I’ve been busy writing an essay on Tatterhood and wondering if I’ve gone off the edge even further into mental masturbation. I made these cards to share on slow news days, as it were.
[EDIT: Oops: Even wore. I already posted something today. Enjoy the bonus post.]
Every philosopher dreams of a device that reveals ‘truth’. The Constructivist Lens does the opposite. When you tap it, the world doesn’t come into focus – it multiplies. Each pane shows the same thing differently, reminding us that knowing is always a form of making – seeing as building.
In The Discipline of Dis-Integration, I wrote that philosophy’s task is ‘to remain within what persists … to study the tension in the threads rather than weave a new pattern’. The Lens embodies that ethic. It is not an instrument of discovery but of disclosure: a way to notice the scaffolding of perception without mistaking it for bedrock.
Flavour text: “Knowledge is not a copy of reality but a tool for coping with it.” — Richard Rorty
Where Enlightenment optics promised clarity, the Lens trades in parallax. It insists that perspective is not a flaw but the condition of vision itself. Each player who peers through it – artist, scientist, moralist – constructs a different coherence, none final. The card’s rule text captures this tension: replace any keyword on a permanent with a metaphor of your choice until end of turn. Reality bends, language shifts, yet the game continues.
In the Dis-Integration set, the Lens sits alongside Perspectival Realism and Language Game (not yet shared), forming the Blue triad of epistemic doubt. Together they dramatise what the essay calls ‘the hyphen as hinge’: the small pause between integration and its undoing. The Constructivist Lens, then, is not a tool for clearer sight but a reminder that every act of seeing is already an act of construction.
The Travelogue of a Recovering Enlightenment Subject
I’m asked endlessly – usually by people who still believe TED talks are a form of knowledge production – ‘Why are you so negative? Why must you tear things down if you’ve no intention of replacing them?’
It’s adorable, really. Like watching a toddler demand that gravity apologise.
They’ve been trained for years in the managerial catechism:
‘Don’t bring me problems; bring me solutions.‘
As if the world were some badly-run workshop in need of a fresh coat of agile methodology.
They might as well say, ‘Don’t tell me I can’t win at Lotto; give me money’.
I, too, would enjoy the spare universe. Or the winning Lotto ticket. And yes, one day I might even buy one. Until then, I’ve embraced the only adult philosophy left: Dis-Integrationism – the fine art of taking things apart without pretending they can be reassembled into anything coherent.
A Little History
My suspicion began early. Secondary school. All those civic fairytales whispered as if they were geology.
The ‘reasonable person’? Bollox. ‘Jury of one’s peers’? What are peers? Whose peers? I have no peers. ‘Impartial judges’? Please. Even as a teenager, I could see those robed magicians palming cards like bored street performers. Everyone else nodded along, grateful for the spectacle. I stared, wondering how the other children hadn’t noticed the emperor’s bare arse.
Later, I watched adults talk past each other with a fluency bordering on performance art. Not disagreement – different universes, cosmetically aligned by grammar.
A Federal mediator once tried to teach me that common ground could be manufactured. Not by clarifying meaning, mind you – that would have required honesty – but by rhetorical pressure and a touch of Jedi mind-trickery. Negotiation was simply controlled hallucination.
University communications classes offered temporary distraction with denotation and connotation, a little semantic drift, the illusion that language might be domesticated with enough theory. Charming. Almost convincing.
Then Gödel and Arrow arrived like two polite assassins and quietly removed the floorboards.
And then – happily, inevitably – Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard. I’d already danced with Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus. I’d ingested the Western canon like every obedient young acolyte: Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire. Americans force-feed their citizenry Jefferson and Franklin as moral fibre, as if the republic might otherwise suffer constipation.
It never gelled. Too much myth, too much marketing. The Enlightenment had the energy of a regime insisting on its own benevolence while confiscating your torch. To call oneself ‘enlightened’ should have raised suspicion – but no, the branding stuck.
Whenever les garçons dared tug at the curtain, we were assured they simply didn’t ‘understand’, or worse, they ‘hated civilisation’.
Image: “I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids.”
Then Came the Internet
The digital age didn’t usher in clarity — it unmasked the whole pantomime. Like Neo seeing the Matrix code or Roddy Piper slipping on the sunglasses in They Live, one suddenly perceives the circuitry: meaning as glitch, discourse as scaffolding, truth as a shabby stage-set blinking under fluorescent tubes.
Our civilisation speaks in metaphors it mistakes for mechanisms. The Enlightenment gave us the fantasy that language might behave, that concepts were furniture rather than fog. Musicians and artists always knew better. We swim in metaphor; we never expected words to bear weight. But philosophers kept pretending communication was a conveyor belt conveying ‘meaning units’ from A to B.
By 2018, the cracks were gaping. I began taking the notes that would metastasise into A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis – an attempt to map the hollow spaces between our words, the fractures we keep wallpapering with reason.
Half a decade later, the work is ready. Not to save anything – nothing here merits salvation – but to name the debris honestly.
If that sounds negative, good. Someone has to switch off the Enlightenment’s flickering lightbulb before it burns the whole house down.
Where This Road Actually Leads
People imagine negativity is a posture – a sort of philosophical eyeliner, worn for effect. But dismantling the world’s conceptual furniture isn’t a hobby; it’s the only reasonable response once you’ve noticed the screws aren’t actually attached to anything.
The Enlightenment promised us a palace. Step inside and you discover it’s built out of IKEA flatpacks held together with wishful thinking and a prayer to Kant.
Once you’ve seen that, you can’t go back to pretending the furniture is sturdy.
You stop sitting.
You start tapping the beams.
You catalogue the wobble.
This is where Dis–Integrationism enters – not as a manifesto, but as the practice of refusing to live inside collapsing architecture out of sheer politeness. Negativity is simply the weather report.
The Lie We Keep Telling Ourselves
We cling to the fantasy that if we critique something long enough, a solution will crystallise out of the void, like enlightenment through sheer irritation. It’s the Protestant work ethic meets metaphysics: salvation through sufficient grumbling.
But critique is not alchemy. It unmakes. It refuses. It loosens the bolts we pretended were load-bearing.
Once you stop demanding that thought be constructive, you can finally see the world as it is: improvised, rhetorical, and permanently under renovation by people who don’t read the instructions.
The Enlightenment’s heirs keep insisting there must be a blueprint. There isn’t. There never was. We’ve merely been tracing the silhouettes of scaffolding, calling it a cathedral.
And Yet – Here We Still Are
The online age (God help us all) didn’t deepen the crisis; it merely turned the lights on. What Enlightenment rationality hid beneath a tasteful layer of neoclassical varnish, the internet sprayed with fluorescent graffiti.
Turns out, when seven billion people speak at once, meaning doesn’t ’emerge’; it buckles. Our systems weren’t built for this volume of contradiction. Our language wasn’t built for this density of metaphor. Our myths weren’t built for this much empirical evidence against them.
And yet here we are, still demanding coherence from a medium held together by emojis and trauma. If you laugh, it’s only to stop crying. If you critique, it’s only because someone has to keep the fire marshal informed.
The Only Honest Next Step
Having traced the cracks, you’re now in the foyer of the real argument – the one hanging like a neon sign over your entire Anti-Enlightenment project:
We don’t need to rebuild the house. We need to stop pretending it was ever architecture.
Language is insufficient. Agency is a fiction. Objectivity is an etiquette ritual. Democracy is a séance. Progress is a hallucination with better marketing. And yet – life continues. People wake, work, argue, aspire, despair.
Dis-Integrationism isn’t about nihilism; it’s about maintenance. Not repairing the myth, but tending the human who must live among its debris. Not constructing new temples, but learning to see in the half-light once the old gods have gone.
The travelogue becomes a guidebook: Welcome to the ruins. Mind the uneven floor. Here is how we walk without pretending the path is paved.
The Fetish for Solutions
Here is the final indignity of the age: the demand that every critique come bundled with a solution, like some moral warranty card. As if naming the rot weren’t labour enough. As if truth required a customer-service plan.
‘Where is your alternative?’ they ask, clutching Enlightenment logic the way a drowning man clutches a shopping receipt.
But solutions are the real tyranny. They arrive bearing the smile of reason and the posture of progress, and behind both sits the same old imperial instinct: replace ambiguity with order; replace lived complexity with a diagram. A solution is merely a problem wearing a fresh coat of confidence.
Worse, a solution presumes the system is sound, merely in need of adjustment. It imagines the structure holds. It imagines the furniture can be rearranged without collapsing into splinters, and the memory of Kant.
Solutions promise inevitability. They promise teleology. They promise that the mess can be disinfected if only one applies the correct solvent. This is theology masquerading as engineering.
The Violence of the Answer
A solution is a closure – a metaphysical brute force. It slams the window shut so no further interpretation can slip in through the draft. It stabilises the world by amputating everything that wriggles. Answers are how systems defend themselves. They’re the intellectual equivalent of riot police: clean uniforms, straight lines, zero tolerance for nuance.
This is why the world keeps mistaking refusal for chaos. Refusal isn’t chaos. It’s hygiene. It is the simple act of not adding more furniture to a house already bending under its own delusions. When you decline to provide a solution, you aren’t abandoning the world. You’re declining to participate in its coercive optimism.
And So the Travelogue Ends Where It Must
Not in triumph or a bluepirnt, but in composure – the only posture left after the Enlightenment’s glare has dimmed. Negativity isn’t sabotage; it’s sobriety. Dis-Integrationism isn’t cynicism; it’s the refusal to replace one failing mythology with another wearing vegan leather.
A world obsessed with solutions cannot recognise maintenance as wisdom. It can’t tolerate ambiguity without reaching for a hammer. It can’t breathe unless someone somewhere is building a ladder to a future that never arrives.
So no – I won’t provide solutions. I won’t participate in the fantasy that the human condition can be patched with conceptual duct tape. I will not gift the Enlightenment a eulogy that surrenders to its grammar.
What I offer is far smaller and far more honest: Attention. Description. Steady hands in a collapsing house. And the simple dignity of refusing to lie about the architecture.
Some milestones arrive quietly; others tap you on the shoulder and whisper, “Well? Are you going to gloat, or shall I?”
So here we are. The Anti-Enlightenment corpus – yes, that unruly battalion of essays insisting that the Enlightenment was less a dawn and more a flash-bang grenade into the human psyche – is about to pass 1,000 downloads across Zenodo and PhilArchive. By the time you read this, the counter will likely have ticked over, as if to confirm that a non-institutionally affiliated heretic can, in fact, find readers willing to squint at philosophy written in the half-light.
I should say something gracious. Something humble. Something befitting a scholar who’s spent far too much time dismantling the sacred furniture of modernity.
Video: Midjourney woman sketch for no apparent reason (no sound)
And hooray for you, the masochists who keep downloading this stuff.
Whether it’s Objectivity Is Illusion, which politely reminds you that truth is just a social ritual in a lab coat, or Against Agency, where we pretend the autonomous self was ever more than Enlightenment-era fan fiction, or The Will to Be Ruled, in which we accept that most people would rather outsource their freedom to the nearest charismatic authoritarian – each piece contributes to the great unmasking of reason’s beloved myths.
If you’ve made your way through The Illusion of Light (cloth or paperback – the cloth is for people who enjoy prestige bindings with their epistemic despair – or on Kindle for the ones who have already surrendered), you’ve already walked the whole architecture: rooms filled with rational ghosts, temporal anxieties, moral fictions, and the faint smell of Enlightenment wiring beginning to smoulder.
And still you download. Saints, the lot of you.
A thousand reads does not confer legitimacy – nothing so vulgar – but it does confirm that the cracks in the Enlightenment’s porcelain façade are visible from more than one angle. It suggests that others, too, are learning to see in the dark, to navigate by afterglow rather than glare.
So: thank you.
For the curiosity.
For the tolerance of structural pessimism.
For indulging a scholar who insists on disassembling Western metaphysics one lovingly overlong sentence at a time.
Here’s to the next thousand. And the thousand after that. And to the collective, slow, post-Enlightenment work of maintenance in the half-light.
The Anti-Enlightenment lives on your hard drives now.
There’s no taking it back.
Written by Bry Willis and ChatGPT because Bry is off to Fiji, celebrating (or something like that.
A LinkedIn colleague posts this. I didn’t want to rain on his parade there – we’ve got an interesting binary intellectual relationship – we either adamantly agree or vehemently disagree. This reflects the latter. The title is revelatory – the all-caps, his:
A good society requires more than virtuous individuals and fair institutions: it requires a mediating moral principle capable of binding persons, communities, and structures into a shared project of human flourishing.
Unfortunately, LinkedIn is a closed platform, so you’ll need an account to access the post. Anyway…
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
I can remember when I emerged from this mindset – or at least consciously reflected on it and declined the invitation.
Video clip: Because I felt like it. (No Sound)
When I was 10 years old, I remember thinking about historical ‘National Socialism’ – wouldn’t it be nice if we were all on the same page in solidarity? Then I realised that I’d have to be on their page; they wouldn’t be on mine.
Then, I realised that ‘solidarity’ isn’t a warm circle of clasped hands under a rainbow; rather, it’s a demand to harmonise one’s interior life with someone else’s tuning fork. So-called unity is almost always a euphemism for ideological choreography, and one doesn’t get to pick the routine.
Children are sold the Sesame Street version of solidarity, where everyone shares crayons and sings about common purpose. Cue the Beach Boys: Wouldn’t It Be Nice?
Meanwhile, the historical version is rather more Wagnerian: impressive in scale, suspiciously uniform, and with all dissenters quietly removed from the choir.
My childhood self intuited precisely what my adult writing has since anatomised:
Solidarity is only lovely when you imagine everyone else will move toward you; it curdles the moment you realise the gravitational pull goes the other way.
‘We’re all on the same page’ always becomes ‘Get on the page we’ve selected for you’ – or elected against your vote. The fantasy of we dissolves into the machinery of they.
This isn’t a bug in the system; that is the system. Solidarity requires a centre, and once there’s a centre, someone else gets to define its radius. Even the gentle, ethical, cotton-wool versions still rely on boundary enforcement: who belongs in the shared project, who must adjust their cadence, who is politely removed for ‘disrupting the collective good’. I’m more often apt to be that person than not. History merely illustrates the principle at scale; the mechanism is universal.
Anyway, this is how my brain works, and how I think how I do, and write what I write. As much as I witter on about episodic selves, this remains a prevalent continuity.
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.
It’s remarkable what surfaces when one lingers deliberately in a given space. In this case, Kazimierz Dąbrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration has drifted into view.
As often happens, we find agreement in the opening movement and parts of the second, but part company in Act III. That’s where Dis-Integration begins. Like many before and after him, Dąbrowski tries to reconstruct atop a compromised foundation. This can only fail. The scaffolding may hold for a time, but reality has a way of reminding us it was never load-bearing. Eventually, the quake comes, and the structure folds in on itself.
Japan, of course, knows this. Earthquakes are not hypothetical there; they are assumed. Traditional builders worked with the instability, designing dwellings that could flex, even collapse, without killing their inhabitants. James Clavell’s Shōgun is not scripture, but it captures the principle: impermanence as an architectural ethic.
Image: Shirakawa-go by Colette English
Then there’s kintsugi – the gold-laced repair of broken pottery. The break is not erased but acknowledged, even exalted. The resulting vessel bears the evidence of its fracture, made stronger not by restoration to an imagined wholeness but by visible accommodation of its failure.
Image: 金継ぎ, [kʲint͡sɯɡʲi], lit. ’golden joinery‘
If Dąbrowski had stopped there – if his ‘positive disintegration’ had remained a celebration of fracture rather than a prelude to rebuilding – we might have been entirely aligned.
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.
Philosophics 