Philosophers adore two things: inventing problems and then fainting when someone solves them. For decades, we’ve been treated to the realism–idealism tug-of-war, that noble pantomime in which two exhausted metaphysical camps clutch the same conceptual teddy bear and insist the other stole it first. It’s almost touching.
Enter Nexal Ontology, my previous attempt at bailing water out of this sinking ship. It fought bravely, but as soon as anyone spotted even a faint resemblance to Whitehead, the poor thing collapsed under the weight of process-cosmology PTSD. One throwaway comment about ‘actual occasions’, and Nexal was done. Dead on arrival. A philosophical mayfly.
But MEOW* – The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World – did not die. It shrugged off the Whitehead comparison with the indifference of a cat presented with a salad. MEOW survived the metaphysical death match because its commitments are simply too lean, too stripped-back, too structurally minimal for speculative cosmology to get its claws into. No prehensions. No eternal objects. No divine lure. Just encounter, mediation, constraint, and the quiet dignity of not pretending to describe the architecture of the universe.
And that’s why MEOW stands. It outlived Nexal not by being grander, but by being harder to kill.
Image: The Four Mediation Layers – Biological, Cognitive, Conceptual, Cultural – structuring every encounter we mistake for ‘direct’.
This little illustration gives the flavour: • T0 Biological mediation – the body’s refusal to be neutral. • T1 Cognitive mediation – the brain, doing predictive improv. • T2 Linguistic–conceptual – words pretending they’re objective. • T3 Cultural–normative – the inheritance of everyone else’s mistakes.
The essay argues that what we call ‘mind’ and ‘world’ are just abstractions we extract after the encounter, not the metaphysical scaffolding that produces it. Once you begin with the encounter-event itself – already mediated, already structured, already resistive – the mind–world binary looks about as sophisticated as a puppet show.
What the essay actually does
The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World is the first framework I’ve written that genuinely sheds the Enlightenment scaffolding rather than rebuking it. MEOW shows:
Mediation isn’t an epistemic flaw; it’s the only way reality appears.
Constraint isn’t evidence of a noumenal backstage; it’s built into the encounter.
Objectivity is just stability across mediation, not a mystical view-from-nowhere.
‘Mind’ and ‘world’ are names for recurring patterns, not metaphysical hotels.
And – importantly – MEOW does all of this without drifting into Whiteheadian cosmological fan-fiction.
If you prefer a soft landing and the sound of a passable human voice explaining why metaphysics keeps tripping over its shoelaces, a NotebookLM discussion is here:
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this essay.
MEOW is the survivor because it does the one thing philosophy is terrible at: it refuses to pretend. No substances, no noumena, no grand metaphysical machinery—just a clean, relational architecture that mirrors how we actually encounter the world.
And frankly, that’s quite enough ontology for one lifetime.
* To be perfectly honest, I originally fled from Michela Massimi’s Perspectival Realism in search of a cleaner terminological habitat. I wanted to avoid the inevitable, dreary academic cross-pollination: the wretched fate of being forever shelved beside a project I have no quarrel with but absolutely no desire to be mistaken for. My proposed replacement, Nexal Ontology, looked promising until I realised it had wandered, by sheer lexical accident, into Whitehead’s garden – an unintentional trespass for which I refused to stick around to apologise. I could already hear the process-metaphysics crowd sharpening their teeth.
Early evasive action was required.
I preferred nexal to medial, but the terminology had already been colonised, and I am nothing if not territorial. Mediated Ontology would have staked its claim well enough, but something was missing – something active, lived, structural. Enter the Encounter.
And once the acronym MEO appeared on the page, I was undone. A philosopher is only human, and the gravitational pull toward MEOW was irresistible. What, then, could honour the W with appropriate pomp? The World, naturally. Thus was born The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World.
Pretentious? Yes. Obnoxious? Also yes.
And so it remains—purring contentedly in its absurdity.
This is the proof copy of The Illusion of Light. I reviewed it, approved it, and signalled ‘good to go’. This is being printed and distributed through KDP. I’ve used them before. They’ve been reliable.
EDIT: On the upside, I’ve been notified that the hardback version is available, but it doesn’t appear to be available in France and Canada, two target regions. Hopefully, it becomes available outside of the U.S. soon.
EDIT : J’ai été informé que la version reliée est désormais disponible. Malheureusement, elle ne semble pas encore l’être en France ni au Canada, les deux régions que je visais en priorité. Espérons qu’elle franchira bientôt les frontières du système et sera distribuée ailleurs qu’aux États-Unis.
International marketplaces. It takes 3-5 business days for your hardcover to show as in stock.
Until now.
My approval triggered a workflow. I know workflows. I used to design them. I also know how dumb they can be.
KDP’s process flagged an error: the text on the spine might not be on the spine. ‘Might’. Theoretically. It could be offset, cut off, or printed on a fold. I understand their reasoning – high-speed printers, mechanical variance, and return risk. I also understand statistics, and a single observation doesn’t make a trend. But anyone with eyes can see at least a couple of millimetres of clearance at the top and bottom. This isn’t a case of ‘maybe’. It’s fine.
What fascinates me here is the ritual of compliance. Once a process is codified, it becomes self-justifying. The rule exists; therefore, it must be obeyed. There is no appeal to reason – only to the flowchart.
In the 1980s, when I was an audio engineer recording to two-inch magnetic tape, some of us liked to record hot, pushing the levels just past the recommended limits. You learned to ride the edge, to court distortion without collapse. That’s how I designed the spine text. Within tolerance. With headroom.
The problem is that modern systems don’t tolerate edges. There’s no “override” button for informed judgment. My remediation path is to shrink the type by half a point, resubmit, and pretend the machine was right.
What’s absurd is the timing. The same system that generated the proof approved this layout days ago. An automated OCR scan could have caught this phantom error earlier. Instead, the machine waits until the human signs off, then throws a flag so the process can justify its existence.
KDP is still faster and saner than IngramSpark. But this is capitalism distilled: survival by being marginally less incompetent than your competitor. Optimisation, not in the sense of best possible, but of barely better than worst acceptable.
The lesson, as always, is that processes begin as aids and end as prisons. The workflow, like the Enlightenment, believes itself rational. But the longer it runs, the less it serves the human at the console and the more it worships its own perfection.
Want to talk about meta? This underscores the contents of the book itself. What the Enlightenment once called Reason, modernity now calls Process. Both pretend to neutral objectivity while enshrining obedience as virtue. The bureaucracy of light has become digital – its catechism written in checkboxes, its priests replaced by automated validators. Every workflow promises fairness; each only codifies submission. The real danger isn’t that machines will replace judgment, but that we will stop noticing when they already have.
The Story Continues: Behind the Scenes
Image: Screenshot of Illustrator layout
I’ve reduced the font size on the spine from 14 points to 13.5. It still technically bleeds over a guideline. I hope I am not forced to reduce it to 13. A reason for text on the spine is to make it visible. Hopefully, the black-and-white vertical separation will help in this regard. Fingers crossed.
Photo : épreuves de validation – éditions anglaise et française.
Pourquoi cette double parution ?
Parce que ce livre appartient autant à la tradition française qu’à la langue anglaise. Ses sources – Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Barthes, Lyotard, Merleau-Ponty – m’ont appris à penser autrement : à défaire la clarté pour retrouver la nuance. Traduire ce texte, ce n’était pas seulement le rendre lisible ; c’était le rendre à son sol natal.
L’ouvrage examine ce que les Lumières ont laissé derrière elles : un monde ébloui par sa propre clarté. Il retrace comment le culte moderne de la raison a transformé la radiance en surveillance, la transparence en extraction, la clarté en contrôle. Dans cette version française, j’ai cherché à restituer non seulement les idées, mais le rythme — cette respiration lente, entre lumière et ombre, où la pensée apprend à voir autrement.
L’Illusion de la lumière clôt un chapitre du projet Après les Lumières avec une proposition simple : le monde n’a pas besoin d’être sauvé ; il a besoin d’être entretenu.
📖 L’Illusion de la lumière – bientôt disponible en version brochée et reliée. 📖 The Illusion of Light – déjà publié par Philosophics Press.
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.
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 