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?
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Summary Schema – The Anti-Enlightenment Project – Unpublished Essays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? | The Uncounted World: Ecology and the Non-Human |
| Linguistic (Semiotic) | How does language betray the clarity it promises? | The Fractured Tongue: Language Against Itself |
| Communal (Social Ontology) | Can there be community without conformity? | The Vanished Commons: Between Isolation and Herd |
Below is a summary of the essays already published. These are drawn verbatim from the Anti-Enlightenment Project page.
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.
→ Read on Zenodo
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.
→ Read on Zenodo
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.
→ Read on Zenodo
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.
→ Read on Zenodo
Below are possible future topics for this series*
8. The Absent God: Metaphysics After Meaning
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.
Philosophics 