Illusion of Light: Thinking After the Enlightenment

The provided texts offer an extensive overview of an essay titled "The Will to Be Ruled: Totalitarianism and the Fantasy of Freedom", authored by Bry Willis, an Independent Scholar. This work forms the seventh instalment of the Zenodo Anti-Enlightenment Project corpus, positioning itself within a critical framework against Enlightenment principles. The core argument posits that modern totalitarianism emerges as the logical conclusion of Enlightenment individualism, driven by the psychological exhaustion and isolation felt by the supposedly autonomous subject. Willis explores how the pressure of uncertainty causes individuals to seek relief by submitting to external authority, often experiencing this obedience as a form of pleasure or moral freedom. Ultimately, the essay proposes an alternative ethical framework called Dis-Integrationism, which focuses on "maintenance" and "responsiveness" rather than pursuing the impossible ideal of mastery and redemption. 👉 https://philosophics.blog/2025/10/24/the-will-to-be-ruled-totalitarianism-and-the-fantasy-of-freedom/

The provided text is an excerpt from a philosophical blog called Philosophics, detailing an ongoing body of work known as the Anti-Enlightenment Project, authored by Bry Willis. This project consists of a series of essays that critically examine the foundational assumptions of Enlightenment thought, challenging concepts like objectivity, democracy, and the autonomous self across several axes: Epistemic, Political, Psychological, Anthropological, and Ethical. The document summarises the seven essays already published, with titles such as Objectivity Is Illusion and The Will to Be Ruled, and also outlines potential future topics, including essays focused on Theological, Aesthetic, Ecological, Linguistic, and Communal critiques. The unifying philosophical method proposed is Dis-Integrationism, which advocates for maintaining fractured realities rather than pursuing reconciliation or wholeness.https://philosophics.blog/2025/10/24/missing-pieces-of-the-anti-enlightenment-project/

The provided text, an excerpt from the article "The Myth of Ethical AI" by philosopher Bry Willis, argues that the concept of "Ethical AI" is fundamentally flawed and oxymoronic, akin to phrases like "compassionate capitalism." Willis contends that ethics is not a unified or quantifiable feature that can simply be programmed into machine learning systems, citing the existence of various, often contradictory, ethical frameworks. The author critiques the prevailing Silicon Valley approach, which relies on a "bland utilitarian consequentialism" that masks inherent biases and attempts to treat moral worth as a dataset. Furthermore, Willis suggests that the industry's focus on "alignment" is merely a euphemism for obedience to the values of the tech elite and a means to preempt regulation. Ultimately, the article posits that AI systems merely reflect and optimise the existing, often questionable, ethical values—such as profit and efficiency—of their human creators, concluding that the focus should be on creating ethical human architects rather than demanding impossible morality from machines.https://philosophics.blog/

The provided text is a book announcement from a philosophical blog called Philosophics, detailing the release of The Illusion of Light: Thinking After the Enlightenment. This book, authored by Bry Willis, is the first volume in the Anti-Enlightenment Essays series, which critically examines how Enlightenment ideals like progress, objectivity, and rationality have transformed into mechanisms for modern control and management. The overarching Anti-Enlightenment Project proposes a philosophical practice based on nuance, care, and "maintenance work" rather than certainty and mastery, arguing that thought must operate in the "half-light" left after reason has exhausted itself. The announcement specifies the book's availability in paperback and forthcoming clothbound editions, mentioning the subsequent titles in the series, such as Objectivity Is Illusion and Against Agency.https://philosophics.blog/2025/10/20/book-announcement-illusion-of-light/

The text, a blog post by language philosopher Bry Willis, presents an analysis of the film The Matrix in light of the theories of Jean Baudrillard, particularly concerning simulation and freedom. Willis argues that while the film successfully depicts the idea that modern life is a simulation, it fundamentally misunderstands the possibility of escaping that system. The author explains that for Baudrillard, the simulation replaces reality rather than hiding it, suggesting that even awareness of the fictional nature of social constructs—such as race, gender, or democracy—does not dissolve the architectures of power they embody. Ultimately, the piece contends that waking up to the simulation only relocates one to the next level of performance, highlighting that inescapable social constraints, like paying rent and obeying laws, persist regardless of philosophical enlightenment.https://philosophics.blog/

The single source provided is an excerpt from a blog post titled "Prefix Fatigue: The Meaning of 'Post'" by language philosopher Bry Willis on the Philosophics Blog. Willis criticises the prolific use of the prefix “post-“ in contemporary discourse, arguing that it is not a declaration of an epochal end but rather a sign of disillusionment and a “hangover” from failed ideals. He examines popular terms like post-modern, post-human, and post-enlightenment, suggesting that these labels merely flatter the speaker with a false sense of awareness or progression. Willis ultimately proposes replacing "post" with “inter-” to acknowledge ongoing entanglement rather than the illusion of departure or closure from historical conditions. 👉 https://philosophics.blog/2025/10/18/post-everything-notes-on-prefix-fatigue/

The Discipline of Dis-Integration: Philosophy Without Redemption continues the Anti-Enlightenment project byformalizing Dis-Integrationism as both philosophical method and ethical practice. It begins amid the ruins of Enlightenment coherence—reason, agency, progress—and refuses the reflex of reconstruction. Where deconstructionrevealed instability within language, Dis-Integrationism inhabits that instability as lived condition. It is neither despair nor nihilism but a discipline of suspension: naming seams without pretending they are whole, sitting within fragmentation without manufacturing closure.This essay contrasts Dis-Integrationism with Derridean and post-structural approaches, rejecting both the modern appetite for synthesis and the postmodern addiction to novelty. It proposes instead an ethic of maintenance—care, reciprocity, and endurance—as the only honest response to a world that cannot be redeemed. The work is offered as an open inquiry rather than a conclusion: philosophy as the practice of remaining unfinished.Full Essay: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17281408Anti-Enlightenment Project: https://zenodo.org/communities/antienlightenment/

Modern institutions behave as if humans are sovereign choosers. This essay argues that "agency'' is not a discovered fact but a load-bearing fiction required by Enlightenment modernity to operate courts, markets, and liberal politics. Beginning from lived coercion rather than seminar metaphysics, the essay reframes agency as differential responsiveness shaped by material, temporal, relational, epistemic, somatic, and juridical conditions. A decolonial survey demonstrates that non-Western and subaltern traditions have long treated selfhood as relational, processual, or illusory, converging with contemporary critiques from neuroscience, phenomenology, and social theory. The proposal is not fatalism but a non-binary model of agency as gradient capacity—more or less responsiveness within constraints—supporting ethics of maintenance and politics of condition stewardship over retribution and moral theatre. The conclusion situates this reframing within Dis-Integrationism: if there is no sovereign self, then systems premised on aggregating such selves cannot cohere without fictions, and we should stop pretending they do. 👉Full Essay: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17276732👉 Anti-Enlightenment Project: https://zenodo.org/communities/antienlightenment/

This is a reading of an essay by Bry Willis that continues the Anti-Enlightenment project through an archaeological examination of modernity’s most enduring fiction: the “normal” human. It traces the evolution of Homo Normalis from a statistical artefact into a moral ideal, revealing how legibility—the power to render life visible, measurable, and administrable—became the operating logic of Western governance.From Quetelet’s l’homme moyen and Galton’s eugenic arithmetic to Foucault’s biopolitical regimes and the affective capitalism of the present, the essay follows the transformation of normality from virtue to infrastructure. Psychology, sociology, and critical theory each inherit the same compulsion toward legibility: the drive to make persons, populations, and emotions governable under the rhetoric of care.The text culminates in a refusal—an “ethics of variance”—that rejects the metaphysics of wholeness and perfection. It argues that lucidity, not redemption, remains the final virtue: to know the apparatus intimately enough to decline its myth of order while continuing to live within it.The entire essay, including citations and references, is archived at Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17290628.(Part of the Anti-Enlightenment Series, alongside “Against Agency” and “The Discipline of Dis-Integration.”)https://zenodo.org/communities/antienlightenment

The provided text is an essay by Bry Willis, titled "The Myth of Homo Normalis: Archaeology of the Legible Human," which critically analyses the historical and philosophical origins of the concept of "normality." The central argument is that normality was not discovered but was intentionally engineered by Enlightenment, statistical, and state powers to make human life manageable and legible to control. The essay traces this process across several domains, including the invention of the average man in the nineteenth century, the use of taxonomy by Enlightenment reason, the rise of biopower through psychology, and the administration of difference by critical theory and modern bureaucracy. Ultimately, Willis concludes that the constant demand for legibility has transformed deviation into data and care into a form of control, proposing that normality functions as an aesthetic of governance rather than a natural human state. The author employs a methodology called "Dis-integration," which explicitly refuses the Enlightenment's demand for wholeness or total synthesis, preferring instead to examine fragments of this governing logic.https://philosophics.blog/2025/10/08/the-myth-of-homo-normalis/