The Illusion of Light

The Enlightenment called itself an awakening. Bry Willis argues it was the longest dream in history.

In this erudite yet accessible meditation, philosopher Bry Willis traces how the Enlightenment's promise of illumination became the organizing myth of modernity - the belief that light reveals, that progress redeems, that reason saves. The Illusion of Light reframes that heritage as both brilliance and blindness: a radiance that made the world visible by erasing its shadows.

Drawing on history, philosophy, and cultural critique, Willis guides readers through six "rooms" of reason - from objectivity and democracy to progress, agency, normality, and redemption - showing how each was built on foundations that cannot hold. What emerges is not cynicism but composure: a practice of thinking in the half-light, where clarity and humility coexist.

This volume completes the Anti-Enlightenment Project, gathering and reinterpreting the ideas developed across Willis's earlier essays (Objectivity Is Illusion, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency, The Myth of Homo Normalis, and The Discipline of Dis-Integration). Written for the erudite general reader, The Illusion of Light invites a different kind of lucidity - one that no longer mistakes brightness for truth.