Contextual Quote

"In the 1990s he became focused on the notions of proportionality. Most of us did not understand quite what he meant back then. We would walk away from his erudite lectures on the history of proportionality in music and art and shake our heads, wondering, what did he mean? Now, I think he meant the following: What is the appropriate proportion of the use of energy, technology, institutions for a convivial society? How do we know when we have gone too far in our practices of knowledge, rituals, and culture; how can we recognize as a culture when they become threatening rather than liberating? How do we know when we are using too much carbon and make the necessary adjustments to our actions? How do we recognize this and move together on containing the damage? It was another way to expand his earlier idea of “thresholds”."

- Vijaya Rettakudi Nagarajan [1]

Bio

Vijaya Rettakudi Nagarajan:

"Ivan Illich (1926-2002) was born in Vienna, Austria to a Catholic father from the Dalmatian Islands in Croatia and a Jewish mother who came from a converted Catholic family, originally from Germany. In the spring of 1984, he related to me the terrors he felt when Nazism arose and took over his worlds in Vienna when he was a teenager from the 1930s to the early 1940s.2He described in an anguished voice, decades after it had happened, the force with which he was humiliated in elementary and middle school because of his Jewishness and the terrors of that time. As a teenager, in the early 1940s, during the height of the takeover of Austria by Germany, he helped his family---his mother and his younger twin brothers---escape Vienna, Austria to Florence, Italy.Once he finished his high school in Florence, he trained intensively at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in theology and felt the intellectual force of another Catholic priest, Jacques Maritain. Illich subsequently received a Ph.D. in history at the University of Salzburg after WWII. Throughout Illich’s life, he actively linked the worlds of the spirit and the material in unique and distinguished ways."

(https://journals.psu.edu/illichstudies/article/view/62221/61627)

2. Brian C. Anderson:

"Illich was born in 1926 in Vienna, his father a Croatian diplomat and civil engineer from a wealthy Catholic family, his mother a German-Jewish convert to Christianity. As a child, he picked up languages with ease: German, French, English, Italian, and Spanish rolled off his tongue. He also recognized, by eleven, that he possessed a charismatic influence over others, which he would need to guard against lest it lead him down dark paths. In 1942, Illich’s family fled the Nazis and settled in Florence. He would never find a steady home.

After World War II, Illich attended the University of Florence, earned a PhD in medieval history at the University of Salzburg in Austria with a dissertation on Arnold Toynbee’s philosophy of history, and entered the Jesuit Gregorian University in Rome to begin preparations for the priesthood. In the Eternal City, Illich read St. Thomas under the supervision of Jacques Maritain, who was then the French ambassador to the Vatican. The encounter with Aquinas built the “architecture,” Illich said, that let him travel among intellectual eras and different cultures “without getting dispersed.” Yet Illich never considered himself a Thomist. Aquinas, he said, is “like a delicate vase, something glorious, but apt to be broken when it is moved out of its time.”

Ordained in early 1951, prodigiously intelligent, Illich seemed to his higher ups a likely “prince of the Church.” But he wanted out of Rome, so that autumn he took a steamship to New York City and became an assistant parish priest at the Church of the Incarnation in Washington Heights, serving a barrio of Puerto Rican newcomers. Illich loved the communal Catholicism of these first-generation immigrants and felt that their faith could enlarge the horizons of American Christianity; his parishioners loved him in turn, recognizing his deep commitment, to them and to the Catholic Church. The relationship between the gospel and the cultures it encounters always fascinated Illich. The Church, he believed, must be open to new experiences, even as it stays faithful to “the deep and trans-historical wisdom of orthodoxy,” as Cayley puts it. Francis Joseph Cardinal Spellman, in whose diocese Illich served, was impressed by his dynamic new priest and saw him as a key figure in the American Church’s future.

With Cardinal Spellman’s encouragement, in 1956 Illich was appointed vice-rector of the Catholic University at Ponce in Puerto Rico, tasked with introducing American priests to Latin American culture. He clashed almost immediately with his regional superiors. In Illich’s view, they had gotten too involved in Puerto Rican politics, campaigning aggressively against the ruling leftists. “As a theologian,” he later said, “I believe that the Church must always condemn injustice in the light of the Gospel, but never has the right to speak in favor of a specific political party.” In 1960, the local hierarchy, tired of his criticisms, ordered him to leave the university.

Illich moved that year to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he founded the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC), a think tank that would provide him with a base for years to come. CIDOC became a magnet for smart, often eccentric people from across the political spectrum, though it drew a disproportionate number of them from the burgeoning New Left. The center supported itself by offering Spanish and cultural instruction to missionaries, both religious and secular. Illich’s instruction program was rigorous, indeed harsh, as it had been in Puerto Rico. He felt that most North American missionaries were arrogant and clueless, contemptuous of local expressions of the faith and keen to impose inappropriate modern development models on the foreign poor, which would corrode the “vernacular” ways of life that made poverty tolerable. Better to keep such do-gooders out entirely. One participant, the pacifist Jesuit Daniel Berrigan, grumbled that CIDOC inflicted a “lot of intellectual violence” on the religious left. But Illich dismissed missionary tourists, whatever their politics. The sociologist Peter Berger, a friend of Illich, recalled that CIDOC’s free-wheeling model eventually descended into chaos. “All sorts of people were allowed to lecture,” Berger observed, “some of them with quite outlandish ideas.” The serious people started to stay away, and Illich closed the institute in 1976.

By then, Illich was famous—and no longer conducting official priestly duties. CIDOC’s activities had raised the suspicions of some local members of Opus Dei, and in proposing reforms in Church governance, including declericalization, Illich had made enemies within the Vatican too. In 1968, the Holy Office launched an inquisition, questioning him about his doctrinal opinions. Illich refused to answer—the process was rigged against him, he maintained—and he stressed his complete orthodoxy. The inquisition delivered no verdict, but Illich chose to withdraw from the active priesthood. He would celebrate occasional private Masses, and he never stopped viewing himself as a man of the cloth, but his days as an official man of the Church were over.

The jet-setting guru phase of Illich’s career then began, based on books of social thought that were intellectual grenades. "

(https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/02/the-genius-of-ivan-illich?)

Intellectual Bio

1. Vijaya Rettakudi Nagarajan:

"There were three phases to his adult life which were not distinct and separate but rather overlapped with each other. From 1951 to 1968, he moved in the world primarily as a Catholic priest. He worked with a Puerto Rican community in Harlem in the 1950s. He became fascinated by the ways in which they had come to Catholicism with their own unique cultural gifts. He organized one of the biggest Puerto Rican-American Catholic festivals on the Fordham University campus. Subsequently, he became the Vice Rector at the University of Puerto Rico in Puerto Rico. Then, he moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico and started an organization called the Center for Intercultural Formation (CIF) in 1961 which later merged into another organization called CIDOC (Centre for Intercultural Documentation). CIDOC was a Spanish language training center for those in the United States who wanted to learn Spanish. Simultaneously, it was a center that ran seminars and courses on the sustainability of contemporary institutions, the ideas behind western civilization and the unrecognized strength and vitality in traditional, vernacular cultures. For nearly its entire existence, CIDOC became very famous and attracted students from all over the world. CIDOC lasted until 1976."

(https://journals.psu.edu/illichstudies/article/view/62221/61627)

2. From http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm :

" Ivan Illich's concern for conviviality - on the ordering of education, work, and society as a whole in line with human needs, and his call for the 'deprofessionalization' of social relations has provided an important set of ideas upon which educators concerned with mutuality and sociality can draw. His critique of the school and call for the deschooling of society hit a chord with many workers and alternative educators. Further, Ivan Illich's argument for the development of educational webs or networks connected with an interest in 'non-formal' approaches and with experiments in 'free' schooling. Last, his interest in professionalization and the extent to which medical interventions, for example, actually create illness has added to the critique of professions and a concern to interrogate practice by informal educators - especially those in more 'community-oriented' work. As Gajardo (1994: 717) has commented, 'if... we separate Illich's thought from its emotional context, it is interesting to realize how thought-provoking some of his suggestions and proposals are'.

Erich Fromm, in his introduction to Celebration of Awareness (Illich 1973: 11) describes Ivan Illich as follows:

- The author is a man of rare courage, great aliveness, extraordinary erudition and brilliance, and fertile imaginativeness, whose whole thinking is based on his concern for man's unfolding - physically, spiritually and intellectually. The importance of his thoughts... lies in the fact that they have a liberating effect on the mind by showing new possibilities; they make the reader more alive because they open the door that leads out of the prison of routinized, sterile, preconceived notions.

Ivan Illich's critique of the process of institutionalization in education and his setting of this in the context of the desirability of more convivial relationships retains considerable power. As Finger and Asún (2001: 14-15) have argued, the 'forgotten Illich' offers considerable potential for those wanting to build educational forms that are more fully human, and communities that allow people to flourish. For Illich, and for Finger and Asún (2001: 177), 'De-institutionalization constitutes the challenge for learning our way out' of the current malaise."

(http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm)

Discussion

Ivan Illich on the Recovery of the Commons

1. Ivan Illich:

"“How shall I call the opposite project: the reconquest of the right to live in self-limiting communities, that each treasure their own mode of subsistence. Pressed, I would call this project the recovery of the commons. Commons, in custom and law, refer to a kind of space which is fundamentally different from the space of which most ecologists speak. ... The public environment is opposed to the private home. Both are not what“ commons” mean. Commons are a cultural space that lies beyond my threshold and this side of wilderness. Custom defines the different usefulness of commons for each one. The commons are porous. The same spot for different purposes can be used by different people. And above all, custom protects the commons. The commons are not community resources; the commons become a resource only when the lord or community encloses them. Enclosure transmogrifies the commons into a resource for extraction, production or circulation of commodities. Commons are as vernacular as vernacular speech. I am not suggesting that it is possible to recreate the old commons. But lacking any better analogy, I speak of the recovery of the commons to indicate how, at least conceptually, [it can be understood] ... Truly subsistence-oriented action transcends economic space, it reconstitutes the commons. This is as true for speech that recovers common language as for action which recovers commons from the environment.”

(https://journals.psu.edu/illichstudies/article/view/62221/61627)

Illich as a historian of the premises of industrialized society

Vijaya Rettakudi Nagarajan:

"In his third life phase he began his sharp turn in writing towards history. He moved away from current issues and looked for the sources of our cultural assumptions in historical texts, archives, and other materials. He tried to understand where we had come from, how the very modern assumptions we lived became naturalized into unspoken and hidden (even to ourselves) certainties. For example, in Towards a History of Needs(1978), he turned towards understanding the deeper history of our cultural assumptions of actual needs and constructed needs; he traced the conversion of artificially induced desires into culturally necessary needs served by excessive consumption. How did a car become the definition of transportation? He argued consistently for a society organized around the speed of the bicycle, rather than the car. In the phenomenal book, H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness(1985), he presented a history of the sacredness of water in the west, from ancient Roman fountains to the representations of water in paintings in the 19thcentury. He set out a more nuanced understanding of the history of smells, the toilet and industrial sewage systems. It is a brilliant book, bringing together the history of the toilet and the parallels between the ways in which cities developed their water systems and how we came to understand the fluid runways inside our own bodies. How did sewage and waste get to be seen in the ways that they were?

During the 1980s, Illich became a historian of ideas. I met him in 1982 in Berkeley when he taught a course on Gender based on his book of the same name. I did not think his notions of gender were as well thought as they could have been. This book was built on history of feminist thought, but it strangely undercut them, as he bluntly battled feminism and women’s increasing power as another aspect of the modern. In this argument, I could not follow him and my arguments with not just what he was saying but also the certainty with which he was saying it provoked me into intense discussions within the Illich circle of friends that Illich had come to Berkeley with. And yet, through these conversations with some of the key interlocutors, I also came to remember my paternal grandmother and the stories of my dead maternal grandmother, who were powerful in their families and households and ran them with an iron hand, with power to the point that my grandparents, father, and uncles were full of respect, awe and subservience in their presence. I had seen their gendered worlds and lived in them for months and years at a time. Sometimes I got a glimpse of Illich’s perspectives of gendered worlds, of bypassing the modern lens through which we usually look at the past as incomplete or a shadow of modernity. It sometimes made sense. Throughout the 1980s, he tried to articulate a unique perception of our industrial civilization from the view of the 12th-13thcentury in Europe. He wanted to know how we got to this point. How did we come to believe the ideas we as a culture hold close to our hearts? He was engaged in unpacking the deep assumptions with which we all live in the world, which we are mostly unaware of. He lectured widely in the 1980s and 1990s. He moved amongst three places: Cuernavaca, Mexico; Penn State University, State College, PA; and Bremen, Germany. He questioned the central assumptions of the industrialized west. He battled the rigidification of the industrialization of our certainties in these times. He argued that we as a society needed to and should exercise much more choice in our selection of what tools we use to satisfy our needs. He argued that we as a society should decide what we actually needed, rather than believing in the advertised articulation of our needs or self-serving needs of professionals who wanted us to become dependent on what they were experts of, whether it was education, medicine, technology, or energy. In this phase, he turned to the 12th-13thcentury to give himself a different vantage point to understand contemporary modern society and its underlying assumptions and beliefs. He constantly seemed to ask the vital, important question: How did we get here? If we are here, we can get out of here, by thinking and acting together to a different understanding of our actual needs. His training as a Catholic priest, I believe, gave him a strong basis of asceticism, of advocating a radical simplicity of living, of realizing how little one could actually live with and be content. He lived simply and he advocated a “liberating austerity” in order to live one’s life without imposing on the poor. His work emerged out of his theological, historical training, and his genuine curiosity of other cultural understandings of the world. He was critical of entrenched hierarchies and abuses of excessive power wherever he found them. Unfortunately, for the most part, the world is still under the spell of industrialized lifestyles which uses far more energy than needed and it is possible for all of us to have, given the excessive carbon we have released into the world. It was not that Illich or Gandhi was completely against industrialization or modernity, but rather they both thought as a society, we needed to slow down and contemplate, to discern, to figure out whether that was the best direction to go. If so, what did we actually need and how were we going to get there in terms of a fairer sense of ecology, equity, and economics that did not leave huge shadows of inaccessibility, poverty and inequality in their wakes?"

(https://journals.psu.edu/illichstudies/article/view/62221/61627)

Publications

Deschooling Society

Brian Anderson:

"a polemic against the “world-wide ‘cargo cult’” of government schooling. In Puerto Rico, Illich had come to see state education as a form of “structured injustice.” Every young Puerto Rican entered the system—but few made it all the way through. It was, Illich observed, as if a system had been invented “for producing dropouts,” compounding “the native poverty” of many of the children with a “new sense of guilt for not having made it.” The same dynamic was at work in wealthier societies, he believed.

Deschooling Society depicted the modern educational system as a totalizing, quasi-religious institution. Not only did it indoctrinate captive subjects, often against their families’ beliefs—think of the imposition of critical race theory or gender ideology in today’s grade schools; it was compulsory for years, just as church attendance was traditionally required for salvation. The teacher, Illich explained, took on the roles of “pastor, prophet and priest—he is at once guide, teacher and administrator of a sacred ritual.” Most perniciously, thanks to the system, official accreditation became expected for most jobs, even when the work was unrelated to anything taught in the classroom. Degrees really served as a social-status sorter—and now, as Cayley underscores, the required credentials demand (at least) sixteen years of schooling, and a majority of young people never get them. The system perpetuated itself ritualistically and attacked its critics relentlessly, as parents fighting racialized curricula recently discovered when teachers’ unions got President Joe Biden’s Justice Department to declare them potential terrorists.

It was time to disestablish schools, and to conceive new possibilities. Education wouldn’t vanish, Illich emphasized. After all, people have always sought out knowledge through libraries, apprenticeships, friends, and mentors. Such activity would persist after the overthrow of the existing system. Schools would still exist, too, he noted, but they ideally would be more “convivial” institutions, open to all on a voluntary basis. And why couldn’t demonstrated competence, not an earned degree, be the criterion for employment, status be damned?

Critics of Deschooling Society blasted Illich for being a “romantic Rousseauian,” as social critic Daniel Bell called him. But this is unfair. His book was often visionary, predicting, for example, a post-disestablishment proliferation of “learning networks,” with computers connecting eager learners with willing educators—and this long before the explosion of free internet instructional programs. One need not endorse Illich’s entire argument—few, say, would want to abolish compulsory education entirely—to recognize the potency of his criticisms of the suffocating, imagination-free current system, and the potential of a pluralistic, decentralized, and freedom-based learning environment. Illich’s influence on the homeschooling movement has been significant."

(https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/02/the-genius-of-ivan-illich?)

Medical Nemesis

Brian Anderson:

"Modern medicine was another institutional nightmare, in Illich’s view. In his ambitious 1975 book Medical Nemesis, he explored the various dimensions of iatrogenesis: physician-caused illness. Clinical iatrogenesis was the most familiar: adverse reactions to drugs, catching an illness at the hospital, botched operations—everyone can recount horror stories they have heard or endured themselves. A second form was social. It occurs, Illich wrote, when

the medical bureaucracy creates ill-health by increasing stress, by multiplying disabling dependencies, by generating painful new needs, by lowering the levels of discomfort and pain, by reducing the leeway that people are wont to concede to an individual when he suffers, and by abolishing even the right to self-care. America’s opioid-addiction crisis, fueled by unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies, would be a current example.

On the deepest level is cultural iatrogenesis, when a society declares a Promethean “war against all suffering” and seeks to rob death of any religious or philosophical meaning, seeing it only as the termination of high-tech medical treatment. “Medical civilization,” Illich lamented, brought a “progressive flattening out of personal virtuous performance,” in which the “art of suffering” is forgotten. Just as compulsory schooling was “disabling” human capacities, so, too, was modern medicine. What Illich wanted to protect and revivify in health, as in education, was a sphere of natural and cultural competence outside of dehumanizing institutional control.

Medical Nemesis goes too far, as is often the case with Illich. Modern medicine obviously saves lives. Most would prefer, say, to have a tumor professionally removed than to leave it untreated—as Illich did with a growth on his cheek that first appeared in 1980, and that left him so pain-wracked late in life that he started smoking raw opium to ease the agony. Since the book appeared, too, medical practitioners and administrators have become more aware of clinical iatrogenesis, though the problem remains significant.

The lightning-like development of life-saving vaccines is accelerating the COVID-19 pandemic’s end. But after the last two years, Illich’s anathema against a monstrous medical bureaucracy seems less outlandish, to put it mildly. The deployment in economically advanced nations of what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, influenced by Illich, calls “techno-medical despotism” in response to the pandemic, with unprecedented government lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, and other erosions of liberty—authoritarian measures disturbingly supported by many citizens—underscores the dangers a medically administered society poses to the human spirit."

(https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/02/the-genius-of-ivan-illich?)

Tools for Conviviality

Brian Anderson:

"llich’s seventies’ work returned repeatedly to the theme of modern alienation. Tools invented to better the human condition—he always used “tools” capaciously, to refer to vast institutions such as hospitals, media, transportation infrastructure, and the most advanced technology, as well as hammers and plows—passed a threshold of extension and power beyond which they turned on their creators. People then accepted this artificial creation as if nothing else were possible—believing that the hospital, not the home, is where birth and death must happen, because the doctor no longer makes house calls; or that compulsory schooling is the only way learning can happen; or that what “the science” says about a problem should end any discussion; or that—other Illichean bugbears—high-speed roadways and ubiquitous automobiles will make transport more efficient (ask someone stuck in Los Angeles traffic). Everything was getting too big, too out of control, too inhuman.

The 1973 manifesto Tools for Conviviality is Illich’s clearest statement of his alternative: a “chastened modernity,” in Cayley’s formulation, in which the power of experts and bureaucracies is curbed, and communities can once again choose “the dimensions of the roof” of technological characteristics they want to live under. Tools can foster conviviality, writes Illich, “to the extent which they can be used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user.” A good example is the old-fashioned technology of the pay telephone: “It is impossible for bureaucrats to define what people say to each other on the phone, even though they can interfere with—or protect—the privacy of their exchange.” Another is the public library, which anyone can use to learn. Illich emphasized that a convivial society would not need to ban “manipulatory” technologies; instead, it would allow space for “complimentary, enabling tools which foster self-realization.” As historian of technology Suzanne Fischer observes, engineer Lee Felsenstein, a trailblazer in the invention of the personal computer, acknowledged the influence of Illich’s book on his efforts. Tools for Conviviality presents a demand for balance, localism, and practical wisdom in the application of tools that is hard to categorize politically but far from irrelevant to contemporary debates."

(https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/02/the-genius-of-ivan-illich?)

Gender

Brian Anderson:

"Illich’s intellectual celebrity collapsed—one could almost say he was canceled—with the publication of his dense 1982 study Gender, the last of his volumes to appear from a major commercial publisher. The book, growing out of lectures at Berkeley, claimed that the modern economy of commodity circulation, where almost everything had a price, only arrived with the overcoming of gender, which Illich defined as the division of the human world into two distinct but complementary realms. Gender was there in every pre-capitalist society, he observed, with men and women taking on differing roles. Culture still shaped the economy in these earlier forms of life; the prospect of men and women becoming perfectly exchangeable in economic calculation wasn’t yet possible. And Illich believed that something of worth—not least for women—disappeared with the loss of this reality.

Illich was looking not to restore the patriarchy but to show how the economic logic of scarcity could be kept within limits, with the hope, again, of defending a realm of convivial life. But as Cayley recounts, feminists went ballistic. One, a linguist, denounced Gender for manifesting all the “salient features of modern propaganda, as exemplified in classics of the genre like Mein Kampf.” At the University of Marburg, where Illich often taught, protestors greeted him with a giant papier-mâché phallus. His reputation on the left never recovered."

(https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/02/the-genius-of-ivan-illich?)

Vineyard of the Text

Brian Anderson:

"Two major themes, Cayley shows, dominated Illich’s later thought. The first continued his preoccupation with technology. Illich sensed an enormous change “in the mental space in which many people live.” Society was moving from an age of instrumentality to a new age of computerized systems. The age of instrumentality, which Illich claimed ran from the Middle Ages until the late twentieth century, was based on the making and application of effective tools. Crucially, it distinguished the users of tools from the instruments and technologies themselves, and thus left open chances for convivial balance. Illich’s 1993 book In the Vineyard of the Text finds the seed of a philosophy of technological self-limitation in the writings of the twelfth-century monk Hugh of St. Victor. For Hugh, one of Illich’s favorite thinkers, tools were a remedy to the bodily weakness that resulted from our Edenic exile—and a remedy, properly understood, is bounded by our nature.

In the systems age, by contrast, our nature risked getting completely obscured. “The computer,” Illich noted, “cannot be conceptualized as a tool in the sense that has prevailed for the last 800 years.” People were losing the ability to separate themselves from their computerized networks; they were merging with the network itself—becoming cyborgs. Writing long before the metaverse, Illich anticipated a fully mediated existence that could produce an even deeper alienation, he feared, than anything he had warned against in the seventies. Our sense of reality was being consumed in “soul-capturing” abstractions."

(https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/02/the-genius-of-ivan-illich?)

More Information

Key Books to Read

* Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey. by david cayley. penn state. review

Ivan Illich

Contents

Contextual Quote

Bio

Intellectual Bio

Discussion

Ivan Illich on the Recovery of the Commons

Illich as a historian of the premises of industrialized society

Publications

Deschooling Society

Medical Nemesis

Tools for Conviviality

Gender

Vineyard of the Text

More Information

Key Books to Read

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