Convivial Tools article

An article about Ivan Illich and his notion of convivial tools appeared recently on The Atlantic Monthly's website. In "Why the Landline Telephone Was the Perfect Tool," Suzanne Fischer, an historian of science and technology, reviews Illich's idea and concludes that "our contemporary convivial tools are mostly in the realm of communications. At their best, personal computers, the web, mobile technology, the open source movement, and the maker movement are contemporary convivial tools."

Do you agree?

An encounter

A man from New Zealand named Tony Ward writes of Ivan Illich on his website, TonyWardEdu.com ("Critical Education Theory and Practice"):

I only met him once, when he came to deliver a seminar to the Faculty at the School of Architecture at Berkeley in (I think) 1972. My colleagues and I numbered about fifteen, and were seated around a large conference table while Illich stood at the blackboard, talking and drawing diagrams to illustrate his words. We all listened respectfully, but after about fifteen minutes I began to realise that I didn't understand the highly abstract monologue that he was delivering. So I raised my hand and said:

"Dr Illich", I said, "I don't mean to be disrespectful, but I have the feeling that you are not really here! Where are you?"

An eternity of silence and disapproval filled the room as my colleagues glared at me. Ivan Illich looked at me quizzically, broke into a smile and responded:

"You're quite right! I'm not here at all! I'm preparing a lecture to present at the University of San Francisco tomorrow." He put down the chalk, sat at the table and asked, "What shall we discuss?".

The seminar turned out the be an extraordinary exchange of ideas.

Contingency

The idea of contingency and how that idea evolved over time was a major theme in Illich's thinking, especially as put forth in his final interviews with David Cayley. Illich talks at length about contingency in The Rivers North of the Future, arguing in two successive chapters that contingency helps to explain the death of nature and the rise of today's technology-saturated world.

Contingency, Illich points out, originally referred to the idea that the world's existence is a gift from God. Early Christians thought of the world -- "the whole of nature" -- as existing "in God's hands, where it acquired its aliveness through God's constant, creative support." Why does the world exist at all? Simply because God willed it, said St. Augustine. St. Thomas went on to further develop this idea.

Eventually, however, philosophers such as William of Ockham and Descartes sought to "break out of a world-view defined overwhelmingly by contingency," and coinciding with this, according to Hans Blumenberg, whose thinking Illich works from, is the beginning of modernity. Once "the possibility of understanding things without reference to God had been created," and "once God's will has become totally arbitrary it has also become, in a sense, redundant, and the connection between God and the world can be easily cut." And it was cut, with man having taken it upon himself, more and more, to engineer and improve through technology seemingly every aspect of the world and even his own body and mind. Think of the schemes afoot to control the earth's weather on a global scale, and the "transhumanist movement."

Says Illich: "A contingent nature at its noon is gloriously alive, but it is also uniquely vulnerable to being purified and cleaned of its aliveness in the sunset of contingency. … once the universe is taken out of God's hands, it can be placed into the hands of people, and this couldn't have happened without nature having been put in God's hands in the first place."

From here, Illich goes on to sketch out a striking new theory to explain how the notion of "tools" came about. Illich reviews Aristotle's thinking about the implements that craftsmen used and shows that these were not conceived of in a way that matches how we think of tools today. But during the Middle Ages, Church thinkers came to believe that angels needed some kind of tool to affect the heavenly spheres, and from that follows the idea of tools that people would use. (Naturally, we're over-simplifying, here.) Later, as Illich sees it, the 800-year epoch of tools and instrumentality gave way to the current age of systems.

We bother to write about this as we have mainly to set the scene for noting our discovery of a paper on the Web (PDF) entitled "Illich: contingency and transcendence." Its author is Dr. J. van Diest, who describes the paper as related to a lecture he gave in 2010 during a Conference on Culture and Transcendence, held at the Free University in Amsterdam. The paper discusses Illich's ideas about contingency and attempts to distinguish two kinds of contingency, one of being and another of "determination." Unfortunately, due to what we take to be a fairly rough translation (from Dutch?), the paper is somewhat difficult to follow, but we've been through it only once, so far. We'll definitely give it another try.

An Italian Take on Illich

An Italian website offers in PDF an article about Illich and, as indicated in its headline, the idea that shaped his thought for many years, corruptio optimi pessima - the corruption of the best is the worst. The best way to understand the West as we know it, Illich concluded, is as a perverse, even demonic version of the Gospel.

The article is one that appeared in a magazine called Meditteraneo. Alas, we cannot read the piece, but we're happy to report that it does include a photo of Illich that we've not seen before.

From the left, this shows Sindaco Vitali, Romano Prodi, Illich, and Paolo Prodi. Romano Prodi has served twice as prime minister of Italy - from 1996 to 1998, and from 2006 to 2008. His brother Paolo is an historian whom Illich credits (In The Rivers North of the Future, p. 80) as an important "teacher."

Illich tells David Cayley: "With Paolo I had, for the first time, an opportunity of reflecting, with a man several years younger than I, on the way in which the Western, Roman Church attempted to give a juridical shape to the household rules by which monastic communities lived together. This attempt to create a canonical establishment … produced a deep corruption. It led … to a toning down of the message of the founder…."

Illich is introducing the topic of the "criminalization of sin." Illich goes on to explain that while the Library of Congress' online catalog lists eighty-two items by Prodi, only one is available in English.

"I bow to this authority and feel pretty certain that he is right, and I say this having read his critics and satisfied myself that I am not allowing friendship to outshine my critical intelligence. But I would hardly dare to say what I'm about to say, if he were looking over my shoulder, because I will take liberties which are neither academically legitimate, nor necessarily kind. I'm sure, if he reads it later, he will bear with me."

Among other topics, llich's discussion of the criminalization of sin delves into the history of oath-taking and contracts, which Prodi has spent much effort looking into. Oaths, Illich notes, were proscribed in the New Testament - "nothing [was] more absolutely forbidden." And that was a radical change from the way people had generally acted up until then - a "rule-breaking innovations," as Illich calls it, that the Church ended up perverting in its effort to turn Christ's call to "love thy neighbor" into a law.

A year ago, a symposium was held in honor of Illich - A New Beginning, it was called. The opening talk was given by Paolo Prodi. A program for this meeting can be seen here and here. And here, we believe, is one of the papers delivered there, about Illich in Mexico. And Facebook shows a page about this event, as well.

"Second Language Learning as a Tool for Conviviality"

We've just learned of "Wringing the Neck of the Swan," a paper published recently (PDF) in the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. In it, Kristin Dillman Jones of Concordia University in Chicago, looks at the teaching and learning of second languages.

"I propose language learning as a convivial tool [that] opens our hearts to learn in the commons from our neighbors and also shatters the current commodification of languages" Ms. Jones writes. The swan whose neck she seeks to wring is modernist and industrial methods of learning, and in that process, she refers often to the thought of Ivan Illich, among others. Ms. Jones relates some of her own experiences learning - and not learning - foreign languages at different moments of her life.

A response to "body history"

By 1985, Ivan Illich had come to the conclusion that "today's major pathogen [is] the pursuit of a healthy body." Twelve years earlier, in Medical Nemesis, he had famously stated that the "medical establishment" was a major threat to health and he identified many of its "iatrogenic" effects. But in subsequent years, he had seen that "the experience of 'our bodies and our selves' had become the result of medical concepts and cares." He explained his revised thinking in a "Plea for Body History," published in an issue of Lancet in 1986. Later, it showed up in a collection of Illich's essays, In the Mirror of the Past. (This essay may be read online, one page at a time, at the Michigan Quarterly Review.)

We recently ran across a somewhat sarcastic and humorous essay written in response to Illich's plea, "Philosophers and other threats to health." It appeared in the British Medical Journal for May 9, 1987, and it is available in PDF format right here. The author is George Dunea, an Australian doctor based in Chicago. In 1975, he began writing a regular column for BMJ called "Letter from Chicago." A nephrologist, he once converted a Maytag washing machine into a dialysis machine. Quite appropriate for the very good writer he is, Dr. Dunea is currently editor in chief of Hektoen International, a journal in the field of medical humanities.

Ivan Illich and Nietzsche

A professor of philosophy at Fordham University has written a paper with the title "Education and Exemplars: On Learning to Doubt the Overman." Babette Babich opens her paper so:

In what follows I treat Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society as a general prelude to a discussion of Nietzsche’s philosophical engagement with his classical philology, a profession which he argued to be essentially pedagogical, one of a piece with cultural formation, understood as Nietzsche liked to put it as actively “getting” oneself a culture. Such cultivation is antithetical to the “schooling” Illich criticizes. I then take this educational point further by exploring the notion of the exemplar for Nietzsche as he analyses it in “Schopenhauer as Educator.” I conclude with a critical reading (or philologically contextual “de-schooling”) of the standard understanding of the meaning, the who, of Nietzsche’s Übermensch.

We won't try to summarize the paper as we wouldn't be able to do it justice. Twenty-six pages long, it appears mainly to discuss Nietzsche, whose philosophy, we gather, is one of Prof. Babich's specialties. (Among other things, this interest has led her to look closely at a certain YouTube video of KD Lang singing Leonard Cohen's song "Hallelujah"; in an hour-long, supremely erudite and slightly mischievous video available for viewing at the Fordham website, she discusses the YouTube phenomenon in general, this video in particular, and Lang's art and eroticism. The text of this lecture is available here, with many footnotes.)

Prof. Babich's paper about Illich and Nietzsche appears as a chapter in a book, Education, Dialogue and Hermeneutics, by a Paul Fairfield ($130 at Amazon), and also is available in PDF format off the Web.

The professor describes herself as "a friend of the late Ivan Illich (of the telephone and letter variety: we never met in person), … I find his views unsettling. I have yet to recover from the shock of reading (just reading) H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness and I have yet to stop teaching it in my classes on technology and environmental ethics just because of its uncanny rightness (and for the same disturbing reasons)."

Prof. Babich has written another paper, "Nietzsche's Post-Human Imperative: On the "All-too-Human" Dream of Transhumanism," which appeared in The Agonist, a journal about Nietzsche. It also refers to Illich and his thoughts on education.

Schooling and social myth

Pat Farenga has posted an interesting piece about John Holt and Ivan Illich on his website, Learning Without Schooling. It quotes the latter:

Arnold Toynbee has pointed out that the decadence of a great culture is usually accompanied by the rise of a new World Church which extends hope to the domestic proletariat while serving the needs of a new warrior class. School seems eminently suited to be the World Church of our decaying culture . . .

. . . School serves as an effective creator and sustainer of social myth because of its structure as a ritual of graded promotions. Introduction into this gambling ritual is much more important than what or how something is taught. It is the game itself that schools, that gets into the blood and becomes a habit. A whole society is initiated into the Myth of Unending Consumption of services. This happens to the degree that token participation in the open-ended ritual is made compulsory and compulsive everywhere. School directs ritual rivalry into an international game which obliges competitors to blame the world’s ills on those who cannot or will not play.

Pat found this in Deschooling: A Reader, edited by Ian Lister.

Bremen Event

Our spies tell us there may be a celebration of Illich in Bremen this coming December, the 10th anniversary of his death. It may include a workshop devoted to him and his work. If and when plans gel, information will be posted on the Pudel website.

Illich on iTunes

In the USA, anyway, Ivan Illich has made his debut in the iTunes store. Available for downloading as electronic books are two titles by David Cayley: Ivan Illich in Conversation and The Rivers North of the Future. They are priced at $12.99 and $11.99, respectively. The downloads are formatted in Apple's iBooks format and are viewable on the iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch.

Notably absent from the electronic book listing is Illich's In the Vineyard of the Text. (Amazon doesn't sell this title as an electronic book, either.)