An Introduction to Ivan Illich with Deacon Christopher May

An Introduction to Ivan Illich by Deacon Christopher May

We will meet on Zoom on four Tuesdays: 17 June, 01 July, 15 July, and 29 July, each at 7 pm CDT. There will be no assigned readings.

Ivan Illich (1926—2002) was an Austrian-born priest, philosopher, historian, and cultural critic.

Ferociously brilliant, his rise to fame was meteoric in the in the early 1970s, when he published books such as: Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, Medical Nemesis, and many more. Very widely read and celebrated at the time, he was the enfant terrible of the 70s. Although his background was in Medieval history, he was keenly observant and presciently attuned to the spirit of the times in which he wrote. This, coupled with his tendency to express himself in exaggerated terms, may lead the contemporary reader to regard him as just another dated, faddish, “burnout” from “the movement” of that turbulent decade. His fall from public grace was clinched in 1982 when he published Gender, a widely misunderstood examination of how modernity has altered human relationships.

However, his work is now being re-examined by many who, despite his sometimes time-bound rhetorical flourishes, find significant and subtle criticisms of Western modernity in his thinking. He has been called “a forgotten prophet whose time has come”.

His work painstakingly examines the changes in our thoughts and values since the late medieval period. He is attempting a phenomenology of modernity. His thought is similar in many ways to that of another Catholic philosopher: Peter Maurin. Like Maurin, he mourns the loss of simple communal life, of the lives we lived in common on the commons, before the tremendous changes brought about in modernity by industrialization and the rise of wage labor. He is not calling for a return to pre-modern patterns, but rather he wants us to find ways to use modern technology in ways that enhance our lives. Illich called his goal “conviviality”, a world where we can flourish together; Peter Maurin called it “building a world where it is easier to be good.”

Although we will sometimes talk about one or another of his books, the primary goal of this introductory course will be to examine the themes that are found throughout his body of work: Conviviality, tools, alienation, disembodiment, commodification, respect for limits, especially the necessity to limit consumption, and the damage done by institutions that develop in ways that undermine their original intentions. A personalist, Illich wants to prioritize relationships over consumption, and autonomy over dependency. As we will see, there are many points of convergence between Ivan Illich and Peter Maurin, Co-Founder of The Catholic Worker.