Ivan Illich

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Ivan Illich (born September 4, 1926 in Vienna , † December 2, 2002 in Bremen ) was an Austro-American author, philosopher , theologian and Roman Catholic priest .

Life

Origin and education

Illich's mother Ellen Rose Illich, b. Regenstreif, came from a Jewish family of German origin. She converted to Christianity and was baptized Protestant . Another source states that the mother was a Jew of Sephardic descent. His father Petar Illich, a civil engineer by profession and from a landowning family, was a Roman Catholic Croat . Illich writes about the fate of his Jewish ancestors that they were expelled from Toledo in 1492 . - The Piero Illich family lived near the Croatian port city of Split in the Dalmatia region until 1932 .

Illich's maternal grandfather was Friedrich Regenstreif, a timber merchant in Bosnia and Herzegovina . He had the Regenstreif villa built in the Pötzleinsdorf district of Vienna from 1914 to 1916 according to the plans of the architect Friedrich Ohmann . The mother lived there with her three children Ivan, Micha and Sascha from 1932 to 1942. In his birthday letter to the educational researcher Hellmut Becker , published under the title Loss of World and Meat , Illich got his feeling for the scenic atmosphere of Pötzleinsdorf in 1992 and thinking on March 10, 1938 - two days before the annexation of Austria .

As a child, Ivan Illich lived in Sigmund Freud's house , whose friends included the family.

After the annexation of Austria , he had to leave school in Vienna in 1941 because of his mother's Jewish descent. He made in 1943 as an external student in Florence his high school . He first studied chemistry and history at the University of Florence . Then he studied philosophy as a diocesan candidate from Split from 1944 to 1947 and from 1947 to 1951 theology at the Collegium Romanum ( Pontifical Gregorian University ) in Rome . He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest on March 24, 1951 . Illich received his doctorate at the end of 1951 at the Theological University Faculty - a predecessor institution of the University of Salzburg , which was re-established in 1962 - with Father Albert Auer , OSB ( Benedictine ), and Thomas Michels with the work The Philosophy Toynbees . The philosophical foundations of historiography in Arnold Toynbee . Since the work was lost, but it has been preserved in the Salzburg University Library, it could not be taken into account in a discussion of the scientific writings that Illich published.

Professions and stations

After his ordination, Illich worked in the Vatican . From 1951 to 1956 he worked as a priest in the Incarnation Parish, located on the West Side of Manhattan ( New York ). The neighborhood was mostly inhabited by Puerto Ricans. During this time Illich took on the US citizenship. In 1956 he became vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico at Ponce; Illich headed the rectorate until 1960.

Here his personal conflict with the Vatican's South American policy began, by criticizing the American technocracy in Latin America and attacking the mechanisms of the traditional church, institutionalized education and the inhumanity of technical medicine . Illich saw himself less as an objective scientist than as an intellectual close to liberation theology who wanted to denounce both undesirable developments in the First World and grievances in the Third World. In effective and highly polemical writings, he criticized the practice of school learning and called for a "de-schooling of society". He directed further criticism against modern medicine, whose expertocracy, although it fits with the medicalized mentality of society, often does not help sick people. Especially in countries of the “Third World”, the large-scale education and health systems designed by experts would often do more harm than good.

Both Illich's views on the de-schooling of society and his theses on cultural history were often rejected as unworldly by theologians of the Catholic Church. One of his provocative core theses was, for example, that Western civilization can only be properly understood as the corruption of the Christian message.

In 1960, Illich and his friends (including Paulo Freire ) founded the South American Institute Centro Intercultural de Documentación in Cuernavaca (Mexico) and was seconded there by his Archdiocese of New York as director. After the death of his patron Cardinal Spellman in 1967, Illich fell out of favor within the Church. As a result of long disputes with the Vatican under Pope Paul VI. Illich resigned from his priesthood in 1969. He now turned to the subject of education, calling for the abolition of all institutions, especially schools.

Illich belonged - together with André Gorz , Jochen Steffen and Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker - to the advisory group of the former magazine Technologie und Politik , of which Freimut Duve was the publisher. In 1979 Illich became a visiting professor in Kassel , Marburg , Oldenburg and Bremen . In 1981/1982 he was one of the first fellows of the newly founded Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin .

In 1998 Illich was awarded the Villa Ichon Culture and Peace Prize in Bremen.

Ivan Illich was buried in the cemetery in Bremen- Oberneuland at his own request and through the written intercession of the former mayors Hans Koschnick and Henning Scherf .

Works and reception

Illich coined the term conviviality, where he was concerned with a realistic use of technical progress. In his work “Selbstbegrenzung - Tools for Conviviality”, Illich writes: “By conviviality I understand the opposite of industrial productivity ... To transition from productivity to conviviality means an ethical value in place of a technical value, a realized value in place of a material value Set value. "

Furthermore, he sees conviviality as the “individual freedom that is realized in a production relationship that is embedded in a society equipped with effective tools”. At the same time, he wants to draw attention to the consequences of incorrectly deployed technical progress: “If a society, of any kind, pushes conviviality below a certain level, then it will succumb to want; because no productivity , no matter how hypertrophied , will ever succeed in satisfying the needs that are created and multiplied at will. "

In 2006 his conversations with the Canadian radio editor David Cayley under the title “In the rivers north of the future” appeared posthumously. The title comes from a poem by Paul Celan .

To this day, there is an association of Illich students and friends at the University of Bremen, including Barbara Duden and Johannes Beck (1938–2013) , under the name Denk nach Illich .

Illich's thinking was formative for various philosophical-political directions. These include currents of growth criticism , the associated growth-critical movement and ecofeminism .

In particular, his rejection of modern conventional medicine was heavily criticized. In an interview with the weekly newspaper Zeit , he advised cancer patients not to seek treatment. When asked what he would do if his wife to cancer fall ill, he said he would advise her to make on the Greek Islands holiday to visit rather than a hospital. His claim that cancer treatment would work no better than a placebo was rejected as false by all the doctors involved. The sociologist Helmut Schoeck saw Ivan Illich primarily as a “commercially driven entrepreneur in a 'pamphlet industry' with 14 employees”.

Quotes

“My work is an attempt to accept with great sadness the fact of Western culture. [Christopher] Dawson ... says the Church is Europe and Europe is the Church and I say yes! Corruptio optimi quae est pessima [The corruption of the best is the worst]. By trying to secure, guarantee, regulate revelation, the best becomes the worst ...

I also live in a feeling of great ambivalence. I cannot do without tradition, but I have to recognize that its institutionalization is the root of something evil that goes deeper than any evil that I could see with the naked eye and mind. "

See also

Publications

Fonts

  • 1951: The philosophical foundations of historiography with AJ Toynbee. Dissertation. Salzburg.
  • 1970: clarifications. Pamphlets and polemics. Beck, Munich 1996. (reprint)
  • 1970: Alms and Torture. Failed progress in Latin America. Kösel, Munich. (Translated from the English by Helmut Lindemann. Title of the original American edition: Celebration of Awareness. Doubleday and Company 1970.)
  • 1971: Society de-schooling . ISBN 3-466-42030-X , (1987) ISBN 3-499-15246-0 .
  • 1972: Schools don't help. About the myth-making ritual of industrial society. Rowohlt, Reinbek.
  • 1973: self-limitation. A political critique of technology. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1975, ISBN 3-498-03201-1 . (German by Nils Thomas Lindquist. Original title: Tools for Conviviality. Harper and Row, New York 1973.)
  • 1974: The so-called energy crisis or the paralysis of society. ISBN 3-499-11763-0 .
  • 1975: The Expropriation of Health - Medical Nemesis. Rowohlt, Reinbek.
    • The nemesis of medicine. The criticism of the medicalization of life. 5th edition. Beck, 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-56072-9 .
  • 1978: Myths of Progress. ISBN 3-498-03204-6 .
  • 1980: shadow work or vernacular activities. To colonize the informal sector. In: Freimut Duve (Hrsg.): Technologie und Politik. 15/1980, pp. 48-63.
  • 1981: The nemesis of medicine. From the limits of health care. ISBN 3-499-14834-X .
  • 1982: The right to be mean. ISBN 3-499-14829-3 .
  • 1983: Genus. A historical critique of equality. Hamburg. ISBN 3-498-03207-0 .
  • 1984: school in museum. Phaedros and the consequences. Bad Heilbrunn 1984.
  • 1985: Vernacular values . In: Satish Kumar / Roswitha Hentschel (eds.): Metapolitics. The Ernst Friedrich Schumacher Lectures. Dianus-Trikont-Verlag , Munich, pp. 166-184, ISBN 3-88167-130-7 .
  • 1987: H 2 0 and the waters of oblivion. ISBN 3-499-12131-X .
  • 1988: with Barry Sanders: Thinking learns to write. Reading culture and identity. ISBN 3-455-08293-9 .
  • 1991: In the vineyard of the text. A comment on Hugo's “Didascalicon”. ISBN 3-630-87105-4 .
  • 1991: What makes people sick? 18 critical analyzes. ISBN 3-7643-2583-6 .

conversations

  • 2005: The Rivers North of the Future. The Testament of Ivan Illich as Told to David Cayley. House of Anansi Press, Toronto
    • German edition 2006: In the rivers north of the future. Final conversations on religion and society with David Cayley. Translated from English by Sebastian Trapp. Beck, Munich, ISBN 3-406-54214-X .

literature

  • David A. Gabbard: Silencing Ivan Illich: A Foucauldian Analysis of Intellectual Exclusion. Austin & Winfield, 1993, ISBN 99939-73-28-9 .
  • Hans Halter : Abductions in the Shadow Realm . In: Der Spiegel . No. 48 , 1979, pp. 268-272 ( Online - Nov. 26, 1979 ).
  • Lee Hoinacki & Carl Mitcham (Eds.): Challenges of Ivan Illich the: A Collective Reflection. State University of New York Press, 2002, ISBN 0-7914-5422-3 .
  • Martina Kaller-Dietrich : Ivan Illich (1926–2002). His life, his thinking. Provincial Library. Publishing house for literature, art and music, Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-85252-871-7 .
  • Edith Kohn: Attempt to approach Ivan Illich's work from different perspectives. A contribution to the pedagogical history of ideas and effects of radical social criticism. Inaugural dissertation. Department of Education at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main 2006.
  • Wolfgang Palaver : Ivan Illich (1926–2002): Critic of the modern age and apocalyptic Christian. In: M. Benedikt u. a. (Ed.): Repressed humanism - delayed enlightenment. Volume VI: In Search of Authentic Philosophy. Philosophy in Austria 1951-2000. facultas.wuv, Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-7089-0446-7 , pp. 1160-1170.
  • Thierry Paquot: Ivan Illich. Thinker and rebel. Translated from the French by Henriette Cejpek and Barbara Duden . Beck, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-406-70704-9 .
  • Stephan H. Pfürtner (Ed.): Against the Tower of Babel. Dispute with Ivan Illich. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-499-15640-7 .
  • Helmut Woll : Ivan Illich's socio-philosophical criticism of modern industrial society. In: Zeitschrift für Sozialökonomie, Issue 188/189, 5/2016, pp. 45–52.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ivan Illich: Vernacular values. In: S. Kumar, R. Hentschel (Eds.): Metapolitics. The Ernst Friedrich Schumacher Lectures. Dianus-Trikont-Verlag , Munich 1985, p. 166.
  2. ↑ Barbara Duden , Silja Samerski: On the death of the cultural critic Ivan Illich. In: The Friday of December 13, 2002.
  3. ↑ Helmut Woll : Ivan Illich's socio-philosophical criticism of modern industrial society. In: Journal for Social Economy. Volume 188/189, Issue 5, 2016, pp. 45–47. Online .
  4. ↑ Ivan Illich, David Cayley: In the rivers north of the future. Final conversations on religion and society with David Cayley. Beck, Munich 2006, fourth cover page.
  5. ↑ Hans-Albrecht Koch : Stories from the Grunewald. Uwe Pörksen talks about the early days of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of January 10, 2015, international edition, p. 53.
  6. ↑ Illich refers in particular to the 1973 existing and prevailing systems of market economy and planned economy .
  7. ↑ Self-Limitation - Tools for Conviviality. P. 32 f.
  8. ↑ Internet presence of the group Thinking after Illich.
  9. ^ Zeit-Forum from April 18, 1975.
  10. ↑ Helmut Schoeck: The business with pessimism. P. 11.
  11. ↑ Ivan Illich in Conversation. Toronto 1990, pp. 242-243.
personal data
SURNAME Illich, Ivan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-American educator, philosopher, theologian
DATE OF BIRTH September 4, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH December 2, 2002
Place of death Bremen