In the Mirror of the Past

by Ivan Illich

  Biblical scholars are well aware of the limited correspondence between the Hebrew word for blood, dam, and the Greek term we would render as soul, namely, psyché. Neither comes anywhere near the meaning of the substantive, life. The concept of life does not exist in Greco-Roman antiquity: bios means the course of a destiny and zoe something close to the brilliance of aliveness. In Hebrew, the concept is utterly theo-centric, an implication of God’s breath.

  Life as a substantive notion appears 2000 years later, along with the science that purports to study it. The term ‘biology’ was coined early in the nineteenth century by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. He was reacting to the Baroque progress in botany and zoology which tended to reduce these two disciplines to the status of mere classification. By inventing a new term, he also named a new field of study, ‘the science of life.’

  Lamarck’s genius confronted the tradition of distinct vegetable and animal ensoulment, along with the consequent division of nature into three kingdoms: mineral, vegetable and animal. He postulated the existence of life that distinguishes living beings from inorganic matter, not by visible structure but by organization. Since Lamarck, biology searches for the ‘stimulating cause of organization’ and its localization in tissues, cells, protoplasm, the genetic code or morphogenetic fields. ‘What is life?’ is, therefore, not a perennial question but the pop-science counterfoil to scientific research reports on a mixed bag of phenomena such as reproduction, physiology, heredity, organization, evolution and, more recently, feedback and morphogenesis. Life appears during the Napoleonic wars as a postulate which is meant to lead the new biologists beyond the competing descriptive studies of mechanists, vitalists and materialists. Then, as morphological, physiological and genetic studies became more precise towards the middle of the nineteenth century, life and its evolution become the hazy and unintended by-products reflecting in ordinary discourse an increasingly abstract and formal kind of scientific terminology. With the possible exception of the earliest two generations of nineteenth century biologists, obiter dicta based upon the substantive notion of life are not, and never have been, part of the argument of biology as a science. It is therefore surprising to observe with what solemnity biologists have recently been asked by church executives to pool their competence with that of theologians in the study of issues related to post-Lamarckian life.

  Second, the loss of contingency, the death of nature and the appearance of life are but distinct aspects of the same new consciousness.

  A thread which runs back to Anaxagoras (500–428 B.C.) links a number of otherwise profoundly distinct philosophical systems: the theme of nature’s aliveness. This idea of nature’s sensitive responsiveness found its constant expression well into the sixteenth century in animistic and idealistic, gnostic and hylomorphic versions. In these variations, nature is experienced as the matrix from which all things are born. In the long period between Augustine and Scotus this birthing power of nature was rooted in the world’s being contingent on the incessant creative will of God. By the thirteenth century, and especially in the Franciscan school of theology, the world’s being is seen as contingent not merely on God’s creation, but also on the graceful sharing of His own being, His life. Whatever is brought from possibility, de potentia, into the necessity of its own existence thrives by its miraculous sharing in God’s own intimacy, for which there is no better word than — His Life.

  With the scientific revolution, contingency-rooted thought fades, and a mechanistic model comes to dominate perception. Caroline Merchant argues that the resulting ‘death of nature’ has been the most far-reaching event in changing men’s vision and perception of the universe. But it also raised the nagging question: how to explain the existence of living forms in a dead cosmos? The notion of substantive life thus appears not as a direct answer to this question, but as a kind of mindless shibboleth to fill a void.

  Third, the ideology of possessive individualism has shaped the way life could be talked about as a property.

  Since the nineteenth century, the legal construction of society increasingly reflects a new philosophical radicalism in the perception of the self. The result is a break with the ethics which had informed Western history since Greek antiquity, clearly expressed by the shift of concern from the good to values. Society is now organized on the utilitarian assumption that man is born needy, and needed values are by definition scarce. The possession of life in axiology is then interpreted as the supreme value. Homo œconomicus becomes the referent for ethical reflection. Living is equated with a struggle for survival or, more radically, with a competition for life. For over a century now it has become customary to speak about the ‘conservation of life’ as the ultimate motive of human action and social organization. Today, some bio-ethicists go even further. While up to now the law implied that a person was alive, they demand that we recognize that there is a deep difference between having a life and merely being alive. The proven ability to exercise this act of possession or appropriation is turned into the criterion for ‘personhood’ and for the existence of a legal subject.

  During this same period, homo œconomicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analog for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic ‘economic’ behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age.

  Fourth, the factitious nature of life appears with special poignancy in ecological discussion.

  Ecology can mean the study of correlations between living forms and their habitat. The term is also and increasingly used for a philosophical way of correlating all knowable phenomena. It then signifies thinking in terms of a cybernetic system which, in real time, is both model and reality: a process which observes and defines, regulates and sustains itself. Within this style of thinking, life comes to be equated with the system: it is the abstract fetish that both overshadows and simultaneously constitutes it.

  Epistemic sentimentality has its roots in this conceptual collapse of the borderline between cosmic process and substance, and the mythical embodiment of both in the fetish of life. Being conceived as a sytem, the cosmos is imagined in analogy to an entity which can be rationally analyzed and managed. Simultaneously, this very same abstract mechanism is romantically identified with life and spoken about in hushed tones as something mysterious, polymorphic, weak, demanding tender protection. In a new kind of reading, Genesis now tells how Adam and Eve were entrusted with life and the further improvement of its quality. This new Adam is potter and nurse of the Golem.

  Fifth, the pop-science fetish ‘a’ life tends to void the legal notion of person.

  This process is well illustrated in the relationship between medical practice, juridical proceedings and bio-ethical discourse. Physicians in the Hippocratic tradition were bound to restore the balance (health) of their patient’s constitution, and forbidden to use their skills to deal with death. They had to accept nature’s power to dissolve the healing contract between the patient and his physician. When the Hippocratic signs indicated to the physician that the patient had entered into agony, the ‘atrium between life and death,’ he had to withdraw from what was now a deathbed. Quickening — which means coming alive — in the womb and the onset of agony — a personal struggle to die — defined the extreme boundaries between which a subject of medical care could be conceived. This now rapidly changes. Physicians are taught to consider themselves responsible for lives from the moment the egg is fertilized through the time of organ harvest. In the early twentieth century, the physician came to be perceived as society’s appointed tutor of any person who, having been placed in the patient role, lost some of his own competence. Now he becomes the socially responsible manager not of a patient, but of a life. According to one of the most reputable bio-ethicists, science has endowed society with the ability to distinguish between a life which is t
hat of a human person and that which corresponds to ‘a human non-person.’ The latter creature lacks the quality or ‘capacity required to play a role in the moral community.’ The new discipline of bio-ethics mediates between pop science and law by creating the semblance of a moral discourse that roots ‘personhood’ in the qualitative evaluation of the fetish, life.

  Medical Ethics: A Call to De-bunk Bio-ethics

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  Drafted with Dr Robert Mendelsohn for discussion at the School of Medicine, University of Illinois Chicago, 20th November 1987

  Medical ethics is an oxymoron, bringing to mind safe sex, nuclear protection and military intelligence.

  Since 1970, bio-ethics has spread like an epidemic, creating the semblance of ethical choice in an intrinsically unethical context. This context has taken its shape from the extension of medicine from conception to organ harvest. Given this new domain of operation, medicine has ceased to look at the sufferings of a sick person: the object of care has become something called a human life.

  The transmogrification of a person into ‘a life’ is a lethal operation, as dangerous as reaching out for the tree of life in the time of Adam and Eve.

  Ethics, institutes, programs and courses have created a discourse within which ‘life’ appears as the object of medical, professional and administrative management. Thus, the umbrella of academic rationalization is now lending legitimacy to an essentially flawed enterprise. Medical ethics now obscures the practice of virtue in suffering and dying.

  We consider bio-ethics irrelevant to the aliveness with which we intend to face pain and anguish, renunciation and death.

  Other works by Ivan Illich available from

  Marion Boyars Publishers

  * * *

  CELEBRATION OF AWARENESS

  This, his first book, established Ivan Illich as a formidable and passionate critic of the social myths and cherished institutions of modern industrial society. Committed to a radical humanism he set himself the target of breaking down the ideologies which alienate men from men as well as from their traditional sources of human dignity and joy. The author challenges newer orthodoxies and current ideas of social virtue by his profound questioning of bourgeois and liberal assumptions. He urges us to a new celebration of awareness so that we can escape the existing dehumanizing systems by our unwillingness to be constrained and our willingness to accept responsibility for the future.

  DESCHOOLING SOCIETY

  Ivan Illich presents a startling view of schooling: schooling (as opposed to education) has become our modern dogma, a sacred cow which all must worship, serve, and submit to, yet from which little true nourishment is derived. Schools have failed our individual needs, supporting fallacious notions of ‘progress’ and development that follow from the belief that ever-increasing production, consumption and profit are proper yardsticks for measuring the quality of human life. Our schools have become recruiters of personnel for the consumer society, certifying citizens for service, while at the same time disposing of those adjudged unfit for the competitive race. The author offers radical suggestions for reform.

  TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

  A work of seminal importance, this book presents the author’s penetrating analysis of the industrial mode of production where enterprises, ranging from health services to national defense, are ‘each producing a service commodity, each organized as a public utility and each defining its output as a basic necessity’, and eventually imposing their uses on the consumer. Illich chooses ‘conviviality’ to mean the opposite: ‘individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value’. The overall objective is to survive with justice, avoiding the bleak prospects of totally planned goals and desires and total loss of individual privacy.

  ENERGY AND EQUITY

  In this essay, by means of a detailed survey of the way people travel, Ivan Illich develops his arguments against industrial society. He argues that speed is a source and tool of political manipulative power in rich as well as poor countries. The ideology of continual growth of both socialist and capitalist systems imposes intolerable social inequalities. The overconsumption of energy not only destroys the physical environment through pollution but causes the disintegration of society itself. Illich advocates a radical political decision to neutralize the energy crisis by the limiting of traffic, which he argues corrupts and enslaves, and results in a further decline of equity, leisure and autonomy for all.

  LIMITS TO MEDICINE

  Medical Nemesis – The Expropriation of Health.

  ‘The medical establishment has become a major threat to health’. This is the opening statement and basic contention of Ivan Illich’s searing social critique. Decimating the myth of the magic of contemporary medicine and ruthlessly examining the rituals conducted by the medical profession and its adjuncts, he demonstrates how the fulfilment of genuine human needs, such as the maintenance of good health, has been turned by over-professionalization into a nightmarish spiritual and physical agent of destruction: treatment creates illness. In response Illich calls for a halt to the expropriation of man’s coping ability and presents an alternative to the inevitable Medical Nemesis that will set in unless the autonomy of the individual is re-established.

  DISABLING PROFESSIONS

  Ivan Illich, Irving Kenneth Zola, John McKnight, Jonathan Caplan, Harley Shaiken

  Why do we spend so much on health services, and levels of treatment do not improve? Why do we spend so much on education and our children seem to learn less? Why is so much spent on law enforcement and criminal justice systems and our society seems less secure and less just? This fascinating and controversial collection of essays questions the power of the professional over an apathetic citizenry.

  THE RIGHT TO USEFUL UNEMPLOYMENT AND ITS PROFESSIONAL ENEMIES

  Here Ivan Illich, possibly at his most controversial, calls for the right to useful unemployment: a positive, constructive, and even optimistic concept dealing with that activity by which people are useful to themselves and others outside the production of commodities for the market. Unfettered by managing professionals, unmeasured and unmeasurable by economists, these activities truly generate satisfaction, creativity and freedom.

  SHADOW WORK

  This major historical and sociological analysis of modern man’s economic existence traces and analyzes options which surpass the conventional political ‘right-left’ and the technological ‘soft-hard’ alternatives and presents the concept of the ‘vernacular’ domain: ‘the preparation of food and the shaping of language, childbirth and recreation.’ Illich deals provocatively with the controlling uses of language and science and the valuation of women and work.

  GENDER

  Ivan Illich insists that we survey attitudes to male and female in both industrial society and its antecedents in order to recover a lost ‘art of living’. In pre-industrial communities there was ‘vernacular gender’: the sexes accepted their differences which were expressed in speech-idioms and apportioned tasks. The increasingly powerful forces of organized religion, and the rise of a commercial culture, created images of the sexes which acquired self-perpetuating power. Our present industrial society has debased ‘vernacular gender’ into ‘economic sex’ — less secure and more savagely crippling. Illich argues that only a radical scrutiny of scarcity can prevent an intensification of this grim predicament.

  H2O AND THE WATERS OF FORGETFULNESS

  ‘Water throughout history has been perceived as the stuff which radiates purity: H2O is the new stuff, on whose purification human survival now depends. H2O and water have become opposites: H2O is a social creation of modern times, a resource that is scarce and that calls for technical management. It is an observed fluid that has lost the ability to mirror the water of dreams’. Tracing the history of the use and abuse of H2O as a source of commodity in twentieth century life with its quest for odorless hygiene, Ivan Illich contrasts these matters with an examination of the history of ideas, mythologies a
nd visions associated with water.

  ABC: THE ALPHABETIZATION OF THE POPULAR MIND

  (with Barry Sanders)

  Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders (medieval scholar and literary critic) have produced an original and provocative study of the advent, spread and present decline of literacy. They explore the impact of the alphabet on fundamental thought processes and attitudes and culminate their research in an examination of the present erosion of literacy in the new technological languages of ‘newspeak’ and ‘uniquack’; and they point out how new attitudes to language are altering our worldview, our sense of self and of community.

  By the Same Author

  Celebration of Awareness

  Deschooling Society

  Tools for Conviviality

  Energy and Equity

  Limits to Medicine:

  Medical Nemesis — The Expropriation of Health

  Disabling Professions

  The Right to Useful Unemployment

  Shadow Work

  Gender

  H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness

  ABC: The Alphabetization

  of the Popular Mind

  (with Barry Sanders)

  Copyright