Ivan Illich facts for kids

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This page is about the Austrian philosopher. For the novella, see The Death of Ivan Ilyich. For the Russian philosopher, see Ivan Ilyin.

Quick facts for kids The Reverend Monsignor Ivan Illich

Born	Ivan Dominic Illich (1926-09-04)September 4, 1926 Vienna, Austria
Died	December 2, 2002(2002-12-02) (aged 76) Bremen, Germany

Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Catholicism
Main interests	Philosophy of education philosophy of technology
Influences Paul Goodman Arnold J. Toynbee Everett Reimer Jacques Maritain Leopold Kohr Jacques Ellul Hugh of Saint Victor Michel Foucault Emmanuel Levinas
Influenced Everett Reimer André Gorz Lee Felsenstein Wolfgang Sachs Kevin Carson Bob Black John Zerzan Charles Taylor Barry Sanders Giorgio Agamben

Ivan Dominic Illich (/ɪˌvɑːn ˈɪlɪtʃ/ iv-AHN-_-IL-itch, German: [ˈiːvan ˈɪlɪtʃ]; 4 September 1926 – 2 December 2002) was an Austrian Roman Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and social critic. His 1971 book Deschooling Society criticises modern society's institutional approach to education, an approach that constrains learning to narrow situations in a fairly short period of the human lifespan. His 1975 book Medical Nemesis, importing to the sociology of medicine the concept of medical harm, argues that industrialised society widely impairs quality of life by overmedicalising life, pathologizing normal conditions, creating false dependency, and limiting other more healthful solutions. Illich called himself "an errant pilgrim."

Biography
Influence
List of works
Honours, decorations, awards and distinctions
See also

Biography

Early life

Ivan Dominic Illich was born on 4 September 1926 in Vienna, Austria, to Gian Pietro Ilic (Ivan Peter Illich) and Ellen Rose "Maexie" née Regenstreif-Ortlieb. His father was a civil engineer and a diplomat from a landed Catholic family of Dalmatia, with property in the city of Split and wine and olive oil estates on the island of Brač. His mother came from a Jewish family that had converted to Christianity from Germany and Austria-Hungary (Czernowitz, Bukowina). Ellen Illich was baptized Lutheran but converted to Catholicism upon marriage. Her father, Friedrich "Fritz" Regenstreif, was an industrialist who made his money in the lumber trade in Bosnia, later settling in Vienna, where he built an art nouveau villa.

Ellen Illich traveled to Vienna to be attended by the best doctors during birth. Ivan's father was not living in Central Europe at the time. When Ivan was three months old, he was taken along with his nurse to Split, Dalmatia (by then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), to be shown to his paternal grandfather. There he was baptized on 1 December 1926. In 1929 twin boys, Alexander and Michael, were born in the family.

Work in Europe and the Americas

In 1942, Ellen Illich and her three children—Ivan, Alexander, and Michael—left Vienna, Austria for Florence, Italy, escaping the Nazi persecution of Jews. Illich finished high school in Florence, and then went on to study histology and crystallography at the local University of Florence. Hoping to return to Austria following World War II, he enrolled in a doctorate in medieval history at the University of Salzburg with the hope of gaining legal residency as he was undocumented. He wrote a dissertation focusing on the historian Arnold J. Toynbee, a subject to which he would return in his later years. While working on his doctorate, he returned to Italy where he studied theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, as he wanted to become a Catholic priest. He was ordained as a Catholic priest in Rome in 1951 and served his first Mass in the catacombs where the early Roman Christians hid from their persecutors.

A polyglot, Illich spoke Italian, Spanish, French, and German fluently. He later learned Croatian, the language of his grandfathers, then Ancient Greek and Latin, in addition to Portuguese, Hindi, English, and other languages.

Following his ordination in 1951, he "signed up to become a parish priest in one of New York's poorest neighborhoods—Washington Heights, on the northern tip of Manhattan, at that time a barrio of newly-arrived Puerto Rican immigrants." In 1956, at the age of 30, he was appointed vice rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, "a position he managed to keep for several years before getting thrown out". It was in Puerto Rico that Illich met Everett Reimer and the two began to analyze their own functions as "educational" leaders. In 1959, he traveled throughout South America on foot and by bus.

The end of Illich's tenure at the university came in 1960 as the result of a controversy involving bishops James Edward McManus and James Peter Davis. The bishops also started their own rival Catholic party.

After Illich disobeyed a direct order from McManus forbidding all priests from dining with Governor Muñoz, McManus ordered Illich to leave his post at the university, describing his presence as "dangerous to the Diocese of Ponce and its institutions."

Despite this display of insubordination and an order from Paul Francis Tanner, then general secretary of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, forbidding Illich from any official role in the organization's Latin American bureau, Illich maintained the support of the influential priest John J. Considine, who continued to push for Illich to have a role in training the Church's missionaries, personally funding trips to Mexico in order for Illich to scout locations.

Following his departure from Puerto Rico, Illich moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he founded the Center of Intercultural Formation (CIF) in 1961, originally as missionary training center. As the center became more influential it became the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC, or Intercultural Documentation Center), ostensibly a research center offering language courses to missionaries from North America and volunteers of the Alliance for Progress program initiated by John F. Kennedy. His real intent was to document the participation of the Vatican in the "modern development" of the so-called Third World. Illich looked askance at the liberal pity or conservative imperiousness that motivated the rising tide of global industrial development. He viewed such emissaries as a form of industrial hegemony and, as such, an act of "war on subsistence". He sought to teach missionaries dispatched by the Church not to impose their own cultural values. "Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, CIDOC was part language school and part free university for intellectuals from all over the Americas." At the CIDOC, "Illich was able to develop his potent and highly influential critique of Third World development schemes and their fresh-faced agents: Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, and countless other missionary efforts bankrolled and organized by wealthy nations, foundations, and religious groups."

After ten years, critical analysis from the CIDOC of the institutional actions by the Church brought the organization into conflict with the Vatican. Unpopular with the local chapter of Opus Dei, Illich was called to Rome for questioning, due in part to a CIA report. While he was not convicted or punished by the Vatican, it was then that he decided to renounce active priesthood. In 1976, Illich, apparently concerned by the influx of formal academics and the potential side effects of its own "institutionalization", shut the center down with consent from the other members of the CIDOC. Several of the members subsequently continued language schools in Cuernavaca, some of which still exist. Illich, who had been made a Monsignor at 33 himself resigned from the active priesthood in the late 1960s, but continued to identify as a priest and occasionally performed private masses.

In the 1970s, Illich was popular among leftist intellectuals in France, his thesis having been discussed in particular by André Gorz. However, his influence declined after the 1981 election of François Mitterrand as Illich was considered too pessimistic at a time when the French Left took control of the government.

In the 1980s and beyond, Illich traveled extensively, mainly splitting his time between the United States, Mexico, and Germany. He held an appointment as a Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Science, Technology and Society at Penn State. He also taught at the University of Bremen and University of Hagen. During his last days of his life he admitted that he was greatly influenced by one of the Indian economists and adviser to M. K. Gandhi, J. C. Kumarappa, most notably, his book, Economy of Permanence.

While Illich never referred to himself as an anarchist in print, he was closely associated with major figures in left-anarchist circles, notably Paul Goodman and unschooling advocate John Holt.

Personality

Ivan Illich called himself "an errant pilgrim", "a wandering Jew and a Christian pilgrim", while clearly acknowledging his Dalmatian roots. He remarked that since leaving the old house of his grandparents on the island Brač in Dalmatia, he had never had a home.

Death

Illich died on 2 December 2002 in Bremen, Germany. Not realised was his last wish: to die surrounded by close collaborators in Bologna amid the creation of his planned, new learning centre.

Influence

His first book, Deschooling Society, published in 1971, was a groundbreaking critique of compulsory mass education. He argued the oppressive structure of the school system could not be reformed. It must be dismantled in order to free humanity from the crippling effects of the institutionalization of all of life. He went on to critique modern mass medicine. Illich was highly influential among intellectuals and academics. He became known worldwide for his progressive polemics about how human culture could be preserved and expand, activity expressive of truly human values, in the face of multiple thundering forces of de-humanization.

In his several influential books, he argued that the overuse of the benefits of many modern technologies and social arrangements undermine human values and human self-sufficiency, freedom, and dignity. His in-depth critiques of mass education and modern mass medicine were especially, pointed, relevant; and perhaps, more timely now than during his life.

Health, argues Illich, is the capacity to cope with the human reality of death, pain, and sickness. Technology can benefit many; yet, modern mass medicine has gone too far, launching into a godlike battle to eradicate death, pain, and sickness. In doing so, it turns people into risk-averse consuming objects, turning healing into mere science.

The Dark Mountain Project, a creative cultural movement founded by Dougald Hine and Paul Kingsnorth that abandons the myths of modern societies and looks for other new stories that help us make sense of modernity, drew their inspiration from the ideas of Ivan Illich.

List of works

Die philosophischen Grundlagen der Geschichtsschreibung bei Arnold J. Toynbee. Salzburg: Diss.. 1951.
Illich, Ivan (1971). Celebration of Awareness. ISBN 978-0-7145-0837-5.
Illich, Iván (1971). Deschooling Society. ISBN 978-0-06-012139-6. https://archive.org/details/deschoolingsocie44illi.
Illich, Ivan (1973). Tools for Conviviality. ISBN 978-0-06-080308-7.
Illich, Ivan (1974). Energy and Equity. ISBN 978-0-06-080327-8.
Medical Nemesis. London: Calder & Boyars. 1974. ISBN 978-0-7145-1096-5. OCLC 224760852. https://archive.org/details/medicalnemesisex00illirich.
Illich, Ivan (1975). Medical Nemesis. ISBN 978-0-394-71245-1.
Illich, Ivan (1978). The Right to Useful Unemployment. ISBN 978-0-7145-2628-7.
Illich, Ivan (1978). Toward a History of Needs. ISBN 978-0-394-41040-1. https://archive.org/details/towardhistoryofn00illi.
Illich, Ivan (1981). Shadow Work. ISBN 978-0-7145-2711-6. https://archive.org/details/shadowwork0000illi.
Illich, Ivan (1982). Gender. ISBN 978-0-394-52732-1. https://archive.org/details/gender00illirich.
Illich, Ivan (1985). H₂O and the Waters of Forgetfulness. ISBN 978-0-911005-06-6.
Illich, Ivan; Sanders, Barry (1988). ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. ISBN 978-0-86547-291-4. https://archive.org/details/abcalphabetizati00illi_0. Coauthored with Barry Sanders
Illich, Ivan (1992). In the Mirror of the Past. ISBN 978-0-7145-2937-0. https://archive.org/details/inmirrorofpast00illi.
Illich, Ivan (1993). In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon. ISBN 978-0-226-37235-8.
Blasphemy: A Radical Critique of Our Technological Culture. We the People. Morristown, NJ: Aaron Press. July 1995. ISBN 978-1-882206-02-5.
interviews with David Cayley, ed. (1992). Ivan Illich in Conversation. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.
The Rivers North of the Future - The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. 2005. ISBN 978-0-88784-714-1. https://archive.org/details/riversnorthoffut0000illi.
David Cayley, ed. (2000). Corruption of Christianity. ISBN 978-0-660-18099-1.
Disoccupazione creativa (Creative Disoccupation), Italy, Italian, 1977
Illich, Ivan (2013). Beyond Economics and Ecology. ISBN 978-0-714531-58-8.: Edited by Prof Sajay Samuel

Honours, decorations, awards and distinctions

Culture and Peace Prize of the Villa Ichon in Bremen (1998)