A Review of Humanism and Embodiment

Susan Babbitt, Humanism and Embodiment: From Cause and Effect to Secularism, Bloomsbury, 2014

This book came to my attention because its author, a professor of philosophy at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario wrote to me to let me know that, in writing it, she had made considerable use of the work of Ivan Illich.  She focuses particularly on The Rivers North of the Future, a book made from my late interviews with Illich that was published in 2005, three years after Illich’s death.  Illich’s work has rarely received serious philosophical attention – Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s engagement with Illich in his preface to The Rivers North of the Future and in his own A Secular Age is exceptional – so I read the book avidly.  I do not really consider myself competent to review it, since it belongs to a series called Bloomsbury Research in Analytical Philosophy, and I have at best a very scant and mostly second-hand knowledge of analytical philosophy; but, since Illich’s work concerns me so closely, I thought I would pass along what I was able to glean of the argument. 

Babbitt’s book is about humanism, a vast word which has been deployed in many different ways over the centuries.  It is interesting to note in passing that when Erich Fromm introduced Celebration of Awareness, a collection of Illich’s essays from the 1960’s, he could find no better characterization of Illich’s stance than “humanist radicalism” which he defined as “radical questioning guided by insight into the dynamics of man’s nature.” Babbitt defines humanism as faith in “the possibility of (approximate) truths about human well-being…that is, about how best to live.”  These truths are to be discovered, Babbitt thinks, in a bodily way, which explains the second half of her title.  Humans, for her, are thinking bodies, not brains in vats, and “dualism” insofar as it separates mind and body is one of her bêtes noires.   Embodiment, she says, is “a philosophical challenge [which] reaches further than feminist philosophy typically ventures,” though the implied critique of feminist philosophy isn’t really developed in the book.  (Her subtitle “From Cause and Effect to Secularism,” I found a bit mystifying, since secularism is not extensively treated and no trajectory towards it from “cause and effect” is identified.)

A philosophy of embodiment, in her view, is “best conceptualized from within one of the core areas of analytic philosophy, the philosophy of science.”  The gist, as I understand it, is that, on the one hand, she wants to retain the idea that the world exists apart from our theories about it and is knowable as such. “However persuasive we may be in describing the world,” she writes, “the causal structures of the world do not change as a result.”  On the other hand she does not accept “positivism” which she defines as the view that all knowledge is justified by appeal to foundational beliefs with a privileged status – an example would be beliefs based on observation.   Positivism, she says, has failed because all beliefs depend on other beliefs, as well as on circumstances and conditions.  But this “context relativity” does not defeat our aspiration to truth because “there is a world with which we engage causally” and this world “acts on us, affecting us bodily.”

Cause, obviously, is a very important word here, and Babbitt says surprisingly little about what the term has meant historically, or even what it means in the context of this book.  The best definition I can offer, if I have read her well, is to say that the word refers to undeniable bodily experience which could guide us, if we would only allow ourselves to trust it.  But our ability to recognize the unchanging “causal structures of the world” is menaced by the fact that truth is only persuasive insofar as it is plausible or “projectible” – a term she borrows from American philosopher Nelson Goodman.  She illustrates by Eugene Ionesco's absurdist theatrical fable Rhinoceros, in which people in a small town gradually turn into rhinoceroses, until only one man is left who is not a rhino.  Now he is the monster.  Human-ness is not projectible in a world where rhinoceritis is the norm.  The same can be said where injustice is so pervasive and normalized that justice is unprojectible – think of the way in which slavery was taken for granted in the ancient Greek culture that we still think of as one of the seedbeds of humanism.  

Projectibility, then, threatens our ability to recognize, name and cultivate what is properly human, but it does not prevent it altogether.  And this ability, Babbitt thinks, is crucial   Early on in her book she gives two examples of writers whom she thinks have failed in this task.  The first is Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis who has written eloquently about saving languages and cultures, but who cannot, she says, tell us how to distinguish what is good in culture from what is reprehensible.  All cultures as such deserve preservation.  Her second example is philosopher/economist Amartya Sen who argues, in her words, “that  development aims for the realization of human capacities” but then fails to explain “how to know which capacities are the essentially human ones.”   Sen assumes, she says, “that human-ness is known.”   In other words, he takes as given what Babbitt thinks must first be discovered.

How human-ness is to be discovered is the main subject of her book.  She draws on three traditions, or streams of thought which she names as historical materialism, eastern philosophy and Christian scripture.  These three have certainly come into contact and even dialogue, but it is still somewhat unusual to find them aligned in the way Babbitt aligns them  – Marx mixing with the ancient Chinese sage Chuang-Tzu and L’Arche founder Jean Vanier rubbing shoulders with the Italian reform Communist Antonio Gramsci, and all being treated as equal, and, in some sense, compatible authorities.  What they have in common, in Babbitt’s view, is their respect for embodied experience.  She begins with Marxist thought and with the dialectical interplay of theory and practice that its exponents have preached.  For example, she quotes, Lenin on the pursuit of self-understanding as a passage through “dark waters” in which the subject must sometimes be transformed in order to understand himself or herself.   And she cites Gramsci who says that “only the man who wills something strongly can identify the elements that are necessary to the realization of his will.”   These ideas, she says, are “resources” for a philosophy of embodiment.  She does not endorse Marxism, or historical Communism;  she says only that historical materialism is right in insisting that we can only act, learn and grow by engaging with the real conditions in which we live.

Her second resource is Eastern philosophy.  The Buddha, she says, understood the role of projectibility in intellectual reasoning, and, for that reason, insisted on close attention to actual experience or what Babbitt calls “cause and effect within the body.”   Feelings count for more than thoughts because they are not subject in the same way to the “constraints of plausibility.”  Meditation, on this view, is ruthless and unsentimental attention to everything that happens to and within the body.  It is not a way of escaping the world but of understandinghow it comes to be. 

Her third resource is Christian scripture.  She finds in the New Testament a strong emphasis on faith grounded in experience, rather than in ideology or “belief system.”  What Jesus calls the Kingdom of God is present in the world, but it can only be found by overcoming the self.  “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it,” he says, “but whoever loses their life for me will find it.”  (Matthew 16:25)  “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies,” he says on another occasion, “it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (John 12:24) This teaching corresponds, for Babbitt, with Buddhism’s recognition of the illusory character of the self and the Marxist insistence that we can change neither ourselves nor the world without submitting to the actual historical conditions in which we live.  The over-arching idea is that we find our humanity in encounter and not in preoccupied subjectivity. 

In connection with Christian scripture, Babbitt also cites French philosopher Alain Badiou’s book on St. Paul.  Badiou says that, for Paul, “it is not the signs of power that count, nor exemplary lives but what a conviction is capable of here, now and forever.”  Paul’s conversion is what Badiou calls an Event – “an utterly original happening which is out of joint with the smooth flow of history and which is unnameable and ungraspable within the context in which it occurs.”  (The quotation is from Terry Eagleton, whose paraphrase of Badiou Babbitt quotes.) The idea, once again, is that what counts is what happens.  Paul’s experience of a universal Christ in whom there is “neither Jew nor Greek” is, in no sense, projectible.  To understand it will be the work of a lifetime for Paul, and, inasmuch as Christianity subsequently remakes the world, it is not wrong to say that we are still absorbing it.  But everything begins, as Paul says repeatedly, “in the flesh.”

At this point readers of Illich will probably begin to see where his reading of the parable of the Samaritan fits in.  Jesus tells the story in response to a question from “a certain lawyer” who asks him, “Who is my neighbor?”  A man was going down to Jericho, he says, and was set upon by robbers and left for dead in a ditch.  Two of his co-religionists, a priest and a Levite, come along but “pass by on the other side” – either because they have more important religious duties to fulfill or because they are avoiding contaminating contact with what may be a corpse.   The next to pass is a Samaritan, someone not of same religion or community as the man in the ditch.  He stops, binds his wounds and takes him to an inn where he can be can recuperate, promising the innkeeper that he will reimburse him for any unforeseen expenses on his return.   This story, Illich says, has for centuries been misunderstood as a teaching about the duty of care.  But its real point, for Illich, is to show that who the neighbor is cannot be known in advance.  The Samaritan turns out to be the neighbor because he responds bodily to the call of the wounded man.  It is not a duty that calls him – according to the ethics of the time his duty would have extended only to his own people, and not to some half-dead foreigner beside the road – it is an urgent bodily response which he feels that he cannot refuse. 

Babbitt drawsattention to several features of Illich’s account.  First the man in the ditch does not “fit” from the point of view of the Samaritan.   No “skein of relations” or “network of concern” exists at the moment of their encounter.  There is no category or a priori understanding which can guide the passer-by.  In acting as he does he reaches beyond all existing horizons.  Second his response is a bodily one – the King James Bible says that he felt compassion but the Greek refers more graphically to what we would call his gut. And, finally, the occurrence depends on chance – the Samaritan happens upon the wounded man.  “Embodiment,” Babbitt says, “implies radical contingency, not just of meanings, but also of meaningfulness.”  She means, I think, not just that various meanings might be assigned to a given event, but that event itself may give birth to the meaning. 

By this point in my reading it had become clearer to me what Babbitt means by saying that we engage “causally” with the world.  As far as I can understand her, she is saying that there is a world that exists beyond the horizons of our theories and beyond what we can reach so long as we remain entrapped in a self that pretends to a certain sovereignty over its own experience – she sometimes adopts Charles Taylor’s term “the buffered self” to describe this modern sovereign stranded in its own subjectivity by its pretension to choice, planning and control.  This world can speak to us and change us but only if we recognize the authority of chance and trust our embodied experience.  (In case this should seem like a truism – who doesn’t trust their embodied experience? -  consider the case of the trained professional who has, in Babbitt’s words “no need to be experientially aware of the person [he or she is] assisting” because the professional, in effect, knows the case in advance.) This trust in embodied experience can potentially lead us towards an understanding of what is properly human. 

I’ve already said that I know little of analytic philosophy, but what little I do know leads me to suppose that Babbitt’s undertaking is both brave and novel.  This is evident in the variety of resources she brings to bear, as well as in the fact that she calls them resources i.e. recognizes that she is intimating andsketching a direction rather than producing a finished philosophy.  A book that yokes together historical materialism and Christian mysticism, Buddhist psychology and analytic philosophy of science must necessarily set aside obvious dissonances and incongruities in order to highlight the common features of these traditions.  I take this not as a fault but as an indication of the direction in which she wants to encourage thought to move.

Looking, finally, with the eye of someone who remains involved with the work of Ivan Illich, I would say two things.  First I am delighted, as I said earlier, to find Illich given such serious and sustained treatment in a work of philosophy.  Second I think he has much more to give.  Babbitt relies mainly on Illich’s interpretation of the story of the Samaritan, though she does refer to other works, and I rejoiced to find an accurate and friendly digest of Gender, a book often vilified by feminists.  A fuller account of Illich’s understanding of embodiment and why he found modern risk society so fatally disembodying remains to be written.   I hope to write this account, and I am happy to have found a sympathetic fellow traveller in Susan Babbitt.

Part Moon, Part Travelling Salesman: Complementarity in the Thought of Ivan Illich

This paper was prepared for a small gathering of friends held at a monastery in the small Italian town of Pescia (between Florence and Lucca)  in the summer of 2014...

PART MOON, PART TRAVELLING SALESMAN:

COMPLEMENTARITY IN THE THOUGHT OF IVAN ILLICH

In one of the titled footnotes in Gender, Ivan Illich suggests that a promising  philosophy of complementarity died still-born within the social sciences.  The footnote, titled Ambiguous Complementarity, discusses the work of the Frenchman Robert Hertz who died in the trenches during the First World War.  Hertz, Illich says, had “tried to incorporate this notion into the social sciences at a time when the concept had begun to be fruitful in the physical sciences.”  The essay Illich commends is “The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Religious Polarity” and, in it, Hertz claims that “dualism is the essence of primitive thought [and] dominates primitive social organization.”   But this idea, Illich goes on, was declawed and domesticated by Marcel Mauss, on whom the inheritance of Hertz’s youthful and foreshortened genius fell.  Mauss, according to Illich, took “the disconcerting asymmetry and ambiguity contained in Hertz’s idea of complementarity” and made it the foundation of a universal process of exchange.  Mauss was then annointed by Claude Levi-Strauss, who claimed that Mauss had been “the first to have treated the total social fact as a system of exchanges and that Hertz had been his inspiration.  “The fuzzy, partly incongruous complementarity that can be understood only by means of metaphors which Hertz had begun to recognize as the root of all culture,” Illich concludes, “was repressed in the social sciences in favour of operational concepts such as role, class, exchange, and, ultimately, “system”. 

I leave it those better acquainted with the work of Marcel Mauss to say whether this is fair to Mauss.  I can say that when I looked into Hertz’s essay I found what one sometimes does when dipping into Illich’s sources – that he had read more into Hertz than the latter may have intended, or, indeed, could have intended, writing, as he was, during the very infancy of his science.  I was also disturbed to find that, in Hertz’s essay, as its title suggests, the preeminence of the right hand is so total in much of his evidence that the left hand is as much scapegoat, victim and pariah as it is the ambiguous complement of the right hand.  I’ll let a Maori proverb Hertz cites stand for a great deal more of the same tenor.  “All evils, misery and death,” it says, “come from the female element” which is, of course, associated with the left hand.   Hertz ends his essay by approving the contemporary tendency, as he says, “to level the value of the two hands.”  “A liberated and foresighted community, he concludes, “will strive to develop better the energies dormant on our left side.”  Now this does not sound to me like the words of a man who wants to make complementarity either the horizon of social science or a bulwark against all universal concepts.  But, whether a philosophy of complementarity in the social sciences died aborning with Hertz or not, Illich’s attempt to construct its genealogy got me thinking about how the quest for such a philosophy motivated Illich’s own work. 

As it happened, not long before I reread Gender and was impressed by this footnote, I had finally braved a 500+ page tome entitled The Complementary Nature of Reality – a book that had been sent to me unsolicited by its publisher after he had heard and liked a long radio series I had done called How To Think About Science.  The book’s author Peter Barab argues that:   “Today’s science is akin to magic: it manipulates nature with dazzling technological displays and mathematical acrobatics, but the primary theories…, especially of physics, lack all meaning, in that scientists cannot explain what they are doing or identify the broader patterns that are involved.”  The consequence is, and here he quotes Neil Postman: “The world we live in is incomprehensible…but never surprises us for long, since we have no consistent picture which new events could alter.”  The solution, according to Barab, is to take complementarity seriously, not just as a pragmatic description of what occurs, but as the deep structure of reality.  In physics this task was begun by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr who reflected on the experimentally demonstrated fact that a given quantum might manifest now as a wave, now as a particle, and also on his German colleague Werner Heisenberg’s finding – the famous Uncertainty Principle – that there is a limit to how precisely one can measure certain paired qualities like position and momentum at the same time.   Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, as it came to be called, held, in effect, that everything comes in pairs.  The findings of quantum physics were not paradoxes or artifacts or mere appearance which would all eventually be resolved, as Einstein hoped, in a unified theory.  Nature is fundamentally dual, not unitary, according to Bohr, and Barab thinks that this can be elaborated into a comprehensive and consistent philosophy of science which thinks in pairs and not always of a reduction to one underlying principle or substance. 

Peter Barab’s book confines itself to physics, but I was led next along the pathways of my eccentric reading to Carl Jung who I think can be said to have advanced a philosophy of complementarity in psychology.  I don’t want to tarry long here with Jung except to say that he insists that nothing can be illuminated without casting a commensurate shadow, that man is unconsciously woman and woman unconsciously man, and that consciousness and unconsciousness exist in a compensatory, or complementary relationship.  Two others also deserve mention before I go on to Illich: the first is Nicolas of Cusa, with whom, I confess, I have only a slight acquaintance.  His idea that we can grasp God only as a complexio oppositorum, a complex of opposites, an idea Jung took over and bent somewhat to his own purposes, I understand as a way of unifying without reducing, of resolving without dissolving you might say.  He yearns beyond duality but never tries to deny it, and I think this is very much in Ivan’s spirit, though I never remember him mentioning Cusanus.  The second is the English poet William Blake who says memorably that “Opposition is true friendship” and that “Without contraries there is no progression.”

I mention these names in passing to hint at possible lineages, and in the hope of starting conversations with those who may know more than me, but what I mainly want to do here is to focus on Illich’s philosophy of complementarity and how it informs his work.  Gender is surely its centerpiece, but I would argue that the idea is there from at least the time of Tools for Conviviality.  There we find the idea of multi-dimensional balances.  And what is balance? Opposing forces in equilibrium, a scale on which opposing weights are suspended, domains that restrict and limit one another in a harmonious way. This idea is developed in various ways, but always a single mode of production, a single mode of thought, the radical monopoly of a single institution is deprecated.  “Well being,” as defined in Shadow Work, is “a balance,” which occurs when “use values and commodities fruitfully mesh in synergy.”  Modernity and the industrial mode of production are not rejected – rather they are to be brought into a complementary relationship with vernacular and communal imperatives.

Gender brings this idea into new relief, and begins to make visible some of its underlying assumptions.  The book was criticized, most pointedly and substantially, in my view, by Nancy Scheper Hughes, a professor of Anthropology at Berkeley, and one of the seven women who responded to Illich’s performance of the text of Gender in Berkeley in the fall of 1982.  Drawing on her own work, she claims that Illich is a naïve and partial anthropologist who has mistaken ideology for practice, exaggerated the extent to which tasks are gendered in pre-capitalist society, and downplayed the perverse, destructive, and arbitrary elements of gender.   “No society or culture could sustain itself for very long,” she says, “under the kind of extreme sexual segregation that Illich posits as characteristic of pre-industrial ‘Vernacular Gender’ societies.” (Feminist Issues 3:1, Spring ‘83, p.34)  This critique may have merit and, I would even say, justice – Gender, to me, is an arrogant book, inasmuch as its author is so preoccupied by his own discoveries and his own agenda that he pays almost no attention to the milieu he is addressing, and is, in addition, quite free with his insults.  For example, “Women academics grab at the semblance of legitimacy that comes from putting on the hand-me-down Marxoid categories discarded by social historians.”  This might be true of some woman academic, or even a whole school of women academics but carelessly aimed, as it appears to be, at all women academics, it seems more inflammatory than enlightening. However, now that I’ve got that off my chest, my point is that Illich is not finally writing anthropology.  Listen to the ways he talks about gender – he calls it “the best heuristic he has yet discovered for the investigation of the pre-industrial past” – this is from memory and I can’t place its source – it may have been written or said somewhere other than in Gender – but clearly a heuristic is a way of seeing, an aid to discovery, rather than an historical claim as such.  He speaks of gender and sex as ideal types.  He says that what is needed more than anything else is an epistemology of gender – that gender, in other words, is a way of knowing and not just a historical object to be known.  He asserts that his understanding of gender is “rooted in the deepest mystical experiences” and that it is nourished by the scholastic concept of relation subsistens.  Relatio subsistens, as Lee Hoinacki would later explain, is a scholastic redescription of the mystery of the Trinity with its three persons who are one and yet distinct, independent as a whole and yet dependent among themselves.  He claims that “gender is a metaphor for the ambiguous symbolic complementarity that constitutes each of the two genders…as metaphors for each other” – in short a metaphor for a metaphor which reminds of Marshall McLuhan’s witty twisting of Robert Browning’s “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp/ Else what’s a heaven for?” into “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp/ Else what’s a meta-phor?”  He also calls gender a way of “incarnating symbolic duality.”

All of this suggests to me that gender is something much more than a historical category for Illich, though I’m not at all denying that it is that as well.  It’s a way of reinstating here and there, and you and me in their proper relation of mutually dependent otherness.  I can still remember the relief I felt in reading the book – that in place of the unlimited and impossible demand that seemed to arise from feminism, as it had from earlier revolutions, an inexhaustible mystery was being restored – along with the possibility of respect, limitation, modesty and friendship.  Illich sums this up in the idea of gender as metaphor – that each, in a beautiful sense, stands for the other.

What this points to is that Illich is not actually all that interested, as he may sometimes appear to be and as many critics claimed he was at the time the book was published, in vindicating this or that historical form of vernacular gender.   Gender, as he explicitly says, stands for a principle of mutual dependence and mutual limitation, and for an otherness that cannot, by definition, be overcome.   It represents the idea that a stable and sustainable social order can only stand on two legs.  And, above all, it blocks what I can only call mon-ism, though it’s ungainly and unfamiliar word.  Monism is universal competition, unlimited growth, denatured language - whatever circulates without impediment because it has no necessary complement by which it could be limited.

Illich struggled for words in which to expound this philosophy.   At the time of Gender, he was still leaning heavily on the idea of ambiguity and asymmetry.  Later on he hit on the idea of di-symmetry, of opposing domains that fit each other and are answerable to each other without being an identical image of each other.  The word didn’t make much of a slogan, dissymmetric complementary being even more of a mouthful than the earlier paradoxical counterproductivity, but it says what Illich wants to say:  that only by opposition do things hold together, only by a plurality of powers can freedom be nourished, only by limitation can language live.

A beautiful statement of this philosophy occurs in Ivan Illich in Conversation: “I like to walk along the watershed,” he says, “and to know that left and right are profoundly different from each other and contradictory to a high degree. The world of sex holds together only because of the rests of gender that survive in it and sprout in it.  The world of cybernetic modeling, of computers as root metaphors for felt perception, is dangerous and significant only as long as there is still textual literacy in the midst of it.  Transportation systems can function only as long as people have legs to walk to the car and open the door.  Hospital systems can make sense only as long as people still engage in that totally intransitive activity which is living.  I wish I could find a way of never appearing like a preacher who focuses your attention on the scenery on only one side of the watershed…Once thinking becomes a monocular perception of reality it’s dead.” (Ivan Illich in Conversation, p. 241)

Complementarity is two-sidedness – not the two-sidedness that William Blake calls “the cloven fiction,” the divorcing of subject from object, but the two-sidedness of man and woman, night and day, breath and heartbeat.  It can also be contradiction, depending on what one wants, at a certain moment, to emphasize – mutual dependence or mutual limitation – the fact that I can’t do without you or the fact that you’re in my way.  It expresses the condition of existence of a world – world in the sense in which Hannah Arendt says that we are now world-less – a limited, bounded state in which action, submission, gratitude and unobstructed listening are still possible.  Without the sense of complementarity we lose what I can only call the otherness of the other, and it was Illich’s conviction that, after the Incarnation, after God has emptied himself into a human person, that it is only through the other that God’s word can reach us.  What is at stake for him, in other words, is not less than everything.

Recognition of complementarity is a mode of awareness, sometimes of tragic awareness, insofar as it’s a principle of opposition, limitation and ultimately nemesis.  And awareness is an important term in Illich’s thought.  It’s what he unreservedly recommends in place of programmes, plans and agendas intended to bring the future into line.  Reality is refractory to our will – it has aspects not just that we haven’t seen yet but that are and must remain, in the very nature of things, beyond our horizon because our horizon always moves with us.  Our salvation doesn’t lie within ourselves – it comes to us and perhaps in an unexpected form.  “I fear the Lord is passing me by,” was one of Illich’s watchwords.   All this is part of complementarity, I think, because complementarity is the very constitution of the reality that allows us to be surprised.

Illich, as I am beginning to understand him, has several rhetorical modes.  Let me call them the prophetic – a term I can’t avoid using, even though I understand why he foreswore it in favour of friend; the sociological; and the satirical.  The prophetic is an inspired seeing that invokes judgment – when Ivan says, as he does in his “Health As One’s Own Responsibility: No, Thank You”, that our world is marked by “a growing matter-of-fact acceptance of a bottomless evil which Hitler and Stalin did not reach” he cannot be refuted with statistics that point to a reduction in poverty or an improvement in dental hygiene. If one could erase the “Onward Christian Soldiers” overtones from the word salvation, then one could say that salvation is his point of view in this mode.   The second mode is the sociological – and it was in the sociology section that Illich was generally filed when his books were still to be found in bookstores (and there were still bookstores to find them in).  This is the Illich of laws, who says, for example, that beyond a certain rate of acceleration mobility is inversely proportional to speed, that shadow work will necessarily expand in lockstep with waged employment, that there are identifiable thresholds at which institutions will begin to get in their own way and frustrate their own purposes, that the wage gap between men and women will never close or be reduced.   These laws, in my view, are sometimes doubtful, but they are certainly essays in social morphology which are subject to evidence and argument.  And finally the satirical.  The existence of this mode only dawned on me gradually, and I don’t know why since Illich very often referred to his productions as caricatures, and he said much the same when he called his more polemical works of the 70’s pamphlets.  When we hear of “life-long bottle babies wheeled from medical centre to school to office to stadium” or “apartment towers that store people between trips to the supermarket” or “the colourless mumbling” of American college students, then we are in this satirical mode. Like the prophetic mode, it has to be taken for what it is – a nightmare vision of modern existence which can’t really be refuted because it takes no account of whatever meaning and purpose these mumblers and bottle-babies may themselves find in their wheeled existence.

I doubt if these three modes exhaust Illich’s considerable rhetorical spectrum, but three are enough for me to make the point I want to make here, which is that these different inflections change the way complementarity is treated.   Illich says that when he walks the watershed he very much appreciates the profound difference between left and right, and he hopes never to be found to be a preacher who directs his reader’s attention to only one side.  And yet when, in prophetic mode, he exposes the contemporary world as a revelation of evil, when he says, in a white hot passage at the end of the essay on shadow work, that modern forms of enclosure are not just cruel and degrading but actually demonic (p. 115), it would seem that he is not just calling for a balanced and complementary relationship between use values and exchange values, or a vernacular sphere and a free market, he is denouncing the modern entirely.  I know Illich can and should be read in very different ways, as befits someone who spoke only as friends, occasions and the urgencies of his time seemed to demand, who never proposed a consistent system of thought, and who definitely did not speak all of his mind on all occasions.   I simply want to raise the question here of whether there is, in Illich’s work, a conflict, a tension if you want, between the Romantic modernist who looks for a reformed and rebalanced modernity, a recovered art of living, as he says at the end of Gender, and the Catholic anti-modernist who was still required to swear the Oath against Modernism before his ordination, and who never really renounced it.

Let me take another example of the way in which I think the understanding of complementarity can be vitiated by the prophetic mode even when Illich is ostensibly working as an historian.  In the essay on Vernacular Values in Shadow Work, he describes the petition the humanist grammarian Antonio Nebrija submitted to Queen Isabella of Spain in the hope, vain as it turned out, that the Queen would patronize his project of creating a grammar of the Castilian language.  This was in the same year that Columbus sailed fatefully westward.  Nebrija’s project is presented in an entirely negative light – a 500 year long war on subsistence is being initiated, and the Castilian people are losing their vernacular, which will be taken away for processing by a new professional elite and then sold back to them as taught mother tongue.  It’s a wonderful essay, full of insight and instruction, but I could never help wondering, as someone who grew up loving grammar and parsed sentences with a relish that many of my contemporaries seemed to reserve for the workings of internal combustion engines, whether a grammar could really be that destructive.  Was not Cervantes also waiting in the wings, or Shakespeare, or Rabelais if one switches the national context?  Wasn’t the ideal a balance between an ever-evolving vernacular and the scholarly anatomy of language Nebrija proposed. Was there nothing good in getting the European vernaculars out of the shadow of Latin?  Could not lengua and habla, tongue and language have made peace and co-existed?  Again a vision of balance seems to be pitted against an all devouring monism, which causes the monopolizing mode to lose its legitimacy altogether, and puts the very idea of a possible balance into the shadows.

One final point: Complementarity, as I have been trying to say, has both its harmonious and its tragic aspect.  There is no action without an equal and opposite reaction – that’s Newton’s third law of motion which can be paraphrased as all forces exist in pairs, or as whenever one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body will exert a force of equal magnitude in the opposite direction.  Christ invokes anti-Christ.  This was the mystery that Illich spent a life-time contemplating, that caused him to say to me - that “the more you allow yourself to conceive of the evil you see as evil of a new kind, of mysterious kind, the more intense become the temptation – I can’t avoid saying it, I can’t go on without saying it – of cursing God’s Incarnation.” (Rivers North of the Future, p.61) You can probably imagine the trepidation with which I broadcast this statement, the layers of script in which I defensively muffled it, and the rueful amusement I then felt when no listener ever even commented to me on what I had thought was an utterly explosive statement; but I quote it here a master instance of complementarity – that the world is “called to glory,” as he put it elsewhere, but the paradoxical consequence is that it ends up enveloped in “demonic night”. (Hospitality and Pain, p. 1) Could this fate, this mysterious darkness, have been avoided?  Yes, Illich says, but not by eliminating the possibility of its occurrence.  It was in the nature of things that the Incarnation would cast a proportionate shadow.  Awareness of this necessity, however, might have mitigated its effect, and produced a church less “brutally earnest” – Illich’s words again – and less fatally convinced of its own rectitude.  Here again I find Illich converging with Jung and Cusanus.  One cannot avoid the opposites, for that is how the world is constituted, but one can dance with them and laugh.   

Politics and Religion in the Thought of Ivan Illich

This paper was prepared for a symposium held at the Oakland High School for the Arts under the auspices of California Governor Jerry Brown in the summer of 2013.  The occasion was the publication of Beyond Economics and Ecology, a collection of Illich's essays on these themes, edited and introduced  by Sajay Samuel.  The conference was called After the Crisis: The Thought of Ivan Illich Today...

POLITICS AND RELIGION IN THE THOUGHT OF IVAN ILLICH

The heading of today’s session is politics and religion, so I’d like to begin by reflecting on these terms, both of which can be extremely slippery.    I know they have practical, everyday meanings –  we will usually agree in ordinary talk that what goes on in churches and mosques, synagogues and temples is religion, while what is discussed in legislatures and government offices, is politics – but if we inquire a little more deeply, they become quite difficult to distinguish.  One of the hallmarks of the modern age was the distinction between a private sphere in which one was free to cultivate one’s religion, and a public realm governed by the canons of secular reason.   This regime began to take shape at the beginning of the modern age, roughly the 16th century, and it’s arguable that before that time there was no such thing as religion in the sense in which the word is used today.  Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the great Canadian scholar of religion writing in the 1960’s says: “religion as a discrete category of human activity separable from culture, politics and other areas of life is an invention of the modern West.”  Before the 16th century - at the earliest - the word can denote a virtue, a disposition, a habit – a practice let’s say - but not the adoption of a set of propositions or beliefs as “my religion.”  In fact Cantwell Smith goes on to say that “the rise of the concept of religion is in some ways correlated with a decline in the practice of religion itself.”   (Just as an aside here some of the slipperiness of the word religion can be seen in that quote, in which Smith, having just said that religion is not a transhistorical essence but a modern invention then goes on to speak of “religion itself” as if it were just such an essence. This shows, I think, the difficulty we still have in speaking of these matters.)  By the beginning of the eighteenth century, according to the historian of Christianity John Bossy, the idea of religion is well established.  “By 1700,” he writes, “the world was full of religions, objective social and moral entities characterized by system, principles and hard edges.”   And religion once distinguished from politics became in many ways its scapegoat:  the conflicts between the nascent national states of the 16th and 17th centuries, to take just one example, became known as the wars of religion, when they could just as plausibly – more plausibly - have been called the wars of state-making, and taken as illustrating the arbitrary and violent character of state power, rather than the violent and arbitrary character of religious belief.   

One could say a lot more about the segregation of the secular from the religious in the modern world, and about the fateful imperial reorganization of other civilizations and cultures along these lines during the colonial era, but the point that I want to make here is that this whole mythology has come undone in our time – undone to the extent that, in some circles at least, one hardly needs to argue the point any more.   There are a lot of people to whom it now seems obvious that religion and politics were never really separate – we can see, for example, that millenarian political ideologies like Communism were transpositions of Judaeo-Christian originals, that civilizations are spun out of something more fundamental than either reason or belief,  that we enter public and political life as  all that we are and not just as disinterested and disembodied units of discourse, that there will always be a sacred – something for which we will sacrifice – because it’s in the nature of human beings to produce one.   The holy, as William Cavanaugh says, only migrates, never disappears, and, in the modern era, it is as likely to appear in the trappings of the state as of the church - in fact, at the moment, in countries like mine and yours, one can probably more safely abuse religious symbols than desecrate a flag or some other sign of the state.

What this means, in brief, is that when we talk about religion – let’s leave politics aside for the moment - we don’t always know what we’re talking about.  The German legal scholar Carl Schmitt says that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”  All right, but even this bold and often quoted statement still imagines two domains between which there is a not quite legitimate intercourse called secularization – the very point that Hans Blumenberg argued with Schmitt in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age.   The map we have inherited doesn’t fit the territory in which we’re living, and the apparent resurgence of religion, I think, confirms rather than refutes this diagnosis.  With no visible way ahead one tries to go back.  But there is no going back.  And this is what it means to live, as the title of our gathering has it, after the crisis.  There is a crisis, but it is by now so diffuse, so familiar, so total, and so intractable that it makes no sense to call it a crisis in the absence of some way of getting a handle on it.  Modern concepts like religion and politics, private and public, sacred and secular no longer open the door we’re trying to open.

This is a situation in which I think Ivan Illich’s work can be helpful.  This is a subject for a book not a half hour’s talk, and I hope to write such a book during the next couple of years, but let me try to just give you a short sketch of why I think he matters.  Many thinkers in recent years have developed the idea that I can remember Illich first quoting to me from the historian Christopher Dawson: that the Church is the West and the West is the Church.  Jean Luc Nancy, a French philosopher, whom I have been reading recently, says that the nervous system of the West is Christian – an interesting image.   It’s no longer a surprise to find a contemporary philosopher like Nancy expounding the Epistle of James, as he does in the book I mentioned, or to find Alain Badiou or Giorgio Agamben poring over the letters of the apostle Paul, but these thinkers are, you might say, trying to crack the code of their civilization without ever really declaring themselves in relation to the Gospel.  Illich, I think, can tell us more because with him here is still something left to recover once Christianity has been, as Nancy says, deconstructed.

Here again we run into a difficulty with words, and specifically the word Christianity.  When I was about to present my last interviews with Illich on CBC Radio in 2000, I got into an argument with my usually indulgent executive producer about the title.  I wanted to call it “The Corruption of the Best is the Worst” because that title stuck most closely to the hypothesis Illich wanted to argue.  My superior thought the phrase awkward and obscure and insisted that I call the series, The Corruption of Christianity.   But, I protested, that implies that there was once some uncorrupted thing called Christianity which then was spoiled, and Illich doesn’t believe that.  Christianity names the corruption that was inherent in the Christian revelation from the outset – the world being what it is.  Christ and anti-Christ enter the world together.  I lost the argument and thought it better to present the series under a mystifying title than not to present it at all, but the problem remains.   Jacques Ellul got around this difficulty by using the word Christianity for the institutional religion, and an algebraic ‘x’ for the revelation itself.  If you’ll allow me I’ll just speak of the Gospel as a way of pointing at this ‘x’.  

Illich claimed that the Gospel was and is something peculiarly  volatile or unstable.   It’s the charter of our freedom to love wherever and whenever we feel called – a possibility that must be revealed since it doesn’t lie within humanity’s natural repertoire – but it is also the source of a unique evil which is generated whenever this love is made compulsory, and power is exercised in its name.  This faith, initially, is not a religion.  Illich says so explicitly: “faith in the incarnate word sacrificed on the cross is not a religion and cannot be analyzed with the concepts of religious science.” (Illich in Conversation, p. 268.)  But it became a religion: what escapes all bounds was confined and controlled, what can only be a response to a call was delivered on demand.   Illich traces out this institutionalization over centuries.  It can be summed up as the breaking and dissolution of boundaries.  What begins with the Samaritan daring, by God’s grace, to reach across the ethnic and ethical divide which separates him from the beaten man in the ditch ends with globalization, the universal circulation of commodities, a morality of relative values, and the fathomless virtuality of life in a here with no beyond.

Christianity, and now I mean Christianity, confronts us today not just as a creed, not just as the sum of its millions of adherents, but as a fully achieved historical Juggernaut.  Our way of speaking, our habits of thought and our institutions all emerge from the historical crucible in which, first the church, and then secular governments attempted to make the Gospel perform punctually and reliably.  Care is now the primary commodity in which we trade, life the primary idol which we worship.

Illich describes the gradual unfolding of the perverse consequences of the Incarnation as apocalyptic, using this much abused word in its root sense of revelation or unveiling.    Over time these consequences accumulate and become visible – visible in a way they were not to the believers who first planted their seeds.  To take a simple example – the pioneers of public health insurance in Canada thought of their programme as an obvious desideratum of Christian charity.  They did not foresee what Illich called medical nemesis – the way in which the blanket of professional care would eventually suffocate vital abilities and turn life itself into a resource.  But we can see it, and this disillusionment is our gift as well as our burden.

Through Illich’s eyes, I can see that our religion is our way of life, and not our profession of “belief.”  In his study of theology, he says, he was always drawn to ecclesiology – the study of the church as an institution – and within ecclesiology to the study of liturgy.  Liturgy is the way in which the church manifests itself, the practices of penitence and prayer, praise and procession, eating and drinking by which it comes alive as a social body.  Aidan Kavanagh, a historian of liturgy, describes early Christian liturgies that took entire cities as their scale and occupied most of the day on Sunday.   There was no congregation meekly seated in rectilinear rows following along in a printed programme – faith was enacted.  Theologians say relatively little about the church in the first millennium, Kavanagh says, because they simply take it for granted that “Christian faith could not be lived in any other way than socially, communally and sacramentally.”

Today we perform different liturgies.   Modern schooling is a liturgy, Illich says, a public service whose ritual repetition produces a social body, and I think we need to take this idea seriously.  Our consciousness of who and what we are is produced by what we do.  Our religion is defined by our actions not our speculative beliefs.   Illich liked the term religiosity because he thought it reached past explicit creeds to capture the atmosphere, the climate of opinion, as one says, in which we live.  And our religiosity is generated by our liturgical practices – in schools and hospitals, museums and prisons, hotels and cinemas where we enact what we really believe. 

Illich was a proscriptive thinker, as his friend John McKnight said long ago.  He engaged in proscription, not prescription.  Another way of saying this is to call him an apophatic theologian, one who tells you what God is not, not what God is, but since Illich so emphatically denied being a theologian, I prefer to take him at his word and not call him one.  Proscriptive thinker is all right, and  the term may  even shed some light on the question of how to locate him in relation to the problematic categories of politics and religion.   Illich, in his campaigning days, between - let’s say - 1960 and 1980, was often understood as a political thinker, and as far as the term goes I think he was.  He referred to his own efforts as political campaigns and many of his most celebrated books end with a call for “political counter-measures” against this or that form of institutional overgrowth.   But as he went on and began to contemplate the extraordinary inertia of the institutions whose growth he had thought to limit, he finally came face to face with a conclusion that I think had been gradually dawning on him all along: that modern certainties are so tenacious because their roots go so deep.  “Everywhere I look for the roots of modernity,” he says, “I find them in the attempts of the churches to institutionalize, legitimize and manage Christian vocation.”

Our politics, in short, are rooted in our religion, unsatisfactory as both these terms are, and our religion moreover is a derivation of something that in its nature could never be a religion, which makes things even more complicated.   This is not to dismiss politics in the instrumental sense of the term, nor to say that nothing is at stake – a great deal is sometimes at stake, and Thomas More’s maxim – If you can’t achieve the best, at least prevent the worst – continues to apply.  But it is to say that if politics as a discussion about what is good, a discussion in which all options have not been foreclosed by economic and technological forces that have long since escaped our control – if politics in that sense is ever to resume, we will first have to understand the liturgies, the rituals, the raindances, as Illich liked to say, by which we produce and reproduce the world that surrounds us.  We will have to learn to swim against the current and seek in our tradition what British theologian John Milbank calls “the future we have missed.”

It seems to me that the time is propitious for such a reconsideration.  Religion persists – against the prediction of universal secularization that was one of sociology’s founding certitudes until not so very long ago – but it doesn’t necessarily persist as “religion” in the modern sense – that is as private, incommunicable, and antagonistic belief.  As modern definitions weaken, we can begin to see that religion is not a private property but a human propensity, and, as such, can be thought of as a commons rather than a private enclosure.   In the face of the recognition that “the crisis”, as I said earlier, has ended only by becoming total, I think we have entered a clearing, an opening where it may become possible to think differently about our tradition.

So let me conclude with another story about the same colleague and friend I spoke of earlier – my old executive producer whose indulgent and understanding supervision of my work was one of the great blessings of my life, even though I may appear to be picking on him here.  Sometime in the late 1990’s I presented him with a plan for four series of broadcast all dealing, I think I said, with contemporary appropriations of Christianity – the four subjects were to be Simone Weil, René Girard, Ivan Illich, and Herman Bianchi, a Dutch jurist, less well known than the other three, who was then trying to reintroduce the theory and practice of sanctuary into criminal justice.  My friend approved my plan, but then expressed a hope that afterwards I would return to more political and social subjects.  I understood at that moment that I did not feel as my colleague seemed to that these “religious” subjects were somehow set aside from social and political concern as if they pertained to some other world than this one.  So I said that I thought that “religion” was precisely what needed to brought to light in the public square, and that nothing could be more political than curious, disinterested inquiry into the religious roots of contemporary predicaments.  I’m not sure I convinced him, but I continue to think that’s true.