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73 C H A P T E R E I G H T E c o n o m y, S u b s i s t e n c e , a n d P s y c h o l o g i c a l I n q u i r y Robert Kugelmann I van Illich’s thought has been a genuine challenge to some of my basic presuppositions . My early work attempted to redress the alienating power of objectified accounts of the body by discovering the lived- or ensouled-body in anatomy and physiology.1 I had neglected to consider that these alienating accounts arose as discursive practices of modern social institutions (the state, medicine, law, education). These institutions mediate self-understanding as conditions of living in the modern age. If my project had succeeded, it would only have worsened our condition, by putting “soul” into the accounts. One advantage of mechanistic explanations of the body is that they do bifurcate the self, relegating soul to an unknown realm of no institutional concern. Mental mechanisms are clearly mechanisms, so that the two—body and soul—are not confused. I recall Illich saying that attempts such as mine, filled with good intentions, “dress up Justine’s body.”2 Thus a psychologist discovers his genealogy. But Illich’s challenge was not simply to pay attention to historical context, nor even to keep in mind that the past is other, that understanding is distorted if the past is colonized by contemporary concepts . No, the basic challenge was one I subsequently found in all of Illich’s work. As he wrote in 1970, each of his writings is “an effort . . . to question the nature of some certainty.”3 This questioning differs from that of genealogical critics such as Friedrich Nietzsche or Michel Foucault, because it does not lay bare an underlying will to power. It differs from Edmund Husserl’s epoché as well, because it does not suspend relations with the world. Illich’s questioning of certainties provokes a particular distance from the contemporary world; it calls for an askesis of knowing, in order to be open to the real. Other thinkers challenge the premise that contemporary categories are eternal verities. Illich’s questioning points elsewhere. It does not yearn for a tradition that has been discarded or neglected. Much has been cast off and lost, often to our impoverishment . Yet all modes of thought are metaphors, ephemeral enactments, as long-lived as the Japanese cherry blossom or the western rose, two symbols for the best and the most beautiful. If taken for more than that, they become idols. Illich’s questioning does not celebrate progress; it does not anticipate what should happen as a result of his scrutiny, nor does it seek to leave those who respond to the searching doubt adrift in the chaos of choices that is the sea we swim in. The consequence of his interrogations might be hope. It was only in reading Emmanuel Levinas on the distinction between two types of knowledge that I came to understand better what Illich does. One type of knowledge is truth as “autonomy,” symbolized by Odysseus, the man who comes home. This is the way of the same, the assimilation of what is, expanding and making more powerful the grasp of reason, whether it be to contemplate or to change nature. The other type of truth, “heteronomy,” the way of the other, is symbolized by Abraham, the man who left home never to return, venturing into the other, the foreign, the strange, in response to a call and in hope: “Truth would thus designate the outcome of a movement that leaves a world that is intimate and familiar, even if we have not yet explored it completely, and goes toward another region, toward a beyond, as Plato puts it.”4 In being faced by another in heteronomous thought, consciousness becomes conscience, which is not a power but a task: “The life of freedom discovering itself to be unjust, the life of freedom in heteronomy, consists in an infinite movement of freedom putting itself ever more into question.”5 Illich’s continuous review of modern “truth” is, to use somewhat old-fashioned phrasing, less consciousness raising than conscience raising. An early example: “I am here to suggest that you voluntarily renounce exercising the power which being an American gives you. . . . I am here to challenge you to recognize your inability, your powerlessness and your incapacity to do the ‘good...

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