In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

233 C H A P T E R T W E N T Y T h e C u l t i v a t i o n o f C o n s p i r a c y * Ivan Illich O n November 16, 1996, I arrived at the library auditorium of Bremen University just in time for my afternoon lecture. For five years I had commented on old texts to trace the long history of Western philia, of friendship. This semester’s theme was the loss of the common sense for proportionality during the lifetimes of John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz, and Johann Sebastian Bach. On that day I wanted to address common sense as the sense organ believed to recognize the “good,” the “fit,” and the “fifth.” But even before I could start I had to stop: The roughly two hundred auditors had planned a party instead of a lecture. Two months after the actual day, they had decided to celebrate my seventieth birthday, so we feasted and laughed and danced until midnight. Speeches launched the affair. I was seated behind a bouquet, in the first row, and listened to seventeen talks. As a sign of recognition, I presented a flower to each encomiast. Most speakers were over fifty, friends I had made on four continents, a few with reminiscences reaching back to the 1950s in New York. Others were acquaintances made while teaching in Kassel, Berlin, Marburg, Oldenburg, and, since 1991, in Bremen. As I grappled for the expression of gratitude fitting each speaker, I felt like Hugh of St. Victor, my teacher. This twelfth-century monk in a letter compares himself to a basket-bearing donkey: not weighed down but lifted by the burden of friendships gathered on life’s pilgrimage. From the laudationes at the library we moved across the plaza to the liberal arts building, whose bleak cement hallways I habitually avoid. A metamorphosis had occurred in its atmosphere. We found ourselves in a quaint café: some five dozen small tables, each with a lighted candle on a colored napkin. For the occasion, the university *Address given at the Villa Ichon, March 14, 1998, on the occasion of Ivan Illich receiving the Culture and Peace Prize of Bremen. department of domestic science had squeezed a pot into the semester’s budget, a pot large enough to cook potato soup for a company. The chancellor, absent on business in Beijing, had hired a Klezmer ensemble. Ludolf Kuchenbuch, dean of historians at a nearby university and a saxophonist, took charge of the jazz. A couple of clowns performing on a bicycle entertained us with their parody of my 1972 book Energy and Equity. The mayor-governor of the city-state Bremen had picked a very old Burgundy from the treasures of the Rathskeller. The lanky and towering official handed me the precious gift and expressed his pleasure “that Illich at seventy, in his own words, had found in Bremen ‘einen Zipfel Heimat,’” something like “the tail end of an abode.” On the lips of the Bürgermeister, my expression seemed grotesque, but still true. I began to reflect: How could I have been induced to connect the notion of home with the long dark winters of continual rain, where I walk through the pastures along the Wümme that are flooded twice a day by the tide from the North Atlantic? I who, as a boy, had felt exiled in Vienna, because all my senses were longingly attached to the South, to the blue Adriatic, to the limestone mountains in the Dalmatia of my early childhood. Today’s ceremony, however, is even more startling than the previous revelry, because your award makes me feel welcomed by the citizenry rather than just by a city father. Villa Ichon is a manifestation of Bremen’s civility: neither private charity nor public agency. You, who are my hosts in this place, define yourselves as Hanseatic merchant citizens. On the day Villa Ichon was solemnly opened, you pointedly refused to let a city official touch the keys to this house, this “houseboat for the uninsured and vulnerable among us,” as Klaus Hübotter has called it. By insisting on your autonomy you stressed the respectful distance of civil society from the city’s government . I am touched that this annual award, meant to honor a Bremen citizen, should today go to an errant pilgrim, but one who knows how to appreciate it. As the eldest son of a merchant...

Share