This Day in Philosophy — 4 September: two critics of modern civilisation

Two dates falling on the same day; two critiques that complete one another.

Ivan Illich was born in Vienna on 4 September 1926. Albert Schweitzer died at Lambaréné in Gabon on 4 September 1965.

Both were clergymen — one a Catholic priest, the other a Protestant theologian. Both left an academic career to build another kind of life. And both regarded the strongest faith of the twentieth century, the idea of progress, from a critical distance.

Illich: when does an institution become the master?#

Ivan Illich was an Austrian philosopher, Catholic priest and social critic. He worked in New York and in Puerto Rico, then founded a research centre at Cuernavaca in Mexico.

His reputation rests on two books.

Deschooling Society (1971) took aim at the institution of the school. Its thesis: school does not provide education — it monopolises it. It teaches us to confuse learning with instruction, competence with a diploma, and fluency with the ability to say something new.

Illich's distinction is sharp: most learning does not happen in school; school imposes the rule that learning counts as real only under its own roof.

Medical Nemesis (1975) applied the same analysis to medicine. He argued that modern medicine had itself become a source of illness — iatrogenesis, sickness caused by the physician. He distinguished three levels: clinical (the direct harm of treatment), social (the medicalisation of health) and cultural (the loss of the capacity to cope with pain, illness and death).

The third is the most radical. Modern medicine, on Illich's account, does not merely relieve pain; it also dissolves the tradition of giving pain a meaning.

The real concept: counterproductivity#

It would be a mistake to file Illich away as a critic of education or of health care. Beneath the whole body of work lies one concept: counterproductivity.

The idea is this. Every institution and every technology serves its purpose up to a certain threshold. Past that threshold it begins to produce the opposite of its own purpose.

His examples are plain. The car was invented to move people faster; once widespread enough it created traffic and lowered average speeds. School was founded to teach; once it held a monopoly it obstructed learning. Medicine was founded to heal; once it medicalised everything it produced illness.

Illich's real question is therefore this:

At what point do institutions built for people begin to govern the people themselves?

The question is almost exactly the one now being asked about algorithmic management. Automation was introduced for efficiency; past the threshold, does it begin to reduce human autonomy?

Illich died in 2002, before algorithmic governance. But his concept remains one of the most useful tools in the present argument.

Schweitzer: where does the moral community end?#

Albert Schweitzer was born in Alsace on 14 January 1875 and died at Lambaréné on 4 September 1965.

His life tests the limit of how many fields one person can be first-rate in: theologian, philosopher, organist and interpreter of Bach, expert on organ building, and physician.

He began to study medicine at thirty and founded a hospital in what is now Gabon in 1913. He spent the rest of his life there. He was awarded the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize; because the prize was reserved that year, it was presented to him on 10 December 1953.

Reverence for life#

Schweitzer's philosophical contribution gathers into a single principle: reverence for life (Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben).

Its formulation is plain, and strong for that reason: I am life that wills to live, in the midst of life that wills to live.

The moral consequence: good is to preserve and further life; evil is to destroy and obstruct it.

And the scope: this principle is not confined to the human community.

That was Schweitzer's objection to Western moral philosophy. The tradition running from Kant to Mill had drawn the boundary of moral attention at reasoning beings. Schweitzer widened it with the criterion of the will to live.

It carries Schopenhauer's influence — the line that places compassion at the foundation of morality.

And today#

Schweitzer's principle is a herald, a century early, of the present argument about animal consciousness.

Recent scientific declarations try to determine by evidence whether a creature is conscious. Schweitzer's proposal was to take a moral stance without waiting for that evidence: the will to live is observable, and that is enough for moral attention.

The tension between the two approaches is productive. Careful scientific language — "a realistic possibility" — preserves caution while leaving the moral consequence open. Schweitzer kept the criterion wide from the start and left the consequence clear.

Criticisms#

Schweitzer is not a figure beyond criticism.

The objection from practicability: preserving all life is in fact impossible. Eating, fighting disease, even walking destroys life. Schweitzer accepts this and refuses to supply a hierarchy — with the result that the principle's power to guide is weakened.

The objection from colonialism: the running of his hospital at Lambaréné and his attitude to Africans were rightly criticised in the decades that followed. The "elder brother" posture was argued to carry the patterns of colonial thought.

That criticism is serious and cannot be set aside. But the principle itself continues to be argued over, independently of the limits of the man who formulated it.

What they share#

The two probably never read one another. But they were looking from the same place.

Illich asked: when do institutions capture the human being?

Schweitzer asked: where does moral attention end?

The first questioned the means of progress. The second, its limits.

And both carried the same suspicion: that being able to do something does not mean we ought to.

That suspicion is more necessary in the age of artificial intelligence than it has ever been.

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Each day in this column we take up an event from the history of philosophy that falls on today's date.