by Leonardo Christopher Eck Glenewinkel
At a certain moment in the 1995 documentary film about the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996), the narrator says: “Wenn wir auch den Himmel über uns verloren haben, so doch nicht schon den Boden unter uns” (even if we have lost the heaven above us, not so, as yet, the ground beneath us).1) But what if we have indeed lost, or better, are losing, the ground too? I propose to seek an answer to this question by plumbing the Lebenskreise (spheres of life) of two great thinkers: Ivan Illich (1926-2002) and Vilém Flusser (1920-1991). Observed synoptically, both biographies shed light on the question of the Sinnesverlust (loss of sense) and Bodenlosigkeit (groundlessness) in our daily lives.
Both thinkers were born in the doomed interwar period between 1918 and 1939, in which the final downfall of Old Europe was incubated. Illich was born in Vienna, Flusser in Prague, so both shared a post-Habsburgian heritage, the intellectual sphere of Alt-Mitteleuropa, but on different sides: Illich was born in the defeated one since the Habsburg Empire was vanquished, whereas Flusser, was born on the victorious side since Czechoslovakia attained independence after World War I. Both grew up in a plurilingual background: Illich with his Italian-German-French linguistic skills and Flusser with his German-Czech skills, and for both, more languages were to come. Both were forced to flee their nations, driven by the same diabolic war machine of the Nazis: Illich after 13 March 1938, the day of the Anschluss (annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany) and Flusser after the 15 March 1939, with the military occupation of Czechoslovakia. Illich found protection in Florence Italy, in 1942 and began his study of theology at the Pontificia Università Gregoriana in Rome by November 1944. Flusser, socially less protected and ‘racially’ more exposed by being a Jew from both sides of his parents, fled his country a few weeks after the Nazi occupation of Prague. Flusser and wife Edith reached London, but already in 1940, they decided to leave for Brazil. Illich on the other hand, arrived on North American shores only at the end of 1951, when the horror of the war was already over. What Portuguese-speaking Brazil was for Flusser, the Spanish-speaking part of South America, Puerto Rico, and Mexico, were for Illich. Two “Old Europeans” were forced and decided to live in a Western-non-European environment: for them a mentally virgin world, far away from their acquired habits and ways of thinking.
However, Europe remained decisive for them both. Between 1979 and 1981 Illich held lectures at the Kassel University in Germany, in 1981 he spent a year of research and lecturing at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and from 1983 until his death in 2002 he gave lectures in Marburg, Oldenburg, and, consistently, at the University of Bremen. Flusser, in contrast, lived as a real refuge with all its uncertainties: for him, Europe was at once a great temptation and a great abomination, but already in 1972, the Flusser couple went back to the old continent, beginning an intense peregrination between England, France, Italy and, only later, Germany.2)
Despite these biographical similarities, there is no evidence of an intellectual or personal intersection between these two men during this period. Though Illich was in and out of Brazil, between 1961 and 1971, there are no records of him meeting Flusser there. Moreover, it seems very unlikely that they did since their intellectual pursuits at the time were not the same. The themes that were central to Illich in the decades between 1960 and 1980 were not at all relevant to Flusser, who in 1965 published in Portuguese A história do diablo (History of the Devil), and in 1983, published, Für eine Philosophie der Fotographie (For a Philosophy of Photography).
Around the mid-1980s, Illich made a radical turn in his intellectual productions when the question of literacy in history became a major topic for his investigations. In 1988, he published ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, co-authored with Barry Sanders.3) Interestingly, though Flusser did not appear in this work, his 1987 published Die Schrift Hat schreiben eine Zukunft? (Does Writing Have a Future?)4) is cited in Illich’s 1991 In the Vineyard of the Text.5) Illich also makes direct reference to Flusser’s Im Universum der technischen Bilder (1985) in his The Scopic Past and the Ethics of the Gaze. A Plea for the Historical Study of Ocular Perception (1995).6)
Of course, we must remember and consider that Vilém Flusser died tragically on 27 November 1991. Like Albert Camus, he died “absurdly” in a car crash, right after his second visit to his hometown Prague, after he had to flee it in 1939. The years between 1988 and 1991 is the only period during which these two minds, who then shared a common field of interests and were more or less in the same geographical region of Nord-West Germany, could have crossed paths. As it turns out, four days before his death, on November 23, Flusser held his last public speech (Vortrag) in Germany in Essen, at the congress “CULTEC- Kultur und Technik im 21. Jahrhundert”, in front of an audience of 800 people. Flusser’s speech was entitled: “Die Informationsgesellschaft. Phantom oder Realität?” (The Society of Information. Phantom or Reality?).7) The only personal meeting of the two that was witnessed and reported on occurred after this speech.8) The meeting seemed very cordial, and the two spoke as if they already knew each other. This cordiality however did not imply a meeting of minds. Indeed, the two held utterly distinct and irreconcilable views on the question of technology and man. Illich already foresaw the shadow cast by technology on the human soul and flesh, while Flusser saw in it just the next step of human development, the age of a post-humanism ante litteram. In May 1991, during his first seminar in Bochum, Flusser pointed out that:
>Since the downfall of Humanism, and therefore, since the downfall of the Enlightenment, briefly, since Auschwitz and Hiroshima, we don’t have a model of the human being (Menschenbild) anymore. So, eventually, we can, within the field of science dealing with human communication, achieve a new model of the human being (Menschenbild).9)
Flusser thought within his timeframe: after the horror of the Second World War, the old ways of thinking were not only rusty and unusable but also dangerous. He felt the “absurdity” of his and our time. Time was not only out of joint, but it was also completely uprooted from the firm ground of the past. In his autobiography, Flusser depicted himself as a still life, or better, using the Italian expression, as natura morta, as dead nature. But he still felt the drive (drang) to enroot within a new ground (Boden), a new world, a new perspective for humanity. In other words, he was looking for a new humus, a new firm ground on which to redefine and redesign humanity itself:
>The word “absurd” in its original concept means “without ground”, in the sense of being “without roots.” Like a plant, which is groundless at the very moment it is picked and placed in a vase. Flowers on a breakfast table are an example of an absurd life. If you try to consider the existence of such flowers, then it becomes possible to feel their drive to root out and to enroot in some ground. This drive of the uprooted flowers is the inner feeling of absurd life.10))
Flusser describes furthermore this deeply damaged form of existence as a senseless circular movement, having nothingness as background (Die sinnlose Kreisbewegung, mit dem Nichts als Hintergrund, ist die Stimmung des absurden Lebens).11) He calls this form of experience the inner feeling of groundlessness (Stimmung der Bodenlosigkeit) or the consciousness of being without firm ground. But unlike Sartre or Heidegger, Flusser placed his “existential philosophy” not on an ontological level but on a historical one: Auschwitz and Hiroshima were, for him, the two fused historical moments in which the old humanitas ceased to exist. Already after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, in 1939, he said that “reality itself crumbled, and piece by piece, fell into the abyss.” (die Wirklichkeit bröckelte ab und fiel stückweise in den Abgrund).12)
A similar feeling was experienced by a young Ivan Illich in March 1939, during the Nazi occupation of Austria:
>I remember the day when I became old once and for all. I cannot forget the dark clouds of March in the evening sun and the vineyard on the Sommerleite between Pötzleinsdorf and Salmannsdorf near Vienna, two days before the “Anschluss.” Until that hour it had been a certainty for me that someday I would give children to the old tower on the Dalmatian Island. Since that lonely walk, this seemed impossible. Then, as a twelve-year-old boy, I experienced the disembedding (Ausbettung) of the flesh from the warp and weft of history, even before a command was issued from Berlin to gas all fools in the Reich.13)
Interestingly, looking back a half-century from around 1992, for both Ivan and Vilém the darkened sky of Nazism corresponded to the end of the World, a World of Yesterday, as the writer Stefan Zweig called it in his autobiography.
However, even if their historical experiences were similar, the consequences drawn from them by the two thinkers could not be more different. As we have already pointed out, Flusser wanted to rebuild and redesign the modern world, of course not in the image of the old one, which he detested, but in the image of the new upcoming era of technology. His Bodenlosigkeit, his historical absence of firm ground corresponded to the need for a new beginning. Flusser tried to embody this in his biography: Brazil was for him a new beginning, and Europe was a new beginning as well: whether it was Robion, France, or Meran—a multicultural city placed in the Italian Alps but historically and linguistically linked to the German-speaking world where he and his wife decided briefly to live—it didn’t matter. But besides these personal situations, Flusser wanted to re-think the history of the human condition generaliter, in its wholeness, and for this reason, he perceived the new beginning as an awareness of being historically placed. In other words, he was aware that our “Menschenbild”, the model of how we conceived and conceive mankind is the result of history, or, as he pointed out in a very poignant and almost profane way:
>I don’t believe that the models of mankind (Menschenbilder) follow each other, like in a sandwich, but I believe that they insert into each other (ineinandergreifen) and that all previously established models of mankind are present in us. This contemporaneity (Gleichzeitigkeit) of the past is, I believe, an important aspect of the so-called post-historical consciousness.14)
For Flusser, even if there was no way back, the highway of history, which carried forward him as an individual and mankind as a historical concept, was still there, ready to be redesigned in word and representation by progress. This becomes clear when he argues that there is a dialectical interdependence between the image and the word, in which imagination plays a central role.
>Imagination is a method to bypass alienation, to find an orientation within a lost world. It is a method for hunting, (Lascaux), for making tourism (Michelin-Atlas), and for project-making (projections). But imagination can twist, dialectically speaking, and become a hallucination. The images that result from such an imagination are not mediations with the world anymore, but on the contrary, they become opaque surfaces, which hide the world. The vectors of signification are reversed, and they show not the world anymore but the maker of such images. These images are not instruments of orientation, because mankind has become an instrument of its own instruments: it adores these images. It’s against the danger of such an idolatry, of an imagination which has become an intensified alienation, that writing was invented. Historically speaking, iconoclasm is the theoretical response against the madness of idolatry.15)
According to this dialectic history, the original sense of writing was determined by the need to limit the magic power of images, in case they could not reflect the world anymore as true vectors of signification. Flusser, at this point, makes no difference between the images produced during prehistoric times, like in Lascaux, and the images produced in modern times like the tourist maps of cities or highways. Both are seen as orientation tools and both, as well as the “techno-images”16) produced by the virtual world, were always endangered by their inner dialectic to become “opaque,” in other words, senseless like hallucinations. The medium has become not only the message, but the image produced by these media has become the only true world. But in Flusser’s post-historical worldview, this was part of the same process, or at least, the risk of man becoming the instrument of his instruments was part of the equation of history.
On the contrary, Illich felt the inner contradiction of the new beginning of this technogenic era as a brave new world, rebuilt on the ashes of Old Europe. What was emerging, he felt, was more like a Golem than a New-Adam, and this new Golem-like technogenic anti-world was, for him, a real Absurdistan. In an interview in 2001, shortly before his death in December 2002, Illich summarized his intellectual effort:
>If there is a reason for me to understand the rules by which this Absurdistan, in which we all live, works, it is because I and my friends want to know where we are NOT involved. [We want to understand] how to avoid that our souls, our senses, and our inner world are influenced.17)
Illich was not a dream-walker or a backward-looking romantic. He feared the disincarnating abstraction of a new way of thinking for he knew that “we stand on soil, not on Earth. From soil we come, and to the soil we bequeath our excrements and remains.”18) At the same time, he was ready to acknowledge “sadly, but without nostalgia…the pastness of the past.”19) Illich knew that the epoch in which he was living had lost the heaven above, and he worried that it was also losing the firm ground, the soil, the humus on which humans had always lived and died. Technological advances, masked as progress, were creating an “absurd” bubble in which the senses atrophied. This new realm of Absurdistan was not Flusser’s Bodenlosigkeit: it went beyond. Illich wanted to unshackle thought to clean our “souls, senses and inner worlds” from the cold breath of Unsinn, of the Senselessness, of the demonic Sinnesverlust, the loss of human-connecting senses.
In his 1992 written letter to Helmut Becker, Illich points out again, how the world in which he lived has become unnatural and absurd, how as a very young boy he felt the “disembedding (Ausbettung) of the flesh from the warp and weft of history.” And this Ausbettung of the living Flesh was perceived as an ontological rupture in the framework of the world. And this rupture was symbolized by evoking the historical decision of the Nazis to “gas all fools in the Reich.” In other words, the harmonic cosmos where reason could co-exist with foolishness because foolishness was still seen as the “dark and unseen side” of universal wisdom had ceased to exist. The original nature of man was mutilated, and for Illich, this mutilation was far away from being completed. In this letter, he continues:
>Genocide and Human Genome-Project; the death of the forests and hydroponics; heart transplants and medicide on insurance—these all are equally tasteless, without smell, impalpable, and un-worldly. We, who are just old enough and yet young enough to have lived through the end of Nature, the end of a world proportionate to the senses, should be able to die like no one else.20)
The English translation doesn’t quote a central passage: “Die Adventsfeier um die Erlanger Leiche zelebriert die Bodenlosigkeit des weltlosen Unmenschen” (the advent-festivity around the dead body of the Elanger-woman celebrates the groundlessness of the worldless unhuman being). Here Illich recalls the media event that took place in Erlangen in 1992, where a brain-dead pregnant woman was held in intensive care for many weeks to allow her unborn fetus to survive and to eventually be brought into the world. The fetus did not survive. For Illich, this was nothing but a pure expression of natura alienata, something natural made unnatural.
For Flusser the Bodenlosigkeit, the absence of firm ground was a historic event, an apocalyptic one, but for him that disaster could still be undone by fostering a new awareness of the upcoming technological possibilities. Illich’s Bodenlosigkeit, on the contrary, stated the undeniable fact that humanity was turning unhuman, that the ground of very human existence had turned into a void, its humus had turned un-human, becoming natura alienata.
Illich’s worldview is open to the awareness that “progress” has a high price that might include the human as such. The difference between Illich’s view and Flusser’s future-orientated worldview is evident in their differing ideas about the custodia oculorum, the disposition to protect our eyes from the illusions of the world. In an unpublished note, Flusser writes:
>The world of images which bathes us does not only press against us. It is also the result of our own discrimination between the images that approach us. It is we who are responsible, in part, for visual pollution. We have only to shut our eyes to shut those images out which we feel that they pollute us. But such a shutting of eyes, such a blinking which permits some images to be seen and others not, is not counter-vision […] Counter-vision intends to see how we are related to things, how we give meaning to them. And, of course, how, thus having provided the things with a specific meaning, we then change them. In sum: the intention of counter-vision is to see our being-in-the-world, not the world itself. Therefore counter-vision is “abstract,” in the sense of having its attention abstracted from the things of the world.21)
Here Flusser realizes that man-created imagery can be a “visual pollution” for our minds, but then he analyzes and describes the functioning structures of the technogenic gaze, which he calls “counter-vision.” Counter-vision reveals our relations with the world but not the world itself, and by showing these relations we are aware of ourselves, but in an abstract and disrupted way. In counter-vision the human relationships get trapped in the network of abstraction.
For Illich, this would exactly correspond to the corruptio optimi.22) If Flusser pleaded for a new conscious use of the technogenic world, Illich took a more anarchic but reflective path, as he recalls in the posthumous book of essays titled Le perte des sens from 2004:
>I plead for a rebirth of ascetic practices to keep alive our senses, in the lands devastated by the ‘show’, in the midst of overwhelming information, perpetual advice, intensive diagnostics, therapeutic management, the invasion of counselors, terminal care, and breathtaking speed. 23)
Illich hope was not directed toward a new religion in technology. Unlike Flusser, who preferred to analyze rather than criticize the new order of things, Illich aimed toward incarnated human relationships. For him, friendship was the only true human Heimat, the only real patria coelestis, the new-old heaven embracing this worldly and earthy gift, called conditio humana. The key formula of this human-divine friendship can be found in ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind.24) Right at the beginning Illich quotes a letter of Hugo of Saint Victor, a twelfth-century cleric, who kindly and softly whispers in our hearts:
>I know for sure that love never fails (1 Cor., 13:8). I was wandering around like a pilgrim, and I came to you in a foreign country; and it was almost not foreign to me, because I found friends there: but I don’t know if I made [them friends], or if they made me [their friend].” 25)
The comparison of these two remarkable thinkers should not end up in an aut-aut. It’s not the time to choose one side or the other, but the time to choose to be at home in an absurd world. Italo Calvino, an Italian writer whom Illich recalled quite often, once said:
>The hell of the living is not something that will be. If there is one, it is what is already here, the hell we live in every day, that we make by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the hell and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, are not hell, then make them endure, give them space.26)
Here we can find the very essence of an Illichian answer to the Sinnesverlust of the world: to recognize “who and what, in the midst of hell, are not hell” and make this endure by giving to it its own “space,” a place to dwell and taste the sense of life.
On the other hand, Flusser’s analysis can help us to gain more consciousness about this “hell.” As a thought-experiment, I would suggest what Calvino was to Illich, Machiavelli could be for Flusser, as when the great Florentine in a letter on 17 May 1521 to a friend, Francesco Guicciardini said “I believe that this should be the true way how to go to Paradise: to recognize the path to Hell and avoid it” (io credo che questo sarebbe il vero modo ad andare in Paradiso: inparare la via dello Inferno per fuggirla).”27)
If Illich-Calvino encourages us to acknowledge the fact that the world is the real hell and, at the same time, to recognize that we all can choose for ourselves the non-hellish elements of this hell, so Machiavelli-Flusser inspires us to study this hell to avoid it. Both are answers to the same existential problem, and both are true.