Ivan Illich's Sixth Sense: Proportionality and the Search for the Good

• In Event: Establishment De-Zombified: Moved by Stories of Illich, Revolutionary Friendship, Inversion, and a Hospitality of Belonging

Abstract

Beyond which scale do social institutions become inhumane, trapping people within the clutches of the logic of their own de-humanizing mechanical systems (creations)? What is the relationship between common sense and proportionality?

This paper explores Illich’s reflections on the mechanical, industrial logic, now destroying the very possibility of moral, aesthetic, ethical principles that define and render possible “the good life”? Living in political and social institutions constructed and supported in an inhumane scale, this paper further explores how “educated” humans so trapped self-destructively in the mechanical/industrial logic of “modern systems,” live so antithetical to “common sense.”

We aim to draw connections among several thinkers who reveal how the commons pluriverse promises to be regenerated by Ivan Illich’s 6th sense.

Authors

• Dana L. Stuchul, Pennsylvania State University

• Madhu Suri Prakash, Pennsylvania State University