"Traditionally the gaze was conceived as a way of fingering, of touching. The old Greeks spoke about looking as a way of sending out my psychopodia, my soul's limbs, to touch your face and establish a relationship between the two of us. This relationship was called vision. Then, after Galileo, the idea developed that the eyes are receptors into which light brings something from the outside, keeping you separate from me even when I look at you. People began to conceive of their eyes as some kind of camera obscura. In our age people conceive of their eyes and actually use them as if they were part of a machinery. They speak about interface. Anybody who says to me, "I want to have an interface with you," I say, "please go somewhere else, to a toilet or wherever you want, to a mirror." Anybody who says, "I want to communicate with you," I say, "Can't you talk? Can't you speak? Can't you recognize that there's a deep otherness between me and you, so deep that it would be offensive for me to be programmed in the same way you are.""
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich (4 September 1926 – 2 December 2002) was an Austrian-born Christian anarchist, author, polymath, and polemicist.
63 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Ivan Illich →
Related Quotes
"Nenà štěstà bez závisti."
"The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions…"
"Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of …"
"Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us. Just before He started out on His public life, Jesus …"
"Churches also have their problems with a Jesus whose only economics are jokes. A savior undermines the foundations of…"
"Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomor…"
"Friendship in the Greek tradition, in the Roman tradition, in the old tradition, was always viewed as the highest poi…"
"I intend to discuss some perplexing issues which are raised once we embrace the hypothesis that society can be descho…"
"Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful s…"
"In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy."