In the summer of 2021, a group of friends met regularly in Toronto parks, seated on blankets the approved 1 meter apart, to discuss David Cayley’s recently published Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey. Our group was not homogeneous: a recently ordained minister, a teacher, a gardener, a social worker, a human rights advocate, and a grad student, we were rarely in agreement, and certainly not all committed Illichians. I had been reading Illich for a few years by then and knew of David through his two books of interviews with him. He emerged as a distinct person for me when I came across his “Questions About the Pandemic” and, on a whim, decided to send him a response. What I found so refreshing in this text was not solely the ideas he threw out, but the expression of an earnest desire to discuss what was happening. I had observed how uncomfortable I made people in those days when I sought to debate the pros and cons of lockdowns, and in response I kept my views to myself or my closest friends. David announced his confusion publicly and dared others to take up the challenge to explain this new historical event to him.
Since that initial contact, I’ve gone through most of David’s archive of CBC Ideas documentaries (which he graciously made freely available on his website) and it is clear that the spirit of his “Questions” fits within a larger pattern. In the interviews he recorded with prominent thinkers of his age—Richard Sennett, René Girard, George Grant, and many others—he performed an incalculable service for future generations. But, despite what even he was probably inclined to think, this service was not limited to sussing out from them an elucidation of their thinking, but involved an actively creative exchange. In this, he revealed the meaning of “speech-thinking,” a notion developed by philosophers Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy which David himself only encountered late in life and whose proponents he described as follows: “They are able to know what they think only through the intermediation of some interlocutor. Their thoughts do not already exist in some pure and essential form in advance of their expression – they take shape in an encounter with some other on whom they depend and for whom they can only wait and hope.” David could reasonably have described his vocation (or job title) as that of interlocutor. Such a task cannot be accomplished by a neutral interrogator; it requires a grappling partner.
David’s persistence, a simultaneous intuitive grasp and stubborn incomprehension, were the necessary condition for getting thinkers to develop as fully as possible their ideas, while trusting that they were speaking to a sincere and interested person. When confronted with an idea he could not comprehend, he did the opposite of what many of us do: he doubled down in his quest to understand it, asking more questions, soliciting more opportunities to talk it over, getting more perspectives to weigh in and resting unsatisfied until he felt convinced that he had truly mastered it. Some highlights from his radio career, for me, are his series on Simone Weil (featuring his daughter Kate giving truly breathtaking readings of Weil); “Being Born,” a report on the wacky and niche field of prenatal psychology; and of course the conversations that would make up The Rivers North of the Future.
When I reached out to David regarding his “Questions,” he immediately invited me into a sphere of confidence and engaged me in dialogue. When I told him about the reading group we were planning, he gladly accepted the offer to come speak to us on the final day of our conversations. Around a table in my backyard and some cheap red wine, David gladly joined the discussion and fielded questions, even as things at one point got slightly heated. The group spawned many more reading groups, with people coming and going. Some continue to ponder the themes brought up then—the modern conception of death and medicine, the relations between Judaism and memory, professionalization, gender, institutionality and evil. Yet arguably, the framework of the discussions itself was the most influential result of the group, which we’ve since gone on to apply in more a formalized humanities project. It is likely that the shape of this model had much to do with the choice of text with which we began. I am grateful to David for providing the occasion as well as the support for our efforts to create para-academic spaces for intellectual practice, as well as for being an example, in the sense he ascribes to Illich in his biography, for how to remain intellectually curious, faithful, and rigorous.