Autism and Philosophy

Autism and Philosophy

Does philosophy cause autism? Does that question elicit a jolt of recognition? I don’t believe the matter has ever been investigated scientifically, but there is anecdotal evidence to support it. That the two are correlated is prima facie plausible, but does philosophy cause autism? Not florid cases of it, to be sure, but does philosophy edge its practitioners into the spectrum? Does it produce low-grade autism? From my own personal experience, I noticed a marked difference between psychologists and philosophers: I didn’t see signs of autism in psychologists (though other pathologies might be present), but when I began to interact with philosophers, I observed a significant divergence. It comes down to what we nowadays call social skills: awkward behavior, inept friendships, emotional blindness, blank stares, solipsistic tendencies, a lack of warmth. It is probably true that philosophy attracts people already like this, but does it exacerbate the precondition? Does it encourage self-absorption, turning into a shut-in, not quite getting what other people are all about? Don’t you think Wittgenstein was like this? His fraught relationships, his solitariness, his oddity—he wasn’t socially normal. Russell, too, despite his need for love and company, was not entirely adept in his social behavior: he was comfortable with mathematics and philosophy, but in human relations he could be cold and remote, ill at ease. Would anyone regard Saul Kripke and David Lewis as socially completely ordinary? I don’t think Michael Dummett and Richard Hare were quite there inter-personally. Was Quine, or Davidson, or Rawls? I didn’t know them well personally, but from a distance they struck me as not exactly smooth socially. Derek Parfit? Hardly your convivial man-about-town. Surely, immersion in philosophy had something to do with this—it deepened the nascent autism. Not that this is all bad—it may even have been necessary—but it put these individuals into a distinct class of human beings. It made them autistically inclined. It forced them inwards.

What about me? Am I exempt? I’m afraid not. I think I changed when I became a fulltime philosopher at age twenty-two. I was always pretty intellectual, a “walking dictionary” as people used to say; but philosophy made me more like that—more cut off from other people, more solitary. It is true that I always had another side to me, expressed in sports and music, but I have the distinct impression that my mind (my brain) was altered by the study of philosophy. My mind feels like a secret place that I can retreat to, especially when other people irritate me. My extreme rationality makes me impatient with stupidity—people seem more annoying to me than before. It’s hard for me to interact with people who just don’t get it. It makes me want to avoid them. I admit to having an excessive fondness for animals. I hate Christmas. I would not describe myself as socially normal, oh no. I tend to go my own way. I believe that philosophy has played a part in this. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing (my autistic self despises normality), but it does seem like a reality, a psychological syndrome of sorts. I’m not intending to condemn (or celebrate); I am doing objective science. Philosophical friends of mine tend to have the same kind of personality—somewhat aloof, non-participatory, inward-looking. I think Bernard Williams was well aware of this syndrome and tried to overcome it—but he too had a dose of it (perhaps this is why he tried so hard to overcome it). Similarly, for Richard Wollheim (willfully eccentric) and Peter Strawson (strangely shy)—though both delightful men to talk to. I think that recognizing this tendency in philosophers could be helpful to people surrounded by it. It’s not our fault—philosophy made us this way! Philosophy becomes a place of retreat, a place to hide away; and God knows there is plenty to hide away from. Other people may not be hell (a useful Sartrean exaggeration, this) but they aren’t heaven either. They aren’t even a pleasant afternoon (see Jane Austen). Philosophy provides a kind of arid alternative to messy humanity; and we can’t be doing with messy humanity. Hence, the distant look in the eye, the robotic speech, the preoccupation with detail and exact formulation. Hence also, perhaps, with the weird morality, the lack of spontaneous reaction, the desire for a moral calculus.

What is to be done about it? Nothing. Nothing can be done. It’s the nature of the beast. Perhaps it can be mitigated to some degree by forcing oneself to take holidays from philosophy, or hanging around non-philosophical people. But the autism cuts deep; it affects everything. I don’t mean clinical-level disabling autism; I just mean a certain remoteness, abstractedness, preoccupation, inflexibility, obsessiveness, eccentricity. You know it when you see it. Go to the average philosophy conference and you can feel it all around you—a general social unease. Are philosophers ever easygoing? Do they ever just switch it off? Are they ever just ordinary people who happen to have a certain occupation? They are locked into their low-level autism. It is manifested in their style of writing. I find it hard to think of an exception. And the women are not that different from the men—they too suffer from mild autism (I could name some prime examples). Mathematicians and physicists might share the syndrome to some degree (I don’t know enough of them to say), but in philosophers it is very pronounced. Some areas of the subject might be more prone to producing it than others—not so much ethics and aesthetics, perhaps. The more abstract and abstruse the more autistic. I wonder how autistic Socrates was, with his insistent gauche questioning, his obliviousness to the impact of his words on his interlocutors. He certainly doesn’t seem like a socially gracious human being (again, no criticism intended). For all I know, philosophical autism may be the best way to be—though somehow I doubt it.[1]

[1] Terms like “autism” are often overused and overgeneralized (compare “psychopath” and “narcissist”); I am using the term somewhat loosely to include a family of kinds of mental makeup. Being “weird” or “nerdy” might be vernacular equivalents. Still, I think the term is apt in the present connection: a distinctive, stable, recognizable personality type—though it can vary from case to case in degree and mode. It might be contrasted with the bubbly outgoing communicative type. You don’t tend to come across many philosophers like that. There is probably a genetic basis for both types.