The Metaphysics of Autism
When I was somewhere between the ages 9 and 10 years old, my primary school and my parents arranged a number of Psychiatric assessments of me. These assessments were meant to determine if suspicions which they, and my family, had about my behaviour went beyond the assertion that “he’s a little different”, or that “he struggles to make friends and to interact with his peers”. They were looking for an explanation, a reason around which they could begin to rally a plan and so best ease my forthcoming transition to secondary school.
Fortunately I was a 9 and 10 year old in the early 2000s, when there was both the funding and the educational resources to pursue a medical investigation and eventual diagnosis of autism, though then Aspergers’ Syndrome. I don’t remember everything perfectly, but I remember sitting in the headteacher’s office and playing with a ball of play-dough, whilst the paediatrician asked me questions about this and that – how certain people were feeling in a depicted scene on a piece of cardboard, or how I might think people would react in certain, given scenarios. I remember clearly having no idea how to answer the questions, which all seemed rather nonsensical to me. How was I, for example, supposed to know if Larry was feeling happy whilst sharing a soda with Jane in the picture before me, I hadn’t asked him.
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Towards the end of the school year, I received my diagnosis. I was, according to the experts, an autistic boy who presented symptoms as well, of dyslexia (difficulties reading and writing), dyspraxia (problems with dexterity and motor control), alongside some aspects of ADHD. From that moment autism defined an explanation of my life. It told a story, and it gave a reason. School was clearly defined by it, and my diagnosis did much good. It allowed me to build more constructive and accessible bridges with my teachers and to find ways that allowed me to sit exams, grow up, and leave school. Hurrah!
Yet, to speak about autistic experiences, is very often to do exactly this. This is an entirely true story, but one that, having grown up and considering that the autistic 10 year old is currently an autistic almost-27 year old, I see now that this story misses key components of autistic life. Indeed, to be someone who is not autistic this may well be the extent to which autism appears in your life, and the coming-of-age stories of white, autistic boys are being increasingly written, shared, and criticised. One need only look to TV shows like Atypical or Young Sheldon to see the clumsy comfort that we have begun to reach for around autism. However, autism didn’t stop when I left school, nor did it start when I was diagnosed. I began to seek a deeper analysis to what it meant to be autistic, beyond the diagnostic sheet and I landed in philosophy.
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that deals with that which is “beyond” physics; the prefix ‘meta’ means beyond – which to be honest sounds like it means nothing, but hear me out. If I talk about the physics of a table, I’m going to be talking about any physical property of the table – how big is it? How much weight can it hold? In a moment of unbridled sexual tension, exactly how much stuff could be swept off the table with one arm whilst your other arm does…. something. These are all parts of the existence of the table that can be measured – physical properties of the table. However, if I ask you the question “what is a table”, well then we have moved beyond any particularity or physical question. It doesn’t matter how much you measure a table, you are never going to arrive at an answer which tells you exactly *what* a table is, only things that give answers like ’it is yay big’, ‘it can hold yay weight’, and that you can usually sweep about 50 items in one decent arm-swing. None of these tell me about what a table is, in order to do that we have to go *beyond* physics – metaphysics.
“It doesn’t matter how much you measure a table, you are never going to arrive at an answer which tells you exactly *what* a table is.”
Metaphysics gives us the tools to develop a fundamental interpretation of the world. It deals with first principles, which means in our table example that metaphysics is concerned with what exactly it is that makes a table, well, a table. How much can you remove from a table, and still be left with a table? That’s perhaps an answerable question, we could say a table has legs and define it by how it looks, or else by a certain social function it takes, but let’s take it up a notch –people are not immune from metaphysics either. What does it mean to be a person. That’s to say, how much can you take away from a person and still be left with a person? Physically –take away arms, legs, eyes, head, or emotionally – take away empathy, fear, anger, love. Are these essential parts of being human? Indeed, what components of human beings should be considered fundamental, and which ones should not? Perhaps most importantly of all, what stories do we tell to each other about these ‘essential’ aspects of one another. Where are their limits, and how can we know if deciding on what is human, is itself ultimately unknowable? These queries into metaphysics are the questions that keep me up at night. Since I was first diagnosed at 10, and as I’ve gotten older I have faced assumptions, observations, and discriminations that speak, usually unknowingly, to the metaphysics of people, the stories that tell ourselves ‘what-we-are’, and almost all of these assumptions start from the point that autistic experience is an aberration, not a fulfillment or individuated fully realised expression of human experience.
Yet despite this Autism is a necessary component of me, as much a part of what some philosophers have called ‘lebenswelt’ (or life-world, that is to say the essence of your lived experience) as having hands, thoughts, breath, and blood. It is immediate to me and my perception of the world, as me, as you are immediate to you, as you. It is as indistinguishable from who I am, as any other aspect of me of my presence, sitting here writing this. It is not a subcategory of my presence labelled ‘autistic’, it is not that I am first present and then autistic, it is that my presence is autistic. Thus there is a metaphysical dimension to autism too, one that has hitherto fallen by the wayside. There exists a story, an explanation to be told about what “is autism”, and by extension “what is to be human”, that goes beyond medicine, schools, and coming of age stories, one that is more concerned with the particular perception of the world autism gives autists. French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception writes on the importance of this perception of self.
“True reflection,” he argues, “presents me to myself not as idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical with my presence in the world and to others, as I am now realising it: I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and through them, all the rest.”
Here Merleau-Ponty does something remarkable, he writes “I am all that I see… not despite my body… but, on the contrary, by being this body”. For Merleau-Ponty, as for many 20th century writers in Europe, the way we answer the question “what does it meant, fundamentally to be human” is begun to be answered by examining what it means to exist as any perceiving, individual human, with a body and a brain. For Merleau-Ponty there is no ‘fundamental’ deep rooted essence of humanity that lies within us like a long-lost relic of the divine, something that if you were to strip away all other non-essential components, would leave you with a pure expression of human being. For Merleau-Ponty, an answer to the metaphysical inquiry of what makes us essentially human is “by being this body” and in “this situation.”
Consequently, it is the metaphysical reality of being “this body and this situation”, that is to say this autistic body and in this autistic situation, which makes autism an aspect of human metaphysics, part of an explanation that makes up an answer to “what is humanity”. A critical account or consideration of autism is thus a component to any complete assertion or understanding of the world, be it through the humanities, the arts, or the sciences. Within each school of study we cannot deny the role of human presence in the processes of reflection. It is the artist who sees beauty in the landscape, the historian who weighs the explanations for past actions, and the scientist who must constrict the universe to a comprehensible semiotic pattern of numbers and riddles. It is the metaphysical light by which aspects of autism-as-identical-to-presence in the world which permits it to cast useful and historically undervalued illuminations onto the various actions of human endeavour; in other words to include autism not only in an understanding of what ‘is’ human, but to account for autism when we ask the various follow-up questions, “what do humans do?”, “How can humans be good?”, and “what are the limits of humanity?”. This is a thought captured by disability rights advocate and theorist Tobin Siebers “People with disabilities,” he writes, “insist on the pertinence of disability to the human condition on the value of disability as a form of diversity, and on the power of disability as a critical concept for thinking about human identity in general.”
“What does it mean to be a person?”
As Siebers claims with disability more broadly, and as in my case of autism more specifically, being disabled alone functions as a fertile and critical ground upon which we can plant the seeds of query and of discourse, because being disabled is “pertinent to the human condition”, or as I have framed it with Autism and Merleau-Ponty, autism is “indistinguishable” from my “presence in the world”.
It is here that we circle back to the conversation around the limitations of represented autistic experience, and indeed the role of this blog moving forward. On the one hand we have the defined context, the development of autistic tropes, discussions of medical intervention of autism, autism research, and controversial, harmful discussions of a ‘cure’ to autism. All of which define autism by itself, as an epistemological function in media or science, as a categorisation of personhood or caricature. On the other hand we have autism as metaphysically validated human experience, thus unlimited by any social constructs of epistemological order; medicine, psychotherapy, education, or paediatrics – and so autism is thus invited into the critical analysis of the full range of human possibility.
As such, our work is positioned twofold; the first and lesser task is towards a critical examination of how Autism is understood by the world. Examining what these re-creations of autism want to portray, and then to critique them. As with all human aspirations, they will always fall short of perfection, but holding a mirror to them will help us tell better stories and find more profound wisdom. Whereas the second, greater task is to approach the world from the premise of autistic perception. As I have argued, autistic experience is metaphysically bound to being, an immutable function of me as an autistic person, and therefore considering this neuro-divergence from the norm, we must take heed of another Merleau-Ponty instruction and rediscover “the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.” In the exploration of these “dimensions of existence”, explored through the aspects of autism, we will be more well placed to try to understand the impossible, fractured and interweaved complexities of what, for a yet greater number of unrecognised people, merely is.