An Autistic History of Philosophy
Preface A (prefaces to books I probably won't have time to write)
Surviving my illnesses is my virtue, in large part because it is also my calling. It is a calling because people call on me. I have to dispel that most modern of myths (a spell that turned into an atheist gospel) that the will to live hangs over us as our ultimate driver, our conatus as Spinoza had it. Animals have that drive, yes, but humans are sick animals precisely, as Nietzsche explains, in questioning everything - and therefore also questioning the value of survival. Kafka captures (t)his sickness like this: “For a long time I have been complaining that, even if I always feel ill, I never have a specific disease that forces me to stay in bed.” I, too, always feel somewhat ill to the sickening point of sometimes longing for the freedom of survival to be taken from me. I only felt I ought to survive because people called on me to survive. I do need this longing to be longed for, not to transform into vermin happy to be crushed so it is no longer a burden to its environment1. Thus ought is first because it is the only basis to look with others into an is that may be of help in finding the gaiety wherein we forget that, qua animals, life is just struggle for survival. Explanation without understanding is stale. It makes us ruthless, merely calculating machines; animals that kill other animals just because they can2.
Which brings me to my autism. “What is autism?” scientists ask in trying to excuse my less than ‘optimal’ social behavior. It appears that I am programmed that way: determined to be a calculating motherfucker who loses it when things don’t add up. Some even go as far as to say that I lack that most precious of modern attributes: a self. Not that that would make me selfless. Quite the opposite: it makes me self absorbed and unable to genuinely attach to others3. The fact is that I am not too bad at calculating, therefore I can definitely say this does not add up. Science may be seen as a crowning achievement of Western philosophy, but that does not make it immune to our wonderfilled eyes observing that it can’t be so. If it talks like a human, it cannot be fully determined and at least part of the problems it makes could well be made for good reason. I believe philosophers are restless problem-makers - in the same way as autistics are trouble-makers - and the history of philosophy is a history of making trouble, of making problems where people resting with status quo explanations can’t see a problem anymore and just accept - rest with - established paradigms.
For Nietzsche the history of humanity is a history of overcoming asceticism. Priests fooled healthy people into obeying moral rules favoring survival of the unhealthy, thereby creating the self-fulfilling prophecy in which there is ever more room for the unhealthy, wielding their moral powers as ... Priests who fool, so on, so forth. This vicious circle can only be broken by the overman philosopher who throws away the ascetic-religious ladder to achieve final freedom, to wit: the freedom of the noble. This is no doubt a nice prophecy of his own self, but the ultimate gaiety of its queer point can’t be appreciated without noting Nietzsche was an unhealthy person if ever there was. Throwing away the ladder is a theme in Eurocentric philosophy where philosophers continuously try to transcend the problem. The irony of this was not lost on Wittgenstein who identified this desire to overcome problems as the heart of the problem of philosophy. Eurocentric philosophers are always driven towards survival of their philosophy as something somehow outside of history. They then become blissfully unaware of their own historical contingency, for instance by declaring the spirit of evolution somehow culminates in the insight gained by their Copernican revolutions. In very abstract terms this is nothing else than the very concrete prejudice of supremacy of Western man. The result is a lack of self-reflection that results in reflecting the self of the philosopher on nature (i.e. in my autistic analysis: Western science as frustration with just being humus)4.
An autistic history of philosophy then leads to a philosophy that is never at ease; that feels eternally uneasy in its continuous search for a bit of ease. It is a history of those who were deemed unhealthy, inventing ascetic rituals within which those lacking animalistic survival skills could survive so as to stay with the type of trouble that obsesses them. One person’s ease is, however, unavoidably another’s unease. An ascetic priest becomes a persecutor of gaiety, leaving a gay priest no other option but to challenge a status quo of moral power based on their moral prowess of not accepting the ideal of health that persecutes them as diseased, disordered or otherwise morally deranged. This is the perpetuum mobile of man: a sickness that can only be cured by becoming ever more ill. Erecting more order such as to allow less people to be stigmatized as disordered. Evolution then cannot be understood as overcoming problems but only as always, perennially, creating new ones5.
If so, it all starts with the problem of trying to understand the other and all spirals, via trying to explain the world together such as to be able to trust the other, to the end result of being able to identify more problems where we still fail to understand the other charitably. That is exhausting (something both autism and philosophy have in common too) but it is also what we ought to do. The inescapable conclusion is that this simply is what life is. Science can only be gay when instead of fixing a neutral perspective it embraces the perspective of the other honestly: with reasonable respect for tensions between freely (neuro)diverse people.
This then is a book investigating the autistic-ascetic complementarity, showing humanity is that which grows by subtracting essential features from it. I would hope it at least achieves the correct spelling of theorethical. It certainly does not resolve anything at all. What would come of my autistic obsession for philosophy if philosophy would finally be able to resolve things once for all? I may not be a healthy survivor, but I am not that self-injurious.
PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it is the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).
I implore you to now read The Metamorphosis this way, as a rite of passage towards a state not only of freeing yourself but also freeing your dear others of your self. A cheerful, gay story with an ending that is as happy as it is open; no other judgment being passed than that everything passes; one person’s hybris necessarily becoming another person’s humus.
Something we wouldn’t wish even on animals, which is why we invented evolution as a way for animals to be redeemed in evolving into us. A sick idea if ever there was. As if animals would need our sickness for their health. The simple truth is that disease is a possible outcome of evolution, and if that possibility is actualized then that outcome has to deal with it, just like a whale has to deal with having lungs.
Clearly they never met me with my mother.
The subtext of the previous sentences identifies Hegel, Kant and Dilthey respectively. It is not that they did not see the trouble. They were just unable to, as Haraway counsels, stay with it, as Eurocentrism is, in the end, anathema to a lack of resolution. Shorter this: they would not have become recognized as the crucial backbone of the Western philosophical canon if they would not have offered ultimate solutions.
A new god is born here: that of entropy, because it is better to acknowledge a power greater than the individual instead of capitalistically sacrificing unlucky individuals to the glory of some lucky ones. In less thermodynamic, more straightforward terms inspired by Lugones: every difference is innovation