Ian Hacking on How We Have Been Learning to Talk About Autism

Charlie and I caught the PATH train in Jersey City and got off at 23rd Street in Manhattan. We usually take it all the way to the end at 33rd Street where we catch a subway up to where Jim’s office is near Lincoln Center and get some dinner together but Friday night was different. Philosopher Ian Hacking, Professor Emeritus of the College de France, was giving a lecture on How We Have Been Learning to Talk About Autism as a keynote lecture for a conference, Cognitive Disability: A Challenge to Moral Philosophy. The conference’s stated aim was to explore

philosophical questions about three specific populations — people with autism, Alzheimer’s disease, and those labeled “mentally retarded”

with those questions specifically being:

Personhood: Should individuals with cognitive disabilities be excluded from the protections and responsibilities we assign to “persons”? Do the implications of such exclusion force a reconsideration of the concept of personhood?

Justice: Should individuals with cognitive disabilities be excluded from the claims and protections granted to members of a political community? If not, how might their interests be represented and given a political voice?

Care: How should we define, and how can we recognize, relationships and obligations to people lacking the ability to fully care for themselves? How should we understand the obligations of and to their caregivers? What significant aspects of the nature of all human interaction are revealed in these relationships?

History and Conceptual Bases of Classifications: How have various categories of cognitive disability emerged? What historical, social and political contingencies have played a part in our classifications?

Metaphilosophical Concerns: How has the “benign neglect” philosophers have exercised with respect to this subject shaped the substance of wider philosophical theory and practice?

Prof. Hacking looked at recent autobiographies by autistic persons as well as “parental biography, fictions, stories for children, and above all blogs,” to argue that these perform “an essential part of transforming the conception that severely autistic people lead ‘thin’ emotional lives into a vision of a far richer mode of existence.” Writings by Temple Grandin, by Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, by Daniel Tammet, and by Donna Williams were discussed. Prof. Hacking reflected on how such narratives by autistic writers serve as a sort of antidote to the notion that autistic individuals have “thin” interior lives.

A question posed to the audience was in reference to those “severely” autistic individuals who do not have the linguistic ability too communicate as do Grandin, Mukhopadhyay, and others. How, it was asked, can one find out if such individuals have not “thin” emotional lives, but “thick” ones (if I am rephrasing a very small portion of Prof. Hacking’s lecture accurately)?

It’s a question that arises constantly, if in different form, in my mind. I feel I’ve learned a lot from reading books by all four authors and, too, blogs by autistic authors (more than a few of whom are on the Autism Hub). It’s learning with a practical and immediate application for me, Charlie’s language being so limited, though his communication, and specifically his communicative intent, is rich and constant. It’s a matter of knowing what to look for, to know how to “read” what Charlie does and how he responds to the world around him. It is an interpretative act—-I’m like a detective trying to crack the code of what Charlie is doing, putting his hands over ears or twisting his right thumb in his shirt, or singing a bit of a certain melody. Life with Charlie has suggested to me that we perhaps puts too much value in language to understand each other; that we tend to overlook that just being with each other builds and fosters an intuitive, wordless, communication. Words are just the beginning.

Jim met Charlie and me as walked down 27th Street. I said a fast good-bye and Jim took Charlie back to get dinner and to go to his office. Charlie looked back at me, briefly, and was (Jim said) very eager to be in Jim’s office. I heard a good part of the lecture, the respondent, asked a question, and met some old and new faces and then went out into the night. I sighted Jim and Charlie standing in an island off of 32nd Street and Broadway, Jim craning his neck to see me amid a mass of teenagers and twentysomethings, Charlie with his hood over his head, Leapster in the crook of his arm, and standing sideways. We immediately went back underground to catch the PATH train.

Jim explained how Charlie had gotten sushi but just poked at it, preferring some fresh spring rolls (yes, Charlie seems to have a preference for Asian food) and trying a piece of cake. “Blue,” said Charlie and put his hand into my bag. He pulled out a book and set it on the seat, and then fished in the front pocket. I handed him two pens, first a black one and then a blue, and Charlie held these (along with one he’d taken from Jim’s desk) all the way back to Jersey City and down Kennedy Boulevard as we walked back to the black car.

He held onto them very tightly, and they were still in his hand when he went to bed, after we came home.