An Affectionate but Clear-Eyed Close-Up of Parfit
Derek Parfit: His Life and Thought, a collection of essays by people who knew him, edited by Jeff McMahan, was published a couple of days ago.
detail of photo by Derek Parfit
There is an online (gated) version at Oxford Academic. (It supposedly comes out in print in June, though Amazon says September.)
It contains essays by family members and philosophers who were close to him.
The following is an excerpt from the chapter by his wife, philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards, in which she discusses their lives together, her recognition of the signs that Parfit had some kind of autism, and how that has helped her better understand him and their relationship.
Derek was never anything other than supportive and admiring, and once I had stopped looking for things that were simply not there and working on the very many things that were, it was an easy and a very affectionate relationship. We both eventually had a clear understanding of what was going on and learned to treat the differences as humorous. When he said he loved me, as he often did, I would look arch, and he would say, “I have a funny way of showing it?” Then he might say, “I have loved you in my fashion,” (quoting Poe). “Would you rather I loved you in someone else’s fashion?” To that I would say, “Yes, of course.” But who knows? I certainly wanted more from him than there was to be got, but on the other hand if the missing module had been there, could Derek still have been what he was in other ways? Probably not; Baron-Cohen quotes Asperger as saying, “It seems that for success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential” (169). If you really are to devote your life to the pursuit of the sublime, it is as well not to be distracted by normal interpersonal emotions.
Anyway, I was not deterred, even though—or perhaps because?—I realized very early on that I was a relatively small part of his life. I remember telling someone that I was “his other . . . quarter”. I did not want a normal domestic life, either. I would have managed my own life very differently if I had understood Derek earlier, but I don’t think I would not have stayed with him. I could not have married anyone else.
The fact is, he was the love of my life, and it is rather hard to explain why in any further terms. I am materially better off than I would have been if our incomes had not been joined, of course, but that was never any kind of issue: I was happily independent when we met and could have remained so. There was nothing gained in the way of reflected status, since for many years most people who were aware of either of us did not know about the connection with the other; in fact, I think that in the eyes of some people who were aware of it, my philosophical standing was if anything diminished, because in Derek’s circle I was merely his partner, and barely known otherwise. He did not open up new opportunities for me; on the contrary, I rather dropped out of public view when we lived together. He did not widen my social circle, because he did not have one; in practice (not deliberately), he severely contracted it. He was of little use for anything recreational, because we did together only what he wanted to do, and soon after I met him most possibilities of that kind were perpetually over the horizon. He did not in any way advance my career: he was neither my teacher nor my referee, and I had started to establish my terrain—very different from his—before I knew him. I learned an enormous amount from him, of course; but I did not often find it helpful to discuss my work with him. Even my eventual return to Oxford had nothing to do with him.
As he never seemed a means to any further end, therefore, I presume he must have been the end in himself. I once found myself saying, “Women will put up with a lot for a high enough calibre man.” Maybe I was right, at least in a rare case like this, where the high calibre comes with undemandingness, kindness, and manifest appreciation and affection.
Like my cat, Derek did simply what he wanted to do.
Autistic people do not have a ‘missing module’ and we are perfectly capable of full, loving relationships. This notion that the partners of autistic people must learn to settle with ‘wanting more than there is to be got’ because we are just missing something is stigmatizing and I am exhausted of it.
Though Richards is clearly writing from a place of deep affection and seems happy with her relationship, that is compatible with interpreting it through stereotypes that are inaccurate and do real harm. If you don’t believe me on the harm point, look up ‘Cassandra syndrome,’ a fake disorder premised on the notion that the supposed relational deprivations of a relationship with an autistic person can induce a form of PTSD.
To be clear, I am not denying that Richards wanted more than Parfit was able or willing to give, or that he made her feel like his ‘other quarter.’ But whatever explanation there is to that, it’s not that Parfit was autistic.
What ‘real harm’ are you referring to?
Harms to autistic people to the extent that these stereotypes contribute to social exclusion which contributes to loneliness (explicit stereotypes are of course only one factor among many that contribute to the social exclusion of autistic people). Loneliness is one of the factors that contributes to higher rates of suicidality among us.
Harms to both autistic and allistic people to the extent that these stereotypes can damage relationships by offering unhelpfully reductive and false explanations of relationship problems. Needless to say, this leads to stress, relationship dysfunction and for autistic people that internalize these stereotypes, damage to self-esteem.The more extreme the steroetypes, the worse the damage. Cassandra syndrome occupies the extreme end and has actually been used in the past by certain ‘advocacy groups’ towards what I think are pretty clearly harmful ends, e.g. https://autisticadvocacy.org/2009/04/tell-tony-attwood-to-end-the-hate/.
In other words, to a negligible extent (and I say this as someone on the spectrum). In the context of so much harm and suffering in the world, one could be forgiven for thinking that you are scraping at the bottom of the barrel.
If you read the news, it should be easy to find instances of ‘real harm’, in comparison to which the harm you are referring to is worse than negligible—it’s someone looking to be a victim of some kind.
This comment is a good example for that other recent thread about certain kinds of comments!
It is not negligible if someone is typecast as far less capable than the rest of us of empathy, sympathy or love, and — as a consequence — less fitting to be a friend, lover, colleague, companion, indeed someone to whom we relate. This is only harmless if bigotry in general is harmless; actually, as stigmatising stereotypes go, being deficient in pro-social emotions is one of the worst. So to infer it — fallaciously, as it turns out — from the fact that someone is autistic is very harmful, indeed.
And it would not become excused if it could be shown that some subclass of people with autism do, in fact, have these impairments — not any more than other harmful stereotypes about whole groups become ok if they’re true of some.
I’d have thought all this was obvious.
(Oh, and yes — there are worse harms than being stigmatized and outcast because of one’s neurodiversity. Thank you for that.)
I love the reasoning that there are worse harms, as if those worse harms simply occur at random and come from nowhere and aren’t built out of the foundation of (and legitimated by) the harms Jon B. dismisses as “negligible.” Although, if they are so “negligible,” presumably the effort to address them is concomitantly low effort—so why wouldn’t we do it? We can make the world a better place with only a “negligible” sacrifice of time and energy, while at the same making some headway toward addressing the worse harms that Jon is clutching pearls over.
Clearing this since my other reply just got approved (thanks Justin)
“To be clear, I am not denying that Richards wanted more than Parfit was able or willing to give, or that he made her feel like his ‘other quarter.’ But whatever explanation there is to that, it’s not that Parfit was autistic.”
Is the idea that autism never affects anyone in ways that can make interpersonal relationships difficult?
I never ceased to be shocked how many people here seem never to have heard of the principle of charity. EAP never said anything remotely like your gloss. I take that EAP’s point is that autistic people, at least those who are as capable of functioning in society when they need to be as Parfit was, can think about and correct their behavior to take others into account. To say otherwise is honestly demeaning and dehumanizing. That’s quite consistent with saying that we should make them allowances for finding say finding certain things difficult. Look at this way there’s a difference between giving a student I know is having some personal struggles in life an extension and maybe offering to meet in extra office hours and just giving them an A without even asking them do their work. The former is common human empathy and good judgment, the latter is a judgment that this person isn’t capable and deserves our pity and charity. I think it’s the latter EAP is rightly objecting to.
Surely if the principle of charity were applied it would be clear that Janet Richard’s original comment was entirely innocuous. And yet here we are.
Exactly. I’m surprised how uncharitable commenters are to the person who must have known Parfit the best and loved him the most.
Except that nobody’s really objecting to her take on Parfit or to most of what she was trying to say. It’s only a side point of hers that implied something about autism (not Parfitism). It was a tangent that sparked a more general discussion of a harmful stereotype, beyond her personal remarks.
The ‘harmful stereotype’ is her clumsy way of trying to come to grips with what she saw (or didn’t see) in her husband. She could have said ‘he was wired differently’ or ‘he navigated social interactions radically differently’ or anything else, the point would be the same: she’s trying to capture what Parfit was like, relying on crude heuristics that are indeed contested but in this context should charitably be read as offensive. Importantly there’s another side to the stereotype that no one seems to be taking issue with: that people like Parfit made for their ‘missing module’ with a kind of greatness that is open to most mortals. She’s not just saying Parfit was impaired or missing something but that he was built differently than most of us. Isn’t that the core insight of neurodivergence: that there are many ways to be, cognitively, not one of them being ‘the normal way’, and that many of us make up for some things with other things?
*shouldn’t be read as offensive
** not open to most mortals
Actually, I agree that’s the thrust of what she’s saying, and there may be some merit to the idea of greatness sometimes linked to an absence of some otherwise typical personality trait. But phrasing it the way she did, perhaps in a clumsy stray remark, happened to reflect a problematic stereotype, even if only as a side point — and that (new topic!) is what EAP was writing about. The thread clearly switched subjects, going on a tangent, becoming about that stereotype re. autism, and why it’s problematic, and no longer about What did Janet Say, or What did Janet Mean? EAP’s main point would stand even if she was misquoted.
And, again, it is harmful. While you’re of course right that neurodivergence should come with tolerance of difference, I think it’s self-evident that not all differences are equal. Being unable to empathize or sympathize with others, or love them, is more likely to have a shunning effect — some even link these faculties with being a good person! — than, say, being depressed, or obsessed with numbers or checking or repetitive movements. The fact that sociopathy is a neurodivergence, for example, doesn’t make it any less insulting to attribute to someone.
No. To begin with, there are very few things that never affect anyone in ways that can make interpersonal relationships difficult. It would be a strange stance to take about any characteristic of a person.
What I’m being critical of is the way autism, as a characteristic, is often singled out stereotypically & synedochally by allistics as an explanation for certain kinds of relationship shortcomings.
An old reply of mine just got approved (thanks Justin), so removing this redundant one.
Thank you, EAP. This was the one about the alleged “missing module” that got me. “If you really are to devote your life to the pursuit of the sublime, it is as well not to be distracted by normal interpersonal emotions.” There’s not a lack of emotion or sensitivity among those of us with Asperger’s/ASD. We just process and recognize it differently.
Hear, hear, EAP! These are outdated and (very obviously) harmful stereotypes that serve to dehumanize a whole class of people, and yet they’re common and accepted in professional circles of people who should know better.
I agree, “it’s not that Parfit was autistic”.
The attributes we associate with autism vary in extent and degree in those that possess them, but certainly in some people they severely hamper depth of intimacy and empathy in relationships. This isn’t to say this was the case with Parfit (the recent Edmonds biography suggests he wasn’t autistic), but it’s not an implausible hypothesis.
How is it a stereotype if she is speaking from her real, lived experience?
People can interpret and describe their real, lived experiences through the lense of stereotype so those are not mutually incompatible at all. She invokes Simon Baron-Cohen quoting Hans Asperger, neither of whose remarks are narrowly abour Richards’ lived exerience with Parfit but about autism in general. That’s where the stereotyping comes in.
It is flatly wrong that all autistic people “are perfectly capabe of full, loving relationships”, just as it is flatly wrong that all non-autistic people are perfectly capable of full, loving relationships. We should not fight the danger of harmful, false stereotypes by inventing salutary facts.
At no point did I make such an absolute generalization as you have attributed to me. I made a remark about the general nature of autism (denying a ‘missing module’ theory) and what autistic people are capable of. If Person A made the remark ‘women are perfectly capable of being great scientists’ in the response to Person B who talked about how Person C never really managed to be a great scientist and attributed that to C being a woman, would you interpret Person A as making the claim that ‘absolutely every woman that has ever existed could be a good scientist’? Somehow I doubt it. Presumably because that is also obviously false (for the same reason ‘absolutely every <insert human social group> could be a good scientist’ is false) and such a strong interpretation is not needed to understand what Person A is trying to say.
To whom does “we” refer in “we are perfectly capable of full, loving relationships”?
The same kind of referent as Person A refers to when referring to ‘women.’ Do you have any trouble understanding what Person A has said?
In the same way Person A was saying something like ‘there is nothing about being a woman that precludes someone from being a great scientist’, I was claiming that there is nothing about being autistic that precludes someone from having full, loving relationships with other people. Both are in response to explanations invoking stereotypes about the incompatibility between one kind of capability and a kind of person.
Neither amounts to the claim that every single person in the extension of that kind has this capability. After all, other things may preclude them even if the mere fact of being of that kind does not.
I assume the relevant claim is that roughly equal percentages of autistic and non-autistic individuals are perfectly capable of full loving relationships, not whether all or no autistic individuals are so capable.
One of the memorable things about Edmonds’ Parfit bio was the discussion of whether Parfit had autism.
Perhaps surprisingly, the people who knew Parfit when he was younger didn’t think so. They seemed to think he was a social butterly — more than one predicted that he’d grow up to be Prime Minister!
analytic philosophy might cause or upregulate latent autistic traits
Another book claiming that Parfit “was widely regarded among philosophers as the best and most important moral philosopher in well over a century.” In other words, another puff piece. Seems a little beneath OUP, doesn’t it?
… that doesn’t sound like that crazy of a claim? Of course, there’s plenty of reasonable disagreement on matters like this, but it’s not so clearly laudatory in excess that I would call this a puff piece.
I suppose they could have claimed he is widely considered the greatest moral philosopher since Socrates. Would that count as excessively laudatory?
They certainly could have claimed that, and then it would have been excessively laudatory, so it’s a good thing that they didn’t!
Worse than that, it perpetuates the cult of genius, which we know is utter nonsense.
Oh that’s cool, I didn’t know we knew that.
How does it perpetuate such a cult? What is nonsense—claiming there are geniuses or worshipping them?
If you think that’s bad, check out this page, where OUP claims Sven Sverdlik is the first respected moral philosopher to have written a book!
They did that with Timothy Williamson. Don’t they just mean it’s their first book?
Of course they do, but it’s still funny since it can be read the other way!
If the claim is that he was *widely regarded* as such then it doesn’t sound too controversial, at least in the analytic philosophy world. Whether that’s a warranted assessment is another question.