The Janus Face of Autism: As the “Between” in Arendt’s Conception of Thinking

Abstract

IntroductIonInterestingly, given the compatibility of their ideas regarding the nature of thinking, neither Hannah Arendt nor Hans Asperger ever met, as far as I can tell; nor do I have any evidence that either even considered the other's scholarly writings. Yet the events of World War II shaped both Arendt's and Asperger's thinking, as both came under threat by the Nazis. Arendt was forced to flee Europe; Asperger remained to work under the auspices of the Nazi regime at the Heilpädagogik Station, where he published his path-breaking dissertation on autism in 1944 at the University of Vienna. I wish they had met; perhaps the discourse on autism today would be a radically different one. Indeed, I have been deeply concerned about autism for nearly three decades, ever since my son was diagnosed as having "Asperger's Syndrome;" because of this I have both a personal and professional interest in Asperger and his "discovery:" autism. But Arendt and Asperger didn't meet or collaborate, and I find it odd that there have been no attempts to bring these two thinkers together or, at the very least, to explore both how Arendt's framework could readdress autism today and how Asperger's autism would speak back to Arendt's notion of thinking.To inaugurate this conversation, the focus of this article is to trace the phenomenological development of what I refer to as the "Janus face" of autism as the "between" in Arendt's conception of thinking. Indeed, as I will argue, in 1944 Hans Asperger "sat" in the between of the Janus face of autism -that place where the past and the future of autism converged -to evoke the term of "autism." In his evocation of autism, Steve Silberman writes:Asperger was speaking out with the "force of his whole personality" for the sake of children all over Europe who had not yet been murdered by a monstrous idea of human perfectibility -an idea that his supervisors, who were fervent Nazis, had imported from America. 1