I mitt arbete som skolpsykolog har jag sökt efter information om autism som man kan lämna till föräldrar. Tyvärr är praktiskt taget all information jag hittar genomsyrad av ett utpräglad biomedicinskt synsätt på autism. Jag skall strax ge några exempel, men först vill jag klargöra vad autism är.

Under vårterminen 2021 läser jag universitetets grundkurs i filosofi på distans. Det första momentet är filosofins historia och vi har kommit fram till George Berkeley. Det slår mig hur lika hur Berkeleys och Husserls utgångspunkter är. De två första punkterna i Berkeleys A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) är inget annat än en beskrivning av intentionaliteten:

Husserl persistently affirmed that one cannot dissolve things in consciousness. You see this tree, to be sure. But you see it just where it is: at the side of the road, in the midst of the dust, alone and writhing in the heat, eight miles from the Mediterranean coast. It could not enter into your consciousness, for it is not of the same nature as consciousness. One is perhaps reminded of Bergson and the first chapter of Matter and Memory. But Husserl is not a realist: this tree on its bit of parched earth is not an absolute which would subsequently enter into communication with us. Consciousness and the world are given at one stroke: essentially external to consciousness, the world is nevertheless essentially relative to consciousness. Husserl sees consciousness as an irreducible fact which no physical image can account for.

Jean-Paul Sartre, »Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology«, övers. Joseph P. Fell, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 1, nr 2 (1970): 4–5, https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.1970.11006118 .

The natural sciences have enjoyed an immense progress and there is no reason to doubt their accomplishments, but eventually one has to engage with the fundamental epistemological questions, and when doing so, Lange argued, one will come to the realization that the realism of the materialists is mistaken. The physiological investigation of our sense organs might seem to offer a thoroughly materialist account of knowledge acquisition, but in truth it undermines our belief in material, self-subsistent, objects, which is why materialism, when thought through sufficiently radically, reveals itself as a form of idealism.

Dan Zahavi, »Brain, Mind, World: Predictive Coding, Neo-Kantianism, and Transcendental Idealism,« Husserl Studies 34 (2018): 34, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-017-9218-z .

People who dismiss the unemployed and dependent as »parasites« fail to understand economics and parasitism. A successful parasite is one that is not recognized by its host, one that can make its host work for it without appearing as a burden. Such is the ruling class in a capitalist society.

Jason Read