By Sinead Murphy at Brownstone dot org.

In What Autism Is, I characterized autism as exclusion from the existential empathy on which meaningful human experience relies.

Autistic people are irretrievably remote from the conditions for meaning. Whatever they learn is learnt as a simulation and from outside of human connection.

Further clarity about autism comes from considering what autism is not. An opportunity has arisen in this regard, with a discussion between psychologists Jordan Peterson and Simon Baron-Cohen.

The discussion is titled What Do We Actually Know About Autism? It concludes that autism is a talent for understanding, not thoughts and feelings but structures, not intentions but arrangements. Some of us tend to be good with people. Autistics tend to be good with things. Some of us tend to 'empathize.' Autistics tend to 'systemize.'

But autism is not a talent for understanding things. Autism is not an attunement to structures and arrangements. Autism is not a propensity for systemizing.

Why not?

Because appreciation of structures and arrangements requires precisely the same baseline aptitude that is required by appreciation of thoughts and feelings – and it is this baseline aptitude that autistic people lack.

It may be true that most of us are more or less good with people or good with things. It is certainly true that those with autism are good with neither.

The idea that those with autism are good with things is often heard, admittedly – Peterson and Baron-Cohen do little more than frame the idea in professional speak.

Those with autism are not attuned to people. It is natural for us to assume that they are attuned to something. We conclude that they're attuned to things.

We are thereby prepared for the hypothesis that those with autism are on a spectrum with those talented at the workings of things – engineers, mechanics, technicians.

And so we take autism to be merely a different style of attention to the world – less adept with people, more adept with things; less empathetic, more systematic.

It is a common mistake.

But it is not only a mistake. It is a category mistake. It posits as a form of meaningful human experience what is categorically impossible as meaningful human experience.

Nothing – not people, not things – means anything without a baseline empathy. The distinction between 'systemizers' and 'empathizers,' between engineers and nurses, is of little significance. All in the end is empathy.

Autism, as the lack of capacity for empathy, is not an attunement to the meaning of things. It is a wholesale exclusion from the meaning of anything. To describe it as a style of meaningful experience is to commit a categorical error, albeit a common one.

What is uncommon about the discussion between Peterson and Baron-Cohen is that it does not simply commit this categorical error – it unfolds it quite explicitly.

In their opening exchange, Peterson and Baron-Cohen immediately dismiss the baseline empathy on which meaning relies. In doing so, they make it clear what must be suppressed so as to normalize autism in our midst: the very achievement that makes our experiences human.

What do we actually know about autism? That autism is not an attunement to the meaning of things. That autism is rather an assault on meaning itself – hiding in the plain sight even of men of science.

At the outset of his discussion with Baron-Cohen, Peterson introduces Martin Heidegger's insight that the fundamental human attitude is one of 'care.'

It is a promising beginning. There are few better philosophical resources for coming to know about autism than the work of Heidegger with its central concept of 'care.'

And Peterson does not only introduce Heidegger's concept of 'care,' he explains it as implying that human beings inhabit 'a shared structure of value that…foregrounds certain perceptions and hides others.'

Peterson's explanation is good. In describing the baseline human attitude as one of care, Heidegger points to the essential...