Asperger’s Syndrome and the Eccentricity and Genius of Jeremy Bentham

Introduction

It is well known that Bentham was eccentric. He was ‘reclusive and inaccessible [...] had a favourite walking stick named Dapple [...] an ancient cat [...] called the Reverend Dr John Langborn, and a jokey vocabulary [...] [using] expressions like “antejentacular circumgyration”, meaning a walk before breakfast’. ² After his death his body was dissected, in accordance with his will, in front of a group of his friends. Bentham was also a genius, producing remarkable work of undisputed contemporary importance. Clearly he had an extraordinary mind.

We asked ourselves whether an explanation for Jeremy Bentham’s unusual positive and negative qualities might emerge if his life were assessed from a present-day psychological, psychodynamic or psychiatric perspective. While aware of the reductionist pitfalls of psychobiography, we believed such an effort might illuminate aspects of Bentham’s character and motivations and thereby assist future biographers. Our findings suggested that, had he lived in the present century, it is likely he would have received the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome.

Genius, eccentricity and Asperger’s syndrome

We hypothesise that Jeremy Bentham’s strikingly unusual cast of mind can be best understood as emerging from Asperger’s syndrome (AS) which is an autistic condition compatible with a wide range of outcomes, from high achievement and independence to severe impoverishment of quality of life. ³ It manifests as a characteristic triad of impairments: at the behavioural level in social and communicative ability; impaired imaginative capacity; and obsessive preoccupation with circumscribed interests. Diminished imaginative capacity appears particularly in the sphere of social relationships, ⁴ and ‘the hallmark of autism and related disorders is deviant social development, which generally seems to be congenital in nature’. ⁵ AS has been linked to exceptional talents and ‘genius’ by several authors. ⁶

As Snyder has explained, the autistic mind differs from the normal mind in that it more readily recalls discrete details, rather than maintaining an image of the whole picture: it ‘sees more of the parts than the whole’. ⁷ Thus the genius who suffers from AS is thought to lack certain neuropsychological mechanisms related to the ordinary process of mental modelling. ⁸ Somehow, in certain cases, that defect allows the flowering of a unique creative capacity linked to the ability to perceive details, their structure and interrelation, which remain unrecognised by the ‘normal’ mind. We contend that just such a distinct and ‘abnormal’ cognitive style may have been an important source of Bentham’s genius.

It has been suggested that Wittgenstein chose to focus on the two areas (language and its social context) that as an AS sufferer confounded him, precisely because they did confound him. ⁹ We believe that Jeremy Bentham’s choice of areas to investigate may have similar origins.

Diagnosis of autism and Asperger’s syndrome

Autism and Asperger’s syndrome, first described in the 1940s, are ‘pervasive developmental disorders’ which sufferers are usually born with, but which can take some time to become evident. The disorders result from abnormal brain development and, while genetic factors are important, the precise aetiology remains uncertain. ¹⁰ Exceptionally severe deprivation can result in a perhaps identical picture. ¹¹ While much recent work has stressed a neuro-cognitive perspective focussing on the autistic subjects’ lack of understanding of the existence of minds (‘theory of mind’), it is important to recognise that in normal development, engagement with people, with the mother as a person, comes first. ‘For those of us who do not have autism, it is natural to become engaged with people. We do not have concern or hatred for others because we think they have a mind. It is the other way round: we come to think people have minds because we find we are involved with them. What we begin with is our attitudes towards persons’. ¹²

The disorder is manifest as subtle differences in development compared with normal individuals: ‘[The] typical infant comes equipped with a partly innate set of neurological mechanisms for making sense of other people’s actions, emotional expressions and vocalisations. The two year old who will comfort his mother when she is looking sad, or who will refrain from hitting his sister because he is aware that she can feel pain, is already mind- reading (or empathising). The 14-month-old child who will look where her father is pointing - without being taught - is already mind-reading her father’s intention to direct her to look not at his finger, but at the event across the room that has caught her father’s interest. That same 14-month-old who will then look back at her father’s eyes, to signal she has seen what he has seen, to acknowledge that the message has been received and the emotional significance shared, is demonstrating extra-ordinary mind-reading skills — all without words. Such looks and exchanges of smiles and acknowledgements are reduced or delayed in many children who go on to receive a diagnosis of autism or Asperger’s syndrome’. ¹³

An account of the effect on the AS sufferer is provided by an intelligent young man recalling his childhood:

I really didn’t know there were people until I was seven years old. I then suddenly realised there were people. But not like you do. I still have to remind myself that there are people [...] I never could have a friend. I really don’t know what to do with other people really. ¹⁴

There is an increasing body of opinion focussing on the centrality of emotions in normal cognitive development. Thus conditions of severe emotional deprivation may have an adverse impact on neural connections in parts of the brain and can, in exceptional circumstances, result in an autistic picture (as mentioned above). ¹⁵ There is general understanding that satisfactory emotional development requires a ‘good enough’ relationship with an attachment figure. Thus, while the majority of investigations into autism focus on the cognitive abnormality of the individual with the condition, recent work on emotional development suggests there should be greater emphasis on the interdependency of individual development and the ‘affective-cognitive and conative processes of interpersonal relatedness’. ¹⁶

Clinical diagnosis of autism and AS involves evidence of impairment in each of the domains of social, communicative and imaginative functioning. Although abnormalities in social development are often evident well before the age of three, that age is taken as the cut-off by which they should be manifest. The disorder is life-long and persists into adulthood. In adults in whom the question of the diagnosis is raised, one seeks corroboration in the early developmental history. ¹⁷

Bentham’s childhood

The evidence suggests that Jeremy Bentham was a ‘frail, nervous, impressionable boy, a prey to nightmares and afraid of ghosts, he found his main sources of enjoyment in whatever books he could lay his hands on and in flowers and music’. ¹⁸ As Bentham wrote much later, `This subject of ghosts has been among the torments of my life, the devil was everywhere in it and in me too [...] how much less unhappy I should have been, could I have acknowledged my superstitious fears!’ ¹⁹ Bentham’s mother died when he was ten years old; his father was ‘affectionate towards him, but demanding and insensitive’. ²⁰ In the nine years which separated Jeremy from his younger brother Samuel, five other children had been born and had died in infancy or early childhood. Only Jeremy and Samuel survived. These family circumstances may have contributed to the remarkably close bond between the two brothers. ²¹

In Bentham’s case, there was no general delay in language or cognitive development, quite the reverse in fact. A delay in language development is the basis of the distinction, made by some authorities, between AS and high functioning autism.

In terms of signs of AS, there are aspects of his childhood that are compatible with the diagnosis but nothing more definite. He `had few companions his own age’; he was ‘morbidly sensitive’; ‘when robbed of all his money at Oxford he did not confide in his father. He was paying by a morbid reserve for the attempts made to force him into premature activity’ and ‘[t]he lad’s diffidence and extreme youth had indeed prevented him from forming the usual connections which his father anticipated as the result of a college life’. ²²

Bentham’s father was highly ambitious for his child prodigy of a son, and intended him to reach the summit of the legal profession. Bentham studied law but did not become a practising lawyer: he found the practice of law intolerable and rapidly developed a consuming interest in legal philosophy and the theory of legislation. ²³

William Hazlitt and John Stuart Mill on Bentham: two contemporary accounts

William Hazlitt and John Stuart Mill, both eminent nineteenth-century thinkers, each wrote an essay on Jeremy Bentham. The portraits of Bentham that emerge are remarkably consistent with one another and, in our view, both suggest that Bentham suffered from Asperger’s syndrome.

Bentham was the first subject in Hazlitt’s collection of sketches of major public figures of the time, which first appeared as an article in the New Monthly Magazine in 1824, and was published as The Spirit of the Age. ²⁴ Mill’s essay on Bentham was first published in August 1838 (and his essay on Coleridge in March 1840) in the London and Westminster Review. ²⁵ William Hazlitt knew Bentham personally, briefly being his tenant in York Street, London in 1819 until ‘he fell behind with the rent’. ²⁶

John Stuart Mill knew Bentham well, albeit not until Bentham’s sixth decade. His father, James, had a close professional relationship with Bentham, who had great influence on the manner in which James educated his son. The latter later gained exceptional knowledge of Bentham’s work when he worked for Bentham and edited several volumes of his writing.

Although his essay was written at a time of Mill’s life when his antipathy to Bentham was at its height, Mill did not renounce the views he expressed although he ‘would later have been less cutting’. ²⁷ Both essays will be discussed in some detail before we go on to present separately evidence for AS in Bentham in terms of each of the triad of impairments of autism.

To those familiar, from a clinical point of view, with autism and Asperger’s syndrome it is difficult to read either Hazlitt’s or Mill’s essay without the thought that Bentham might suffer from AS. Clinical diagnosis of AS is made in just that way: a familiar, rather subtle, pattern is recognised and only then are more explicit questions posed and confirmation sought. In Bentham’s case, the established observation that about 10 percent of autistic individuals have special talents raises the possibility that AS can explain his genius.

Hazlitt describes Bentham’s social oddness while giving a view of his world:

in general habits and in all but his professional pursuits, he is a mere child. He has lived for the last forty years in a house in Westminster, overlooking the Park, like an anchoret in his cell, reducing law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine. He scarcely ever goes out, and sees very little company. The favoured few, who have the privilege of the entrée, are always admitted one by one. He does not like to have witnesses to his conversation. He talks a great deal, and listens to nothing but facts. ²⁸

Mill described Bentham’s striking lack of ordinary understanding of other people.

He wrote of:

the incompleteness of his [Bentham’s] own mind as a representative of universal human nature. In many of the most natural and strongest feelings of human nature he had no sympathy; from many of its graver experiences he was altogether cut off; and the faculty by which one mind understands a mind different from itself, and throws itself into the feelings of that other mind, was denied him by his deficiency of Imagination. ²⁹

Mill is describing Bentham’s lack of ‘the intuitive and automatic attribution of mental states to others’, the ability to `mentalize’ or hold a ‘theory of mind’ of others and the self, which is defective to some degree in every individual diagnosed as autistic, regardless of age and ability, and, on the contrary, effortlessly present in the rest of us. ³⁰ Similarly:

With Imagination in the popular sense, command of imagery and metaphorical expression, Bentham was, to a certain degree, endowed [...] [but the] Imagination which he had not, was [...] that which enables us, by a voluntary effort, to conceive the absent as if it were present, the imaginary as if it were real, and to clothe it in the feelings which, if it were indeed real, it would bring along with it. This is the power by which one human being enters into the mind and circumstances of another. [...]Without it, nobody knows even his own nature, further than circumstances have actually tried it and called it out; nor the nature of his fellow creatures, beyond such generalizations as he may have been enabled to make from his observation of their outward conduct. ³¹

Mill thought, as we no longer do, that a ‘voluntary effort’ was required for such understanding. It is significant that he links the lack of empathic understanding of another person with knowing one’s own nature as ‘mentalizing in the normal case inexorably leads to awareness of yourself as agent’. ³² Similarly, ‘Self-consciousness [...] to which this age knows so much both of its cheerful and its mournful wisdom, never was awakened in him. How much of human nature slumbered in him he knew not, neither can we know. He had never been made alive to the unseen influences which were acting on himself, nor consequently on his fellow creatures’. ³³

Hazlitt wrote:

He regards the people about him no more than the flies of a summer [...] he has carried this single view of his subject too far, and not made sufficient allowance for the varieties of human nature, and the caprices and irregularities of the human will [...] it might be plausibly objected that he had struck the whole mass of fancy, prejudice, passion, sense, whim, with his petrific, leaden mace, that he had "bound volatile Hermes," and reduced the theory and practice of human life to a caput mortuum of reason, and dull, plodding, technical calculation’. The limitations of his understanding of other people is summed up by Hazlitt: ‘his view of the human mind resembles a map, rather than a picture: the outline, the disposition is correct, but it wants colouring and relief. ³⁴

This portrayal of a missing third dimension in Bentham’s understanding of others by an acute contemporary seems highly compatible with that of a sufferer from AS.

Mill also finds Bentham’s philosophy inadequate as a complete explanation of ‘human affairs’:

a sort of estimate of what a philosophy like Bentham’s can do. It can teach the means of organizing and regulating the merely business part of the social arrangements [...] He committed the mistake of supposing that the business part of human affairs was the whole of them. ³⁵

Mistaking the business part for the totality of human affairs might almost be a definition of what is at the heart of the problematic social understanding of the AS patient. AS sufferers do seem to lack a profound understanding of emotional states, both their own and those of others. Mill thought this very much applied to Bentham and limited his ability to understand the ‘workings of the mind’:

Knowing so little of human feelings, he knew still less of the influences by which those feelings are formed: all the more subtle workings both of the mind upon itself, and of external things upon the mind, escaped him. ³⁶

Mill appreciated Bentham’s achievements: ‘He found the philosophy of law a chaos, he left it a science: he found the practice of law an Augean stable, he turned the river into it which is mining and sweeping away mound after mound of its rubbish’. ³⁷ To achieve this required Bentham’s quite extraordinary qualities:

The honour is all his — nothing but his peculiar qualities could have done it. There were wanted his indefatigable perseverance, his firm self-reliance, needing no support from other men’s opinion; his intensely practical turn of mind, his synthetical habits- about all, his peculiar method. ³⁸

Indefatigable perseverance, firm self reliance, massive egocentricity — all qualities prominent in descriptions of an AS sufferer obsessively and persistently following his solitary road in pursuit of his narrow preoccupation. The apparent lack of interest in other men’s opinions noted by Mill reflects the ‘pure egocentrism’ of the autistic ‘self that is not ultimately aware of itself and the selves of others’. ³⁹ Contrasting Coleridge with Bentham, Mill writes:

And as Bentham’s short and easy method of referring all to the selfish interests of aristocracies, or priests, or lawyers, or some other species of impostors, could not satisfy a man who saw so much farther into the complexities of the human intellect and feelings — [Coleridge] considered the long or extensive prevalence of any opinion as a presumption that it was not altogether a fallacy. ⁴⁰

Such holding on to early simplistic explanations for troubling situations is frequent in AS sufferers. In Bentham’s case he held on to a life long grievance against those who effected his signing of the Thirty-nine Articles to take his place in Queen’s College, Oxford: ‘He had to sign the Thirty-nine Articles in spite of scruples suppressed by authority. The impression made upon him by this childish compliance never left him to the end of his life’. ⁴¹

Thus based on Mill’s and Hazlitt’s observations alone, a picture of Bentham is built up which is highly compatible with that of a sufferer from AS. There is a particularly clear description of his lack of intuitive understanding of the minds of others and himself, as well as his egocentrism and his obsessive persistence in pursuit of his narrow goals.

Problems with social interaction: other contemporary accounts

People with autism and AS are often ‘socially active’ but unable to be ‘socially interactive’, the distinction relating to the presence or absence of the ability to mentalize. An example would be the difference between forming an obsessive attachment (socially active) and forming a reciprocal friendship or relationship (socially interactive), where an extra dimension is required. A further example would be ‘showing a desire to please’ (socially active) compared with ‘choosing appropriate gifts’ (socially interactive) or using a person as a tool as opposed to using a person as a recipient of information. ⁴² The following examples suggest Jeremy Bentham may have been socially active but could often have difficulties being socially interactive.

Bentham seems to have ‘look[ed] upon friends and even more casual associates as “disciples” to his own life’s mission [...] [and with] James Mill, George Grote, John Mill and above all Etienne Dumont [...] he proved unable to sustain close or prolonged personal friendship’. ⁴³

Egocentricity

Mill commented on Bentham’s ‘firm self-reliance, needing no support from other men’s opinion’ and, as cited above, Hazlitt suggested he ‘regards the people about him no more than the flies of a summer’. ⁵⁹

One example relating to the Panopticon project is sufficient to indicate his tendency to justify his proposals in terms of his feeling that they would be personally acceptable to him: he shows little capacity here to put himself in the position of others. In the Panopticon Bill of 1794 he proposed that each prisoner ‘would be tattooed with his name and date and place of birth on the upper part of his left arm’. He reacted with ‘bewilderment [that] the idea seems to have been met with ridicule’ and wrote, in 1804, that ‘I intended to have set the example in my own person, and, if possible, in those of my subordinates: ⁶⁰

Semple concludes her balanced and sympathetic account of the Panopticon project thus: ‘Bentham does display a certain frightening arrogance. He wrote of himself:

J.B. the most ambitious of the ambitious. His empire - the empire he aspires to - extending to, and comprehending, the whole human race, in all places[...] at all future time"[...] [Bentham] lacked an imaginative tolerance for the shortcomings of others; he was over-optimistic, he was ruthless, and he was pre-eminently egocentric. ⁶¹

We believe this state of arrogant omnipotence might well have arisen as a consequence of his inability to relate to others as persons like himself, in other words a result of Asperger’s syndrome.

Another aspect of his perhaps autistic self reliance was his propensity to isolate himself and work intensively, alone. As Harrison puts it:

On many occasions in his later life he referred to himself as a hermit, and when he could he buried himself in “colleges, chambers, and cottages”. Even when he visited his brother in a fairly remote part of Russia, he went off to live in an even more remote cottage where, secure from all interruption, he could work “double tides” from sunrise until eight each evening. On return to England, both before and after he inherited his father’s large, central, house, he buried himself for long periods in a room in a dilapidated farm at Hendon, eight miles from London. ⁶²

‘Normal’ social understanding: the case against autism in Bentham

There is agreement that Jeremy Bentham’s relationship with his brother Samuel was the most sustained and, probably, the most important to him of his life. In the following letter, written to his father at the age of twelve when Samuel was almost four, Jeremy Bentham imagines his brother’s responses to his absence and to his return:

I imagine myself too just returned, finding you and my Grandmama and dear little Sammy sitting by the fireside when I come in, and his little Heart exulting and crying Brother Jery is come.— I suppose he often asks you where I am, and what I stay away for? and suppose I should come home, what harm will it do? or what then? ⁶³

As Semple writes, ‘for Jeremy, love of Samuel was probably the strongest emotion in his life. He wished to protect, guide, and provide for his young brother’. ⁶⁴ While it is clear from the quotation above that the twelve year old Jeremy imagines his younger brother missing him in his absence and being glad when he returns, we do not know whether this bears any relation to what his brother is actually thinking and feeling. We know that Jeremy was strongly attached to Samuel. Autistic children have been shown to react in the same way as non- autistic children to the absence of and reunion with their mothers. ⁶⁵ As Frith puts it ‘an awareness of mental states is not required for attachment behaviour’. ⁶⁶ There are clearly cases where Bentham tries to put himself into other people’s shoes, at least in a theoretical context. Semple cites Bentham reflecting on the reaction of ‘a sentimental gentleman’ to the fact that in the Panopticon, men were to be stripped of all privacy (she comments that ‘the identity of this gentleman of sensibility has yet to be determined’):

[t]o a temper formed to humanity [who] happens to have added the elevated birth, the refinements of education and an enthusiastic love of liberty, inflamed by the circumstances of the time; a never-closing inquisitorial eye figured itself to him as a new invented instrument, the only one yet wanting to be added to the horrors of the Bastille. Not to have a moment exempt from scrutiny of an inquisitorial eye! Not to have a moment of liberty even of that scanty and melancholy remnant of liberty which till now has been respected even in a prison! This punishment is a punishment worse than death: a punishment too horrible, too intolerable even for the worst of criminals.

His own belief was that if he, Bentham, had nothing to hide, such constant inspection would be ‘a matter of indifference’ to him or ‘even of comfort’ if he feared abuse of power by his gaoler. ⁶⁷

There are many, many other examples of Bentham recording what he takes to be the responses of others and responding in his turn. His correspondence with Lord Lansdowne cited above is a good example. Perhaps this constitutes an argument against our AS hypothesis. Similarly, it could be argued that it is difficult to imagine Bentham’s painstakingly detailed analysis and classification of human motivation in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) and A Table of the Springs of Action (1815) originating in the mind of a man incapable of empathic understanding. But as will be explained below, it has been well established that the ability to infer the content of someone else’s mind may be acquired, rather as a foreign language is learnt, by individuals with AS who have sufficient cognitive and language capability. ⁶⁸ Furthermore, Bentham’s achievements in the works mentioned can be seen as those of an exceptional ‘systemiser’ rather than those of an ‘empathiser’. ⁶⁹

Communication difficulties

Bentham’s communicative dysfunction is exemplified by his prose style. Marx described him as ‘the insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the commonplace bourgeois intelligence of the nineteenth century, a genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity’. ⁷⁰ Hazlitt’s remark is well-known:

his style is unpopular, not to say unintelligible. He writes a language of his own that darkens knowledge. His works have been translated into French — they ought to have been translated into English’.

Hazlitt summarises thus:

he writes a cypher-hand, which the vulgar have no key to. The construction of his sentences is a curious frame-work with pegs and hooks to hang his thoughts upon, for his own use and guidance, but almost out of the reach of everybody else. It is a barbarous philosophical jargon, with all the repetitions, parentheses, formalities, uncouth nomenclature and verbiage of law-Latin [...] Mr Bentham writes as if he was allowed but a single sentence to express his whole view of a subject in, and as if, should he omit a single circumstance or step of the argument, it would be lost to the world for ever, like an estate by a flaw in the title-deeds. This is over-rating the importance of our own discoveries and mistaking the nature and object of language altogether [...] The best of it is, he thinks his present mode of expressing himself perfect, and that whatever may be objected to his law or logic, no one can find the least fault with the purity, simplicity and perspicuity of his style. ⁷¹

A Times leading article of 28 November 1829 discusses Bentham’s writing style. It starts by noting contemporary criticisms of Edward Gibbon’s style but goes on to say:

if this might be said of EDWARD GIBBON, what shall anyone say of the much inferior, but infinitely more perplexed and un-Anglican writer JEREMY BENTHAM? Neither man, nor hog, nor dog, ever produced such sounds or expressions, or things so far removed from nature, as are poor JEREMY’S writings.

And in the review of Bowring’s ‘Memoirs of Jeremy Bentham’ (see p.9 above) the reviewer comments on Bentham’s language: ‘words all but incapable of being pronounced. The strange language which he invented, was the result of considerable pains as well as deliberation. When he had once adopted it, laughing at it only made him the more obstinate in placing it among his most valuable inventions’. ⁷²

Bentham’s inability readily to communicate the results of work despite intense efforts is well- known. In part it was a result of constantly revisiting problems and a lack of a sense that his contribution was complete. As Harrison put it:

This sense of parts, fragments, uncompleted projects, which is already present in the early Bentham, forms a constant theme throughout his life. However much analysis and thought had been given to a particular area, there was always more that was possible; and Bentham always wished to fill up all the gaps and explore all relevant by-ways. ⁷³

Snyder’s observation that the ‘autistic mind seems to be suited to working algorithmically within a closed system of specified rules’ would seem an apt description of Bentham’s working methods. Our hypothesis that Bentham’s was ‘an autistic mind’ would make sense of his rather obsessional urge to ‘fill up all the gaps and explore all relevant by-ways’ within the closed system. ⁷⁴

Semple writes aptly about objections to Bentham’s proposals for the Panopticon and the National Charity Company:

In many ways Bentham himself is to blame for these profound misunderstandings. By a strange irony, he who was so acutely aware of the delusive power of language, used words in such a way as to create an impression of ossified, frigid, rule-bound bureaucracy. ⁷⁵

Circumscribed interests

In a sense, a description of the whole of Bentham’s output would provide a complete list of examples of his ‘obsessive preoccupations with circumscribed interests’ such as would be required for a diagnosis of autism or AS. As an example of obsessive preoccupation with a circumscribed interest, the Panopticon cannot be bettered. For more than two decades, and using much of his personal fortune, Bentham strove to make real his dream of a penitentiary which he believed would be ‘a way of obtaining power, power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example’. ⁷⁶ It was ‘an attempt to reinforce this structuring of human relationships through architecture’, and ‘an opportunity for the practice of omniscience and omnipotence, for as gaoler he would be the Deity in a microcosm of his own making’. ⁷⁷ But ‘there were probably few men in England less capable of managing a thousand convicts, in spite of his theories about “springs of action”‘. ⁷⁸ Because his attachment to the idea of the Panopticon has been found scarcely comprehensible,

Bentham’s anguish has met with little sympathy, yet it was real enough. In the nadir of the panopticon’s fortunes, he felt he would die “like a rat in a hole” and he clung to memories of childhood in his lonely misery; a friend, “gave me once a loaf, which reminded me of my boyhood, and I kept it till it grew green, during Panopticon distress”. ⁷⁹

As Evans puts it, ‘the question of why such a project should take up so much of a great philosopher’s time has perplexed many of his biographers’. ⁸⁰ We suggest that AS may provide the answer to that question. According to Semple, Bentham ‘lacked an imaginative tolerance for the shortcomings of others: he was over-optimistic, he was ruthless, and he was pre-eminently egocentric. The panopticon mirrors these faults’. ⁸¹

Bentham’s psychological theory: individualistic behaviourism

Does the hypothesis that Bentham suffered from AS shed light on Bentham’s theory of human nature and motivation, his psychological theory?

As mentioned above, both Hazlitt and J.S. Mill judged Bentham’s view of human nature impoverished and inadequate. Hazlitt’s view was that Bentham has ‘not made sufficient allowance for the varieties of human nature, and the caprices and irregularities of the human will’ Mill’s that he

saw [...] in man little but what the vulgarest eye can see; recognized no diversities of character but such as he who runs may read [...] and no one, probably, who [...] ever attempted to give a rule to all human conduct, set out with a more limited conception either of the agencies by which human conduct is, or of those by which it should be, influenced. ⁸²

Mill continued that Bentham’s ‘general conception of human nature and life, furnished him with an unusually slender stock of premises’. He was particularly struck by the apparent absence of any concept of ‘conscience’.

Nothing is more curious than the absence of recognition in any of [Bentham’s] writings of the existence of conscience, as a thing distinct from philanthropy, from affection for God or man, and from self-interest in this world or in the next.

Mill writes that Bentham’s

view of human nature and life[...].overlooks the existence of about half of the whole number of mental feelings which human beings are capable of, including all those of which the direct objects are states of their own mind. ⁸³

Mill describes the lack of psychological complexity of Bentham’s model of the mind. In the place in Bentham’s theory where Mill believes Bentham should recognise ‘conscience’, Mill finds a gaping absence, a glaring example, perhaps, of Bentham’s lack of recognition of internal divisions, inner conflicts within the human mind.

In the twenty-first century, it would be difficult not to be influenced by what Dinwiddy terms ‘the emphasis on the unconscious and the irrational in modern psychology’ and to see Bentham’s view of the mind as two-dimensional. ⁸⁴ Mill’s essay on Bentham makes it clear that his near-contemporary held a similar view. We believe there is a strong argument that the specific lack of complexity and incompleteness of Bentham’s psychological theories could be the result of AS. Indeed, the link between autism and a ‘behaviourist’ view has been shown experimentally. Autistic subjects are significantly less likely than controls to refer spontaneously to mental functions of the brain (such as ‘thinking’) when asked what it is for. Most autistic subjects referred to its role as the cause of behaviour such as ‘walking and running’. ⁸⁵

Extreme behaviourists of the twentieth century such as J.B. Watson (1878-1958) and B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) did not believe anything useful could be said about what went on within the human mind: their interest was in stimuli and responses, inputs and outputs and not in the ‘black box’ between. Bentham did not go so far in denying the importance of mental states in affecting behaviour. But he did believe that it was at least theoretically possible to reduce all such states to a single dimension — greater or lesser degrees of happiness; more or less punishment, more or less reward; quantities of aversive and quantities of positive stimuli.

In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation and A Table of the Springs of Action, Bentham set out his scheme of human motivation in meticulous detail, analysing into many categories the positive and negative emotions. However, the ‘essential purpose of Bentham’s attempt to produce an exhaustive analysis of pains and pleasures, motives and sanctions, was to lay out before the legislator the factors that determined the conduct of human beings, and the possible means of influencing it. What needed to be contrived was that people should pursue their own happiness in ways that were either innocuous, or actually conducive, to the happiness of others; and the basic means available to the legislator for achieving this were punishments and rewards’. ⁸⁶

His psychology was elaborated for the purpose of allowing the legislator to influence individual behaviour in order to maximise happiness (utility) of society as a whole. Bentham’s behaviourist descendants would have a similar approach to the individual. Indeed, in the Panopticon, ‘a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example’, Bentham sought to change behaviour in a manner that was to become the hallmark of the behaviourists. ⁸⁷ Watson, for example, wrote as follows:

Give me a dozen healthy infants and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any kind of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, merchant chief, and yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. ⁸⁸

In experiments, people with AS can recognise happiness and sadness but have more trouble with more subtle emotions such as surprise, embarrassment and jubilation which require the understanding of the mental states of those experiencing the emotions. ⁸⁹ This might suggest the existence of basic positive and negative emotional states, accessible without deep awareness of self or other. One could speculate that reducing all motivation to pleasure and pain would appear to make sense if other emotional states felt less ‘real’. It is thus possible that Bentham’s restricted, one-dimensional view of human motivation emerged from a basic constriction in his understanding of the nature of emotion linked to AS.

Three psychological models of AS: lack of ‘theory of mind’, ‘weak central coherence’ and ‘impaired executive function’

There are currently three main broad based psychological models of the autistic spectrum disorders which are not mutually exclusive and together try to account for the different aspects of autistic disorder: 1. the AS sufferer lacks ‘theory of mind’: there is a lack of intuitive and automatic attribution of mental states to others, the ability to do what cognitive scientists and psychotherapists have come to call `mentalizing’; 2. the AS sufferer employs a cognitive style of ‘weak central coherence’ focusing on detail (this theory addresses the strengths of the autistic mind); and 3. the AS sufferer has impaired ‘executive’ function: top-down organization of non-routine behaviour is impaired. This may account for the perseverative aspect of the psychopathology. ⁹⁰ It is our contention that there is evidence supporting all three in Bentham’s case in addition to evidence for the classic triad of impairments of autism.

Empathising-Systemising theory

Baron-Cohen has proposed a two-dimensional psychological model of normal socio-cognitive function. One dimension, empathising - the drive to identify emotions and thoughts in others and to respond to them appropriately - includes not only inference about the thoughts and feelings of others but also appropriate spontaneous emotional reactions, enabling an understanding of the behaviour of others and natural ways of responding. The other dimension, systemising, is defined as the drive to analyse and build systems in order to understand and predict non-agentive events. The identification of the relationships between components and the correlations between events enables the understanding of relevant underlying ‘rules’. In people with extreme ‘systemising’ bias, these capacities are much greater than ‘empathising’ skills. ⁹⁷

One research study found that males with AS performed poorly on empathising tasks compared with non-AS males, who in turn performed poorly compared to non-AS females. ⁹⁸ Although Lawson et al believe their results do not support the weak central coherence model, Frith argues that the weak central coherence model is compatible with the two dimensional model of AS because, although at first sight concern with structure would seem inimical to weak central coherence, in fact ‘systemisers’, including those with AS, collect information in ‘self-limiting taxonomies that do not link up with each other’. Jeremy Bentham can be seen to exemplify this approach.

The autistic mind seems to be suited to working algorithmically within a closed system of specified rules’. ⁹⁹ This seems admirably to describe Bentham’s method of ‘bifurcation’ or `bipartite analysis’ to which he attached great value. As Dinwiddy states, ‘It was certainly novel as applied to the field of legislation, and one can see why, as a believer in codification, Bentham found it so attractive. He thought that by means of it he could produce a systematic and exhaustive catalogue of offences or crimes, which would in turn provide the basis for an ordered and comprehensive code of penal law’. ¹⁰⁰

Bentham as the arch ‘systemiser’ is here on display. It is of note that this theory of the ‘empathising’/ ‘systemising’ divide in cognitive processing has close parallels with the contrast Mill stresses between Coleridge and Bentham. ¹⁰¹

Jeremy Bentham and John Howard

Lucas brought together the available evidence and concluded, despite the limitations of retrospective diagnosis, that John Howard suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome. ¹⁰² Frith included a section on Howard in the most recent edition of her book on autism. ¹⁰³ As Semple writes:

Despite his saintly qualities, Howard left an ambiguous legacy; there is no adequate modern biography, so the contradictions in his personality and his achievements have yet to be explored [...] His obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine condescendingly deplored the “not unexpected, yet certainly untimely, death of the eccentric, but truly worthy, John Howard”.

She cites a draft preface written by Bentham which ‘shows how close he believed their affinity to be’: The obligations I owe to you [Howard] are great and many[...]. From your example I have derived encouragement in many a fit of despondency, and argument in many a debate. ¹⁰⁴

Probably mindful of charges levelled at both him and Howard, Bentham wrote of Howard:

He is no crack-brained enthusiast: the qualities of his head are scarcely inferior to those of his heart [...] From all this rhapsody you would be apt to infer that I fancied myself a great man. The fact is, I live in the same dirty chambers, and am as poor as when you knew me [...] Mr Howard and the public honour he has met with, are of more use to me than you would imagine to prove to my friends that I am not crazy. ¹⁰⁵

It seems significant that Semple perceived a degree of identification by Bentham with Howard. There were similarities between Howard and Bentham in some of the content of their prison projects, in their persistence in the face of an unresponsive public, and in the reputations each attracted as ‘eccentric’. Underlying Bentham’s sympathy and respect for Howard may have been a sense that Howard and he shared something fundamental: perhaps their mutual AS.

Lucas noted a lack of a ‘psychologically coherent human portrait’ of John Howard and Semple the lack of an ‘adequate modern biography’. ¹⁰⁶ Burns made a similar point with regard to Bentham. ¹⁰⁷ The fact that both books remain unwritten may have the same cause and connect with a fundamentally ‘absent self’ at the heart of the personality in AS and autism. ¹⁰⁸

AS and the nature of Bentham’s preoccupations

The thrust of the paper up to this point has been to provide the evidence in favour of the hypothesis that Bentham may have suffered from AS. In the present section we will explore the links between Bentham’s putative AS and the particular goals he pursued in his work. It is of course highly speculative. We hypothesise that the nature of Bentham’s particular experience of life was profoundly influenced by AS and that this experience played an important part in determining what he sought to do.

Conclusion

Our contention that Jeremy Bentham may have suffered from Asperger’s syndrome is supported by contemporary accounts of his social oddness, and by the particular nature of his achievements. We have analysed aspects of his behaviour in each of the three relevant domains and found it generally consistent with Asperger’s syndrome. We have discussed Bentham’s egocentricity, his psychological theories, and the congruence between his preoccupations and the specific difficulties suffered by those with Asperger’s syndrome.

As Sacks puts it, ‘while a single glance may suffice for clinical diagnosis, if we hope to understand the autistic individual, nothing less than a total biography will do’. ¹²⁹ Sacks is drawing attention to the reality that each patient [...] has, interwoven with their autism, an intact, non-autistic part of their personality’. ¹³⁰ But in Bentham’s case,

It is striking, yet hardly surprising, that no one has even yet written a thorough biographical account of Bentham’s later years — or indeed of the second half of his long life. To anyone in sympathy with his ideas such a task would often be painful; to anyone else much of it would be inexpressedly tedious. ¹³¹

Amongst others, Alvarez and Reid have pointed out that the lack of a clear ‘personality’ is somehow at the very heart of the condition of AS. ‘There is something so striking, so mysterious and disturbing about the condition of autism, especially the reduction of personhood in the sufferer’. ¹³² The fact that there is still no ‘total biography’ of Bentham may connect with this fundamental diminution in the quality of his ‘personhood’.

‘The banishment of chance and the consolidation of certainty is what Bentham’s work is all about’. ¹³³ This assessment resounds strikingly with the typical AS sufferer’s efforts to find security and to manage uncertainty. Bentham’s lifetime of indefatigable effort to codify and render clear and unambiguous the vast areas of jurisprudence, ethics, political theory, welfare and social administration and, particularly, language, can be seen as having just such motivation. The Panopticon project in particular could have reflected Bentham’s ‘infantile’ desires for omniscience and omnipotence as an AS sufferer’s reaction to helpless confusion in the social world.

Mill wrote in his essay on Bentham that:

The truths which are not Bentham’s, which his philosophy takes no account of, are many and important [...] [but] almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers. ¹³⁴

We contend that AS was the underlying explanation for the fact that Bentham could be viewed as a ‘half-thinker’: AS may have prevented him from having ordinary access to that part of human experience that Mill found so well-understood and expressed by Coleridge.

It is striking how well current psychological theories of AS and of ‘autistic genius’, particularly those that highlight ‘weak central coherence’, appear to fit Bentham’s mode of working, both in terms of his specific achievements and in terms of his difficulties in completing and publishing his work. ¹³⁵ At the same time, the difficulties in social interaction (illustrated in the present paper) indicate his impairment in the realm of ‘theory of mind’ — the intuitive understanding of other people.

We conclude that AS appears to represent the most parsimonious explanation for Bentham’s particular combination of social oddness and striking intellectual abilities. AS may prove to be the underlying explanation for the fact that from the start his ideas have been particularly prone to misunderstanding and caricature. By rendering him incapable of sharing so many of his contemporaries’ common-sense assumptions, AS may have enabled Bentham to continue articulating, with extraordinary persistence, Enlightenment critiques of the status quo in various domains, pushing them to what he saw as their logical conclusions. AS may help to explain Bentham’s genius insofar as it led him, partly as a result of particular anxieties and preoccupations, to formulate questions unanticipated by his contemporaries, at the same time as ‘motivating’ him to pursue the answers to those question so relentlessly and indefatigably.

Copyright © 2006, Philip Lucas and Anne Sheeran. This file may be copied on the condition that the entire contents, including the header and this copyright notice, remain intact.