Schopenhauer's Philosophy in Light of the Diagnosis of Autism

Arthur Schopenhauer's Philosophy in Light of the Diagnosis of Autism

Stage 1: Diagnostic Grounding

1.1 Language Development and Linguistic Peculiarity

Schopenhauer's early language development appears to have followed a typical trajectory — he was precocious in some respects, learning French during a two-year stay in Le Havre as a child and returning to Hamburg "speaking German haltingly, like a foreigner." But what marks his linguistic profile as distinctively autistic is not delay but formal peculiarity: his prose style was, from the beginning, rigidly architectonic, resistant to colloquial ease, and marked by what Bryan Magee calls "a clarity and directness unusual in German philosophy." He wrote as if social lubricant did not exist. His sentences are declarative, absolute, uncompromising. There is no dialogic softening, no concession to the reader's possible resistance. This is the prose of a mind that does not automatically simulate the mind of its audience — a classic feature of autistic communication.

His school records at the Gotha Gymnasium reveal a boy who excelled in classical languages but was socially alienated from his peers. A teacher's report noted his "arrogant disposition" and difficulty fitting in. At the University of Göttingen, he studied medicine before switching to philosophy — the pattern of the autistic autodidact who follows an intense inner compass rather than external expectations.

1.2 Social Reciprocity and Conversational Style

The biographical record converges overwhelmingly on social impairment. Schopenhauer himself provides the most famous image of his social predicament in the Parerga and Paralipomena — the porcupine dilemma:

"A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse. However the cold drove them together again, when just the same thing happened. At last, after many turns of huddling and dispersing, they discovered that they would be best off by remaining at a little distance from one another."

This parable — which Wittgenstein himself quoted repeatedly — is not merely a metaphor for human relations generally. It is a precise description of the autistic social predicament: the need for warmth combined with the pain of proximity; the discovery that a "moderate distance" is the only viable solution. Schopenhauer lived this distance. He dined alone at the Englischer Hof in Frankfurt for decades, at the same table, at the same hour. When he did interact, he talked at people, not with them. His conversational style was monologic, declarative, and indifferent to the listener's reactions.

His relationship with his mother, Johanna Schopenhauer — a successful novelist who ran a Weimar salon frequented by Goethe — is particularly revealing. She wrote to him in 1807:

"You are not an evil person, you are not without intellect, you are not without education, you have everything that could make you a credit to human society... but you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you."

This is the voice of a neurotypical parent responding to an autistic child she cannot understand. She continues:

"All your good qualities become obscured by your super-cleverness and are made useless to the world merely because of your rage at wanting to know everything better than others."

"Wanting to know everything better than others" — the neurotypical interpretation of autistic systemizing, of the need for correctness that overrides social harmony. She found him "irritating and unbearable." He found her salon gatherings trivial and vacuous. They could not share a world.

Schopenhauer's relationship with women more broadly reveals profound impairment. He never married. His few romantic attachments were brief and disastrous. His essay "On Women" is notorious for its misogyny, but read through the autism lens, it reveals something else: the confusion of a mind that cannot parse the social and emotional signals of the opposite sex and converts that confusion into systematic philosophical condemnation. He writes:

"Women are directly adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our early childhood, for the simple reason that they themselves are childish, foolish, and shortsighted."

This is not mere prejudice; it is autistic literalism applied to social categories, combined with profound mindblindness regarding the inner lives of women.

1.3 Need for Solitude, Routine, Sameness

Schopenhauer's daily routine in Frankfurt was, in the words of Cartwright, "remarkably consistent." He rose at 7 a.m., wrote during the morning hours, took a light lunch, then walked for two hours with his poodle Atma. He dined at 3 p.m. at the Englischer Hof. Afternoons were for reading and correspondence. He played the flute before retiring at 10 p.m. This routine continued, essentially unchanged, for nearly three decades.

The routine was not incidental to his work; it was the condition of its possibility. He needed the sameness. Disruption produced agitation. When noise intruded — his most famous sensory sensitivity — he erupted with fury. His essay "On Noise" is a document of autistic auditory hypersensitivity:

"I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity."

He was particularly tormented by the cracking of coachmen's whips — a stimulus most people filter out but that he could not. He wrote of "the infernal whip-cracking in the narrow resounding streets" that "paralyzes the brain, murders thought." This is not hyperbole from a neurotypical perspective; it is precise phenomenological reportage from an autistic sensory world.

1.4 Control, Rigidity, Moral Absolutism

Schopenhauer exhibited what Fitzgerald would call an "autistic superego" — a harsh, perfectionistic internal authority that tolerated no deviation. He was convinced of his own correctness to a degree that struck contemporaries as pathological. His philosophy was not one position among others; it was the truth, and those who disagreed were not mistaken but dishonest or stupid.

When his masterwork The World as Will and Representation failed to sell, he did not revise his assessment. He concluded that the reading public was incapable of understanding him. "I have long borne in silence the abuse heaped upon me," he wrote in the preface to the second edition, "but a time must come, however late, when people will read me and not lay the book aside."

This certainty in the face of universal rejection is characteristic of the autistic mind, which processes external feedback differently from the neurotypical mind. The autistic system-builder does not adjust his system to accommodate criticism; he concludes that the critics have failed to understand.

1.5 Monotropism and All-Absorbing Narrow Interest

Schopenhauer's entire intellectual life was organized around a single insight: that the world is will and representation. He arrived at this insight in his twenties, published it in his thirties, and spent the remaining four decades of his life refining, extending, defending, and illustrating it. Everything he wrote — on aesthetics, ethics, science, religion, logic, mathematics, color theory, animal magnetism, the immortality of the soul — was an elaboration of this single monotropic fixation.

This is not normal philosophical development. Most philosophers expand, revise, abandon earlier positions, explore new domains. Schopenhauer stayed fixed. He compared himself to a "one-idea'd man" — and meant it as a compliment. His thought did not evolve; it accreted. The second volume of The World as Will and Representation is not a sequel but a set of supplements, chapter by chapter, to the first. He was, in the most literal sense, unable to move on.

1.6 Family History

Schopenhauer's father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, was a wealthy Danzig merchant who exhibited traits consistent with autism spectrum disorder. He was described as rigid, exacting, socially distant, and subject to what his son called "a morbid disposition to anxiety and melancholy." He planned Arthur's life with precision — naming him "Arthur" because the name is nearly identical in all European languages, suitable for the international mercantile career he envisioned. When Arthur chose philosophy over commerce, it was a betrayal of a script that had been written for him. Heinrich Floris died when Arthur was 17, an apparent suicide.

The family pattern — a rigid, controlling father; a socially ambitious mother who found her son unbearable; a son who could not reciprocate normally — maps onto Fitzgerald's observation about the Wittgenstein family: "a religious earnestness, a sense of life as a task... a nervousness and a degree of sensibility which made them difficult to live with."

Stage 2: Cognitive Trait Mapping

From the biographical evidence, we can extract the following cognitive profile:

Biographical Evidence	Cognitive Tendency
Routinized daily life; decades of identical schedule	Preservation of sameness; intolerance of change
Single philosophical insight elaborated for 40 years	Monotropism; recursive, depth-over-breadth cognition
Harsh judgments; conviction of absolute correctness	Moral absolutism; systemizing without social calibration
Hypersensitivity to noise, especially whip-cracking	Sensory atypicality; failure of sensory filtering
Monologic conversation; inability to read social cues	Mindblindness; impaired Theory of Mind
Social isolation; "porcupine dilemma"	Social detachment; difficulty with reciprocal interaction
Single magnum opus revised throughout life	Executive function atypicality; difficulty completing and moving on
Autobiographical remark: "I constantly endeavored to see and depict myself and my actions from the outside"	Compensatory systemizing of social experience
Mother's description: "irritating and unbearable"	Pragmatic language impairment; failure of social cognition
Preference for poodles over people	Cross-species affinity; easier processing of non-human social signals

Stage 3: Philosophical Problem Selection

Schopenhauer's philosophy is organized around a small set of problems that he returned to obsessively throughout his life. Each maps onto autistic cognitive tendencies:

Problem 1: The nature of the world as representation.

Schopenhauer's insistence that "the world is my representation" — that everything we experience is mediated by the cognitive apparatus of the brain — reflects a mind that cannot take intersubjective reality for granted. For the neurotypical person, the shared world is a given; for the autistic mind, it is a problem. Schopenhauer's idealism is not a speculative position but the natural conclusion of a cognition that experiences the gap between self and world as unbridgeable.

Problem 2: The will as thing-in-itself.

The single concept around which Schopenhauer's entire system revolves — the will — is a striking example of autistic cognitive translation. He takes his own intense, overwhelming inner experience (the "press of will" that "knows no fatigue") and universalizes it into a metaphysical principle. The will is blind, striving, never satisfied, identical across all beings. This is what happens when an autistic mind, which experiences its own inner states as powerful and thing-like, projects that experience onto the structure of reality.

Problem 3: Suffering as the default condition.

Schopenhauer's pessimism — his claim that "all life is suffering" — is not merely a philosophical position. It is the affective experience of a person with chronic depression (a common ASD comorbidity) and lifelong social alienation, systematized into metaphysics. He did not arrive at pessimism through argument; he arrived at argument through pessimism. The philosophy rationalizes what the cognition already knows.

Problem 4: Aesthetic experience as escape from will.

Schopenhauer's theory of art — that aesthetic contemplation provides temporary release from the tyranny of the will — is a direct translation of autistic sensory experience. The "purely objective, will-less perception" he describes is what happens when an autistic person becomes absorbed in a special interest or sensory experience to the exclusion of self-consciousness. His claim that music is a "copy of the will itself" reflects the autistic experience of music as direct, unmediated cognition rather than social communication.

Problem 5: The denial of the will and asceticism.

Schopenhauer's ethical ideal — the saint who denies the will, renounces desire, and achieves a state of "will-lessness" — is the autistic solution to autistic problems: overwhelming inner drives, sensory bombardment, social demands. Asceticism is what autism looks like when it becomes an ethical ideal.

Stage 4: Formal-Textual Analysis

4.1 Architectonic Structure

The World as Will and Representation is built with the precision of a machine. Book One: The World as Representation. Book Two: The World as Will. Book Three: The Platonic Idea as Object of Art. Book Four: The Affirmation and Denial of the Will. Each book maps onto the previous with systematic rigor. The supplement volume follows the same structure, chapter by chapter, like a second iteration of the same machine.

This is not organic philosophical development. It is compulsion toward order, the autistic need for everything to be in its proper place. Wittgenstein's Tractatus would later exhibit the same autistic architecture: numbered propositions, decimal sub-numbering, logical hierarchy. Both philosophers built systems that were also machines.

4.2 Repetitive, Recursive Structure

Schopenhauer returns to the same points repeatedly. The primacy of will over intellect is argued in Book Two, then again in the supplements; the aesthetic theory is elaborated in Book Three, then again; the denial of the will closes Book Four, then recurs in multiple supplementary chapters. He does not merely restate; he accretes — adding layers, examples, refinements, but never moving beyond the original framework. This is monotropic cognition in textual form.

4.3 Impersonal, Anti-Dialogic Style

Schopenhauer does not argue with other philosophers; he dismisses them. Hegel is a "charlatan," Fichte a "sophist," Schelling a "windbag." There is no genuine engagement with alternative positions, no attempt to see things from another's point of view. His prose is declarative, absolute, and indifferent to the reader. He writes:

"The world is my representation: this is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being."

The "my" is not personal but universal — and yet it is also intensely personal. He universalizes his own cognitive standpoint without acknowledging the possibility of alternative standpoints. This is the textual equivalent of mindblindness.

4.4 Systematic Unity From a Single Principle

The entire philosophy derives from one insight. Everything — epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics — is a consequence of the will-representation distinction. This is not philosophical eclecticism; it is autistic hyper-systematization. The neurotypical philosopher might find interesting problems in multiple domains and pursue them independently. The autistic philosopher finds one problem and sees everything through it.

Stage 5: Philosophical Reinterpretation

5.1 The Doctrine of Representation: Autism as Transcendental Idealism

At §1 of Volume 1, Schopenhauer writes:

"The world is a presentation to me — this is a truth that holds for every living and cognizant being, although the human being alone can bring it to reflective, abstract consciousness."

And in the supplement to Book One:

"That the objective world would exist even if no cognizant being existed does seem certain at first glance... But when we try to realize this abstract thought... we become aware that what we in this instance imagine is in truth the opposite of that which we had intended, namely, that this is nothing other than a process in the intellect of a cognizant being that perceives an objective world, thus precisely that which we had wanted to exclude."

This is Schopenhauer's version of the autistic discovery that other minds are not directly accessible — generalized into a metaphysical principle. The neurotypical child acquires Theory of Mind automatically, taking the existence of other perspectives for granted. The autistic child must discover that other minds exist, and may never fully internalize the discovery. Schopenhauer's idealism is the philosophical expression of this discovery: the world is my representation, and I can never escape my own cognitive apparatus to check whether there is anything beyond it.

This is what Fonseca would call a "change of aspect": Schopenhauer's transcendental idealism, traditionally read as a metaphysical doctrine derived from Kant, becomes intelligible as the natural philosophy of a mind that experiences its own cognitive boundaries as a fundamental fact about reality.

5.2 The Doctrine of Will: Autistic Inner Experience Universalized

Schopenhauer's identification of the thing-in-itself with will is his most original and controversial move. Kant had left the thing-in-itself unknowable. Schopenhauer claims we have direct access to it through our own bodies — not through outer perception, but through inner experience of willing.

"The will alone is everywhere entirely itself. For its function is of the greatest simplicity: it consists in willing and non-willing, which takes place with the greatest ease, without effort, and requires no practice."

"The intellect tires; the will is untiring."

"Infants, who barely show the first weak trace of intelligence, are already full of self-will: through unrestrained, purposeless raging and screaming, they show the press of will with which they are bursting."

This is a precise description of what contemporary autism research calls "intense inner states" — the overwhelming, poorly regulated drives that many autistic individuals report. Schopenhauer experienced his own will as a blind, driving force that the intellect could barely control. He then concluded that this must be what the universe is fundamentally made of.

The strong blind man carrying the sighted lame man — Schopenhauer's metaphor for the will-intellect relation — is an autistic description of the relationship between drive and cognition. The will is primary, untiring, and essentially stupid. The intellect is secondary, exhaustible, and essentially powerless. This is not a conclusion derived from empirical investigation; it is a projection of inner experience onto cosmic structure.

Read through the autism lens, Schopenhauer's will-metaphysics becomes a case study in how autistic cognition can generate philosophical originality. He noticed something about his own inner life — the overwhelming, involuntary, compulsive character of desire and drive — that neurotypical philosophers had systematized differently (as reason, as the good, as the soul's ascent). He refused to subordinate this raw experience to any intellectually palatable framework. He insisted on its primacy. This is autistic literalism applied to introspection: the will is really like that — blind, relentless, never satisfied — and any philosophy that prettifies it is dishonest.

5.3 Pessimism: Suffering as Metaphysical Principle

Schopenhauer's pessimism is the most famous feature of his philosophy and the one most readily dismissed as temperamental. But read through the autism lens, it becomes something more interesting: the systematization of chronic alienation.

He writes in the Supplement to Book Four:

"Every state, every person, every scene of life needs only to be apprehended purely objectively and made the object of depiction... in order to appear interesting, dear, enviable — but if one is in it, if it is oneself, then (as is often said): let the devil put up with it."

This is the autobiographical confession of an autistic mind. From the outside — apprehended "purely objectively" — life looks interesting. From the inside — experienced as a participant — it is torment. The gap between outside and inside, between representation and will, between how things appear and how they feel, is the fundamental structure of autistic experience.

Schopenhauer's claim that "all life is suffering" is not merely a generalization from personal misery. It is the conclusion of a mind that processes experience differently. Pain, for Schopenhauer, is the positive reality; pleasure is merely the temporary absence of pain. This inversion of common-sense valuation reflects the autistic sensory world, where stimuli that neurotypicals filter out impinge with full force, where social situations are exhausting rather than energizing, where the baseline state is not comfortable neutrality but chronic low-grade distress.

"We feel pain, but not painlessness; care, but not the absence of care; fear, but not security. We feel the wish as we feel hunger and thirst; but as soon as it is fulfilled, it is as with the mouthful that has been swallowed."

This is a phenomenology of autistic experience: the foregrounding of negative states, the invisibility of positive ones. The neurotypical person experiences well-being as a positive presence. Schopenhauer experiences it as an absence of disturbance. This is what happens when a mind with sensory filtering deficits and social alienation turns its experience into philosophy.

5.4 Aesthetic Theory: Art as Autistic Absorption

Schopenhauer's theory of aesthetic experience is perhaps the most direct translation of autistic cognition into philosophical doctrine. He describes the aesthetic state as one of "pure, will-less contemplation" — a state in which the individual subject disappears and becomes the "pure subject of cognition," the "eternal world eye."

"With the disappearance of willing from consciousness, individuality is really eliminated as well, and along with it its suffering and hardship. For this reason, I have described the pure subject of cognition that remains over as the eternal world eye, which, though with very different degrees of clarity, looks out from all living beings, untouched by their arising and passing away."

This state — absorption in an object to the point of self-forgetting — is precisely what autistic individuals describe when engaged in their special interests. Temple Grandin calls it "flow." Donna Williams describes "will-less perception" in nearly Schopenhauerian terms. The autistic capacity for monotropic focus — intense, exclusive attention to a single object or domain — is here elevated to the highest human achievement.

"What makes this state difficult and therefore rare is that, as it were, the accident (the intellect) subdues and nullifies the substance (the will) in it, although only for a short time."

The "difficulty" of achieving this state — the "special impetus on the part of intellect" required — reflects the autistic experience of having to work to achieve what neurotypicals achieve automatically: a state of calm, engaged focus. But Schopenhauer also claims that genius consists precisely in the surplus of cognitive power beyond what the individual will requires — a surplus that enables objective, disinterested contemplation. This is the autistic cognitive profile: difficulty with practical life, extraordinary capacity for focused absorption.

His theory of music is particularly striking. Music, he claims, is not a representation of Ideas (as other arts are) but a direct "copy of the will itself." It bypasses the world of objects and speaks directly to the inner nature of reality:

"Music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, whose objectivity the Ideas are."

This is what music feels like to an autistic person: not a social signal, not an emotional communication, but a direct, unmediated experience. Wittgenstein — the other great autistic philosopher — had a similarly intense, non-social relationship with music. He could hear the "machinery" in post-Brahms composers. Both philosophers treated music as something that bypasses the ordinary circuits of communication and goes straight to the core of experience.

5.5 Ethics and the Denial of Will: The Autistic Solution

Schopenhauer's ethics culminates in the doctrine of the denial of the will. The saint, having seen through the veil of individuation (the principium individuationis), recognizes the identical will in all beings and renounces desire. This leads to asceticism, chastity, poverty, and ultimately a state of "will-lessness" that Schopenhauer describes in terms borrowed from Buddhist and Hindu traditions.

"Here also lies its analogy and even kinship with the denial of the will discussed at the end of the following book."

The denial of the will is the logical endpoint of autistic experience systematized into ethics. If the will is a blind, tormenting force; if social life is exhausting; if sensory input is overwhelming; if desire brings more suffering than satisfaction — then the rational response is to withdraw, to quieten, to stop engaging. The ascetic ideal — solitude, simplicity, silence, reduced stimulation — is what an autistic person might design as the perfect life.

Schopenhauer himself did not achieve this ideal. He lived alone with his poodles, but he dined well, played the flute, and defended his philosophy with ferocious intensity. The ideal remained theoretical — a projection of what complete escape from the tyranny of the will might look like.

Stage 6: Comparative Validation

6.1 Comparison with Wittgenstein

The parallels between Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein are striking and multiply determined:

Domain	Schopenhauer	Wittgenstein
Social style	Isolated; monologic; "irritating and unbearable" (mother)	Isolated; monologic; "tyrant" (Russell)
Relationship to animals	Poodles as preferred companions	Fed and tamed wild birds in Ireland
Sensory sensitivity	Hyperacusis; rage at whip-cracking	Hypersensitive to noise; hammered on walls
Daily routine	Rigid, identical for decades	Same food daily; fixed routines
Philosophical style	Systematic, architectonic, single principle	Aphoristic, fragmented, recursive
Relationship to music	Flute player; music as direct copy of will	Whistler; music as model of understanding
Core insight	World as will and representation	Language as use; meaning in context
Publishing pattern	One magnum opus, repeatedly revised	One published book; massive posthumous Nachlass
Ascetic ideal	Denial of will; "will-lessness"	Simplicity; rejection of academic life
Moral absolutism	Uncompromising ethical positions	"Elementary sin" of suicide
Autistic trait in philosophy	Will as blind, untiring drive	Analogies that "irresistibly drag us on"

Both philosophers discovered in their own cognitive difficulties the subject matter of their philosophy. Wittgenstein, struggling with literal understanding and pragmatic language impairment, made language and communication the center of philosophy. Schopenhauer, struggling with overwhelming inner drives and social alienation, made will and suffering the center of philosophy.

Wittgenstein himself acknowledged the connection. As a young man, he identified with Schopenhauer's "proud and lonely spirit." He returned to Schopenhauer throughout his life. The porcupine parable was his model of ideal human relations. The Tractatus ends with a Schopenhauerian gesture toward the mystical — "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" — which is essentially the denial of the will translated into the philosophy of language.

6.2 Comparison with Other Figures

Schopenhauer fits the Fitzgerald pattern across multiple domains:

Newton: System-building; lifelong monotropic focus; social isolation; possible ASD
Kant: Rigid routine (the Königsberg walks); systematic philosophy; social peculiarity
Gödel: System-building; paranoia about food; social withdrawal; monotropic focus on logic
Beckett: Minimalist, repetitive art; social isolation; focus on suffering and the inexpressible
Simone Weil: Asceticism; self-starvation; intense moral absolutism; social alienation

The pattern is consistent: autistic cognition produces (a) systematic, monotropic thinking; (b) social withdrawal that enables intense work; (c) philosophical focus on the thinker's own cognitive difficulties; (d) a distinctive formal-textual architecture; (e) moral absolutism and a harsh superego.

Stage 7: Final Diagnostic-Interpretive Claim

Schopenhauer's philosophy is what happens when an autistic mind turns its own cognitive particularities into a unified metaphysical system.

His doctrine of representation arises from a mind that cannot take intersubjective reality for granted — that experiences the gap between self and world as fundamental and unbridgeable. His transcendental idealism is the natural philosophy of someone who must learn what neurotypicals inhabit.

His doctrine of the will arises from a mind that experiences its own inner states as overwhelming, thing-like forces — blind, tireless, essentially uncontrollable. The will is what inner experience feels like when it cannot be regulated by social feedback, when drives are intense and poorly integrated with cognition.

His pessimism is the systematization of chronic alienation. He did not arrive at the conclusion that "all life is suffering" through argument; he arrived at argument through the experience of suffering — the baseline state of a mind with sensory filtering deficits, social impairment, and co-occurring depression.

His aesthetic theory is autistic absorption elevated to metaphysics. The "pure, will-less subject of cognition" is what an autistic person becomes when engaged in a special interest — self-forgetting, absorbed, at peace.

His ethics of denial is the autistic solution to autistic problems: if the will is torment, if social life exhausts, if desire disappoints — then stop willing, withdraw, be still.

None of this reduces Schopenhauer's philosophy to symptoms. On the contrary: it explains why his philosophy has the particular shape, force, and originality that it has. Autistic cognition is not a defect in Schopenhauer; it is the condition of possibility for his distinctive contribution. He noticed what neurotypical thinkers pass over — the primacy of will, the unreality of individuation, the escape offered by aesthetic absorption, the possibility of simply stopping — because his cognition was organized differently.

The "pessimism" that his contemporaries found repellent and that posterity has found excessive is, read through the autism lens, something else: the honest phenomenology of a mind that experienced the world as more painful and less accommodating than most minds do, and refused to lie about it.

Coda: The Schopenhauer-Wittgenstein Connection in Light of Autism

The convergence of these two philosophers — so different in style, so similar in cognitive architecture — suggests that autism is not merely a biographical footnote but a genuine category for intellectual history. When two of the most original philosophers of the modern era independently construct philosophies organized around their own cognitive difficulties, and when those difficulties map onto the same diagnostic profile, we are not dealing with coincidence.

Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein both:

Experienced social life as fundamentally difficult and constructed philosophies that either valorized solitude (Schopenhauer) or treated communication as a central philosophical problem (Wittgenstein)
Had intense, non-social relationships with music
Maintained rigid routines that enabled their work
Published little during their lifetimes and revised obsessively
Developed philosophies organized around a single insight
Constructed systems (or anti-systems) that reflected their cognitive style at the formal level
Ended their major works with gestures toward silence or mystical inexpressibility

Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation and Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus are, in their different ways, autistic books — books that could only have been written by minds organized as these minds were organized. The same can be said, with appropriate modifications, of the Philosophical Investigations and the later supplements to The World as Will and Representation. The trajectory from system to supplement, from doctrine to therapy, from the sayable to the inexpressible — this is the arc of autistic philosophy, from Schopenhauer to Wittgenstein and beyond.