At no point were cats domesticated by humans. One particular type of cat—Felis silvestris, a sturdy little tabby—has spread world-wide by learning to live with humans. House cats today are offshoots of a particular branch of this species, Felis silvestris lybica, which began to cohabit with humans some 12,000 years ago in parts of the Near East that now form part of Turkey, Iraq and Israel. By invading villages in these areas, these cats were able to turn the human move to a more sedentary life to their advantage. Preying on rodents and other animals attracted by stored seeds and grains and snatching waste meat left behind after slaughtered animals had been eaten, they turned human settlements into reliable food sources.
I never
aim to evangelize or even persuade the reader. I don’t care whether they are
persuaded. The point of the books is to trigger a process of thought in the
reader, and that can go wherever it goes. I’m very pleased if that happens. I
don’t belong to any religion either, but many of my readers do. If they become
better Christians, better Jews, better Muslims, better Taoists, better Buddhists,
that’s their business. I’m pleased about it, but it’s not the goal of what I
do. The goal of what I do is just to present my findings and my thoughts, and
people can make of it what they want.
EAB : You promoted in your book The Silence of Animals, which seems to be a precursor to this new book, a notion of so-called “godless mysticism.” Could you explain what that term means for you?
JG : That’s a good question. I mean, there’s a tradition of godless mysticism, which I sort of disinter from elements in Christianity, Buddhism, and from European atheists. I mean, there are atheist mystics. One important person I mentioned in the book is Fritz Mauthner, who perhaps survived in the history of philosophy only because of a dismissive reference made by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But a very interesting thing is Mauthner was a tremendous influence, stylistic and otherwise, on writers like Samuel Beckett.
But Mauthner had almost no influence in philosophy, although he was widely read during his lifetime. And Mauthner was a goddless mystic. He actually invented the phrase in German. And a godless mystic was someone who believed that words and modes and concepts, although useful and unavoidable instruments, indeed, could be systematically misleading in that some aspects of the world are in the strict sense ineffable.
Now, I suppose the reason why we call that mysticism is that some of the great mystics, even Christian mystics, like Meister Eckhart, from German Medieval times, said the same thing about God. He said something like, “I pray to God to rid me of the idea of God.” A nice paradox.
So godless mysticism is really a theory about the limits of language, but as a practice, I suppose, it means not putting too much store in general concepts. First of all, I mean, for Eckhart, being a practicing Christian, contemplative of it, it was putting much too much store on the idea of God. For people who aren’t practicing their religion, it might mean not putting too much store in ideas, big ideas of freedom or progress, or that kind of thing. So, it’s linked with the rest of my writing, if you like.
EAB : You were close with Isaiah Berlin, right?
JG : Never a student of his, but for 25 years, up until his death in 1997, I became friendly with him and he with me, and I would often see him. I wouldn’t take academic work with me to him, but I would see him for long conversations, several times a year. A conversation with us might last an entire afternoon.
EAB : Would you say he was an influence on you?
JB : Big influence. Maybe the biggest of the people who I knew personally. There have been writers like Montaigne who have been influential for me, for example, but obviously I didn’t know him. The big influence, regarding Berlin, is I liked his pluralistic way of thinking about ethics, which is thinking of ethics not in terms of a single good, but instead of conflicting goods and conflicting evils that were essentially different, and not reducible to any one thing. And often conflicted, so one had to make choices, sometimes without any clear criteria for making them.
And he represented that current of thought, if you like, that tradition. Which he identified, particularly, with the Russian radical writer, Alexander Herzen. Here’s a story. On the very last occasion I sat with him, not long before he died… I wish I’d seen him once or twice after that before he died, but I was traveling abroad so I couldn’t… But he was already pretty ill, so I asked him a question. I said, “Is there one single writer or thinker that you could name, of all of the philosophers, all of the thinkers and writers you’ve read, who influenced you the most, who would that be?”
And without a single second of hesitation, he said, “Alexander Herzen.” And I knew exactly why, because I’ve read Herzen’s memoirs. But I said, “Well, why is that?” He replied, “Because he had a dramatic amount of tremendous passions.”
Isaiah loved freedom and justice. Herzen had a tragic life, in many ways, but he never stopped loving life and he never stopped fighting for his goals, even though he knew they conflicted with each other and with certain deep-seated features of human behavior. But he was a man who spent his whole life fighting for freedom, and yet he thought that freedom for human beings was an anomaly, almost unnatural.
So, Berlin sort of loved that concept, and I love that. And for Berlin, it was not John Stuart Mill, David Hume, not Spinoza, none of these thinkers. It was Herzen.
EAB : And one writer that I know that you admire is Joseph Conrad, who died in 1924. And yet you once stated that he’s a great 21st century writer. What did you mean by that?
JG : Well, he catches a lot of the themes of our time, our doubts about progress. The people who are the most adamant, the most insistent that there is progress, are the ones that are most consumed by these doubts. If you don’t believe in it, as I don’t, and never did actually, you don’t get terribly worked up about it. But the people who take criticism of progress as heresy, they take it as almost a personal attack on them, but they’re obviously consumed by the notion of progress. And so were the Edwardians.
We tend to forget that, in the Edwardian times, there were writers like H.G. Wells, who was a great progressive, but much of his science fiction, The Island of Dr. Moreau, for example, explores the horror that could be created in the world by the misuse of science. And he, himself, died in despair. Of course, he was ill, for a very long time.
Lots of Edwardian writers were very pessimistic. A lot of writers were influenced by the darker side of [Friedrich] Nietzsche or [Arthur] Schopenhauer. The Edwardian period was one of doubt about progress, which turned out to be very well founded doubt because what happened then was the first World War, a cataclysmic event.
One of Conrad’s great novels, Heart of Darkness, is an attack on imperialism. He captures the sense, which everybody has now, whether or not they admit it, that civilization is skating on thin ice. And that’s all in Conrad.
EAB : What drives you to write the way you have for the past several years? One of the things that interests me about your work since Straw Dogs, which came out in 2002, is how free-roaming your books can be. Shifting from philosophy to literature to politics, and so forth.
JG : I began to feel that what I wanted to write in a way about philosophical questions that were not in the mode of academic fluency. And Berlin was a bit similar, I mean, he used to say he gave up philosophy because it was too hard. I never quite believed that. There’s a story, which he used to tell—which I’m sure it’s true, by the way—whether he said he was flying over the Atlantic during the second world war and wondering what to do when the war ended, and whether he should go back to philosophy and so on. I forget who it was now who said it, but a friend of his, American philosopher, said, “Well, you know, it’s going to be logic after the war. That’s what philosophy is going to be all about. It’s going to be about logic.” And Berlin said, “I’m not good enough at that. I’m not going to do it.” I don’t think that was the reason.
My speculation is that he wanted to do philosophy in the set in which these rather unruly Russians like Alexander Herzen had done it. He wanted to do philosophy in a less formal way, as really being about the kind of thing that philosophers would just laugh about if you told them that, or that philosophy’s about the meaning of human life, or that it was trying to create a weapon that individuals could arm themselves with against the madness of the world, the absurdity of the world. And so, they would just laugh at that. They want to get some solid results.
But philosophy, as Bertrand Russell used to say, “It doesn’t really make progress.” It’s more like art in that respect. There’s good art and bad art, but art doesn’t progress the way science progresses. Science does progress. I’m not a postmodernist. I don’t think science is a collection of stories. I think it does progress. We know more than we did ten years or a hundred years ago about many things. And that’s why there are more human beings on the planet, having transformed the planet by the use of science, not always in a good way, but that’s how it happened.
So, I guess, without comparing myself with Berlin or any of these other people, I felt I wanted to address questions which were really questions of philosophy, but from an angle that included literature, poetry, and so on. And I thought I’d be better off writing like that, even though in my last academic position I could write what I wanted and I didn’t have any other duties. I felt I could do that best if I was freelance. And so, in 2007, that’s what I became.
EAB : What would you say is the most misunderstood topic or running concept of your last several books has been by critics?
JG : That’s a damn good question. Let me see. I guess with Feline Philosophy—and mind you it’s only one or two people who’ve kind of suggested this—that I’m sort of arguing humans should become cat-like. And it’s as if I’d written they should start eating cat food or purr instead of speaking or something like that. That’s very silly. I guess a certain kind of literalism is something I fight against all the time because there’s a certain kind of fundamentalism, whether in religion or politics or anywhere else, which takes things in a very literal way.
Here’s the best example I can think of more generally apart from my present book. When people say, “You don’t believe in progress, but wasn’t the abolition of torture progress?” I say, “Yes, if done away with, very good.” They then say, “Well, there’s progress.” But, again, progress doesn’t mean a particular advance. It’s only progress if it continues and even improves.
Now the trouble with the abolition of torture, which was a great advance started by the Enlightenment, which I give the movement credit for, even though I’m a great critic of the Enlightenment. But the trouble is that the advancement was severely disrupted. Take the twentieth century. Torture didn’t simply creep back. It reemerged as one of the bases of political power in Russian Leninism and Nazi Germany. So, its “abolition” didn’t last all that long. And of course, it’s back now in China, and look at the actions of the U.S. in Iraq, at its various activities at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
EAB : What do you make of the charge that you have been inconsistent in your ideas?
JG : I don’t have a kind of project—political or universal. How my books are written, and this isn’t very fashionable, is they’re for individual readers. And they’re different, these readers. They have different lives. But I don’t think I’m inconsistent. In fact, the people who don’t say I’m inconsistent say I’m terribly, boringly consistent; that’s what they say.
EAB : Bringing it back to Feline Philosophy. Why center your bigger-picture ideas around the nature of cats, and what do you want to be the main takeaway from the book?
JG : My non-philosophical reasons are that I lived with cats for 30 years. The last one passed away just before the end of last year, at the ripe and happy old age of 23 years old, which is a great age for a cat. And he was very happy. He had to be euthanized, but it was very peaceful. Cats, more than any other domesticated creatures who live in close proximity to humans, enable the humans they live with to look outside of the human world into something else. Cats aren’t human, or part human, the way dogs, or maybe even horses, have become to our wishes. Cats remain themselves, but that’s precisely why those of us who love cats, love cats. It’s not the anthropocentric projection of our own personalities on cats. It’s that they’re quite different from what any human being is, or even could be. And so, they give us a kind of window. I find that very fascinating.
What would be the takeaway from the book? It would be: you could be a little bit happier if you don’t pursue your happiness in the way that humans do, but just live the life you find most interesting and revert to nature when you have troubles. You’ll find you recover from those troubles. It’s a bit like Zen. In Zen, there’s an idea of the natural mind. If you talk to real Zen masters, they say everything you need is in your natural mind. It’s all there. You don’t have to go somewhere else for it. You don’t have to strive for some fantastic state of enlightenment, different from anything you’ve ever experienced before. If you do that, you’ll never find it. You’ll waste your life, actually. And I think there’s a danger in modern culture of people wasting their lives searching for what they think will make them happy, because if they found it, it might not even make them happy.
John Gray: Cats Can Teach Us about the Meaning of Life. By Eric Been. JStor, December 6, 2020
While
Feline Philosophy returns to questions that will be familiar to readers of your
work, it seems different in some ways from anything else you have published.
How did you come to write this book?
November 10, 2020.
What’s
it like to be a cat? John Gray has spent a lifetime half-wondering. The
philosopher – to his many fans the intellectual cat’s pyjamas, to his critics
the least palatable of furballs – has had feline companions at home since he
was a boy in South Shields. In adult life – he now lives in Bath with his wife
Mieko, a dealer in Japanese antiquities – this has principally been two pairs
of cats: “Two Burmese sisters, Sophie and Sarah, and two Birman brothers, Jamie
and Julian.” The last of them, Julian, died earlier this year, aged 23. Gray,
currently catless, is by no means a sentimental writer, but his new book,
Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life, is written in memory of their
shared wisdom.
In these three-tiered times our original plan for this interview was to meet and sit outside a cafe in Bath – Gray, 72, is wary of inside – but the forecast suggested we’d have got soaked, so we have retreated, catlike, indoors, and to Zoom. In some ways, I suggest, Gray’s is the perfect book for the estranging oddness of the pandemic. How has he coped?
“I’ve tried to emulate what I recall of my wonderful cat Julian,” he says. “Which is, not to live in an imagined future. We simply don’t know how this is going to develop. And of course, the political response in most places, and certainly here, has been shambolic. But that inability to come up with a clear response reflects, I think, something deep: that even the most well-developed systems of knowledge always leave an enormous amount of uncertainty.”
Alarm bells must have gone off for Gray when Dominic Cummings started promoting the powers of “super-forecasting”, while the government appeared unable to predict what was likely to happen the following day?
“Yes, they did. I think “super-forecasting” is possible only in a very few limited fields. Hardly anyone has forecasted the biggest events in my lifetime. And, more importantly, most of the really big events were not considered even to be within the range of reasonable possibilities. I remember back in the early 2000s, asking various economists and bigwigs if there could be a global banking crisis and the idea was universally dismissed. Only one even said: ‘I don’t think so, but you never know.’”
If we are hopeless at imagining the future, we are, I suggest, brilliant at recasting the suddenly weird present to make it seem normal?
“That has happened, although I think it’s partly on the assumption that many people still have that there will be a ‘normal’ to go back to. I don’t think that’s at all plausible. I think some of the changes that have occurred in the course of this six months might usually take six years or 60 years. Some of these may prove benign in a rich country, which Britain still is, but not so much for the more marginal populations in Brazil or India, say.”
Take HS2, Gray suggests. “Always a mistake for cost and environmental reasons, but now it’s surreal, because huge numbers are never going to travel for work again, not in the way that they did. There is kind of a lag built into politics – in which adapting to a radically changed circumstance is easier to do in practice for individuals than for governments.” Cats, he says, returning to our theme, don’t have stories to which they get deeply attached. “Of course, you may say that’s because they haven’t got the intellectual capacity, but I think it’s just as likely they’re not interested.”
That lack of interest in holding on to particular stories has led Gray over the years to some curious places politically. He grew up in a strong old Labour house on Tyneside, where his father worked on the docks as a carpenter and his mother kept the home. Witnessing that close community being broken up in the 1960s – Victorian streets bulldozed, and residents moved into brutal “utopian” housing schemes built under the criminal Labour council leader T Dan Smith – gave Gray a lasting distrust of all grandiose projects selling the idea of progress.
He has formed the belief since then that “politics is a succession of temporary and partial remedies for permanent and recurring human evil”. His two central intellectual friendships were with the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin, whose family had fled Soviet Russia, and with the novelist JG Ballard, who spent his childhood in a Japanese prison facility. Both helped to convince Gray that any political movement that believed it possessed a monopoly of wisdom, had gulags or concentration camps priced in. (In his most famous provocation, aping Jonathan Swift, Gray wrote a satirical “modest proposal” that called for the urgent reintroduction of torture to protect human rights in western democracies; Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition quickly followed.)
Gray has consistently voted flexibly, for what he sees as the lesser of two political evils at any political moment. “Had I been around, I would have strongly supported the Attlee government in 1945,” he says, but by the 1970s, he believed that postwar Labour settlement had become unwieldy and corrupt. Setting himself against most of the university academy, he supported Thatcher as a necessary corrective in British political history. “But then it turned into another ‘universal project’, certainly by 1989. And I would say I started jumping off in about 1987.” He was in favour of New Labour for a while, before abandoning the idea of that project for the same reasons.
In the last election he voted Conservative, persuaded in part, he says, by that need to get Brexit done, and laughing now at the delusional hypocrisy of “democrats”, who wanted a second referendum “without the option that people had voted for the first time even on the paper!” That was never going to end well, in his eyes – and neither too was the European Union itself, with its grand schemes and projects.
“I was interviewed in the early 90s, by a Polish newspaper,” Gray says. “They asked, ‘What do you think will come after the new [Thatcherite] right that had emerged after the fall of communism in eastern Europe?’ And I said, ‘Probably the old right’. The idea of a Europe-wide economic space was from day one a very capitalist project. And given that communism had imploded, where was the backlash against the European Union going to come from? It would have to come from the right – and that is what has happened.”
Gray predicted the election victory of Trump in 2016 for something like the same reasons – “the feeling of abandonment, and disrespect in large parts of the working population” had to go somewhere – and suggests that even in the event of a Biden victory next month, those forces will not be silenced. Human beings, particularly in extremis, should never be expected to make rational choices. “As Bertrand Russell pointed out, the first world war, when it started, was welcomed largely as an interruption of boredom.”
Cats don’t appear to get bored, because in Gray’s terms it would never occur to them to struggle to be happy. Humans, on the other hand, “are self-divided creatures whose lives are mostly spent on displacement activity”. Much of this displacement activity is a product of that other disabling difference to their feline companions, the certain knowledge of death. Gray is, typically, both irreligious and anti-atheist, reserving genial contempt for the likes of Richard Dawkins, and their censorious belief “that religion can be simply erased”.
Gray believes that our innate need to explain mortality and suffering with imagination and myth is far too fundamental. “I don’t have an idea of God or anything but I find the idea that you could wipe the slate clean of that impulse to be ridiculous. I once met in America a Christian fundamentalist, who told me in all seriousness that if young people were brought up in a completely chaste environment, they wouldn’t experience sexual urges until they got married.” He laughs loudly. “That’s exactly what Dawkins thinks about religion. Myth-making has been a part of every single human culture in history, why would we imagine that it is disappearing from our own?”
Gray writes with great amusement in this book and elsewhere of the stubborn gap between philosophers’ higher ideals and the more animal instincts of their lives, but he genially resists any autobiographical reading of his own life or thinking. He has a few catch-all defences to more personal questions – “I tend to think my life is not that interesting,” and so on. (To which one’s cynical instinct is to think: “The philosopher does not reflect much on his own life? Yeah, right.”) I ask him at one point if he thinks that being childless has had any bearing on his thinking, but he shuts down that line of inquiry, with his only vaguely curt reply in two hours of wide-ranging cat chat: “I tend not to talk about that aspect of my life.”
I wonder if he chose to live in Bath for the same reasons he suggests Schopenhauer chose to live in Frankfurt for the last decades of his life: “no floods, better cafes and good dentists”?
He laughs. “Well the dentists seem pretty good.” He came to Bath after leaving academic life – having been a professor of politics at Oxford, he was for a decade professor of European thought at the London School of Economics – to become “a freelance writer”. “I was looking for a walking city,” he says. “And I like the fact here that if you look up you can see trees.” The liberation from academia has given him more liberty, he suggests, to write exactly as he pleases, cat-like.
“If you’re an academic, before you say anything at all, you have to give about 20 caveats,” he says. “And when I was a professional academic, I used to do that. But now I take a different view. I just say I’m just putting this out for you to consider. Don’t throw it away – or if you do at least give it to Oxfam.”
And what does he say to those critics who argue that his writing dwells on the reductive, brutish side of humanity, as opposed to its great collective achievements?
“If you think, as I do, that civilised life is like a spider’s web, easy to destroy, but hard to construct, then what I write is perhaps a caution, a warning. I’m anti-hubris.”
In the last sentence of Straw Dogs, Gray asked a question, almost plaintively: “Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?” Has writing the current book helped him to understand what such a life of experience might look like?
“Cats live for the sensation of life, not for something they might achieve or not achieve,” he says. “If we attach ourselves too heavily to some overarching purpose we’re losing the joy of life. Leave all those ideologies and religions to one side and what’s left? What’s left is a sensation of life – which is a wonderful thing.”
John
Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future. By Tim Adams. The Guardian, October 25, 2020.
Anti-directionalism is a multifaceted view. One form it takes is scepticism about historical progress. The idea that history has a direction, and that one can be on the right or wrong side of it, is a conceit shared by those on the political left and right. Inspiration for the left was provided by Hegel, who thought history came to an end when he added the full stop to the final sentence of his book, The Phenomenology of Spirit: “History is the process whereby the spirit discovers itself and its own concept.” This is what Hegel, modestly, thought he had achieved. Marx and his followers took up this idea, recasting it in materialist form, and understanding the end of history as the emergence of a perfect – ie communist – society. On the right, Francis Fukuyama adopted a similar approach, except he took the most perfect form of society to be modern liberal democracy. History, it must be said, has not been kind to these declarations of its demise.
Another form anti-directionalism takes is the denial that nature, rather than culture, has a direction. In some ways, this seems an unnecessary denial – Darwin already divested us of the right to believe that nature has a direction. Nevertheless, we still can’t quite seem to shake the idea. At one time, people believed in something called the “great chain of being”. The universe was ordered into levels of being: God at the top, then the angels, then humans, then the animals, and so on. Below the angels but above the animals: that is our place. The theory of evolution should have shattered this chain. But, strangely, it didn’t. Darwin’s discovery was, in the minds of many, superimposed on the great chain of being. Evolution was conflated with progress: a process slowly producing in more-and-more perfect life forms, with us, of course, at the top of the evolutionary tree.
John Gray’s engaging new book, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life, can be understood as exploring the consequences of anti-directionalism about nature. His chosen guide is Felis catus – the domestic cat. It’s a good example of writing what you know: Gray has lived with cats for nearly 30 years.
Directionalism about nature sees humans as the zenith of the natural world because of what we view as the “higher faculties” that separate us from the rest of the natural world. Common candidates include our intelligence, morality and sense of our own mortality. However, as the environmental philosopher Paul Taylor once argued, a judgement that one faculty is higher or lower than another is impossible to justify. Cats are much faster than we are. But we are, allegedly, more intelligent. A common directionalist assumption is that humans are “better” than cats because intelligence is superior to speed. But there is no such thing as “better” in an unqualified sense – there is only better in a given respect, or better for a certain purpose. In the world we live in today, some baseline level of intelligence is generally more useful to us than blinding speed. But speed is much more useful to the average cat, especially to the feral street cat whose life depends on it.
Nevertheless, the notion that there are distinctively human characteristics that somehow elevate us above all other animals is a pervasive and tenacious one. In Feline Philosophy, Gray attacks this idea with originality and dexterity, through the medium of the cat. In his hands, the cat throws into sharp relief the failings of human “higher” faculties. He brings to life what he sees as the essential nature, or soul, of the cat, through an examination of the lives of individual cats – fictional, historical and mythological. Fundamentally, for Gray, cats are echoes of our prelapsarian selves. The consequence of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge is that Adam and Eve realise, for the first time, that they are naked. They become self-aware. An elevating characteristic, one might suppose. Not so, argues Gray: “Thinking of yourself is the gift of the serpent that cannot be returned.”
The ability to think about ourselves generates an alienation from the world to which only humans are susceptible. This alienation goes by various names. Heidegger described it as unheimlich – eerie. Sartre talked of angoisse – anguish, a realisation that we are not a part of the world in the way other things are. A cat can never really be alienated from its world in this way. It can be torn out of its world, and deposited in a new, utterly unfamiliar, environment. This happened to Mèo, a cat rescued as a kitten from the horrors of war-torn Vietnam, whose life was detailed in John Laurence’s book The Cat from Hué. Mèo subsequently lived a well-travelled life, first residing in the press compound in Danang, before moving on to a hotel room in Saigon, to Laurence’s mother’s house in Connecticut, then an apartment in Manhattan, and finally London. But even this extreme form of displacement falls short of the existential alienation imparted by the “gift of the serpent”. “Throughout the smoke and wind of history,” Gray writes, “Mèo lived his fierce, joyous life. Torn from his home by human madness, he flourished wherever he found himself.”
Fierce is an apt adjective for Mèo, who brought a certain violent gusto to his life, involving frequent attacks on unfamiliar adults, and occasional attacks on more familiar ones – Laurence’s housekeeper, for example – if their behaviour transgressed acceptable boundaries (such as using the vacuum cleaner). There is a type of flourishing available to a cat that is only rarely available to us. A human is never simply what she is, but is always striving to become something she is, as yet, not. This is the result of a self-image – a conception of herself and what her life should be – which, when unrealised, can occasion frustration and despair. Unburdened by such a self-conception, a cat is existentially complete in a way that we can never be and, therefore, can live in a way that is beyond humans.
Much of human artistic and intellectual endeavour has, Gray argues, been an attempt to cope with the existential incompleteness engendered by self-awareness. This striving is reflected in the development of philosophy and our conception of morality, mortality and the meaning of life, among other things.
Philosophy, Gray argues, was born in anguish and desire. According to Pyrrho, the ancient sceptic, the aim of all philosophy is ataraxia, or tranquillity – a goal shared by two other major schools of philosophy in the ancient world: Stoicism and Epicureanism. What does it say about the creature that invented philosophy that ataraxia would be its foremost concern? We might, echoing Wittgenstein, ask: what kind of creature has need of philosophy? The answer is a creature who is eerily estranged from its worldly home – a creature very much unlike a cat. Gray cites Hodge, the feline companion of Samuel Johnson. We can clearly see, Gray argues, Hodge’s whiskers peeking out from the pages of Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. Bored and discontented, Rasselas leaves the happy valley, but fails to find contentment elsewhere. In the end, he returns to the happy valley, but it can never be the same place again. This book is about the inability of thought – intelligence – to cure our human restlessness, occasioned by self-awareness. “Hodge,” Gray argues, “gave Johnson respite from thought, and so from being human.” A cat has no need of philosophy and is all the better for it.
The search for happiness has a similar genesis and trajectory. How can we, given our essential alienation, be happy? Epicureanism (what Gray calls “a neurasthenic vision of happiness”) tells us we can be so by curbing our desires, whittling them down to a bare minimum. If you have fewer wants, then you will be less disappointed. Stoicism (a “funereal celebration of endurance and resignation”) advises us to extinguish our desires, perhaps by identifying a rational order in the universe in which one is merely allotted a part to play. Buddhism advocates a similar path: longing is the source of all human misery, and letting go is the cure.
Another strategy, advocated by Montaigne, is distraction. Talking about the grief occasioned by the death of his friend, Montaigne writes: “I needed a mind-departing distraction to divert it; so by art and effort I made myself fall in love, helped in that by my youth.” Gray regards the need for diversion as an essential human trait: “Diversion is a response to the defining feature of the human animal: the fear of death that comes with self-awareness… much of our lives are spent running from our own shadow.”
The root cause of all these strategies – delimitation, denial and distraction – is the same: we can think about ourselves, and therefore are not fully in the world in the way other creatures are. As a result of self-awareness, we are constantly searching for a happiness we can never achieve. It begets morality: instead of simply doing, we worry about what it is we should do. And instead of simply living, we worry about what life means. Self-awareness may seem like a higher faculty but in many ways, Gray argues, it is pernicious. Cats offer the feline contours of a possible life that is alien to us.
I do wonder, however, whether the idea of self-awareness is really at the heart of the issues with which Gray grapples and, if it is, whether it is not a symptom of something deeper. I am pretty sure that Gray’s cats are self-aware. I’m almost as sure that Gray believes they are self-aware, too. A form of self-awareness goes hand in hand with having any conscious experience.
What Gray seems to have in mind is the ability to think thoughts about oneself, which is one of the more complex forms self-awareness can take. It is here that Gray’s choice of cats – as companions and also as the foil for his argument – is especially interesting. Compared with other mammals, and many birds, cats are asocial. A reasonable case can be made that the more advanced forms of self-awareness – such as the ability to think of oneself – are essentially social phenomena. They arise, most completely, in social groups. If so, perhaps it is the distinction between the social and the solitary animal that is really at the core of Gray’s arguments? This is an observation, not a criticism. But it does make one wonder how Gray’s arguments might have differed had his choice of companion animal been a more social creature. I wonder, too, how much of the exceptional work Gray has produced in the preceding decades has been entangled with his choice of animal companion. Rereading Gray in this light, we might find not only an engaging subversion of contemporary mores and unquestioned sacred cows, but also a portal into another world and another way of being, alien to us yet comprehensible to those with sufficient familiarity – 30 years of familiarity in Gray’s case – with its denizens.
Feline Philosophy is engaging, amusing, perceptive and untimely, in the most admirable Nietzschean sense. This is a history of human thought and civilisation as it might have been written by a feline philosopher – if cats had ever discovered a need for philosophy.
What the cat knows. By Mark Rowlands. New Statesman, November 18, 2020
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