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cats are arch-realists. Faced with human folly, they simply walk away.
Cats have no need of philosophy. Obeying their nature, they are content with the life it gives them. In humans, on the other hand, discontent with their nature seems to be natural. With predictably tragic and farcical results, the human animal never ceases striving to be something that it is not. Cats make no such effort. Much of human life is a struggle for happiness. Among cats, on the other hand, happiness is the state to which they default when practical threats to their well-being are removed. That may be the chief reason many of us love cats. They possess as their birthright a felicity
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Schopenhauer used his pets to support his theory that selfhood is an illusion. Humans cannot help thinking of cats as separate individuals like themselves; but this is an error, he believed, since both are instances of a Platonic form, an archetype that recurs in many different instances. Ultimately each of these seeming individuals is an ephemeral embodiment of something more fundamental – the undying will to live, which, according to Schopenhauer, is the only thing that really exists.
When turned in on itself, consciousness stands in the way of a good life. Self-consciousness has divided the human mind in an unceasing attempt to force painful experiences into a part that is sealed off from awareness. Suppressed pain festers in questions about the meaning of life. In contrast, the feline mind is one and undivided. Pain is suffered and forgotten, and the joy of life returns. Cats do not need to examine their lives, because they do not doubt that life is worth living. Human self-consciousness has produced the perpetual unrest that philosophy has vainly tried to cure.
Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), who wrote: ‘When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?’6
he belongs in a tradition of thinkers who were open to faith because they doubted reason.
Montaigne was influenced by its most radical strand, Pyrrhonism, named after Pyrrho of Elis (c.360–c.270 BC), who travelled with the army of Alexander the Great to India, where he is reputed to have studied with the gymnosophists (‘naked sages’) or yogis. It may have been from these sages that Pyrrho imported the idea that the aim of philosophy was ataraxia, a term signifying a state of tranquillity, which he may have been the first to use. Suspending belief and disbelief, the sceptical philosopher could be safe from inner disturbance.
Small doses of such a homoeopathic remedy against philosophy – an anti-philosophy, one might say – might bring us closer to other animals. Then we might be able to learn something from creatures that philosophers have dismissed as our inferiors. An anti-philosophy of this kind would begin not with arguments, but with a story.
Much of human life is a succession of tics.
Careers and love affairs, travels and shifting philosophies are twitches in minds that cannot settle down.
Fortunately there are other ways of thinking about the good life. In ancient Greece and China there were ethical traditions that made no reference to what is nowadays called morality. For the Greeks, the good life was living according to dike – your nature and its place in the scheme of things. For the Chinese, it meant living according to tao – the way of the universe, as manifest in your own nature. There are many differences between these ancient kinds of ethics. But it is what they have in common that is most useful to us today. These ways of thinking do not feature ‘morality’, because
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Aristotle believed everything in the universe has a telos or purpose, which is to realize its nature as the kind of thing it is. A good life was one in which this was achieved.
For Taoists, in contrast, the self-regarding consciousness of human beings is the chief obstacle to a good life.
All Spinoza’s ethics requires is the idea that living things assert themselves as the particular organisms they are.
A Spinozist-Taoist ethic is quite different. Humans are like other animals. A good life is not shaped by their feelings. Their feelings are shaped by how well they have realized their nature.
In Spinoza and Taoism, power means being able to be what you are. The languorous sloth asserts its power as it slumbers through its days as much as the tiger at the kill. Exercising power, in this sense, does not imply dominating others. But if ethics consists in the affirmation of your individual nature, you may find yourself outside of morality as understood by monotheists and humanists. As
Neither Spinoza nor Taoism thinks about the good life as living for others. At the same time they link self-realization with a kind of egolessness. As pointed out by Paul Wienpahl, an American philosopher and scholar of Spinoza who was also a long-standing practitioner of Zen meditation, the seventeenth-century French philosopher and sceptic Pierre Bayle identified this affinity between Spinozism and Zen Buddhism.
An ethics in which you realize your individual nature differs from any idea of self-creation. The self with which humans identify is a construction of society and memory. Forming an image of themselves in infancy and childhood, they seek happiness by preserving and strengthening that self-image. But the image they have of themselves is not the reality of their bodies or their lives, and chasing after it can lead not to fulfilment but to self-frustration.
In their lack of a deceptive self-image, cats are exemplary.
Feline ethics is a kind of selfless egoism. Cats are egoists in that they care only for themselves and others they love. They are selfless in that they have no image of themselves they seek to preserve and augment. Cats live not by being selfish but by selflessly being themselves.
A good life for any living thing depends on what it needs to fulfil its nature. The good life is relative to this nature, not to opinion or convention. As Pascal observed, human beings are unusual in having a second nature formed by custom, along with the nature they have when they are born.
But what is"human nature "?
Judging by the single-minded way in which cats conduct themselves, the feline condition of selflessness has something in common with the Zen state of ‘no-mind’. One who achieves ‘no-mind’ is not mindless. ‘No-mind’ means attention without distractions25 – in other words, being fully absorbed in what you are doing.
We pass through our lives fragmented and disconnected, appearing and reappearing like ghosts, while cats that have no self are always themselves.
Among human beings love and hate are often mixed. We may love others deeply, and at the same time resent them. The love we feel for other human beings may become hateful to us, and be felt as a burden, a fetter on our freedom, while the love they feel for us can seem false and untrustworthy. If, despite these suspicions, we go on loving them, we may come to hate ourselves. The love animals may feel for us and we for them is not warped in these ways.
To be human is finally to be a loser, for we are all fated to lose our carefully constructed sense of self, our physical strength, our health, our precious dignity and finally our lives.44
There is no one more logical than the lunatic, more concerned with the minutiae of cause and effect. Madmen are the greatest reasoners we know, and that trait is one of the accompaniments of their undoing.
Wittgenstein wrote: If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.15
But if the nature human beings believe they have is composed of habits that can crumble away in weeks, what is there in human beings that is truly their own?
The good life is not the life you want but one in which you are fulfilled.
Do not become attached to your suffering, and avoid those who do.
Cats show us that seeking after meaning is like the quest for happiness, a distraction. The meaning of life is a touch, a scent, which comes by chance and is gone before you know it.
