More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Seldom doing anything unless it serves a definite purpose or produces immediate enjoyment, cats are arch-realists. Faced with human folly, they simply walk away.
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 humans regularly fail to attain.
The source of philosophy is anxiety, and cats do not suffer from anxiety unless they are threatened or find themselves in a strange place. For humans, the world itself is a threatening and strange place.
Simple-minded folk will say the reason cats do not practise philosophy is that they lack the capacity for abstract thought.
Thinking in generalities slides easily into a superstitious faith in language. Much of the history of philosophy consists of the worship of linguistic fictions.
Descartes believed his experiments proved non-human animals were insensate machines: what they actually showed is that humans can be more unthinking than any other animal.
Conscious awareness can spring up in many living things. If one strand in natural selection led to humans, another led to the octopus. There was nothing preordained in either case. Evolution is not moving towards increasingly self-aware forms of life. Appearing by chance, consciousness comes and goes in the organisms that possess it.3 Twenty-first-century transhumanists think of evolution as leading to a fully self-aware cosmic mind. Such views have precedents in nineteenth-century theosophy, occultism and spiritualism.4 None of them has any basis in Darwin’s theory. The self-awareness of
...more
A better understanding of cats, and of the limits of philosophy, was shown by 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?’
Montaigne is often described as one of the founders of modern humanism – a current of thought that aims to leave any idea of God behind. In fact he was as sceptical of humankind as he was about God. ‘Man is the most blighted and frail of all creatures,’ he wrote ‘and, moreover, the most given to pride.’
The causal principle of scepticism we say is the hope of becoming tranquil. Men of talent, troubled by the anomaly in things and puzzled as to which of them they should rather assent to, came to investigate what in things is true and what false, thinking that by deciding these issues they would become tranquil.
As Montaigne put it, ‘There is a plague on Man: his opinion that he knows something.’
The end of philosophizing was peace. Montaigne had no such hopes: ‘All the philosophers of all the sects are in general accord over one thing: that the sovereign good consists in peace of mind and body. But where are we to find it?… For our portion we have been allotted wind and smoke.’
Montaigne did not believe any philosophizing could cure human disquiet. Philosophy was useful chiefly in curing people of philosophy.
he risked his life with the casual abandon of those who think they’re invincible … He was never nervous and never wasted energy. His moves were fluid, unfathomable.’
He remembered Mèo, alone in the night, wandering through the far end of the apartment, making a cry that was unlike any other sound he made, unlike a sound I had heard any animal make. It seemed to be the call of an animal taken out of the wild, or out of its home, or away from its family. It was more of a wail, a long powerful howl, not a scream or a meow or an ordinary cat cry, but a call from the deepest part of his soul, the wail of the forest. The only time Mèo cried like that was when the home was quiet, usually when everyone was asleep, when he thought he was alone. It was a call for no
...more
Cats initiated this process of domestication, and on their own terms. Unlike other species that foraged in early human settlements, they have continued to live in close quarters with humans ever since without their wild nature changing greatly. The genome of house cats differs in only a small number of ways from that of its wild kin.
Even as they rely on us, they remain independent of us. If they show affection for us, it is not just cupboard love. If they do not enjoy our company, they leave. If they stay, it is because they want to be with us. This too is a reason why many of us cherish them.
Whereas cats live by following their nature, humans live by suppressing theirs. That, paradoxically, is their nature. It is also the perennial charm of barbarism. For many human beings, civilization is a state of confinement. Ruled by fear, sexually starved and filled with rage they dare not express, such people cannot help being maddened by a creature that lives by affirming itself. Tormenting animals diverts them from the dismal squalor in which they creep through their days. The medieval carnivals in which cats were tortured and burned were festivals of the depressed.
When people say their goal in life is to be happy they are telling you they are miserable. Thinking of happiness as a project, they look for fulfilment at some future time. The present slips by, and anxiety creeps in.
Unless they are confined within environments that are unnatural for them, cats are never bored. Boredom is fear of being alone with yourself. Cats are happy being themselves, while humans try to be happy by escaping themselves.
A more fundamental limitation of Epicurean philosophy is the spiritual poverty of the life it recommends. It is a neurasthenic vision of happiness. As in a convalescent hospital, no noise is allowed. Only a restful stillness remains. But then life is stilled, and much of its joy is gone.
All these philosophies have a common failing. They imagine life can be ordered by human reason. Either the mind can devise a way of life that is secure from loss, or else it can control the emotions so that it can withstand any loss. In fact, neither how we live nor the emotions we feel can be controlled in this way. Our lives are shaped by chance and our emotions by the body. Much of human life – and much of philosophy – is an attempt to divert ourselves from this fact.
In regard to diversion, humans and cats are at opposite poles. Not having formed an image of themselves, cats do not need to divert themselves from the fact that they will some day cease to exist. As a consequence, they live without the fear of time passing too quickly or too slowly. When cats are not hunting or mating, eating or playing, they sleep. There is no inner anguish that forces them into constant activity.
Where Pascal is right is that diversion is a uniquely human trait. Some have believed tool-making marks us off from our animal kin. Others have claimed it is the transmission of knowledge or the use of language. But none of these is exclusively human. Beavers build homes for themselves, ravens use tools to seize food, apes form cultures using knowledge transmitted from previous generations. The howls of wolves and the songs of whales are the sounds of them speaking to one another. The need for diversion, though, is essentially human.
Johnson mocked the belief that happiness could be achieved by thinking about the best path in life. As he wrote to his friend and biographer James Boswell: Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent; deliberation, which those who begin it by prudence, and continue it with subtilty, must, after long expence of thought, conclude by chance. To prefer one future mode of life to another, upon just reasons, requires faculties which it has not pleased our Creator to give us.
As Pascal put it, human beings do not know how to sit quietly in a room.
In Chapter 44 of Rasselas, Johnson analyses the imagination’s dangerous power and concludes that it cannot be overcome by an act of will: Perhaps, if we speak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state. There is no man whose imagination does not sometimes predominate over his reason, who can regulate his attention wholly by his will, and whose ideas will come and go at his command. No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannise, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability. All power of fancy over reason is a degree of
...more
You can be in paradise only when you do not know what it is like to be in paradise. As soon as you know, paradise is gone. No effort of thought can take you back, for thought – the conscious awareness of yourself as a mortal being – is the Fall. In the Garden of Eden, the primordial human pair are clothed in ignorance of themselves. When they come to self-awareness, they find they are naked. Thinking of yourself is the gift of the serpent that cannot be returned.
Cats are often described as being amoral. They obey no commandments and have no ideals. They show no signs of experiencing guilt or remorse, any more than they do of struggling to be better than they are. They do not exert themselves to improve the world, or agonize over what is the right thing to do. If they could understand it, the notion that how they live should be decided by any external standard would be laughable to them.
As Pascal noted, ‘Justice is as much a matter of fashion as charm is.’1 Morality has many charms. What could be more captivating than a vision of everlasting justice? Yet visions of justice are as immutable as styles in shoes. What morality demands shifts across the generations and may change more than once within a single human lifetime. Not so long ago morality required spreading civilization by extending imperial power. Today, morality condemns empire in all its forms. These judgements are irreconcilably opposed. But they provide the same satisfaction to those who pronounce them – a
...more
The universe has no favourites, and the human animal is not its goal. A purposeless process of endless change, the universe has no goal.
The central drive to self-preservation, which in part determines my other appetites, strictly matches a universal and unchanging feature of individual physical things. My rational reflections have as their objects my first-order desires and the activity of thought is embodied in a corresponding activity in the brain. In reflection, forming ideas of ideas, I evaluate the desire, or other thought, positively or negatively, either affirm it or deny it, or suspend judgement on it. The reflection is an activity of the mind, its self-assertion, against the inputs from external things.
Plato misled western philosophy when he represented knowing the good in terms of visual experience. We can look at something without touching it; but the good life is not like that. We know it only by living it. If we think about it too much and turn it into a theory, it may dissolve and disappear. Contrary to Socrates, an examined life may not be worth living.
Empathy, in this tradition, is the heart of the good life. Cats, on the other hand – except where their kittens are concerned – show few signs of sharing the feelings of others. They may sense when their human companions are distressed, and stay with them through a time of trouble. They may give succour to the sick and dying. But cats are not sacrificing themselves in any of these roles. Just by being there, they are giving human beings relief from sorrow. As predators, a highly developed sense of empathy would be dysfunctional for cats. That is why they lack this capacity. It is also why the
...more
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.
As in human beings, the good life in cats depends on their virtues. Aristotle pointed out that someone lacking in courage cannot flourish no matter what other virtues they may possess: whatever they do will come to nothing. Similarly, a cat that is always fearful cannot live well. Whether in the wild or in human settlements, a cat’s life is dangerous. Courage is as much a feline virtue as it is a human one. Without it, neither cats nor humans can thrive.
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. It is natural for them to mistake their second nature for the first, and many who lived by the customs of their societies have lived badly as a result. Mistaking their own nature is not a habit of cats.
To be sure, we cannot know what it is like to be a cat. Nor can we know what it is like to be another human being. Yet we rightly think that someone who believes other human beings are unfeeling machines has a mental illness, whereas philosophers such as Descartes who thought the same of other animals have been feted as sages. In fact the inner world of cats may be more lucid and vivid than our own. Their senses are sharper and ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
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. In humans this is rarely spontaneous. The supreme archer is one who shoots the arrow without thinking, but this comes only after a lifetime of practice.26 Cats have no-mind as their inborn condition.
There was a great deal of talk below, noises of feet, breaking of bushes, and then the smell of all of them mounted the steps, the smell of tobacco, sweat, and the familiar smell of blood. The man’s blood. Ming was pleased, as he was pleased when he killed a bird and created this smell of blood under his own teeth. This was big prey. Ming, unnoticed by any of the others, stood up to his full height as the group passed with the corpse, and inhaled the aroma of his victory with a lifted nose.
There is no doubt she loves him. It is left open whether he reciprocates her affection, or regards her simply as a creature he is happy to be with. And if the latter, might that not be love too?
Society forms a sort of biological culture in which individuals can try out all the means by which they can make contact with one another … Love is born there … But, more than anything else, what flourishes in all its forms is the need for ‘diversion’ in the Pascalian sense of the word. ‘Diversion’ for society people is the art of using others for the sole purpose of satisfying one’s needs and disguising one’s boredom. Where affections are concerned, this exploitation can be admitted neither to oneself nor to others. That is why Proust’s characters hide, dissemble, and betray one another. They
...more
In Praise of Shadows (1933), Tanizaki wrote: we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates. A phosphorescent jewel gives off its glow and color in the dark and loses its beauty in the light of day. Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.
We do not dislike everything that shines, but we do prefer a pensive luster to a shallow brilliance, a murky light that, whether in a stone or an artefact, bespeaks a sheen of antiquity … Yet for better or for worse we do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.
Who decides which … deaths are tragic and which are not? Who decides what is big and what is little? Is it a matter of numbers or physical mass or intelligence? If you are a little creature or a little person dying alone and in pain, you may not remember or know that you are little. If you are in enough pain, you may not remember who or what you are; you may know only your suffering, which is immense … What decides – common sense? Can common sense dictate such things?
She smiled and thought, ‘Gattino’. Even if he was dead, he was there in that splayed, ecstatic leap. ‘This idea was no doubt an illusion, a self-deception. But that dog was not. That dog was real. And so was Gattino.’43 Whether Gattino was still present in the world does not matter much. It is the fact that Gattino existed and what he did that are important. Mary’s attachment to the cat was unlike any she had with human beings.
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.
It has always surprised me how people can rely on the gradualness of human development, on the stability of human nature, on rational appeals to truth, on the objective standards of good, and all the other ambrosial illusions, in view of the unrelieved corruptibility and transitoriness of human life and the mortal wounds inflicted on man by every death, every parting, every betrayal, every passion.
cats decide to die. They creep into a cool place somewhere, because of the heat of their blood, crouch down, and wait to die.
the characteristics the modern mind prides itself on are precisely those of madness. 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. All their vital processes are shrunken into the mind. What is the one thing they lack that sane men possess? The ability to be careless, to disregard appearances, to relax and laugh at the world.
