Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life

by John Gray

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. The philosopher who believed he had persuaded his cat to adopt a meat-free diet only showed how silly philosophers can be. Rather than trying to teach his cat, he would have been wiser if he had tried learning from it. Humans cannot become cats. Yet if they set aside any notion of being superior beings, they may come to understand how cats can thrive without anxiously inquiring how to live.

Instead of being a sign of their inferiority, the lack of abstract thinking among cats is a mark of their freedom of mind. Thinking in generalities slides easily into a superstitious faith in language. Much of the history of philosophy consists of the worship of linguistic fictions. Relying on what they can touch, smell and see, cats are not ruled by words. Philosophy testifies to the frailty of the human mind. Humans philosophize for the same reason they pray. They know the meaning they have fashioned in their lives is fragile and live in dread of its breaking down. Death is the ultimate breakdown in meaning, since it marks the end of any story they have told themselves. So they imagine passing on to a life beyond the body in a world out of time, and the human story continuing in this other realm.

A few philosophers have recognized that something can be learned from cats. The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (born in 1788) is famous for his love of poodles, a succession of which he kept throughout his later years, calling all of them by the same names – Atma and Butz. He also had at least one feline companion. When he died of heart failure in 1860, he was found at home on his couch beside an unnamed cat.

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. He spelt out his theory in The World as Will and Representation: I know quite well that anyone would regard me as mad if I seriously assured him that the cat, playing just now in the yard, is still the same one that did the same jumps and tricks there three hundred years ago; but I also know that it is much more absurd to believe that the cat of today is through and through and fundamentally an entirely different one from that cat of three hundred years ago … For in a certain sense it is of course true that in the individual we always have before us a different being … But in another it is not true, namely in the sense in which reality belongs only to the permanent forms of things, to the Ideas, and which was so clearly evident to Plato that it became his fundamental thought.

Schopenhauer was more humane in his view of animals than other leading philosophers. According to some reports, René Descartes (1596–1650) hurled a cat out of a window in order to demonstrate the absence of conscious awareness in non-human animals; its terrified screams were mechanical reactions, he concluded. Descartes also performed experiments on dogs, whipping one while a violin was being played in order to see whether the sound of a violin would later frighten the animal, which it did. Descartes coined the expression, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ The implication was that human beings are essentially minds and only accidentally physical organisms. He wanted his philosophy to be based on methodical doubt. It did not occur to him to doubt the Christian orthodoxy that denied animals souls, which he renewed in his rationalist philosophy. 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.

Ancient Greek scepticism was rediscovered in Europe in the fifteenth century. 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.

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. Recent evidence points to a similar process taking place independently in China around five millennia ago, when a central Asian variety of Felis silvestris pursued a similar strategy. Having entered into close proximity with humans, it was not long before cats were accepted as being useful to them. Employing cats for pest control on farms and sailing vessels became common. Whether as rat-catchers, stowaways or accidental travellers, cats spread on ships to parts of the world where they had not lived before. In many countries today, they outnumber dogs and any other animal species as cohabitants of human households.

The brains of house cats have diminished in size compared with their wild counterparts, but that does not make house cats less intelligent or adaptable. Since it is the part of the brain that includes the fight-or-flight response that has shrunk, house cats have become able to tolerate situations that would be stressful in the wild, such as encountering humans and unrelated cats.

A more fundamental reason why humans accepted cats in their homes is that cats taught humans to love them. This is the true basis of feline domestication. So beguiling are they that cats have often been seen as coming from beyond this world. Humans need something other than the human world, or else they go mad. Animism – the oldest and most universal religion – met this need by recognizing non-human animals as our spiritual equals, even our superiors. Worshipping these other creatures, our ancestors were able to interact with a life beyond their own.

It is not that cats are always alone. How could they be? They come together to mate, they are born in families and where there are reliable food sources they may form colonies. When several cats live in the same space a dominant cat may emerge. Cats may compete ferociously for territory and mates. But there are none of the settled hierarchies that shape interactions among humans and their close evolutionary kin. Unlike chimps and gorillas, cats do not produce alpha specimens or leaders. Where necessary, they will cooperate in order to satisfy their wants, but they do not merge themselves into any social group. There are no feline packs or herds, flocks or congregations.

Hostility to cats is not new. In early modern France it inspired a popular cult. Cats had long been linked with the devil and the occult. Religious festivals were often rounded off by burning a cat in a bonfire or throwing one off a roof. Sometimes, in a demonstration of human creativity, cats were hung over a fire and roasted alive. In Paris it was the custom to burn a basket, barrel or sack of live cats hung from a tall mast. Cats were buried alive under the floorboards when houses were built, a practice believed to confer good fortune on those who lived there.26 On New Year’s Day 1638, in Ely Cathedral, a cat was roasted alive on a spit in the presence of a large and boisterous crowd. A few years later Parliamentary troops, fighting against Royalist forces in the English Civil War, used hounds to hunt cats up and down Lichfield Cathedral. During pope-burning processions in the reign of Charles II, the effigies were stuffed with live cats so that their screams would add dramatic effect. At rural fairs a popular sport was shooting cats suspended in baskets.27 In some French cities, cat-chasers put on a livelier show by setting fire to them and pursuing them as they were burning through the streets. In other entertainments, cats would be passed around so that their fur could be torn off. In Germany the howls of cats tortured during similar festivals was called Katzenmusik. Many carnivals concluded with a mock trial in which cats were bludgeoned half to death and then hange...

At bottom, hatred of cats may be an expression of envy. Many human beings lead lives of muffled misery. Torturing other creatures is a relief, since it inflicts worse suffering on them. Tormenting cats is particularly satisfying, since they are so satisfied in themselves. Cat-hatred is very often the self-hatred of misery-sodden human beings redirected against creatures they know are not unhappy. 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. They dread their progress to this future state being disrupted by events. So they turn to philosophy, and nowadays therapy, which offer relief from their unease.

Among the ancient philosophers, the Epicureans believed they could achieve happiness by curbing their desires. When someone is described as an epicurean today, we think of a person who delights in fine food and wine and the other pleasures of life. But the original Epicureans were ascetics who aimed to reduce their pleasures to a minimum. They dined on a simple diet of bread, cheese and olives. They had no objection to sex as long as it was used medicinally, as a remedy against frustration, and not mixed with infatuation or what we would nowadays call romantic love, which would only disturb their peace of mind. For the same reason, they spurned any form of ambition or political engagement. Withdrawal into the tranquil seclusion of a well-appointed garden would secure them from pain and anxiety and enable them to achieve ataraxia.

Epicurus has some things in common with the Buddha. Both promise release from suffering through the abandonment of desire. But the Buddha is more realistic in acknowledging that this can be fully achieved only by stepping off the carousel of birth and death – in other words, by ceasing to exist as a distinct individual. Enlightened human beings may experience a state of bliss during their lifetime; but they can be liberated from suffering only when they are no longer going to be reborn.

You can enjoy Epicurean seclusion only if you live in a time and place that permits such luxury and you are lucky enough to be able to afford it. This has never been true for most human beings, nor will it ever be. Where such retreats have existed they have been shelters for the few, and overrun in wars and revolutions. 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. When sleeping, they may dream. But there is no reason to think they dream of being in any other world, and when they are not asleep they are wholly awake. A time may come when they know they are about to die, but they do not spend their lives dreading its arrival.

For Pascal, human unease points beyond the world. For Montaigne, it comes from a flaw in the human animal. Here I side with Montaigne. Humans are self-divided creatures whose lives are mostly spent in displacement activity. The sorrows they have in common with their animal kin are multiplied by thought constantly doubling back on itself. It is this reflexive self-consciousness that engenders the special wretchedness of the human animal.

The denial of death and the division of the human soul go together. Dreading anything that reminds them of their mortality, humans push much of their experience into an unconscious part of themselves. Life becomes a struggle to stay in the dark. Not needing such darkness within themselves, cats on the other hand are nocturnal creatures that live in the light of day.

Many seem confident that the modern civilization that has developed over the past few hundred years will endure, even though climate change and global pandemic are creating a different and more dangerous world. No doubt humankind will somehow adapt. But the nature of these adjustments is unclear. Will the kinds of societies that exist today be renewed in different forms? Or will institutions from the past – feudalism or slavery, for example – be revived and maintained with new technologies? No one can tell. The future of human life on Earth is as unknown as what (if anything) comes after we die.

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.

Ancient Chinese thought contains a similar way of thinking. The Taoism of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu turned on the ideas of tao and te: the way or nature of things and the ability to live according to it. Though te has often been translated as ‘virtue’, it did not refer to any exclusively ‘moral’ capacity but the inner power that is needed in order to act according to the way of things. Following it meant acting as you must, and this was not only true for humans. All living creatures flourished only insofar as they obeyed their own natures.

Aristotle’s account of ethics is anthropocentric and hierarchical. Though he allows that virtues exist in other animals, he insists that the good life is realized most fully in a few human beings. The human mind most resembles God’s – a divine intellect or nous, the final cause or ‘unmoved mover’ of the universe – and everything that exists is striving to be like God. It follows, for Aristotle, that the human animal is the telos – the end or goal – of the universe. This idea fitted well with Christianity and persisted in popular theories of evolution. Darwin’s theory, however, is altogether different: natural selection has no purpose and the human species has come about by accident. Humans are not ‘better’ than countless extinct species. But Darwin found it hard to stick to this view.7 Today, many of his followers hold to the idea that humans are worth more than other animals, though this makes no sense unless you believe in a cosmic hierarchy of values. In Taoist thought, on the other hand, human beings are in no way special. Like every other creature, they are straw dogs – ceremonial objects that were carefully prepared for rituals, then casually burned. As Lao Tzu puts it, ‘Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs.’8 The universe has no favourites, and the human animal is not its goal. A purposeless process of endless change, the universe has no goal. In the central western tradition, humans rank higher than other animals because human...

According to Aristotle, the best sort of human being was one like himself – male, slave-owning and Greek – who was devoted to intellectual inquiry. Apart from justifying the local prejudices of his time – a practice nearly universal among philosophers – this view has a more radical defect. It assumes that the best life for humans is the same, at least in principle, for everybody. True, most cannot achieve it, but this only shows their inferiority to those that can. The possibility that human beings might flourish in many different ways, which cannot be ranked in any scale of value, did not occur to Aristotle. Nor did the idea that other animals might live good lives in ways of which humans are incapable. Taoism again offers a refreshing contrast. Human lives are not ranked in value and the best life for other animals does not mean becoming more like human beings. Each individual animal, every single creature, has its own form of the good life.

There may be several reasons for Spinoza’s equivocation. Like Montaigne he belonged to a Jewish family that fled the Iberian Peninsula to escape persecution and forcible conversion by the Inquisition. Bolder than Montaigne, he was expelled in 1656 from the central synagogue in Amsterdam for expressing some of the ideas which would be published posthumously in the Ethics to his co-religionists, who regarded them as heretical. Following his excommunication he was offered an academic position, which – fearing his freedom to think and write might be compromised – he refused. Instead he made a modest living as a lens-grinder, an occupation that may have shortened his life. Spinoza’s critics were right in regarding his views as heretical. For him, God is not the power that created the universe. God is an infinite substance, Deus sive Natura, God or Nature, self-subsisting and everlasting. Human values cannot be derived from a God that created the universe, since God is the universe itself. Spinoza’s ambiguous language may have been an attempt to make this philosophy more palatable to those who had excommunicated him. But it may also be true that he underestimated the extent to which his philosophy undermined traditional beliefs. At times he seems to back away from what is most original in his thinking.

In Spinoza’s view, ‘good’ is what furthers this endeavour, ‘evil’ what obstructs it. Values are not objective properties of things, but neither are they purely subjective. The virtue of an individual is what prolongs and extends their activity in the world. But the mass of human beings do not understand themselves or their place in the world. As a result, they are often mistaken in how they live.