Philosopher believes essence of a ‘good life’ can be seen in cats
An uncertain fate awaits the most bracing and contrarian writers: Will the insights they offer still come across as stingingly original if the disillusion they so often recommend becomes commonplace?
I was thinking about this while reading John Gray’s peculiar new book, “Feline Philosophy,” the latest in a provocative oeuvre that has spanned four decades and covered subjects including al-Qaida, global capitalism and John Stuart Mill.
Gray, a British philosopher, has long been one of the sharpest critics of the neoliberal consensus that emerged after the end of the Cold War. (He happens to share a name with an American self-help author, leading to some unintentional comedy whenever someone has to explain that the writer of books like “Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia” isn’t also responsible for the bestseller “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.”)
“Feline Philosophy” would seem like a departure for Gray — a playful exploration of what cats might have to teach humans in our neverending quest to understand ourselves. But the book suggests that this very quest may itself be doomed. “Consciousness,” he writes, “has
been overrated.” We get worried, anxious and miserable. Our vaunted capacity for abstract thought often gets us (or others) into trouble. We may be the only species to pursue scientific inquiry, but we’re also the only species that has consciously perpetrated genocides. Cats, unlike humans, don’t trick themselves into believing they are saviors, wreaking havoc in the process. “When cats are not hunting or mating, eating or playing, they sleep,” Gray writes. “There is no inner anguish that forces them into constant activity.”
Humans like to think of themselves as special, but what makes us special also, not infrequently, makes us worse. We are human supremacists whose vanity and moralism and tortured ambivalence make us uniquely unhappy and destructive.
“While cats have nothing to learn from us,” he writes, “we can learn from them how to lighten the load that comes with being human.”
This is a variation on an unwavering theme for Gray, who has been critiquing the follies of humanity and humanism for some time now. “Humans are like any other plague animal,” he wrote in “Straw Dogs” (2002). “They cannot destroy the Earth, but they can easily wreck the environment that sustains them.” In “The Silence of Animals” (2013), he connected a belief in progress, which he ascribes to both the left and the right, to the hubris that denies our animal nature. In “The Soul of the Marionette” (2015), he went so far as to assert that an insentient puppet was infinitely more free than any sentient human being.