FELINE PHILOSOPHY

CATS AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

JOHN GRAY

Allen Lane, 121pp, £20

Feline Philosophy is an elegant treatise from a distinguished contrarian which argues that cats have no awareness of their own mortality and are therefore free to be themselves in a world of material pleasure. If something doesn’t suit them, they don’t stick around. Humans, by contrast, are miserable because of our compulsion to find meaning in something larger than ourselves as we try to distract ourselves from the fear of extinction. Gray proceeds by way of Stoics and Epicureans, vignettes of individual philosophers – Schopenhauer, Montaigne, Pascal, Descartes, the last named threw a cat out of a window in a spirit of philosophical inquiry – and anecdotes about cats in history and literature. Colette and Patricia Highsmith both feature.

Critics were agreed in enjoying the wit and style of Gray’s essay, although Jane O’grady in the Telegraph didn’t buy his argument that because cats don’t empathise they could not count as cruel – ‘why assume that cats don’t relish mice’s suffering?’ Sam Leith in

Unherd regretted that the author ‘doesn’t develop what seems to me an interesting point — which is that the adult cat’s meow is an inter-species communication. They don’t meow at each other: only at us.’ Kathryn Hughes in the Literary Review pronounced Gray’s offering ‘magnificent’ and particularly relished his advice that humans should learn from cats that ‘it is better to be indifferent to others than to feel you have to love them. “Few ideals”, suggests Gray, sounding like a particularly grumpy tortoiseshell who has been kept waiting for his Felix, “have been more harmful than that of universal love.”’