{"id":761975,"date":"2020-10-29T06:21:50","date_gmt":"2020-10-29T10:21:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=761975"},"modified":"2020-10-29T10:17:02","modified_gmt":"2020-10-29T14:17:02","slug":"activists-rescue-dogs-from-illegal-kitchen-in-nightmare-animal-welfare-battle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=761975","title":{"rendered":"JOHN GRAY: ‘What can we learn from cats? Don’t live in an imagined future’"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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In his book Straw Dogs, John Gray dismantled the history of western philosophy, with its illusory faith in our species living somehow above evolving life and outside the constraints of nature. <\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

TIM ADAMS:<\/strong> What\u2019s it like to be a cat? John Gray has spent a lifetime half-wondering. The philosopher… has had feline companions at home since he was a boy… The last of them, Julian, died earlier this year, aged 23. Gray, currently cat-less, is by no means a sentimental writer, but his new book, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life, is written in memory of their shared wisdom…<\/p>\n

Other philosophers have been enthralled by cats over the years… The rationalist Ren\u00e9 Descartes, Gray notes, once \u201churled a cat out of the window in order to demonstrate the absence of conscious awareness in non-human animals; its terrified screams were mechanical reactions, he concluded”.<\/p>\n

One impulse for this book was a conversation with a fellow philosopher, who assured Gray that he \u201chad taught his cat to be vegan\u201d. (Gray had only one question: \u201cDid the cat ever go out?\u201d It did.) When he informed another philosopher that he was writing about what we can learn from cats, that man replied: \u201cBut cats have no history.\u201d \u201cAnd,\u201d Gray wondered, \u201cis that necessarily a disadvantage?\u201d…<\/p>\n

Gray writes with great amusement in this book and elsewhere of the stubborn gap between philosophers\u2019 higher ideals and the more animal instincts of their lives… Gray believes that humans turned to philosophy principally out of anxiety, looking for some tranquillity in a chaotic and frightening world, telling themselves stories that might provide the illusion of calm. Cats, he suggests, wouldn\u2019t recognise that need because they naturally revert to equilibrium whenever they\u2019re not hungry or threatened. If cats were to give advice, it would be for their own amusement…<\/p>\n

Readers of Gray will recognise this book as a postscript or coda to Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, the 2002 bestseller in which he elegantly dismantled the history of western philosophy \u2013 with its illusory faith in our species living somehow \u201cabove\u201d evolving life and outside the constraints of nature. That book aimed its fire particularly at the prevailing belief of our time: that of the inevitably steady forward progress of humankind brought about by liberal democracy…<\/p>\n

Cats don\u2019t appear to get bored, because in Gray\u2019s terms it would never occur to them to struggle to be happy. Humans, on the other hand, \u201care self-divided creatures whose lives are mostly spent on displacement activity\u201d. Much of this displacement activity is a product of that other disabling difference to their feline companions, the certain knowledge of death. Gray is, typically, both irreligious and anti-atheist, reserving genial contempt for the likes of Richard Dawkins, and their censorious belief \u201cthat religion can be simply erased\u201d…<\/p>\n

Gray never bought the idea that his book was a handbook for despair. His subject was humility; his target any ideology that believed it possessed anything more than doubtful and piecemeal answers to vast and changing questions. The cat book is written in that spirit… And what does he say to those critics who argue that his writing dwells on the reductive, brutish side of humanity, as opposed to its great collective achievements? \u201cIf you think, as I do, that civilised life is like a spider\u2019s web, easy to destroy, but hard to construct, then what I write is perhaps a caution, a warning. I\u2019m anti-hubris.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the last sentence of Straw Dogs, Gray asked a question, almost plaintively: \u201cCan we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?\u201d Has writing the current book helped him to understand what such a life of experience might look like? \u201cCats live for the sensation of life, not for something they might achieve or not achieve,\u201d he says. \u201cIf we attach ourselves too heavily to some overarching purpose we\u2019re losing the joy of life. Leave all those ideologies and religions to one side and what\u2019s left? What\u2019s left is a sensation of life \u2013 which is a wonderful thing”. SOURCE…<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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