Feline Philosophy

Perplexity at the philosopher’s behaviour would soon have been followed by indifference. 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. (Location 122)

Cats have no need of philosophy. Obeying their nature, they are content with the life it gives them. In humans, on the other hand, discontent with their nature seems to be natural. With predictably tragic and farcical results, the human animal never ceases striving to be something that it is not. Cats make no such effort. 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. (Location 127)

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. Religions are attempts to make an inhuman universe humanly habitable. (Location 131)

According to Pyrrho, nothing can be known. As Montaigne put it, ‘There is a plague on Man: his opinion that he knows something.’ (Location 215)

More sceptical than the most radical Pyrrhonist, Montaigne did not believe any philosophizing could cure human disquiet. Philosophy was useful chiefly in curing people of philosophy. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), he recognized that ordinary language is littered with residues of past metaphysical systems.11 By uncovering these traces and recognizing that the realities they describe are actually fictions, we could think more flexibly. Small doses of such a homoeopathic remedy against philosophy – an anti-philosophy, one might say – might bring us closer to other animals. Then we might be able to learn something from creatures that philosophers have dismissed as our inferiors. An anti-philosophy of this kind would begin not with arguments, but with a story. (Location 223)

That cats acknowledge no leaders may be one reason they do not submit to humans. They neither obey nor revere the human beings with which so many of them now cohabit. 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. (Location 381)

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. (Location 420)

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. (Location 431)

Boredom is fear of being alone with yourself. Cats are happy being themselves, while humans try to be happy by escaping themselves. (Location 436)

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. (Location 517)

Diversion. Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things. (Location 522)

Yet Johnson’s unease was only an exaggerated version of a disquiet common to all human beings. Much of human life is a succession of tics. Careers and love affairs, travels and shifting philosophies are twitches in minds that cannot settle down. As Pascal put it, human beings do not know how to sit quietly in a room. Johnson knew he could never sit quietly anywhere, but he could not cure himself of his restlessness. Like other human beings, he was ruled by his imagination. (Location 662)

Many people claim to value morality more than anything else. In their view, nothing marks them off from their animal kin more than the sense of right and wrong. A good life is not just one that is worth living; it must also be moral. If a life does not satisfy the requirements of morality, it cannot have much worth – or possibly any worth at all. Morality deals with a special sort of value, incomparably more precious than any other. Pleasure may be valuable, as may beauty and life itself, but unless these goods are pursued morally they are worthless, or else positively bad. This is true for every human being, since the laws of morality are universal and categorical. Everyone must be moral before they can be anything else. Those who think like this are convinced they know what morality dictates. There cannot be fundamental disagreement where right and wrong are concerned. After all, being moral is the supreme good. How could human beings differ on something so important? In fact, there are many divergent and opposing moralities. For some people today, justice is the core of morality. But justice is neither as unchanging nor as important to them as they imagine. As Pascal noted, ‘Justice is as much a matter of fashion as charm is.’ (Location 695)

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 gratifying sense of virtue. (Location 706)

When people talk of morality they do not know what it is they are talking about. At the same time they are unshakably certain in what they say. This may seem paradoxical. But it is not, since what they are doing is expressing their emotions. (Location 709)

More plausibly, a subjective view of ethics is a result of the hollowing out of religion. Expressed in universal laws or commands, ‘morality’ is a relic of monotheism. If there is no author of these edicts, what authority can they have? In religion, the author was God. Later, with the rise of the Enlightenment, it came to be ‘humanity’. But humankind cannot be the author of anything, since there is no such thing as a universal human agent. All that exists is the multitudinous human animal, with its many different moralities. (Location 715)

others. Instead, the good life means living for yourself with the nature you have been given. To be sure, the good life requires virtues – traits and skills that make it possible to survive and flourish – but these virtues concern not only what we have been taught to think of as morality. They also include aesthetics, hygiene and the whole art of life, and they are not confined to human beings. In this understanding, ethics – from ethikos in the Greek language, meaning ‘character’ or ‘arising from habit’ – is found among non-human animals. (Location 727)

The flaw in rationalism is the belief that human beings can live by applying a theory. But theory – a term that comes from the Greek theorein, meaning ‘to look at’ – cannot replace practical knowledge of how to live. 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. (Location 826)

if the value of a life is the value it has for the creature that lives it, any such hierarchy of value is without meaning. To live well does not mean being ever more conscious. The best life for any living thing means being itself. This diverges from the Romantic view that each of us should fashion a unique individuality for ourselves. For the Romantics, human beings create their lives in the way artists do their works and the value of any work of art has to do with how original it is. Here the Romantics drew on a biblical idea of creation from nothing that is not found in ancient Greek thought. Romanticism is one of Christianity’s many modern surrogates. (Location 831)

For many people today, no way of living could be more oppressive. (Location 837)

In Spinoza and Taoism, power means being able to be what you are. The languorous sloth asserts its power as it slumbers through its days as much as the tiger at the kill. Exercising power, in this sense, does not imply dominating others. But if ethics consists in the affirmation of your individual nature, you may find yourself outside of morality as understood by monotheists and humanists. (Location 842)

Altruism is a modern idea. The word was coined by the French sociologist Auguste Comte (1798–1857) to define the core of the Religion of Humanity he invented and propagated. In this supposedly scientific religion, a good life was one that served ‘humanity’, not any divine being. To be sure, the altruism he advised his disciples to practise was not directed to any actually existing human being. The beneficiary – the enlightened species he believed was emerging – was as much a creation of the human imagination as the Deity it replaced, and if anything more incredible. (Location 914)

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. (Location 962)

A good life need not embody any idea. Someone who responds to the suffering of others by helping them displays compassion whether or not they have any idea of what they are doing. They may be more truly virtuous if they have no notion that they are being compassionate. The same goes for courage. (Location 974)

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. They can’t unbend, can’t gamble their whole existence, as did Pascal, on a fanciful wager. They can’t do what religion has always asked: to believe in a justification of their lives that seems absurd. (Location 1389)

If cats could understand the human search for meaning they would purr with delight at its absurdity. Life as the cat they happen to be is meaning enough for them. Humans, on the other hand, cannot help looking for meaning beyond their lives. The search for meaning comes with awareness of death, which is a product of human self-consciousness. Fearing their lives ending, human beings invented religions and philosophies in which the meaning of their lives carried on after them. But the meaning humans make is easily broken, so they live in greater fear than before. The stories they have fashioned for themselves take over, and they spend their days trying to be the character they have invented. Their lives belong not to them but to a figure conjured up in their imagination. (Location 1527)

1 Never try to persuade human beings to be reasonable Trying to persuade human beings to be rational is like trying to teach cats to be vegans. Human beings use reason to bolster whatever they want to believe, seldom to find out if what they believe is true. This may be unfortunate, but there is nothing you or anyone else can do about it. If human unreason frustrates or endangers you, walk away. (Location 1571)

6 Life is not a story If you think of your life as a story, you will be tempted to write it to the end. But you do not know how your life will end, or what will happen before it does. It would be better to throw the script away. The unwritten life is more worth living than any story you can invent. (Location 1583)