Dear Sophiya,
Be careful if you ever meet the philosopher John Gray. You may end up an object lesson in human folly, like the colleague who unwittingly supplied the opening anecdote of Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life: “A philosopher once assured me he had convinced his cat to become a vegan.”
Naturally, Gray wanted to know more. Was the philosopher’s secret “vegan titbits?” Inspiring moral examples of cats who were “already practicing vegans”? A brilliant argument to persuade it “that eating meat is wrong?” None of the above. Then was this an outdoor cat? It was. “That solved the mystery,” Gray decided. “Plainly, the cat was feeding itself by visiting other homes and hunting. If it brought any carcasses home – a practice to which ethically undeveloped cats are sadly all too prone – the virtuous philosopher had managed not to notice them.”
It’s an introduction so perfect that I read it and purred. Not only because it’s funny, but also because it illustrates, in a few quick strokes, Gray’s lifelong targets and preoccupations: faith in reason, the confidence that we can transform nature to our liking, an ironclad belief in the necessity and feasibility of moral progress, the whole liberal humanist potpourri. Gray has made a career out of saying it’s delusional and it stinks.
Gray’s genteel pessimism and limpid prose style go together like gin and tonic. To those of us who are ironic by disposition, more apt to watch than act, who hold all the correct political opinions (really!) and yet find mass movements off-putting and moral fervor alternately scary and a bit ridiculous, he is intoxicating. In Feline Philosophy Gray once again asks us to give up “the tragic and farcical” human effort to change the world and ourselves. We should instead live like cats, who “obeying their nature,” Gray writes, “are content with the life it gives them.”
Contentment sounds good, like a release from the human predicament. The only trouble is that while Gray’s cats may have taught him how to live, mine have taught me how not to.
1. Gray’s Anatomy
John Gray’s career could be roughly cut in two. From the early 1980s until the turn of the century, he was a conventional political philosopher, albeit one with unconventional positions. He belonged to a line of British thought running (as he followed it) from Hume to Michael Oakeshott, conservatives for whom “the conservative outlook is found in the skeptical denial that a political philosophy of [a] universal and rationalist sort can be anything other than an illusion.[1]” He faulted liberal political theory for thinking it could discover the perfect set of principles and procedures for establishing a just society. In the 1990s he broke with his former comrades on the British right as they became ever-more enthusiastic about the free market, as if market logic, just like fair procedures, could solve the problems of human community.
Both left and right, he charged, believed they were progressing, slowly and unsteadily but certainly, toward utopia. Gray traced their shared articles of faith deep into the history of western philosophy, from the Enlightenment’s zeal for reason and progress to Christian millennialism and Greek philosophy’s pursuit of eternal truths. “The obsession of secular rationalists with true belief is an inheritance from Christian traditions deformed by Greek philosophy,” Gray wrote in an introduction to a collection of his essays, “which from Socrates onwards preached the fanciful dogma that reason, virtue and the good life are one and the same.”[2]
There was, of course, a tension inherent in Gray’s project. He was criticizing western philosophy’s supposed fetish for rationality in very rational ways: citing his sources, performing close readings, explaining the shortcomings of his opponents’ positions, and offering his own instead. That changed in 2002 with the publication of Straw Dogs.
Straw Dogs was a strange book. It was allusive, unsystematic, woven together out of bits of philosophy, literature, and Taoist aphorisms. Gray rechristened homo sapiens as homo rapiens. This pitiless ape destroys nature in their vain attempt to set itself apart from the natural world by controlling it, in the ultimate hopes of immortality in one form or another. As an alternative Gray offered a passive, godless mysticism that simply contemplates the shifting world. “Other animals do not need a purpose,” he councils. “Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?”[3] Since then his books have continued in this vein. They are less concerned less with linear argument than with demonstrating a whole new way of seeing things, aiming less to convince than convert.
2. What Is It Like To Be A Cat?
In Feline Philosophy Gray invites his readers to see the world as cats. Most humans are prone to unhappiness, overly self-conscious, worried about death, and uneasy in the face of the unknown and change. Cats have no need for self-consciousness, never worry about death, and get along well enough without living the examined life or searching for truth. Consequently, “happiness is the state to which they default when practical threats to their well-being are removed,” Gray writes.
The book includes chapters on happiness, love, ethics, and death. For each subject, Gray mines the work of philosophers, authors, and journalists for highbrow cat content, all showing that cats live better lives than their human companions. In an essay on her cat Gattino, for instance, Mary Gaitskill favorably compares feline to human love. “Human love is grossly flawed, and even when it isn’t, people routinely misunderstand it, reject it, use it or manipulate it. It is hard to protect a person from pain because people often choose pain,” she observes. “An animal will never choose pain; an animal can receive love far more easily than even a very young human.”
The underlying problem, according to Gray, is that cats follow their natures, while human beings deny theirs, or try to change them. “Modern humanism follows the Romantics, who idealized the natural world but still regarded it as inferior to the best that human beings could create,” Gray writes. “For these unwitting post-Christians, being free means rebelling against nature, including their own.” The result is chronic unhappiness as they strive to be other than they are and inevitably fall short of their dreams. For an alternative, Gray splices together the Taoist te, “the way or nature of things,” and Baruch Spinoza’s conatus, “the tendency of living things to preserve and enhance their activity in the world.” Instead of pursuing some exalted vision of the good life, Taoist-Spinozists will live in whatever way they find fulfilling, obeying their inclinations without interrogating them much, if at all. Gray dubs this “a kind of selfless egoism.” Cats, of course, exemplify it.
At the end of the book Gray offers ten “hints as to how to live less awkwardly” by living more like cats. Some are humorous (“sleep for the joy of sleeping”), some fit Gray’s lifelong preoccupations (“never try to persuade human beings to be reasonable”), and others are reminiscent of Zen koans (“forget about pursuing happiness, and you may find it”). Those who cannot live like Taoist-Spinozist cats, Gray advises, should find contemplation and consolation in “an old-fashioned religion, preferably one that abounds in rituals.” Those who can’t manage that either should distract themselves with “the excitement and disappointments of romantic love, the pursuit of money and ambition, [and] the charades of politics.” It will all be over soon enough.
In an ending that recalls Straw Dogs,Gray concludes with Mèo, a cat who accompanied the American journalist John Lawrence through the Vietnam War. Mèo had lived through his share of suffering and danger, but accepted the world as he found it. “He did not search for meaning in the world,” Gray writes of Mèo. “Perched precariously” on a window ledge, “simply to look was enough.”
But what does one see when looking at cats? Gray insists that cats are not “cruel,” because cruelty requires “empathy in a negative form.” Be that as it may, they are still murderous, perhaps only second behind homo rapiens. I have loved many cats in my life, but love has not blinded me to their natures.
3. Little Purring Genocidal Killers
Surely, Sophiya, you remember our childhood cat Hermes. One afternoon when I was reading on the couch you suddenly started screaming, so I ran into the kitchen to see what was wrong, and there was Hermes parading through the back yard with the severed head of a rabbit hanging from his jaws. He stopped and turned his head to look at us, as if to say, “What? This is what I am.”
Hermes rid our backyard of any bird or mammal smaller than a woodchuck. Nor was he exceptional. My current cat Phineas reminds me of Hermes, in fact he is if anything worse. Phiny is positively genocidal.
I do not use that word lightly. While living with me in Charlottesville, Phiny found a nest of voles in the woods behind my apartment, and every morning he would yowl by the window until I let him out, whereupon he marched up the hill and into the woods and lay in wait near the mouth of the nest for one of the voles to peek its little nose out into the sunlight.
One by one, he slaughtered them all. He also brought every one of their little heads back to the apartment (there were dozens), and unlike Gray’s philosopher, I noticed.
I was also trying to become a vegetarian—by reading. With his blunt-force utilitarianism, Peter Singer had convinced me long ago that eating meat was wrong: suffering is bad, animals suffer as they become our food, ergo eating meat is bad. But I was still eating it.
More recently I had been reading and re-reading, almost obsessively, a strange essay by the philosopher Cora Diamond, “Eating Meat and Eating People.” More like Gray than Singer, she was interested in how one might come to care about animal suffering in the first place. She quoted a poem by Walter de la Mare, who won “happy company” by feeding a bird and recognizing their commonality before the bird flew away:
This tiny son of life; this spright,
By momentary Human sought,
Plume will his wing in the dappling light,
Clash timbrel shrill and gay—
And into Time’s enormous Nought,
Sweet-fed will flit away.
The important thing to see, says Diamond, is that the poet is not appealing to a biological similarity (susceptibility to physical pain, say) but rather offering “an extension of a non-biological notion of what human life is.”[4] Both are the poet and the bird are sons of life, “which means being in a certain boat, as it were, of whom it makes sense to say … that [the bird] goes off into Time’s enormous Nought, and which may be sought as company.” Sympathy, pity, fellow feeling—none of these are given in biological facts, nor are they entirely matters of reason. They must be seen, recognized, felt, perhaps even cultivated as a daily moral habit until they become second nature.
I liked to read out on my front deck. My company as I read was a little mole who lived somewhere underneath the porch. Usually he stayed out of sight, but I also lured him out with bits of cornbread and, if I were lucky, I would catch him in the act of peering over the edge, whiskers and nose waving in expectation, reaching out with his paws, and then disappearing with his treat. I would go back to reading happy, feeling I had done well by a fellow mortal.
What happened to the mole next will surprise no one. My wife walked into our bedroom one night and informed me, “Phineas killed the mole.” I started sobbing. (I had spent the entire afternoon at the Charlottesville Craft Beer festival, Sophiya, so my emotional defense shields were low.) My wife tried to reason with me. “It’s in his nature, Paul, he can’t help it.”
“But I can!” I blubbered back. “I can!”
What’s more, I did. The next morning, I announced that I wasn’t going to eat meat any more, and with the exception of an occasional fish for my health, I haven’t.
4. Homo Misericordiae
This story, though admittedly silly, opens up onto both the strengths and weaknesses of Feline Philosophy, and its author.
Gray is probably right that “the flaw in rationalism is the belief that human beings can live by applying a theory.” That usually isn’t sufficient. For me, and I think this is true of many others, rational argument wasn’t enough to make me a vegetarian; I needed the kind of moral conversion Gray is usually trying to bring about. I needed to see animals, and myself, in a new way.
But that didn’t happen just by following my te, which I suspect is naturally carnivorous. Instead, I had to recognize that something I found fulfilling (and deliciously filling) had consequences almost too horrible to imagine. Gray never seems to consider that seeing things for what they are may not be the final step. What you see may make you want to change yourself.
And even if rational thinking is insufficient for personal moral transformation, it does not follow that it is therefore unnecessary or unwise. Unlike cats, who really do just need to follow their instincts, the human animal—even if it cannot be anything it likes—can live in so many different ways, hence its anxiety. To decide which way to live, even to follow your conatus or te, you will probably need to think about it, distinguish deeper inclinations from ephemeral desires. Reaching Gray’s conclusions, let alone following a rigorous program like the Taoist te, would require an examined life.
Once one sees rightly, one also might want to change the world. Again, I suspect Gray is right to say that reason does not move history. Yet even Gray, who normally scoffs at the idea of moral progress, must admit that “the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century was a genuine gain.”[5] Abolition was rationally defensible, of course, but I don’t think it succeeded because nice liberal people made convincing arguments that compelled their fellow citizens to agree with them. I think it succeeded because abolitionists fought and died for it. If so, then banding together with people who have the same vision of the future that you do isn’t necessarily a fool’s errand.
Here Gray sometimes retreats to the position that he isn’t saying there’s no such thing as moral progress, only no permanent moral progress. That strikes me as trivial. And furthermore, it also might lead to the exact opposite conclusion than the one he draws. If the world is indeed changeable, then it’s more important than ever for those who see the same things to band together, look forward to the day that homo rapiens might finally show mercy, might finally become humane.
Paul
[1] John Gray. “A Conservative Disposition.” Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings. Penguin Books, Ltd, pp. 133.
[2] John Gray. “Introduction.” Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings. Penguin Books, Ltd, pp. 17.
[3] John Gray. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 199.
[4] Cora Diamond. “Eating Meat and Eating People.” The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind. MIT Press, pp. 329.
[5] “Introduction.” Gray’s Anatomy, pp 10.