The cat forgets the vet by morning; we spend years asking what the diagnosis meant.
Most of us assume that thinking about life is how we get better at living it. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, and a great deal of philosophy, religion, therapy and self-help rests on the same hope: if we understand our situation well enough, we will stop suffering from it. Yet anyone who has lived with a cat has watched an animal with no philosophy at all spend most of its day in a state that humans pursue through all of those disciplines and seldom reach. Montaigne, who spent his later years examining his own life on paper, noticed the oddity. Playing with his cat, he wondered whether she was not amusing herself with him more than he was with her.
John Gray’s Feline Philosophy takes the puzzle seriously. If reflection were the road to contentment, the most reflective animal ought to be the most content, and it plainly is not. Gray’s answer is that philosophy does not cure human restlessness so much as express it. 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. The human animal never ceases striving to be something it is not, and the source of that striving, and of philosophy with it, is anxiety. Cats do not suffer from anxiety unless they are threatened or find themselves in a strange place.
The cat after the vet
That qualification about threats and strange places is worth taking literally, because it shows what kind of animal the cat is. Take a cat to the vet. It howls in the carrier, flattens itself on the examining table, and hides under the bed once it gets home. The fear is real and intense. But by evening, or the next morning, it is asleep in a patch of sun by the window as if nothing had happened. When the threat has gone, the cat goes back to contentment, because contentment is the state to which it returns when nothing is wrong.
Humans run the same sequence differently. After a frightening diagnosis, the fear does not end when the appointment does. We go on asking what it means, whether we brought it on ourselves, what it says about how we have lived, and how the story of our life will end now. Much of human life is a struggle for happiness; for a cat, happiness is the baseline that practical threats interrupt.
The difference is not intelligence. Gray locates it in self-consciousness. Humans turn their lives into stories, fear the endings of those stories, and need philosophy to cope with the anxiety that the stories produce. Cats construct no such stories, so the cat at the vet has nothing to carry home except the memory of a bad afternoon, and the memory fades.
Philosophy as a symptom
Seen this way, philosophy testifies to the frailty of the human mind. Humans philosophize for the same reason they pray: they know the meaning they have fashioned is fragile and live in dread of its breaking down. Death is the ultimate breakdown, since it marks the end of any story they have told themselves. So philosophy, posing as a cure, is a symptom of the disorder it pretends to remedy.
The ancient schools would reply that they understood the problem perfectly well. Stoicism, Epicureanism and Skepticism all had tranquility as their goal. But Gray thinks Montaigne had seen their common failing: each imagines that life can be ordered by human reason, either by devising a way of life secure from loss or by controlling the emotions so that they withstand any loss. In fact neither can be controlled this way, because our lives are shaped by chance and our emotions by the body.
The attempt has a cost, and here Gray turns Socrates around: the examined life may not be worth living. Self-consciousness has divided the human mind in an unceasing attempt to force painful experiences into a sealed-off part of awareness, and suppressed pain festers in questions about the meaning of life. The feline mind, in contrast, is one and undivided. Pain is suffered and forgotten, and the joy of life returns, which is exactly what happened under the bed after the vet.
The same absence of a self-image explains why cats can be independent without becoming defensive. Gray calls them selfless egoists: they care only for themselves and those they love, but they have no image of themselves they seek to preserve and augment. Neediness requires a self-image that depends on external validation, and a human who gets free of it usually does so by building enough internal security to stop caring how others see them. Cats skip the whole effort. If they do not enjoy your company, they leave; if they stay, it is because they want to be with you.
What a human can take from a cat
Read quickly, the book can sound like advice to be simpler, or like anti-intellectual nihilism dressed up as wisdom. Neither reading fits. Gray does not think humans can become cats; self-consciousness cannot be unlearned, and an attempt to imitate feline ease would become one more project of the anxious mind. The cat serves instead as a mirror for a specific human dysfunction: the belief that life must be justified by a story, a meaning, or a philosophy in order to be good. The cat does not prove that meaning is worthless. It shows that the frantic pursuit of meaning is often the thing preventing the contentment it promises to deliver. If you crave tranquility, you will be forever in turmoil.
What Gray offers in place of a doctrine is contemplation. Eternity, in his sense, is not another order of things but the world seen without anxiety, and seeing things without wanting to change them gives a glimpse of it. For humans, contemplation is a break from living. For cats, it is the sensation of life itself. The cat asleep in the sun the morning after the vet is not recovering from anything or making sense of anything; it is simply back. Cats do not miss the lives they have not lived, and that may be the deepest thing they have to teach an animal that spends so much of its own life missing them.
References:
- John Gray, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life