THE GUARDIAN, 25 October 2020
By Tim Adams
Whatâs it like to be a cat? John Gray has spent a lifetime half-wondering. The philosopher â to his many fans the intellectual catâs pyjamas, to his critics the least palatable of furballs â has had feline companions at home since he was a boy in South Shields. In adult life â he now lives in Bath with his wife Mieko, a dealer in Japanese antiquities â this has principally been two pairs of cats: âTwo Burmese sisters, Sophie and Sarah, and two Birman brothers, Jamie and Julian.â The last of them, Julian, died earlier this year, aged 23. Gray, currently catless, 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.
Other philosophers have been enthralled by cats over the years. There was Schrödinger and his box, of course. And Michel de Montaigne, who famously asked: âWhen I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?â The rationalist RenĂ© Descartes, Gray notes, once âhurled 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.â
One impulse for this book was a conversation with a fellow philosopher, who assured Gray that he âhad taught his cat to be veganâ. (Gray had only one question: âDid the cat ever go out?â It did.) When he informed another philosopher that he was writing about what we can learn from cats, that man replied: âBut cats have no history.â âAnd,â Gray wondered, âis that necessarily a disadvantage?â
Elsewhere, Gray has written how Ludwig Wittgenstein once observed âif lions could talk we would not understandâ, to which the zookeeper John Aspinall responded: âHe hasnât spent long enough with lions.â If cats could talk, I ask Gray, do you think we would understand?
âWell, the book is in some ways an experiment in that respect,â he says. âOf course, itâs not a scientific inquiry. But if you live with a cat very closely for a long time â and it takes a long time, because theyâre slow to trust, slow to really enter into communication with you â then you can probably imagine how they might philosophise.â
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, wouldnât recognise that need because they naturally revert to equilibrium whenever theyâre not hungry or threatened. If cats were to give advice, it would be for their own amusement… [+]