By Sean Illing
Humans might be the smartest animal on this planet, but are we the
wisest?
Wisdom, after all, isn’t really about knowledge. Humans are the
only creature on earth capable of building a rocket ship or developing a
vaccine. That makes us intelligent, not wise.
To say that someone is wise is to say they understand something
about how to live. For instance, I know I’m being an asshole when I wake up
grumpy and act impatiently with my wife and son. But often I still behave like
a grumpy asshole. My problem isn’t a lack of knowledge so much as a lack of
wisdom. I simply can’t take my own advice.
A new book by the esteemed British philosopher John Gray, called
Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life, offers a somewhat provocative
suggestion: If we’re looking for models of wisdom, we should look at cats.
According to Gray, humans think too much. Indeed, we invented philosophy in
order to divert ourselves from the anxieties created by our overactive minds.
Cats, on other hand, have nothing to learn from philosophy because
they have no need for diversion. They’re among the wisest animals because
they’re spontaneous and playful and content with whatever life presents them. And they’re too immersed in the present to worry about what might happen in
the future. Cats aren’t exactly unique in this regard (a fact Gray happily
admits), but they do seem to stand out.
I should say that Gray’s book is obviously not an empirical study,
and it’s not presented that way. It’s self-consciously light, and Gray
definitely projects some of his own beliefs onto cats. But the tongue-in-cheek tone makes the book all the more accessible.
If we accept the conceit of Gray’s book and just look at how cats
live, then maybe we can learn a thing or two. In that spirit, I reached out to
Gray to talk about why our feline friends are so much wiser than we are, and
why all animals, especially cats, may not be able to teach us how to think, but
they can absolutely teach us how to live.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
If cats could talk, what do you think they would tell us?
John Gray
I guess the first question is: If they could talk, would they find
us sufficiently interesting to talk with? I try to imagine in the book whether
cats would philosophize at all if they had the intellectual capacity to do it.
And if they did, I’m certain it would be for very different reasons than humans
philosophize.
Sean Illing
Why do humans philosophize?
John Gray
I think it’s a search for quietude, for a state of calm. And if
that’s the case, then you have to ask why humans have such a need for calm.
Humans are rather anxious and restless by nature. That’s what makes us so
different from cats, to get back to your original question. Unless cats are
hungry or mating or directly threatened, they default to a condition of rest or
contentment or tranquility — basically the opposite of humans.
So if cats could philosophize, my guess is they’d do it for their own amusement, not because of some deep need for peace. Philosophy is such a human thing because it comes from this anxious search for answers, for freedom from anxiety, and really freedom from our own nature. But of course that’s not achievable. If you yearn for tranquility, you’ll spend your life in turmoil because that’s not what life is like.
The ease with which cats live is such a lovely alternative to
humans in that sense. There’s a natural rhythm or flexibility to their
day-to-day life that’s rarely achieved by humans. We’re obviously very
different from cats, but I do think we can learn something about how to live
from them.
Sean Illing
I live with a cat and a dog, and the biggest
difference I notice is how manic the dog seems in comparison to the cat. The
cat is cool to the point of indifference, whereas the dog always seems to need
some kind of external stimulation. It’s so clear that dogs have become, well,
more human and the cats have remained cats.
John Gray
Exactly. Cats have remained non-human. They’re like aliens, in a
sense. They have a mind and they can get to know us, but they remain alien to
us. Of the four cats I had, one of them in particular was extraordinarily
subtle in her responses to me and my wife. She reacted differently to each of
us. But the cat never looks for validation from us, the way, say, dogs do. Cats
are living their own lives and that’s why they seem so indifferent to us.
Sean Illing
Do you think cats are capable of loving humans in the ways dogs
seem to be?
John Gray
I think they can come to love humans, but unlike us, they can love
humans without needing them. They come to love us in the sense of enjoying
our company. They may even delight in it and sometimes they’ll initiate games
and play and some kind of communication with us, but at bottom, they don’t
really need us and we know it. They can love us without needing us. That’s an
almost impossible contradiction for humans, I think.
Sean Illing
I want to go back to what I consider the
genius of cats, which is their imperviousness to boredom. Wherever they are,
whatever they’re doing, every moment is complete and perfect — or at least it
seems that way. Why can’t humans live like that? Why can’t we see the folly in
our anxiousness?
John Gray
That’s the big question, isn’t it? When humans
aren’t in immediate pain or experiencing immediate pleasure, we’re bored. If
not immediately, then soon. And all of our pleasures — sex, drinking, good
food, whatever — all become boring after a while. Why is that? When cats are
not immediately under some direct threat, they revert to being content. The
sensation of life itself is enough for them.
One of the thinkers I discuss in the book is
the French philosopher Pascal. He says a great deal of human activity is basically diversionary.
He says if you put human beings in a situation where they have nothing to do,
they’ll be intensely unhappy. They’ll do things like gamble or start wars or
really anything to escape the condition of inactivity. This is just a
fundamental fact about humans.
I know a few really rich people, people who don’t have to sweat to
keep their money. And they all know this about themselves. They know boredom is
a threat. One of them told me recently that the only way he can feel excitement
is gambling, because then he knows he can lose everything and that excitement
wakes him up from the lethargy of life. But this is a problem for basically everyone
who isn’t in desperate poverty or in desperate need.
Sean Illing
And where do you think this pathology comes from? Are we too self-aware to be happy?
John Gray
I think it comes from the shock of
self-consciousness and the revelation of mortality. If you don’t have an image
of your self, as I’m fairly sure cats don’t, then you won’t think of yourself
as a mortal, finite being. You may, at some point, sense something like death,
but it’s not a problem for you. When death happens for cats, they seem quite
ready for it. They certainly don’t waste their lives worrying about death.
Sean Illing
Other animals fear death, but worry is a very different thing. You fear what’s right in front of you. But worry is an act of imagination, something you can only do if you’re anxious about the future.
John Gray
Yeah, and I think there’s something uniquely
human about anxiety over death and constantly thinking of ourselves as mortal.
This is where our incessant need for storytelling comes from. If you sit around
considering your own mortality, you’ll be driven to invent stories about an
afterlife so that the stories you fashion for yourself can carry on after
death. This is what religions have done. And it’s what so-called transhumanists
do today. They imagine all these technological solutions to death and they hope
that our minds will persist after our bodies fade away.
Cats have no need for these games. They don’t
have this problem because they don’t have the concept of death. They die, of course,
but they don’t fret over the idea of death. This need to divert ourselves is
deeply human. So at the end of the book, when I give my 10 feline tips for
living, I just say that if you can’t live as freely as cats, and most of us
can’t, then by all means return to the human world of diversion without regret
and stay in it. Take up politics. Fall in love. Gamble. Do all the things
humans do and don’t regret it.
And you know, maybe that’s what a cat would say if it could
philosophize. It would say, “Don’t struggle to be wise because it doesn’t lead
anywhere.” Just take life as it comes and enjoy the sensations of life as cats
too. And if that’s too austere for you, then you can always immerse yourself in
the human world of illusion and distraction.
Sean Illing
In defense of humans, I’ll concede that we’re awkward and anxious
and self-pitying and all those things, but we also have the capacity for
transcendent love and art and spirituality, and none of those things are
available to cats. So maybe the benefits of thinking outweigh the costs?
John Gray
That’s true, and I do think that all the troubles of being human
are worth the price. But I’d also say that we should look around the world of
nature and study how other creatures live and maybe incorporate the lessons
into our own lives. There are, after all, lots of ways to live, lots of ways to
be human. Cats, like other animals, are wise in all kinds of ways, and it’s
worth reflecting on that and it’s worth pushing back on the Western idea that
the good life is really the intellectual life. That’s such an impoverished view
of the good life, and I find it easier to see that through the eyes of a cat.
Sean Illing
If you had to distill the best of feline
philosophy in a single commandment, what would it be?
John Gray
Live for the sensation of life, not for the story you tell about
your life. But never take anything, including that commandment, too seriously.
That’s the great lesson from our feline friends. No animal is more
spontaneously playful than cats. Which is why, if they could philosophize, it
would be for fun.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21536524/cats-dogs-feline-philosophy-john-gray
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