Can Philosophers learn from our feline friends

John Gray’s Feline Philosophy,  is a collection of quotes from great thinkers about their furry companions.

`Gray agrees with honourable tradition of philosophers  who are paradoxically suspicious of philosophical thoughts.

Some consider philosophy is a symptom of mental disorder. The best philosophy is one that cures itself, leaving nothing to philosophise about and the world was exactly as it did before philosophical illness took hold.

According to Wittgenstein philosophy is a ladder we throw away once we have climbed it.

As cats are not self conscious in the way people are, they do not fall into philosophical distress. Cats are engaged in their lives completely without forming an image of themselves. But Humans are doomed by self-consciousness  to be “self divided creatures  whose lives are spent mostly in displacement activity>” Our normal animal sufferings  are doubled when we concoct ourselves in the mirror. Cats accepts life as it comes, and walk past mirrors with indifference.

A cat’s life is good, when it realises its cat-nature: hunting, sleeping and amusing itself with its companions. Gary claims the feline good life to the ethics of Spinoza, and the Taoists, which call for us to live in harmony with out true natures and the state in which self conscious self falls away.

The self-awareness and rationality are the cause of all the trouble striving after universal ideals, most of them dressed versions of Christian morality.

The simplicity and directness of feline love and the human version which is frequently tainted with toxic egotism.

“Among human beings love and hate are often mixed. We may love others deeply and at the same time resent them.. the love animals may feel for us  and we for them is not warped in these ways”.

There is no real evidence that humans ever “domesticated” cats but in fact the cat saw the potential value to themselves of humans. Feline philosophy draws on centuries of philosophy from Montaigine to ‘Schopenhauer  to explore the complex and intimate links that have defined how we react to and behave with this most unlikely pet. In the essential loneliness of our position in the world John Gray gives us a sense of our own animal nature.

Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life by John Gray, Allen Lane, £20, 128 pages.