Feline Philosophy by John Gray

Author:John Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Wienpahl goes on to observe that a central notion in Zen is the nothingness of the self. The Zen school emerged in China as a result of an interaction between Buddhism and Taoism, and the insight that human selfhood is illusory is common to both of them.

Another scholar who recognized an affinity between Spinozist and Taoist ethics was the Norwegian Jon Wetlesen. In The Sage and the Way: Spinoza’s Ethics of Freedom, Wetlesen writes that Taoism ‘does not aim at becoming what one is not, but in being what one is. This does not require any special doings on the part of the temporal ego, but rather an undoing of the ego.’23 He finds the same distinction between the ego and the true nature of the individual in Spinoza.

An ethics in which you realize your individual nature differs from any idea of self-creation. The self with which humans identify is a construction of society and memory. Forming an image of themselves in infancy and childhood, they seek happiness by preserving and strengthening that self-image. But the image they have of themselves is not the reality of their bodies or their lives, and chasing after it can lead not to fulfilment but to self-frustration.

Other animals do not share their lives with any such phantom. Most lack any image of themselves. Self-preservation for them means not the continued existence of an imagined self but the ongoing vitality of the body. They are not shadowy selves examining their thoughts and impulses as if they belonged to some other being. When they act, it is without the human sense that it is a separate entity in themselves – a mind, a self – that is acting.

In their lack of a deceptive self-image, cats are exemplary. They are not among the select group that has passed the Mirror Self-Recognition (MSR) test developed in 1970 by the American psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. The test requires that the animal be given some physical mark, often a dot of colour, on a part of the body that is only visible in a mirror. If the animal tries to touch the part of their body that displays the colour, they are deemed to have shown self-awareness. Humans, chimps, bonobos and gorillas passed the test, along with cetaceans such as dolphins and orca whales, and some birds such as the magpie. Other corvids, pigs and macaques have demonstrated partial self-awareness in the test.

Cats respond to their own reflection with indifference, or else react to it as if it were another cat. Some cats have been reported as being distressed when humans laugh at them, and some breeds – Siamese, for example – are reputed to be vain. But rather than being upset at how they are perceived, these cats may be interpreting the human response to them as hostile or dangerous. Again, cats may be coquettish or menacing in the company of other cats, but they are not burnishing an image they have made of themselves. They are projecting an image of themselves to other cats for the sake of courting a mate or protecting their territory.

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