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Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life
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31/99
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26/99
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85/99
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About This Book
The author of Straw Dogs , famous for his provocative critiques of scientific hubris and the delusions of progress and humanism, turns his attention to cats — and what they reveal about humans' torturous relationship to the world and to themselves. The history of philosophy has been a predictably tragic or comical succession of palliatives for human disquiet. Thinkers from Spinoza to Berdyaev have pursued the perennial questions of how to be happy, how to be good, how to be loved, and how to live in a world of change and loss. But perhaps we can learn more from cats--the animal that has most captured our imagination--than from the great thinkers of the world. In Feline Philosophy , the philosopher John Gray discovers in cats a way of living that is unburdened by anxiety and self-consciousness, showing how they embody answers to the big questions of love and attachment, mortality, morality, and the Montaigne's house cat, whose un-examined life may have been the one worth living; Meo, the Vietnam War survivor with an unshakable capacity for "fearless joy"; and Colette's Saha, the feline heroine of her subversive short story "The Cat" , a parable about the pitfalls of human jealousy. Exploring the nature of cats, and what we can learn from it, Gray offers a profound, thought-provoking meditation on the follies of human exceptionalism and our fundamentally vulnerable and lonely condition. He charts a path toward a life without illusions and delusions, revealing how we can endure both crisis and transformation, and adapt to a changed scene, as cats have always done.
Reviews
"And you know Gray: whenever he sees someone clinging to an illusion he goes and stamps on their fingers ..."
"It is difficult to speak about the myth of human progress ..."
"this intermittently witty and intriguing work likely won't be enough to keep cat-loving readers from prowling elsewhere for more satisfying insight into their four-legged companions."
"The heat-seeking aphorisms that characterize his best work are also in evidence ..."
"Lots of endnotes for further discovery."
"What I found missing from Gray's argument was reflection on the possibility that self-consciousness, which causes so much misery, also gives rise to what is most beautiful and exciting in human life: art, science, sport, conversation and so on."
"The paradoxes are only part of the fun."
"His literary treatments are appropriately fleet-footed; he hops from text to text, never alighting on any one for very long ..."
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