Ideas - Feline Philosophy: What We Can Learn From Cats

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

Unlike humans, cats aren't burdened with questions of love, death and the meaning of life. They have no need for philosophy at all. English philosopher John Gray explores this "unexamined" way of being in his book, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life. *This episode originally aired on May 6, 2021.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Cats have no need of philosophy. I'm Nala Ayed, and this is Ideas.

Obeying their nature, they're content with the life it gives them. That must be nice. with the life it gives them. That must be nice. In humans, on the other hand, discontent with their nature seems to be natural. With predictably tragic and farcical results, the human animal never ceases striving to be something that it is not.

Cats make no such effort. John Gray is a British philosopher who argues that when it comes to living the good life, cats can teach us way more than philosophy ever could or can. Posing as a cure, philosophy is a symptom of the disorder it pretends to remedy. Other animals do not need to divert themselves from their condition. Whereas happiness in humans is an artificial state, for cats it is their natural condition. Cats are happy being themselves, while humans try to be happy by escaping themselves. This episode features my conversation with John Gray about his book, whose title says it all,

Feline Philosophy, Cats and the Meaning of Life. Philosophy is a symptom, and I'm quoting here, philosophy is a symptom of the disorder it pretends to remedy. Who else but a philosopher would say something like that? Well, what I mean by that is if you go back to the origins of Western philosophy in Greece and Rome, and I think the same thing applies to some other traditions of philosophy beyond the West, you find that the three ancient schools of philosophy in the West, you find that the three ancient schools of philosophy in the West, the skeptics, the Epicureans, and the Stoics, all actually explicitly said that the goal of philosophy was relief from anxiety. The goal of philosophy was a condition

they called ataraxia or unshakable tranquility, unshakable equilibrium within oneself. That was the goal. So they explicitly identified the goal of philosophy many times as being a state of mind, a particular kind of state of mind characterized by calmness, by tranquility, which no event in life could shake. And that's what I mean by saying that philosophy is symptomatic. It's a symptom of the condition that it aims to cure. And I guess one of the arguments of the book, which was shared by the great early modern

philosopher Michel de Montaigne, is that philosophy has never achieved this and can't achieve it because human restlessness, human anxiety is too deep-seated and mere argumentation, mere reasoning can't really get human beings out of that condition. So it's a failed attempt to overcome the condition that it tries to cure. That's what I meant by that. Okay. Let us speak of this disorder or this condition that you're talking about. What disorder do you think philosophy is trying to remedy exactly? Well, essentially the discomfort of human beings at being in the world, and especially the discomfort that they feel when they confront the knowledge which comes to them in the course of their lives that they're going to die. It does seem that some other animals have an instinctive

sense that something can happen to other members of their species whereby their life ends. Elephants gather around other elephants when other elephants have died. But as far as we know, only humans have the current or continuing sense of mortality. That's to say that they themselves are going to die, which for some people, perhaps many people, is worse than the knowledge that they're going to die. The knowledge that those they love are going to die. For many, bereavement is a worse experience than knowing that they're going to die even quite soon. So these apparently unique features of the human animal, I think, have generated a unique

and peculiar sense of discomfort or disquiet about the abiding disquiet of being in the world. All the other species that lack this abiding disquiet at being in the world don't develop philosophies and don't develop religions. Now, of course, one can imagine a rationalistic philosopher saying, aha, but that's because they haven't got the intellectual capacities for abstract thought to have philosophies or religions. And so in part of the book, I kind of play with the idea of if there could be a cat or a cat-like species which had these capacities, what would a philosophy produced by a cat be like? Now, cats, as I've said, don't need philosophy. So if they did it, they would do it playfully, not because they needed it. They would do it as an entertainment to themselves or others.

So is it fair to say that what you're engaging in here, as you say, is not a scientific experiment, but a thought experiment? Yes, yes, that's absolutely right. So if you cast your mind back before you started the book, when did the moment occur when you knew you absolutely had to write a book about feline philosophy? About 30 or 40 years ago. Wow, that long, wow. Well, we've kept cats for over 30 years. I've always loved cats. And one of the reasons I discovered that I loved cats was not that they were very similar

to human beings, but that they're rather different from them. And they're very different in this respect, which is that unless they somehow sense they're coming very close to death, which I think cats do, actually, having observed them. But for being very close means within days or within a very short period of time. They never think of it. They're never bothered. It never occurs to them.

And that's partly because they don't have an image of themselves as passing through time, passing through mortality to death in the way that humans do. And so I've always wanted to write about it, but I never got around to it until a couple of years ago, writing about other things. And when I got the chance, when I'd written on politics and religion and a number of other, the history of ideas, I thought, now I can do it. So I did it then. Yeah. It's obviously a great deal of reflection, as you say, decades worth of observing cats. What is your cat relationship status at the moment? Well, we had four cats and the last of the cats we had passed away, not this Christmas,

that's just gone, but just before the previous Christmas. I'm so sorry. Well, he had a very happy life. And an important fact is he was nearly 23 years old, which is a great age for a cat. And his life, as far as anything we could see, was a very happy life. And only towards the very end of it, I mean, weeks, did he show sudden deterioration and had to be euthanized. And that, although a sad experience, was also a happy one because he went very peacefully. He died with the peacefulness and grace that he lived with because he was a very, of all the four cats we'd lived with over the last 30 years, he was perhaps the most sweet-natured and the most tranquil. But the tranquility he had was not like human tranquility, one produced by

philosophy, of course. It was his default condition. He was like that nearly all of the time. A few philosophers have recognized that something can be learned from cats. The 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer is famous for his love of poodles, a succession of which he kept throughout his later years, calling all of them by the same names, Atma and Butz. He also had at least one feline companion. When he died of heart failure in 1860, he was found at home on his couch beside an unnamed cat. Schopenhauer used his pets to support his theory that selfhood is an illusion. Kronhauer used his pets to support his theory that selfhood is an illusion. Humans can't help thinking of cats as separate individuals like themselves, but this is an error, he believed, since both are instances of a platonic form, an archetype that recurs in many different instances.

Ultimately, each of these seeming individuals is an ephemeral embodiment of something more fundamental, the undying will to live, which, according to Schopenhauer, is the only thing that really exists. A better understanding of cats and of the limits of philosophy was shown by Michel de Montaigne, who wrote, When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me, rather than I with her? Montaigne is often described as one of the founders of modern humanism, a current of thought that aims to leave any idea of God behind. In fact, aims to leave any idea of God behind. In fact, he was as sceptical of humankind as he was about God.

Man is the most blighted and frail of all creatures, he wrote, and moreover, the most given to pride. Scanning through past philosophies, he found none that could replace the knowledge of how to live that animals possess by nature. They may reckon us to be brute beasts for the same reason that we reckon them to be so. Other animals were superior to humans in possessing an innate understanding of how to live. From Schrodinger to Montagna, and even to you, John, I have to ask, what is it with you philosophers and cats? Well, there aren't that many philosophers, actually, who've written about their experience with cats. I think writers are very commonly attracted to cats. Patricia Highsmith, American writer of thrillers and of a particular kind, I think they're profound psychological studies as well, who invented Mr. Ripley and wrote most of her

books in Europe. She loved cats. I think more than practically any of the human beings she interacted with, with whom she seems to have been mostly unhappy. But when she writes about what cats give her, she says they give her a kind of non-intrusive companionship while she's writing. What she doesn't want then is for her thinking and feeling of the moment to be interrupted by anyone else. But cats don't interrupt it. They're just a kind of, they can be a kind of background calming presence. And that's what a lot of writers, Hemingway, have actually said. Or they can be positively inspiring. One cat in particular, a little tiny one-eyed cat, who shared his life with Mary Gateshills,

the American author, only for about a year, I think, or even less. They can be positively inspiring. I quote practically, I think I quote four philosophers, but that's about all of the ones that I could find who were positively inspired by Katz. And I think that is in itself a kind of symptom of some of the disorder of philosophy, because philosophers have written nearly always and nearly always exclusively. This is a bit different in China, by the way, in Taoism and others, but Western philosophers, at any rate, have written almost exclusively of the human world, of other humans, of humans themselves. And whereas it's not absolutely strictly true, because Aristotle, as I mentioned, is not absolutely strictly true because Aristotle,

as I mentioned, is not a philosopher I particularly like, but he wrote of the good life in dolphins long before ideas of animal rights. He studied dolphins at first hand. He had first-hand observation of them and wrote about how they had virtues and a kind of ethics of their own and so on, and a dolphin good. But on the whole, most Western philosophers have been very anthropocentric. And I argue in the book, I mean this again is a thought experiment rather than a kind of theory of some kind, that this is partly the influence of religion because Western theism, more than other religions, is more human-centered. God is an infinite person, a human person without any of the

faults of humans, whereas in other traditions there are many gods who may or may not be very human, or that God can be considered wholly impersonal as in some kinds of the divine or the ultimate reality of things. It can be entirely impersonal as it is in many forms of Buddhism and Hinduism. So I think Western philosophers don't write much about cats, but they don't write much about other animals either. I mean, the really great books on life with other animals, G.R. Ackley's book about his relations with his dog. Again, it's writers, not philosophers. So I think it's a gap in philosophy.

When you've played with your own cats, do you wonder the same thing that he wondered, Montaigne wondered, whether you're playing with them or they're playing with you? Absolutely. And it feels when you play with a cat that they are playing with you, because for one thing, they'll only play with you if they want to play with you. It's very true. One of the concepts that comes up in your book is the idea of adaraxia. Can you just give us a brief sense of what exactly adaraxia is? idea of adaraxia. Can you just give us a brief sense of what exactly adaraxia is?

In the ancient Greeks and in other ancient philosophers in the West, adaraxia meant a condition of unshakable calmness or tranquility or equanimity that couldn't be disturbed by events in the world. So even if you were being attacked, even if your life was at risk, even if you lost your home or your loved ones in a war, or some said, even if you were being tortured, you would still be calm. I think a modern philosopher said, well, if you can be calm during torture, either you have an enormous capacity for anorexia, or you have a very incompetent torturer. I think it's very implausible. But that was the idea that one could, in a sense, fortify the human mind against fear and anxiety about what could happen in the life of the person who is looking for ataraxia, to the point at which they would be calm in any circumstance that could occur to them. And there's sort of something in it. I mean,

if you go back to philosophers who practiced it, it looks as if some of the ancient Epicureans and the ancient Stoics were very calm when they came to death. Epicurus was said to have been ill for a long time, but he was calm when he came close to death. Some committed suicide, which didn't in the ancient world signify despair or the way it later did. It signified the belief that the point of life, the purpose of life, the pleasure of life had gone, so one could end life at that point without any shame or despair and so on. But my argument in the book is that it's in a way, it's an illusion because, as I said, a bite by a tsetse fly can give you malaria, and then the mind will be shaken by delirium and lose its balance.

It may recover it later, but not because of philosophical reasoning. It'll recover it later if it does as a result of the natural healing powers of the body. But that was the dataraxia, was inner calmness unshakable by anything that could happen to you. As a way of living, ataraxia is an illusion. Even if ataraxia could be achieved, it would be a listless way to live. Luckily, deathly calm is not in practice a state that humans can maintain for very long. Why is it that we humans pursue the state of ataraxia so aggressively if it's never really successful? Because unlike other animals, especially cats, we never really enjoy this state of tranquility or ataraxia. I mean, it is a paradox, as you say, though, because if we could achieve ataraxia, it might be a rather spiritless way to live.

I mean, it might be a rather impoverished way to live. I remember Bertrand Russell, actually, the 20th century British philosopher who was also a great campaigner against war and for various causes such as sexual freedom and intellectual freedom and so on. He wrote somewhere, I can't remember the exact, he said he didn't actually share the ideal of equanimity or tranquility. He said because if you really shared it, you would have to harden your heart against love. If you loved another person and that person died, you wouldn't want to feel nothing. You would have to harden your heart against certain ideals you might have,

as I say, about fighting against oppression, as he did. He had these strong, passionate commitments. And if he hadn't had them, if he'd just been tranquil, or if he'd weakened them in order to become tranquil, he thought his life would be less worth living. And it would be a less interesting life for him, and perhaps for other people as well. So, I mean, that's a kind of example. There seems a very strong tendency in, or need almost, a trait in human beings to want this condition. And yet, as I say, if one thinks about it carefully, what it would be like, it might not be as interesting or satisfying a way to live as is imagined. It might be better to accept turmoil, the natural turmoil of life that comes just by living without any philosophy of this kind, rather than seeking to eliminate all turmoil.

Here's a genuine story from a Japanese Zen master in Japan who acquired a disciple who was an American. And the American came to the and stayed in the monastery, I think for 15 years and sat, did sitting meditation for 15 years and saw the master infrequently every few weeks or months. And after 15 years, went to the master and was asked, the master said, well, how are you? And the disciple said, well, I think I'm doing well now because there's a little tiny part of me that I've created, which is always at peace. And the Zen master said, good, good, he said. If you can destroy that little tiny part, you'll begin to progress. In other words, all that sitting, it was in one sense a waste of time, because he tried to build peace in himself to escape turmoil, but it created a second order

layer of turmoil all along. And if the suggestion, at least I interpret what was said, the suggestion was if the disciple could give up and just sit, this was sitting meditation, instead of sitting in order to be peaceful, could just sit, then that would be a real advance in meditation. I think that's a rather, puts better than I put it myself, what I have in mind here about the self-defeatingness or the paradoxical character of ataraxia, which you've referred to in your question. Montaigne and Pascal accept that philosophy cannot divert the human animal from its misery. They differ in their view of what this misery signifies. Whereas Montaigne thinks other animals are superior

to humans in some ways, Pascal regards human misery as a sign that humans are superior to all other animals. Man's greatness comes from knowing he is wretched. A tree does not know it is wretched. Thus it is wretched to know that one is wretched, but there is greatness in knowing one is wretched. It is the wretchedness of a great lord, the wretchedness of a dispossessed king. Where Montaigne turns to nature, Pascal turns to God. Pascal turns to God. Diversion is a response to the defining feature of the human animal, the fear of death that comes with self-awareness. Along with some other animals, elephants may recognize something like death when it happens to other members of their species. But only humans know the day will come when they themselves will die. Our image of ourselves passing through time

comes with the realization that we will soon pass away. Much of our lives are spent running from our own shadow. own shadow. Much of our lives are spent running from our own shadow. You say that kind of critically as though we're hiding from something we can't escape. No, not necessarily. It's just a fact. At the end of the book, I say, assuming the voice, if you like, of a feline philosopher, I say, if you can't share the lucidity of cats, if you can't emulate, which I don't believe any human being can actually fully emulate the natural contentment or tranquility of cats, if you can't find a religion, preferably a religion with lots of rituals, because ultimately humans gain moments at least of tranquility from bodily movement, from practices, from religion, from rituals, among other things, rather than from just reading books or discussing philosophy or reasoning with themselves. to the life of diversion without regret. Re-immerse yourself in the world. Do all the things that Pascal frowns on very much. You shouldn't gamble because you're running away

from yourself. You shouldn't practice sports because that's the same thing. You shouldn't have romantic love because for Pascal, in his own actual life, the only good sort of life he thought was one involved in making contact with God. I guess that's the question is, you know, what is so wrong with the idea of just eat, drink, and be merry? Nothing, nothing in my view. But it doesn't seem to satisfy lots of people on the other hand. I mean, if you look at people who've had long lives, they quite often, if they live long enough, and they've either been disillusioned or disappointed in eating, drinking, and be merry, or have had more of it than they want, they do

seem to turn to other more what are commonly called spiritual pursuits. So there's nothing wrong with it at all, contrary to Pascal. I mean, I am guided here by, not by Pascal, as I say in the book, but by Montaigne, who himself suffered a dark period in his life when his closest male friend died. He was very unhappy. And what Montaigne says here, how he got out of it, which I think is very charming, he said he relied on nature to get him out of the sadness that he fell into then with a little bit of art. He said, I encourage myself to fall into then with a little bit of art. He said,

I encourage myself to fall into love with someone new. And so there was nothing wrong with him. I mean, romantic love for Pascal might be a kind of illusion, but he welcomed it as part of the pleasure in life. But at the same time, as I say, if eating, drinking, and being merry was enough for human beings, why are there so many religions and philosophies and therapies which actually human beings have invented in order to somehow find something beyond eating, drinking, and being merry? Of course, it needn't just be eating, drinking, and being merry. There are many, many other things. I mean, Pascal and actually the ancient Epicureans thought politics was a kind of diversion. They actually thought, which is very unusual thought now, they thought even the search for knowledge, science,

could be a diversion. And art, of course, could be a diversion. And that's why if you think, if there could be a world, there can't be. It's in a way an impossible thought experiment. But if there could be a world in which humans didn't divert themselves, there'd be no religion and no philosophy, but not only there'd be no science. Perhaps only that part of science which was strictly useful to living comfortably, there'd be no science as a heroic pursuit for knowledge. There might not be much art even, insofar as art has often served the human need to divert oneself. Thank you. ideas. You can also listen to our podcast on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nala Ayyad. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus, and being I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. And being I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. Only humans know a day will come when they themselves will die.

We know that we are the only ones who are preoccupied with our own mortality. But the question still kind of lingers when one reads a book like yours. What might cats know of their own mortality? No other animals, as far as I know, including cats, have developed death rituals. No other animals have buried their kin the way humans started to do, it seems, sometime in Neanderthal time. I remember the other side of cats is that they won't surrender to death from a predator just quietly. They'll fight to the very, very end to protect themselves or their kittens if they're

female cats. When they're sickening, they do seem towards the end to gain some sense. And then they accept that and as anyone who has had a cat might know, they tend to crawl to some quiet place, quiet shadowy place in a sense where they tend to crawl to some quiet place, a quiet shadowy place, in a sense, where they aim to die. I quote a passage from the South African and then British writer Doris Lessing, who kept a lot of cats, knew cats very well. One of her cats attempted to do that, and she prevented it and gave it care and brought it back to life. And it was bitterly resistant for a while, for a long while to this. But after a few months, seems to have forgotten that it wanted to die.

It was very happy, except when it was taken to the vet, when it remembered the time it wanted to die, perhaps. So I think the comparison is you can tell from the behavior of cats and other animals that they're not preoccupied with death the way we are. And then one can speculate, why is that? And my speculation is because they don't have a conception of self-image of themselves. They haven't developed it, which they want to preserve and extend and augment, which all human beings, they just haven't got it. And in the case of, we have some behavioral evidence, as I say, this is not a scientific

theory, but we know that they don't recognize themselves in mirrors the way some other animals do, or some people even think some birds do. They can recognize their names when humans call them out, but they often, in fact, mostly don't respond. They just don't. I mean, there's evidence that they do recognize the name. They do know they're being called to, but they just can't be bothered to respond. They're not interested. So they don't have this self-image that they want to preserve. Now, this is one of the, I just mentioned, important point. Some people have taken my book as an

argument that we should be like cats or become cats. The book is better described as an argument why we can't be like cats, but we can learn something from them. We're too different from cats to be able to become cats. That's why we love cats. Those people who love cats, I think most of them love cats because they're not like themselves as human beings. They're different from them. Plato misled Western philosophy when he represented knowing the good in terms of visual experience. We can look at something without touching it, but the good life is not like that.

We know it only by living it. If we think about it too much and turn it into a theory, it may dissolve and disappear. Contrary to Socrates, an examined life may not be worth living. Socrates, as you mentioned, is credited with that famous line that the unexamined life is not worth living. But you reject the idea. Why? Well, I became a philosopher, partly by chance, no doubt, because that's one of the subjects I studied at university. And I enjoyed doing that for a long time. But I must say, I've never really believed that philosophy could guide life the way that any philosophers have, the way that Socrates in the words that are attributed to Socrates, because we don't actually know, we don't actually have any really reliable records. but at least in the founding statement

of Western philosophy is that Socratic idea that the unexamined life is not worth living. It has the implication, which I find completely ridiculous, that unless you've examined your life, your life isn't worth it, which means that the lives of nearly all the human beings who've ever lived have been not worth living, which I don't think is true at all. It's an absurdity because most of the lives that are evidently very worth living, either to the people who live them or to others who benefit from them and observe them, are not associated with philosophical self-examination at all. But as a side question, just a brief one, isn't that conclusion that an unexamined life is worth living itself the result of examining

what actually makes a life worth living? Well, it's not actually a positive claim I'm making of a philosophical kind. It's an observation. From direct observation, we all know people. You do. Everyone knows people who live lives that are worth living for them and for others they interact with who have not and will not examine their lives philosophically.

It's just a direct observation. Why should I reject a direct observation? Or not just one direct observation, but countless direct observations that I can, for the sake of elevating the practice of philosophy to some supreme... It's like religion in this sense. And as you know, although I have deep respect for religions, I'm an atheist myself, I don't belong to any religion. It's like saying, as many religious people have done, unless you're a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Buddhist, or whatever, unless you're an ex, you can't live a good life. I just find that completely preposterous. We inherit the belief that morality, in highest form means altruism, that is,

selflessness or living for others. Empathy in this tradition is the heart of the good life. Cats, on the other hand, except where their kittens are concerned, show few signs of sharing the feelings of others. They may sense when their human companions are distressed and stay with them through a time of trouble. They may give succor to the sick and dying. But cats are not sacrificing themselves in any of these roles. Just by being there, they are giving human beings relief from sorrow. How do you know that cats aren't sacrificing themselves and comforting us humans? Because they don't have the idea of sacrifice. There's nothing to suggest in their lives that they have the human idea of sacrifice.

And there's nothing else except when a cat gives up its life, risks or gives up its life for its kittens. I mean, for one thing, I mean, cats don't have abstract ideas for which they're prepared to die. And they don't have the idea, for example, some would say this was a loss in them. They don't have the idea of improving the whole world, which humans often claim to do. So why are we so drawn to these creatures if we can't get the same kind of emotional payoff from having them around as you would with a dog, for example? Because they're different from us. Many human beings, perhaps all human beings or most human beings, and sometimes in their lives, many human beings want respite from or relief from their

normal human concern. So actually, in religion, for example, you'll find religions tend to involve a projection of a kind of perfect human being into the cosmos, into the world, particularly if they're theistic. But they also, in many religions, involve an idea of human beings, of gods, god or gods, being quite different from human beings. Human beings want both the world that they live in to be humanly habitable and to be like themselves, but they also want it to be very different from themselves. So they're not always caught up in their own, the circle of their own anxieties and their own preoccupations. So many human beings want to improve the world. Many human beings, sometimes the same human beings, get tired of attempting to do that

or come to believe it's not possible. And for that purpose, they like to be with and like the companionship of a creature that doesn't need the idea of world improvement to be happy. future that doesn't need the idea of world improvement to be happy. That's the key, I think, because what it is in many human beings, I think, is the idea of world improvement gives meaning to their lives, and without that, their lives, they sink into despair. Other animals, and in particular cats, don't need any such idea or any such practice or any idea of self-sacrifice

to have a happy life. As humans became more self-aware, the denial of death became more insistent. For the American cultural anthropologist and psychoanalytical theorist Ernest Becker, the human flight from death has been the driving force of civilization. Fear of death is also the source of the ego which humans build in order to shield themselves from helpless awareness of their passage through time to extinction. Of all the aspects of their condition from which humans strive to be diverted, death is the most threatening.

Most cannot bear the thought of their own non-existence, and the more they try to forget it, the more it obsesses them. Rituals may enable them to leave this pain behind, the more it obsesses them. Rituals may enable them to leave this pain behind because their practices engaging the entire organism are not only the mind. The way to escape anxiety is through what Becker calls the myth-ritual complex. May I ask you, what exactly is the myth-ritual complex? Becker, by the myth-ritual complex, he really means the whole complex of rituals and customs that go with not just religions in the formal sense, but the practices in which surround religion and in which religions are embedded in which for birth, for burial, for the crucial times in one's life growing to maturity.

All of the parts, the passages of a human life are, Becker says, in more traditional societies than modern ones, are surrounded by these myths and rituals, surrounded by a practical myth ritual complex which helps to give the lives of those who live in these practices, helps to give them meaning and to stave off fear of death. If he is right, and death actually drives all that we do, how self-aware do you think we are about that instinct? Like, do we know that as we go about our lives, that what we're doing is actually avoiding the possibility of death?

I think he isn't right about that. I think actually Becker exaggerated when he said that everything we do, the whole of human culture, is death denial. I think that's an exaggeration. But to the extent that it is true, I don't think it is commonly conscious at all. I mean, it probably wouldn't work well if it were conscious. I mean, you could say to yourself, I feel anxious about death, I think I'll join a religion. They're simply the naive adaptations of human beings to that here. Religions in this sense are very natural. The myth-ritual complex is very natural for human beings. They're natural adaptations that humans make to the anxiety that occurs to them about when they are more fully conscious that they will die. Human beings chase power in order to give themselves a sense of escaping death. And according to Becker, human evil comes from the same impulse. The practice of cruelty serves to keep any thought of dying at

bay. Sadism naturally absorbs the fear of death because, by actively manipulating and hating, we keep our organism absorbed in the outside world. This keeps self-reflection and the fear of death in a state of low tension. We feel we are masters over life and death when we hold the fate of others in our hands. As long as we continue shooting, we think more of killing than of being killed. As Becker points out, many modern ideologies have been immortality cults. Russian Bolshevism contained a powerful strand in which the conquest of mortality was the supreme goal of the revolution. And when Lenin was embalmed, the goal of some of those involved was to resurrect him when scientific advance had

developed the means to do so. The project of defeating death through science has been revived in the West, with the Director of Engineering at Google, Ray Kurzweil, emerging as a prominent proponent of technological immortality. If cruelty is one of the major ways we divert attention away from our own mortality, what do you think that says about our nature as humans? Becker argues that the exercise of power and even the exercise of cruelty is a displacement activity that humans adopt to assure themselves or to give themselves, if you like, the illusion, the living illusion

that they're not mortal because they then have power of life and death over other humans. Of course, there's no logic in that because they will die too, just as these other humans would have died even if they weren't killed by dictators or tyrants or sadists. But that's, Becker says, the way humans operate. Do you agree? Yes. I mean, it's obviously true to some extent.

Although I wouldn't say that that has necessarily been the dominant motive in dictators and tyrants throughout history. I mean, people who have been tyrannical and dictatorial in governments and other institutions for lots of reasons, sometimes for material gain, sometimes because they have a strong idea which they want to impose on other people. And they're cruel in the way they impose this idea, but the motive, the initial motive might not be cruelty. I think, again, Beck is a very interesting thinker, but he paints with a very broad brush. And so I think that actually human motives, the motives even of tyranny and of power worship and of cruelty are more complicated than he allows. We've spent some time talking about death and cruelty.

Now let's get back to the fun part, kitty consciousness, and what we can learn from our wise feline friends. A feline philosopher would not encourage human beings to seek wisdom. If you do not take pleasure in life itself, find fulfillment in inconstancy and delusion. Do not struggle against fears of death. Let them die away. If you crave tranquility, you will be forever in turmoil. Instead of turning away from the world, turn back to it and embrace its folly.

At times, you may want to return to yourself. Looking at the world without struggling to fit it into our stories is what many traditions call contemplation. When you see things without wanting to change them, they can give you a glimpse of eternity. see things without wanting to change them, they can give you a glimpse of eternity. Each moment is complete and the shifting scene reveals itself to you as if it were out of time. Eternity is not another order of things, but the world seen without anxiety. For humans, contemplation is a break from living. For cats, it is the sensation of life itself. Cats show us that seeking after meaning is like the quest for happiness, a distraction. The meaning of life is a touch, a scent, which comes by chance and is gone before you know it.

In your work, you seem to strongly resist the idea, as you mentioned, that philosophy should profess to know all the answers to our lives' varied questions. Can you just give us your argument for why you believe that is? Well, a lot of our questions don't have answers. If you say, what should a government or a politician do in a leader in such and such a circumstance, there is a kind of common assumption, not in all philosophers, because some skeptics haven't felt this. Montaigne didn't, for example, or believe it.

But there's a common assumption we've inherited that there is a right answer, which if we're clever enough or resolute enough, we can find out what it is and then perhaps implement that right answer. But lots of human dilemmas, not just in extreme situations of war or pandemic of the kind that we have now, but in everyday life, don't have a single right answer and may not even have any answer. You simply have, human beings simply have to come up with something from their own reserves with which they're satisfied or if not satisfied, at least they can live with. So I guess it's part of the tradition of Western philosophy, I suppose, is that at least there's an idea is possible of a perfect life.

I don't think that, you see. What the objection to the idea of perfection is not, everyone thinks that the idea of perfection is wanting because human beings can't live it. That is not the main objection to the idea of a perfect human life. The main objection to the idea of a perfect human life is that we can't actually imagine perfection. In fact, that's why I think the idea of perfection, which is deeply rooted in Western philosophy, including among those people who say you can never achieve perfection, they still think that it can be imaginable, or they still attribute perfection to, say, God. They still think there could be some kind of entity or spiritual person that was perfect.

I think the very idea of perfection, this is my objection to it, is incoherent. If you start thinking about it carefully, and if you start thinking about it carefully, you'll soon lose interest in it. If humans throughout the ages have continued to be preoccupied with seeking meaning and seeking answers, then would you agree then maybe it's just in our nature? Yes, but our nature is contradictory as humans, because as I mentioned in the book, other animals, and especially cats, are content to live out the nature that they have, that's been given them by nature.

Humans, for humans, it seems to be natural not to want to be humans, not to want to be the people, the human beings, the mortal creatures that they are. And that's why humans have religions, have philosophies, have therapies, have all these kind of traits. And that's why they practice displacement and diversion in ways that other animals never do. So the paradox of human beings is that it's natural for them to somehow want not to be human. So that's also a reason why human beings can't become cats.

But they maybe can learn from cats how to be less fixated on, less obsessed with their need to find a more than human meaning in human life. Have you applied that yourself? I've never had been tempted by these views, even though I studied philosophy for many, many years and taught it, particularly the history of philosophy. I've always been a skeptic about philosophy. I mean, I view philosophy, if you like, as an art. I enjoy systems of philosophy the way I enjoy a painting. But it's never occurred to me to take it with metaphysical seriousness.

In your book, you talk about this concept of the good life. So if by craving tranquility, we will forever be in turmoil, and if seeking meaning and happiness are mere distractions, what are we meant to do? I guess the question is, what are the ingredients for the best life? I mean, there's a huge amount of variety. Human beings aren't all the same. I mean, that's another one of my objections to a certain tradition in Western philosophy, which I suppose starts with Aristotle. Although remember, it only applied in Aristotle's day to males, property owners, and Greeks, and non-slaves, a relatively small number of the

human beings that existed even at the time of Aristotle himself. But one of my objections is that I think it's very hard to come up with a kind of theory of the good life. I mean, you might be able to come up with a theory or a general conception of what the kinds of things that makes human lives bad. They might be relatively uniform, very few human beings, if ever, if any, enjoy being persecuted or tortured or driven from their homes or witnessing traumatic scenes. So you can come up with having terrible experiences themselves. So you can perhaps come up with a range of things that damage or make difficult a good life in humans, but the remainder will be vast. There'll be vastly

different, hugely different types of human life, even for particular persons, perhaps. That can be good. If you want to know the variety of human goodness, don't read philosophers. Read really good novelists of various kinds, in various languages, from various cultures, and various times in history, novelists or writers or poets. You'll learn a lot more about the variety and the real natures or qualities of the good life than you would by reading philosophers. Philosophers are nearly always simplifiers. And maybe that goes with the fact that they've always represented themselves as teachers or been teachers, whereas the best novelists, the best short story writers, the best poets, to my mind, don't represent themselves as teachers. They pass on something to others. That's why they engage in poetry or novels or short story writing. But others can in a variety of ways,

depending on what their needs are. So the best philosophy, I think, is one that takes people back to these other forms of art. One can enjoy philosophy as a form of art, as I do myself, but think that in terms of the human good or the good life, other types of art are more useful and more liberating and actually more interesting. And perhaps acquire a cat. Yes, and live with a cat. One thing cats, I think, do give to all of those who live with them for a long time and love them is a sense of the importance of not clinging too anxiously to any particular story that you tell about your own life, because cats are happy without telling stories of their own life, And that's a rather profound point.

You are listening to Ideas and to my conversation with philosopher John Gray about his book, Feline Philosophy, Cats and the Meaning of Life. This episode was produced by Tayo Barrow. Special thanks to Aaron Wendland for his help in making this interview happen. For more details about this episode, please visit our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also find us on Twitter and on Facebook. Lisa Ayuso is our web producer. Danielle Duval is our technical producer. The senior producer, Nikola Lukšić.

The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. Fearing their lives ending, human beings invented religions and philosophies in which the meaning of their lives carried on after them. But the meaning humans make is easily broken, so they live in greater fear than before. As preached by the early Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialism was the idea that humans have no nature, only histories they fashioned for themselves. The Romantics wanted each human life to be a work of art, created, like the best artworks, they believed, from nothing. But if humans are like other living things and being the random spawn of evolution, how could they create themselves?

Contrary to the postmodernists, there is such a thing as human nature. It is expressed in the universal demand for meaning for one thing. But human nature has produced many divergent and at times antagonistic forms of life. How could anyone know their own nature when human nature is so contradictory? produced many divergent and at times antagonistic forms of life. How could anyone know their own nature when human nature is so contradictory? Might the idea that each of us has a nature of our own be just another metaphysical fiction? For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.