Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life
John N. Gray
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Killing and dying for nonsensical ideas is how many human beings have made sense of their lives.”
“Instead of being a sign of their inferiority, the lack of abstract thinking among cats is a mark of their freedom of mind. Thinking in generalities slides easily into a superstitious faith in language. Much of the history of philosophy consists of the worship of linguistic fictions. Relying on what they can touch, smell and see, cats are not ruled by words. Philosophy testifies to the frailty of the human mind. Humans philosophize for the same reason they pray. They know the meaning they have fashioned in their lives is fragile and live in dread of its breaking down. Death is the ultimate breakdown in meaning, since it marks the end of any story they have told themselves.”
“All these philosophies(Stoicism,Epicureanism, Pyrrhonism)have a common failing. They imagine life can be ordered by human reason. Either the Mind can devise a way of life that is secure from loss ,or else it can control the emotions so that it can withstand any loss. In fact ,neither how we live nor the emotions we feel can be controlled in this way. Our lives are shaped by chance and our emotions by the body.Much of human life -and much of philosophy - is an attempt to divert ourselves from this fact.”
“When people say their goal in life is to be happy they are telling you they are miserable.”
“Humans need something other than the human world, or else they go mad.”
“Humans cannot become cats. Yet if they set aside any notion of being superior beings, they may come to understand how cats can thrive without anxiously inquiring how to live. Cats have no need of philosophy. Obeying their nature, they are content with the life it gives them. 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.”
“A philosopher once assured me he had persuaded his cat to become a vegan. Believing he was joking, I asked how he had achieved this feat. Had he supplied the cat with mouse-flavoured vegan titbits? Had he introduced his cat to other cats, already practising vegans, as feline role models? Or had he argued with the cat and persuaded it that eating meat is wrong? My interlocutor was not amused. I realized he actually believed the cat had opted for a meat-free diet. So I ended our exchange with a question: did the cat go out? It did, he told me. That solved the mystery. Plainly, the cat was feeding itself by visiting other homes and hunting. If it brought any carcasses home – a practice to which ethically undeveloped cats are sadly all too prone – the virtuous philosopher had managed not to notice them.”
“The source of philosophy is anxiety, and cats do not suffer from anxiety unless they are threatened or find themselves in a strange place. For humans, the world itself is a threatening and strange place. Religions are attempts to make an inhuman universe humanly habitable. Philosophers have often dismissed these faiths as being far beneath their own metaphysical speculations, but religion and philosophy serve the same need.1 Both try to fend off the abiding disquiet that goes with being human.”
“Much of the history of philosophy consists of the worship of linguistic fictions. Relying on what they can touch, smell and see, cats are not ruled by words.”
“Morality has many charms. What could be more captivating than a vision of everlasting justice? Yet visions of justice are as immutable as styles in shoes. What morality demands shifts across the generations and may change more than once within a single human lifetime. Not so long ago morality required spreading civilization by extending imperial power. Today, morality condemns empire in all its forms. These judgements are irreconcilably opposed. But they provide the same satisfaction to those who pronounce them – a gratifying sense of virtue.”
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Book Keywords:
philosophy, abstract-thinking, cats, philosophy-of-life, human-nature
