Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life - John Gray

No living philosopher (nor human) has influenced my thinking so much as John Gray. But I never knew he was a big-time animal lover. 

His new book Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life are the lessons he learned from his two late cats Jamie and Julian (Jamie passed away this year at an age of 23). 

I can tell even before reading this book that the book oozes with timeless wisdom. I cannot wait to read this book on November 24th when it releases in the US. Thank you, John, from Max, Fluffy, Graph, and Neo. 

Here is a review and interview with him - 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future': 

Gray believes that humans turned to philosophy principally out of anxiety, looking for some tranquillity in a chaotic and frightening world, telling themselves stories that might provide the illusion of calm. Cats, he suggests, wouldn’t recognize that need because they naturally revert to an equilibrium whenever they’re not hungry or threatened. If cats were to give advice, it would be for their own amusement.

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Gray never bought the idea that his book was a handbook for despair. His subject was humility; his target any ideology that believed it possessed anything more than doubtful and piecemeal answers to vast and changing questions. The cat book is written in that spirit. If like me you read with a pencil to hand, you will be underlining constantly with a mix of purring enjoyment and frequent exclamation marks. “Consciousness has been overrated,” Gray will write, coolly. Or “the flaw in rationalism is the belief that human beings can live by applying a theory”. Or “human beings quickly lose their humanity but cats never stop being cats”. He concludes with a 10-point list of how cats might give their anxious, unhappy, self-conscious human companions hints “to live less awkwardly”. These range from “never try to persuade human beings to be reasonable”, to “do not look for meaning in your suffering” to “sleep for the joy of sleeping”.

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In these three-tiered times our original plan for this interview was to meet and sit outside a cafe in Bath – Gray, 72, is wary of inside – but the forecast suggested we’d have got soaked, so we have retreated, catlike, indoors, and to Zoom. In some ways, I suggest, Gray’s is the perfect book for the estranging oddness of the pandemic. How has he coped?

“I’ve tried to emulate what I recall of my wonderful cat Julian,” he says. “Which is, not to live in an imagined future. We simply don’t know how this is going to develop. And of course, the political response in most places, and certainly here, has been shambolic. But that inability to come up with a clear response reflects, I think, something deep: that even the most well-developed systems of knowledge always leave an enormous amount of uncertainty.”

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In the last sentence of Straw Dogs, Gray asked a question, almost plaintively: “Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?” Has writing the current book helped him to understand what such a life of experience might look like?

“Cats live for the sensation of life, not for something they might achieve or not achieve,” he says. “If we attach ourselves too heavily to some overarching purpose we’re losing the joy of life. Leave all those ideologies and religions to one side and what’s left? What’s left is a sensation of life – which is a wonderful thing.”