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Cats and the meaning of life: John Gray on ‘Feline Philosophy’
11.10.2020
09:13 am
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‘Feline Philosophy,’ out November 24 in US and Canada
 
“Epidemiology and microbiology are better guides to our future than any of our hopes or plans,” the philosopher John Gray wrote nearly 20 years ago in Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. Anyone who entered 2020 with hopes and plans has seen these words vividly illustrated.

Gray’s work makes a strong case that our species is incorrigibly irrational, and it raises questions about humanist beliefs that should be particularly important for those of us on the political left to consider. Among his books are False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, and Seven Types of Atheism.

In his latest, Feline Philosophy, Gray pursues the deep interest in the nonhuman world that makes his critique of humanism so sharp in fang and claw. Through his reading of Montaigne, Pascal, the Stoics and Epicureans, and Spinoza, as well as literary writers from Dr. Johnson to Mary Gaitskill, Gray considers what cats have to teach us about philosophy and the good life. As I write this, the hardcover edition of the book is #15 on Amazon’s “New Releases in Philosophy” list and #1 in “New Releases in Cat Care.”

John Gray answered a few of my questions about cats by email in October.
 

John Gray (photo by Justine Stoddart)
 
While Feline Philosophy returns to questions that will be familiar to readers of your work, it seems different in some ways from anything else you have published. How did you come to write this book?

I’ve been thinking of writing a book on cats for many years. I’ve always wondered what philosophy would be like if it wasn’t so human-centred. Among all the animals that have cohabited with humans cats resemble us least, so it seemed natural to ask what a feline philosophy would be like. My book is an attempt at answering this question, and tries to imagine how a feline creature equipped with powers of abstraction would think about death, ethics, the nature of love and the meaning of life.

The book is also an ode to cats, expressing my admiration for their life-affirming capacity for happiness and their courage in living their lives without distractions or consolations.

Do you live with cats? Have you always? Can you tell us about a particular cat you have known?

My wife and I lived with four cats over the past thirty years, two Burmese sisters and two Birman brothers. For some years they all lived contentedly together, until mortality began to take its toll on them. The last of them, Julian, died on Xmas Eve 2019 in his 23rd year. He was perhaps the most tranquil of all four, and even when old and a little frail seemed to enjoy every hour of his life.

The most companionable was Sophie, who passed away at the age of 13 around seventeen years ago. She was extraordinarily intelligent and extremely subtle in her insight into the human mind, and very loving.

Why don’t cats share humans’ concern with making the world a better place?

Because they are happy. Wanting to improve the world is a displacement of the impulse to improve yourself. But cats are not inwardly divided as humans tend to be, and don’t want to be anything other than what they already are, so the idea of improving the world doesn’t occur to them. If it did, I suspect they would dismiss it as an uninteresting fantasy.

Your writing often deals with distressing truths about human beings, such as their capacity for cruelty and self-delusion. It can be upsetting. But I read Feline Philosophy with a feeling of serenity, which I attribute to cats’ total incapacity for cruelty or self-delusion. Does contemplating cats provide you relief from thinking about human affairs?

Cats are a window looking out of the human world, so I suppose that’s one reason I love being with them. I think they also help me look at the human world as if from their eyes, with tranquil detachment and a certain incredulity.

Do you know of any works of art that plausibly represent the mental experience of cats, or any other nonhuman animals?

I don’t know of any art works that capture the mental experience of cats. Whether literary or visual, they would be very difficult to produce. There are some books that try to enter into the inner world of dogs, the best of which seems to me to be Sirius (1944) by the British science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon. Perhaps the most brilliant book I know that tries to enter into a nonhuman mind is the Polish writer Andrzej Zaniewski’s Rat (1994).

You suggest that cats’ independence arouses envy and hatred in the people who torture them. Is this a culturally specific diagnosis, or do you think all cat torturers share these motives?

By no means all unhappy people hate and envy cats, but I think pretty well all of those who do are unhappy. That seems to be a universal truth.

I was surprised to learn recently that one of my closest friends, who is a committed vegan and supporter of animal rights, is a cat-hater. When I asked him why, he talked about his love of birds. Can there be meaningful ethical standards for nonhuman animals’ behavior?

I can’t speculate as to why your friend feels as he does, but it may be the innocence with which cats kill and devour other living things that offends him. Perhaps he’d like the natural world to conform to human values, which for me would be a kind of Hell.

I’m not persuaded that it is the well-being of birds that he cares about. Birds are also innocent killers, after all. The British writer J.A. Baker, who in his shamanistic masterpiece The Peregrine (1967), described ten years of his life attempting to inhabit the life of a falcon, loved the bird partly because it lived according to its nature as a predator.

The Cynics took their name from Diogenes’ epithet, “the dog.” Why haven’t any philosophers styled themselves after cats?

That’s a very good question. I don’t know a good answer, but possibly philosophers suspect that cats don’t need them.

As a reader of your work, I am very happy to have finally gotten a list of tips for living well from you. Are there any prescriptive philosophies that have helped you conduct your own life?

No, I can’t think of any prescriptive philosophies that have influenced me. In the early Seventies I met Isaiah Berlin, and talked with him regularly until his death in 1997. His value-pluralist philosophy of competing and often incommensurable values strengthened my suspicion of any strongly prescriptive ethics. In recent years I’ve been more and more influenced by Montaigne, whose scepticism about philosophy as a guide to life appeals to me greatly.

My ten feline hints for living well are of course meant playfully, as examples of feline philosophy. But they might not do much harm if taken seriously.

Feline Philosophy, already out in the UK, will be published in the US and Canada on November 24.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
DM talks ‘Godless Mysticism’ with John Gray, the world’s Greatest Living Philosopher

Posted by Oliver Hall
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11.10.2020
09:13 am
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Meet the priest who was Oscar Wilde’s lover and partly the basis for ‘Dorian Gray’

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The writer Max Frisch once wrote that an author does nothing worse than betray himself. In that, a work of fiction reveals more of a writer’s thoughts, tastes, and secrets than any work of biography.

This, of course, may not always be the case, but for many it is true. Like Oscar Wilde, whose novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) revealed more about his tastes and thoughts and secret lifestyle than he ever ‘fessed-up to in public—as he once admitted in a letter to the artist Albert Sterner in 1891:

You’ll find much of me in it, and, as it is cast in objective form, much that is not me.

The parts that were thought to be Wilde—the story’s homoerotic subtext—led the press to damn the book as morally corrupt, perverse, and unfit for publication.

As for the parts that were not Wilde, they revealed some of the people who in part inspired his story, in particular, a poet called John Gray (1866-1934), who was one of the Wilde’s lovers. Gray later loathed his association with the book and eventually denounced his relationship with Wilde and was ordained as a priest.
 
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Wilde thing: A portrait of Oscar in his favorite fur coat.
 
The Picture of Dorian Gray tells the story of a distinguished young man, Gray, whose portrait is painted by the artist Basil Hallward. On seeing the finished picture, Gray is overwhelmed by its (or rather his own) beauty and makes a pact with the Devil that he shall stay forever young with the painting grow old in his place. In modern parlance, consider it Faust for the selfie generation. Gray then abandons himself to every sin and imaginable depravity—the usual debauches of sex, drugs, and murder, etc.—in order to “cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul.” As to be expected, this has catastrophic results for Gray and those unfortunate enough to be around him.

Wilde disingenuously claimed he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray “in a few days” as the result of “a wager.” In fact, he had long considered writing such a Faustian tale and began work on it in the summer of 1889. The story went through various drafts before it was submitted for publication in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. Even then, Wilde contacted his publisher offering to lengthen the story (from thirteen to eventually twenty chapters) so it could be published as a novel which he believed would cause “a sensation.”

It certainly did that as the press turned on Wilde and his latest work with unparalleled vehemence. The critics were outraged by the lightly disguised homosexual subtext, in particular, Wilde’s reference to his secret gay lifestyle:

...there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex…They are forced to have more than one life.

The St. James’s Gazette described the tale as “ordure,” “dull and nasty,” “prosy rigmaroles about the beauty of the Body and the corruption of the Soul.” And went on to denounce it as a dangerous and corrupt story, the result of “malodorous putrefaction” which was only suitable for being “chucked on the fire.”

One critic from the Daily Chronicle described the novel as:

...a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents—a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction…

While the Scots Observer asked: “Why go grubbing in the muckheaps?” and damned the book as only suitable “for the Criminal Investigation Department…outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys.”

The last remark related to the “Cleveland Street Affair” of early-1890, in which young telegraph boys were alleged to be working as prostitutes at a brothel on Cleveland Street. It was claimed the government had covered-up this notorious scandal as the brothel was known to be frequented by those from the highest ranks of politicians and royalty.

Little wonder that when Gray was publicly identified by the Star newspaper as “the original Dorian of the same name” he threatened to sue for libel. Gray asked Wilde to write a letter to the press denying any such association. Wilde did so, claiming in the Daily Telegraph that he hardly knew Gray, which was contrary to what was known in private. The Star agreed to pay Gray an out of court settlement—but the association was now publicly known.
 
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John Gray: ‘The curves of your lips rewrite history.’
 
More on the life of John Gray, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.02.2018
01:16 pm
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DM talks ‘Godless Mysticism’ with John Gray, the world’s Greatest Living Philosopher
02.15.2013
08:29 am
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A review of John Gray’s new book, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Myths (interview below)

I remember reading John Gray’s epochal Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals sometime in 2004, and occasionally laughing out loud at the sheer misery and horror presented therein. Indubitably the book—one of those you’re likely to read not only without putting it down but without blinking—made an exceptional case for the human animal being frail, amoral, savage, irrational and (last but not least) collectively and individually doomed, but as such reading it felt vaguely masochistic, and reading its brilliant successors—from the happy-go-lucky Black Mass to the laugh-a-minute Al Qaeda and What it Means to Be Modern—frankly perverse (like philosophical self-flagellation). One persisted because Gray was so obviously among the finest writers alive—the nearest thing we have to a Nietzsche by a country mile.

Well as it happens, Gray’s new book, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths is not merely an exercise in iconoclasm, and finds the author in an altogether different mood, exploring what might be advisable to the human animal whose precarious existence is compounded by an indifferent universe.

An important thing to note here is that Gray’s books were never meant to revel in pessimism, but to warn us away from reckless delusion. Were fatuous optimism harmless, then maybe we would all do well strolling about looking forward to an eternity in heaven, or, alternatively, anticipating the imminent defeat of death, as did some Bolsheviks (which Gray investigated in his last book, The Immortalization Commission). Such giddy dreams, however, tend to come at quite a frightening price, and the Inquisition or Stalin’s terror represent the respective and bloody tips of those particular icebergs.

Furthermore, although he must have savaged a few thousand modern myths in his time, Gray’s objection is not with myth per se. How else, after all, could he or we hope to grasp his work’s guiding equation—in which to attempt to impose or even seriously imagine an existence without suffering and death exponentially multiplies their influence? The myths of Prometheus or the myth Genesis, Gray suggests in The Silence of Animals, are the very medicines needed to treat those modern myths fathered by Socrates and Christ, two martyrs who chucked caution to the wind… and inspired the rest of the species to follow suit.

Now, if we subsequently see Prometheus or Genesis as being “true”—what do we mean by this? Not that they actually occurred, that’s for sure (Gray has pointed out before that it was only recently that Christians started to consider Genesis as being a literal account of human origins). But this eschewal of literalism is not necessarily an eschewal of mysticism. When we use myth as we have done here, we are trying to access something beyond language and even science—story and symbol are all we have.

For the so-called “New Atheists,” on the other hands, nothing exists you can’t just slap a word on, so their “disbelief” is a matter of having the word “God,” but not having an entity to affix it to (they’ve looked everywhere). Gray suggests an altogether more elevated position:

“Atheism does not mean rejecting ‘belief in God.’ It means giving up belief in language as anything other than a practical convenience. The world is not a creation of language, but something that – like the God of the negative theologians – escapes language. Atheism is only a stage on the way to a more far-reaching scepticism.”

The Silence of Animals is a profound exploration of this “far-reaching scepticism”—or “Godless mysticism.” It is also one of Gray’s best books. No mean feat.
 
An interview with John Gray

Thomas McGrath: John, how did you conceive of The Silence of Animals? Penguin are calling it “the successor to Straw Dogs”—was this your own conception of the book?

John Gray: I do think of The Silence of Animals as a successor to Straw Dogs, though that only became clear to me as I wrote the book. I began it as an exploration of secular myth, especially the variety in which meaning is embodied in cumulative advance in time, but it soon became an attempt to dig deeper into the themes of the earlier book—in particular the idea of contemplation. The chief difference between the two books, from my point of view, is that by presenting contemplation as correlative to a life of action. The Silence of Animals is more positive in tone.

TM: Your The Immortalization Commission is pervaded by the fascinating spectre of the subliminal self - to what extend do you feel something like this guides your own work?

JG: I wrote The Immortalization Commission for three reasons. First, to show how bizarre the history of ideas actually is—and how different from the cleaned-up version that is commonly accepted. Second, to show how the most far-fetched ideas can become an integral part of life as it’s actually lived. How many people know that Arthur Balfour entered into an imagined posthumous correspondence with someone he may have loved? How many that the embalming of Lenin was part of a larger attempt to conquer death? For the people whose stories are told in the book, overcoming death through science wasn’t just an abstract notion. Thirdly, I wanted to tell a story—two stories in fact, though they overlap and interlink—rather than just set out another argument.

Again, these reasons only became clear while writing the book, so I suppose it is true that my writing is in some degree guided by a subliminal thought-process. Maybe this is true of all writers, whether or not they recognize the fact.

TM: The Silence of Animals seems to me your least iconoclastic work. For the first time, you seem to be exploring how the individual might approach the world as it’s presented in your other books. Is this an accurate interpretation?

JG: The Silence of Animals does flow from my earlier work, and you’re right to say that it tries to show how someone who accepted the view of things presented in my other books might approach the world. I’m not sure it will be seen as less iconoclastic—those who hated my earlier work will also hate this, I’m sure, because it too refuses to take seriously the faith in action and progress that they think they live by.

TM: From The Silence of Animals: “By creating the expectation of a radical alteration in human affairs, Christianity—the religion that St Paul invented from Jesus’ life and sayings—founded the modern world.” Given that this “expectation” is the very thing you diagnose as lying behind all the Utopian mythologies you attack, to what extent do you view Christianity as a pivotal and essentially detrimental emergence in the history of humankind?

JG: I think of Christianity as being like many world-transforming movements—at once extremely harmful and highly beneficial. Either way it marks what you call a pivotal point in history. Christian myth seems to me deep and interesting, at times also beautiful, whereas the myths of its secular successors strike me as shallow, banal and ugly.

TM: This critique of Christianity’s influence on humanity resembles Nietzsche’s—especially since you see its influence as allied with Socrates’. I’m interested in your relationship to Nietzsche. It’s obvious how you differ, but was he quite formative to your worldview?

JG: Nietzsche was a gifted moral psychologist from whose writings I’ve learnt a great deal. As you can see from my response above, I don’t share his outright condemnation of Christianity. He was in fact much more confined by a Christian world-view than Schopenhauer, an early and powerful influence on him. The later Nietzsche—who became a sort of hyper-humanist—I find absurd, though still more interesting than the dull, respectable, neo-Christian humanists of today.

TM: One way you distinctly differ from Nietzsche is on the matter of morality. Indeed, in The Silence of Animals you describe slavery and torture as “universal evils.” As a reader, however, I feel I know very little about your views on ethics and morality, or the philosophical foundation for such a statement.  How would you define your moral philosophy? Do you, perhaps, have this in mind for a future work?

JG: You are right that I differ from Nietzsche in thinking there are universal evils such as slavery and torture. You’re also right that I intend to focus on ethics in future work—more specifically, I’m thinking of writing a post-Nietzschean genealogy of morals.

TM: You like telling stories about intellectuals. What events in your own life were pivotal to your worldview?

JG: I don’t think any single event has shaped my thinking. I was influenced by the collapse of communism—a development viewed by mainstream opinion as beyond the realm of reasonable probability, but which I thought quite likely from the early eighties onwards. The financial crisis of the past few years has also been formative, in that it has reinforced my view that the near future is often far more discontinuous with the present than is commonly imagined.

Posted by Thomas McGrath
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02.15.2013
08:29 am
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