A review by sweetcuppincakes
Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life by John N. Gray

4.0

A nice little philosophical read. In such a small book, there are a lot of retellings of other stories by writers who have had very deep connections with a cat: John Laurence's The Cat from Hué, Junichiro Tanizaki's A Cat, A Man, and Two Women, and Mary Gaitskill's 'Lost Cat: A Memoir'. If you passively love cats and never knew there was literature and memoirs about lives with cats (raises hand), then Gray's book will pique your interest to read those other works, as it has mine.

And in such a small book, you can't necessarily get a definitive take on what cats can teach us about philosophy, or answer What Is it Like to Be a Cat (which would be hard/impossible). But I particularly liked his chapter on 'Feline Ethics', which

"is a kind of selfless egoism. [...] They are selfless in that they have no image of themselves they seek to preserve and augment. Cats live not by being selfish but by selflessly being themselves." (p.64)

Even if cats can seem indifferent towards their human caretakers, and fail the Mirror Self-Recognition test, Gray makes the point that this strain of selfless egoism can be found in Spinoza and Taoism, as an alternative to morality's quest for principles to live by (which often conflict, or are arbitrary or very parochial, etc.) or its penchant for thinking too highly about altruism. Perhaps cats' 'no-mind' or selfless lives, where they live in the moment as a cat with no preconceptions or concern for what it is to be a cat, or with any notion of their own narrative arch or inevitable mortality, can be of some succor to modern humans' stressful ruminations and fussing about how to live well. It leads to one of the ten final 'tips' Gray concludes the book with, about what we can learn from cats: Life is not a story

If you think of your life as a story, you will be tempted to write it to the end. But you do not know how your life will end, or what will happen before it does. It would be better to throw the script away. The unwritten life is more worth living than any story you can invent.