Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life

"I love John Gray. He is an acerbic and acidic critic of the modern world and is deeply influenced by Daoism. He doesn’t read Chinese, and he doesn’t have a Daoist lineage, but he often cites the Zhuangzi , in particular the A.C. Graham translation and commentary. Graham was a British sinologist who was schooled in all the proper British ways, was analytically inclined, and brought all of that erudition to bear to really articulate Zhuangzi’s critiques in a very clear-headed way. I chose a John Gray book as my last one because just as ‘go with the flow’ is maybe a trivialization of what Daoism is but does actually accord with a very prominent stream within the Daoist tradition, John Gray, as a critic of society, standing from the outside looking in and often using parables of animals, also gives a voice to a very prominent and, for me, one of my favorite dimensions of the Daoist tradition, which is a form of broad-minded cultural critique of the present historical moment. This really goes back to Zhuangzi himself, who was writing from southern China in the Warring States period. There’s some speculation that Zhuangzi was in touch with hunter-gatherer tribes on the southern periphery of the Zhou world of Late Bronze/early Iron Age China. He was giving voice to critiques of state power as well as basic things like agriculture or having a crank to lift your bucket out of a well. Zhuangzi has this critique of technology that influenced Heidegger via Okakura Kakuzō. Gray uses animals as a counterpoint to all of the absurdities and silliness of present-day human ideologies. His main critique is of the concept of progress: that’s a theme that runs throughout all his work. He doesn’t think we’re making any “progress” and even if we were, it wouldn’t be a good thing. Feline Philosophy is a very short and very readable book and he cites Zhuangzi in it. His main book is called Straw Dogs , which is a line out of the Daodejing . So he cites Daoism quite often. When I’m trying to get my friends to read John Gray, I say he’s a guy who went so far down the rabbit hole of British philosophy that he came out on the other side as a Daoist mystic. The last chapter is on “Cats and the Meaning of Life.” There’s one paragraph where he sums up what he thinks: “If cats could understand the human search for meaning, they would purr with delight at its absurdity. Life as the cat they happen to be is meaning enough for them. Humans, on the other hand, cannot help looking for meaning beyond their lives.” This is a very Zhuangzian critique. For John Gray, philosophy is not the solution to a problem, it’s a symptom of our biggest problem, which is self-consciousness. So cats, not having self-consciousness don’t need to have philosophy. They don’t have the symptoms of self-consciousness or awareness of death and so they just live life as they are. So “Life as the cat they happen to be is meaning enough for them” is something for Gray that we should aspire toward. This is also a theme in the Daoist tradition—living our life deeply and lucidly, and being satisfied with the enoughness of our own existence."