What Cats Teach Us About Happiness | A Cat's Philosophy
Most of us would agree that cats and humans are vastly different. We tend to think of ourselves as more developed, as a higher species, not just because of our superior intelligence but also because we gave ourselves the gift of morality and ethics. Unlike cats, we know about what’s good and evil, right and wrong, and we aspire to transcend our animalistic tendencies to improve morally and make the world a better place.
Cats, on the other hand, don’t care about morals. They don’t have ambitions to improve the world either, nor themselves. Most of the time, cats come across as utterly indifferent. They don’t seem to care about other cats and aren’t too attached to their owners. But does this mean that cats are immoral, heartless creatures? Are cats, from a philosophical viewpoint, devoid of ethics and virtue?
According to philosopher John Gray, author of the book Feline Philosophy, Cats and the Meaning of Life, cats have ethics and are also capable of love and affection. Even if cats indeed have an indifferent, careless demeanor; they do care deeply about some things but mainly if it suits them. In contrast to humans, cats don’t have religions, moral philosophies, or any other external system that provides them with ethics or rules to live. And they don’t need such things to live a fully-fledged feline life.
A cat’s ethics (or philosophy, if you will) come from within, as it already knows how to live. So, we could see a cat’s philosophy as an antiphilosophy, as it challenges traditional philosophy and offers a more primal (or perhaps more feline) approach to life instead. The book Feline Philosophy, Cats and the Meaning of Life explains feline philosophy using John Gray’s interesting insights supplemented with theories and views by other philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer, Michel de Montaigne, and Plato.
Based on my interpretations of Gray’s ideas, this video explores what we can learn from cats. Gray’s explanation of a cat’s philosophy begins with a story about a philosopher who assured him that he had convinced his cat to become a vegetarian. Gray thought the philosopher was joking, but that wasn’t the case. The philosopher seriously believed that his cat had chosen a meatless diet. It turned out that the cat ate vegetarian at home but had been supplementing his diet by catching animals like mice and birds.
The cat wasn’t interested in his owner’s moral idea of eliminating meat from the menu for the sake of other animals. Cats are hypercarnivores by nature, meaning that their bodies need meat to thrive: a vegetarian diet may be acceptable for omnivores like humans, it’s not suitable for cats. Nevertheless, the cat wasn’t offended by his owner’s attempt to push a vegetarian diet. He just accepted the situation, went his own way, and remained faithful to his inborn nature.
The philosopher’s intention to impose human morality onto his cat was pretty questionable. Cats don’t need morals to live. They already know what they need and how to live their lives. Moreover, cats, unlike humans, are happy, relaxed, and content by default and don’t need moral advice from a species that’s perpetually restless and unhappy. And so, Gray concluded that the philosopher could learn something from the cat and not the other way around.
Humans seem generally dissatisfied with their nature, and they’re on a continual quest to be something they’re not, sometimes to absurd levels. They also suffer from continual existential angst. Hence, they cling to philosophy and religion, hoping to answer their many questions and retrieve a sense of meaning. They need morals (or rules) to determine what’s good and evil, how to improve, how not to be bad people.
Gray’s stance on morality is atheist, which is that most (if not all) of these rules are essentially products of people’s imagination. So, none of our morals are inherently true, as they’re value judgments. What’s moral for one person is immoral for another. And like clothing styles, morals go in and out of fashion, so what’s moral...