Gray: Be More Cat

A cat does not do philosophy, and according to John Gray that makes them a better philosopher than anyone else. In his 2020 book Feline Philosophy, Gray argues that for humans philosophy acts as a kind of medicine, because we are the animal that knows it will die, and so this produces an anxiety that is seen nowhere else in nature. To combat this we create systems like religions and ideologies and self-improvement and the examined life. All of which promise a cure to anxiety, but none of which actually does. And so to cure this, we need to be more cat. Imagine there is a cat called Mo. Mo does not search for meaning in her life, she is not trying to become a better cat, and she does not experience her life as a project that could fail. She hunts, she sleeps and she sits in the sun, and when she suffers she does not add to her suffering by asking why. And so Gray's point is not that Mo is wise, it's that Mo is not sick. We humans are. Gray ends his book with hints about how we can become more cat. We can distance ourselves from this sick and broken human way of seeing things. Don't try to find meaning in your suffering. Don't try to persuade other people to be more reasonable. Because you are who you are and it is what it is. Sometimes life just happens. So climb trees, play with a ball, sleep a lot more, and lie by the fire when things get cold and dark.