Category: Cats

From the journal of a cat man.

The cat is happy to reside within his limits: he does not aspire. He is incapable of hubris. There are no feline tragedies. A cat can be miserable, and so can a man, but only a man can be wretched. A man is an animal, but an abyss separates him from the other animals. It is this abyssal difference between man and animal, a difference appreciated from Genesis to Heidegger, that justifies the distinction between animalic misery, which man shares with animals, and spiritual wretchedness, which he does not.

Fear and anxiety

A cat can experience fear (Furcht), but he cannot experience anxiety (Angst). I borrow Heidegger's terms for a distinction already to be found in Kierkegaard. The cat, however, experiences fear and does not merely exhibit fear-behavior: an animal is not a machine. Philosophical behaviorism is as false of  the cat as of the man. A cat can feel and show fear and other emotions just as a man can. 'Just as a man can' does not mean to the same degree or in the same way as a man can; it means that both man and cat feel and show fear and other emotions. Both suffer and enjoy mental states. Cartesius take note.

But a man can fake emotion-exhibiting behavior without feeling the corresponding emotions. This is beyond the cat.  He cannot dissemble, not because he is sincere, but because he is beneath dissemblance and sincerity.

Respect

A cat can neither feel nor show respect. A man can feel respect, show respect, but also dissimulate by faking respect. Do I respect my cats? If respect is of persons, then I respect them at best analogously: cats are not persons. Some of us have and express self-respect; no cat does either. Since a cat cannot respect himself, he cannot disrespect himself. Respect is connected with standards and norms and ideals that a man feels himself to be under and beholden to. 

Ideals and time

Having no ideals, the cat does not face the problem of false ideals. This is because he does not strive or aspire. His life is not a project in pursuit of Jungian individuation or any other form of self-integration. He remains within his natural limits in the moment. He cannot feel anxiety in the face of death, for he has no future. But he also has no past. He abides in the abode of the Now. He cannot, however, experience this Now as a nunc stans, the standing Now of eternity. For he is time-bound to the core. A man, as a spiritual being, is not time-bound to the core: he is not spiritually bound to any particular time, and he is not spiritually bound to time in general. Man is a pan-optic, syn-optic spirit, capable of surveying the entire ontological 'scene' including himself and everything  else. He is "a spectator of all time and existence." (Plato)

But he is at the same 'time' — speaking analogically — embedded in the biotic. For he too is an animal.  He is a spiritual animal. No cat is a spiritual animal. And so no cat shares the human predicament. Life for a man is a predicament, not a mere condition.  'Predicament' suggests a state that is unsatisfactory, problematic, transitional: not a status finalis, but a status viatoris. 'Predicament' suggests a condition from which we need to be released or saved if we are to become what we most truly are. Man is homo viator, on the way, spiritually speaking. A cat may be on the prowl, but no cat is on the way. No cat is  in statu viae. A pilgrimage is a physical analog of a man's being metaphysically on the way. But no cat makes a pilgrimage. For what could be his Mecca, his Jerusalem, his Santiago de Compostela? Buddy the cat may be on the road, but he is not on the way.

I said that the cat abides in the abode of the Now, but not the standing Now, but the moving Now. That is not to say that he experiences the nunc movens, the moving Now: if he did he would feel regret for the past and both hope and fear for the future. Have you ever met a regretful cat, or a hopeful one?

Self-degradation

Unlike a man, a cat cannot degrade himself. This is because he is an animal merely, unlike a man who is a strange hybrid of animal and spirit. Belonging to both orders, a man is neither an animal merely nor a spirit merely.

And so he is a riddle to himself. The human condition is a predicament; the animalic condition is not. A man asks: What am I? and Who am I? These are two different questions that no cat poses.

Rights

Do cats and other non-human animals have rights? Here is a quick little argument contra. Rights and duties are correlative: whatever has rights has duties. No cat has duties; ergo, no cat has rights. But if so, then no cat has a right to life or a right not to be harmed which would induce in us the obligation not to harm him. Does it follow therefrom that it is morally permissible to torture a cat? Kant faces the difficulty. Jonathan Birch:

Kant himself grapples with this problem in the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant 1797/2017) although he does not, I think, appreciate its gravity. He offers a partial solution: we may not owe obligations to animals, but we can have obligations in regard to animals that we owe to ourselves. The idea is that, in torturing animals, killing them inhumanely, hunting them for sport or treating them without gratitude, one acts without due respect for one’s own humanity. Why? Because mistreating animals dulls one’s “shared feeling of their suffering and so weakens and gradually uproots a natural predisposition that is very serviceable to morality in one’s relations with other human beings” (Kant 1797/2017, 6:433).

Kant’s position is not simply that in mistreating animals I make myself more likely to wrong other people. It is rather that, in mistreating animals, I violate a duty I owe to myself by weakening my disposition for “shared feeling”, or empathy. From the formula of humanity (discussed in more detail in the next section), I have a duty to cultivate morally good dispositions, and I violate this duty if I erode dispositions that are “serviceable to morality”. This has come to be known as the “indirect duty” view.

More on this later, perhaps. I will  give Schopenhauer the last word:

To which I add: A man who is gratuitously cruel to men is not a man at all but a demon. Homo homini lupus does not capture the depravity to which humans can sink. Man is not a wolf to man, but a demon to man.

It is perfectly stupid to refer to a human savage, such as a Hamas terrorist, as an animal. Again, no  animal has the power of self-degradation: that is a spiritual power.