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The evident satisfaction with which cats inhabit their skins

This is a lovely short piece from John Gray, about a book which oddly failed to grip me and which I never finished:

A sense of uneasiness about their place in the world seems innate in humans, whereas contentment is the default condition of cats. The evident satisfaction with which cats inhabit their skins is one reason — possibly the main reason — that so many human beings enjoy being with them. It is also why some people hate them. Nothing is more aggravating to those who creep through their days in misery than knowing that other creatures are not unhappy. Medieval and early modern fairs in which cats were chased, tortured and roasted alive were festivals of the depressed. Cats have as their birth-right the freedom from unrest that philosophers have vainly tried to achieve.

https://unherd.com/2020/09/cats-can-teach-us-how-to-live/

This section at the end captures what I was trying to say in this short post yesterday:

The cliché that humans project their own emotions onto their animal companions is the opposite of the truth in regard to cats. People who love cats do not do so because they imagine cats resemble them. They love cats because they know cats are very different from themselves. Without contact with something beyond their world, human beings soon go mad. By entering our world, cats have given us a window looking out of it.

https://unherd.com/2020/09/cats-can-teach-us-how-to-live/

It is the non-linguistic alienness of cats which has always gripped me, since I was a child, perhaps because as a child I had years of speech therapy before I could reliably communicate. Four degrees and a nine year research career later I have learned to speak in elaborate, precise and (sometimes) effective ways. But there is something in the wordless attunement we can enjoy with cats – a sentence which was interrupted by the terminally ill cat I’m sitting with waking up, looking at me and beginning to purr – that connects with something deep within my soul.

I wrote almost a decade ago about the epistemology of the relation between humans and companion animals. Alasdair MacIntyre observes that “knowing how to interpret” is a form of practical knowledge, through which we are able to move from reciprocal responses in interaction to a “set of recognitions of the intentions embodied in these responses and then a set of recognitions that each of the intentions includes the intention that it should be recognized by the other as the intention that it is” (pg 15). To say that companion animals communicate intentions to their humans doesn’t suggest that humans never misread, over-interpret or entirely project in the reciprocal interactions. But it does suggest that “interpretative knowledge of their thoughts and feelings can be gained, relationships expressed in responsive activity” (pg 17).

It’s a hermeneutical horizon which is only accessible through care. As Simone Weil puts it, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”. It is only through that generosity that wordless knowing becomes possible, through the sensitivity to signs and signals that slowly emerge in caring for these creatures, though the forms of acquaintance we can have with companion cats are as fallible as they are profound. We can never entirely know them because they are so fundamentally unlike us. But we can know each other in spite of that ontological gap.

This register of non-linguistic purposive interaction which we enter into with companion animals feels particularly significant to me after a year spend cobbling together an understanding of Lacan. Though I was resistant to the claim initially, I accept the sense that we are trapped in language in a real way; it is the means through which we make ourselves known to others but in our reliance on it we struggle with a irreducible opacity in our relations with others, as well as our relations with ourselves. To use language purposively we have to already be lost within it, with our struggle for clarity forever taking us further away from the pure presence we fantasise is just around the corner.

What I’m calling wordless attunement offers a temporary respite from this human predicament, described by Gray as the “sense of uneasiness about their place in the world” intrinsic to our species. It’s not an escape from language or a way to evade it. But it can be a holiday from it.

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