“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, July 31, 2016

Cats Happen

If you've read Dark Ecology you'll know there's a whole thing about cats in it, more than once.

So I just found out that this dude published a book where he argues that, you know, cats are all about selfish narcissism and dogs are all altruistic and friendly and stuff.

Wow really? On what scientific -- or for that matter artistic -- or for that matter simple normal observation basis does one make such a claim? Oh, I know, none--because the book doesn't have to, because it's coming from Lacan who comes from Hegel who comes from a freak out to Kantian correlationism, so we humans (which "we" is a good question) get to decide what's real. And guess what: the old agrilogistical cat panic means our ideas about cats are accurate.

That and the classic selfish/altruistic binary and double-bind (because how can you really be altruistic? It's a self-defeating concept based on a rigid conception of self).

So I'm not gonna read this book because wow, you can learn all that stuff already--from Garfield.


1 comment:

John T. Maher said...

I agree with all that and interspecies altruism is a key concept here. i recall Zizek's attenuated explanation of why Hitler was worse than Stalin and the vid illustrates this.Most human interactions with critters involve killing and eating them, so altruism remains a bit of an exception. One finds this in Phillipa Foote's essay on Stalingrad as well.

A spoilsport would say the cat acted out of self interest, but as a dog person I am happy to witness cats exceeding expectation. It is just cat people that are horrific, not cats themselves. hehehe