No longer. When my wife recently accidentally left one of our two new cats outside overnight — she found it mewing pitiably at the kitchen door in the morning — she was racked with guilt. I hunt the house to make sure they are safely indoors before turning in of an evening. My mind roams to images of my cats being torn to bits by the urban foxes that slink along the fence, of their being scragged after accidentally invading the territory of a local tom (that happened to my old cat, and the vet’s bills were horrendous), or… of worse.

Our digital culture is saturated with cat adoration — the small portion of the internet not devoted to pornography or political hate-speech is mostly taken up with pictures of cats. But it’s also blooming, like squid-ink, with a related anxiety — that of cats as the objects of malice and cruelty. Rather than being independent creatures, cats now occupy a peculiar position in our minds: we think of them as (God help us) “floofs” and “fur-babies”, cuddly creatures utterly dependent on us for protection; but also as being hard to protect because, well, they’re cats. Unlike dogs, they go where they like and do what they like. It’s a recipe for paranoia.

And where there’s paranoia, there’s a buck to be made feeding it. ITV’s recent How To Catch A Cat Killer told the story — an easy heartstring-tugger for the likes of me — of a spate of cats being stabbed in a quiet close in Brighton, and of the Facebook group of local cat-lovers which was set up to warn other owners of the danger, and even ended up helping to track down the culprit. Where vigilantes, in the traditional Hollywood account of it, tend to be flint-faced, damaged, solitary men with gravelly voices and an unsmiling sense of purpose (think Charles Bronson, Jack Reacher, Batman, Rorschach or The Punisher), the acceptable real-life face of them is now a mildly out-of-shape middle-aged cat lover in a sensible jumper, specs illuminated by the glow of a last-generation laptop.

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Audiences eat this stuff up. This show was very obviously a low-stakes UK reprise of 2019’s surprise Netflix hit Don’t F*** With Cats, which followed an ad hoc group of Facebook friends tracking down a sicko who posted a video of himself suffocating a pair of kittens to death. Their collective digital sleuthing — every pixel was combed for clues as to the killer’s location, from soft furnishings to plug sockets — closed in on a Walter Mitty character called Luka Magnotta, a Canadian porn actor and wannabe model who had created an online persona for himself as fabulous as it was fictitious. Far from being a harmless weirdo, though, Magnotta showed all the signs of psychopathy — and went on to kill a human being before the police caught up with him.

The villain of ITV’s show had a bit less of Tom Ripley about him. He was a nightclub bouncer known to his colleagues as “Creepy Steve”, and though he stolidly denied the cat-killings in the face of all the evidence, he didn’t show any great flair as a master-criminal. He was clearly caught on CCTV, pretty early on, stabbing a cat. He had a knife in his flat contaminated with cat hair and blood. His mobile phone placed him at the location of 14 of the attacks. And his internet search history was full of things like “Dog killing cat”, which in the context is the sort of thing that tends to raise the long eyebrow of the law. Moriarty, at least, would have known how to use Safesearch Mode while planning his next heist.

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Still, a happy ending in both cases for the cat-loving forces of good. The online vigilantes in both these documentaries showed every sign of being responsible and cautious about what they did: they did everything they could to get the police involved. And their discoveries were in some cases genuinely helpful. It took a Brighton cat-lover to obtain the CCTV footage of Creepy Steve by following a trail of blood back to the scene of the killing; something that hadn’t apparently occurred to the police (busy as they no doubt were solving “proper” crimes). Funny, though, that we’re more inclined to give vigilantes a free pass when it comes to cats. Going after cat-killers online, fine: going after child-molesters, not so much (let’s not forget the innocent paediatrician hounded out of his house by concerned parents a few years back).

Pet cruelty seems to hit a sweet spot: it’s at once deeply emotive and, for the most part, below the level of the sort of thing that the police take an urgent interest in. Cats are low-level crime — in the Brighton case, the cat-killer had to be prosecuted for offences against property rather than cruelty to animals because there’s a far higher possible custodial sentence for the former than the latter. The law, literally, cares more about cats qua property than qua living beings. So why not get citizen detectives involved?

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The grisly history of serial killers might be one reason why not. Many if not most of them start out by torturing animals. Luka Magnotta was a classic example: like Ed Gein, he started on cats and moved on to people. Magnotta identified and threatened one of his principal pursuers, Deanna Thompson: he posted taunting videos of the casino where she worked. That is a bit yikes, as they say online. Creating fresh crimes, and making more work for your overstretched local bobby, by getting yourself killed is not anyone’s vigilante dream.

And there, again, we return to what documentaries like these say about our collective anxiety about cats. The stakes are at once low, and high. We infantilise them, much against their own nature. We pour into them — into their free-roaming nature and their vulnerability — our fears of an outside world that is more dangerous than our keyboard-tethered selves would quite like to look at face-on. And we fantasise, too, about being able to reach out and right wrongs in that outside world from the safety of our laptops. Prevention is better than cure, and documentaries be damned. Let’s lock the doors at night, and make sure the cats are in.

What would happen, though, if instead of creating the impression of headlessness, we actually took artists out of the creative process? Well, now we can find out. Researchers are experimenting with applying machine learning to visual imagery, and the result is the unnerving phenomenon of ‘GAN art’.

A ‘GAN’ is a ‘generative adversarial network’, which is to say two machine learning networks programmed to run in parallel. The first is fed a set of input data, such as a type of image, and told to generate new, believable versions of that data. The second is tasked with assessing whether the new, AI-generated data are real or fake.

The aim is for the first network to succeed in fooling the second network more than half the time. As the two models adjust in relation to one another, they become increasingly skilled at predicting and manipulating patterns in the input imagery.

One playful result of this is web or smartphone apps that invite the user to ‘create’ — that is, prompt the AI to create — images based on text. Wombo is a popular one: you can choose from several different ‘styles’, enter your text prompt and watch the machine create an image.

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When you do so, two things become apparent. First, the more abstract the prompt, the more difficult it is to distinguish the output from human-created art. But secondly, there’s something indefinably off about them. That comes more clearly into focus when you give the machine a more specific prompt — as I discovered when I asked Wombo to draw me a cat.

Cat images are so popular and widespread online that one 2013 cat food ad claimed that they make up 15% of all internet traffic. With such an immense dataset, you’d think an AI would find it easy to generate a cat image.

But when I prompted Wombo with ‘Kitten’ I got what looks like the disfigured victim of some deranged scientist’s experimental flesh-sculpting, as viewed through a haze of LSD. Here it is; judge for yourself.

Looking at this abomination, the off-ness becomes easier to grasp.

Everyone — at least, everyone human who’s ever spent time online — knows what a kitten looks like. A skilled artist can convey a kitten’s shape and movement with a few lines of a pencil. But that knowledge is acquired not just by mechanically digesting and attempting to synthesise the aggregate of two-dimensional kitten images, but also understanding what kittens are, and what they mean in our cultural context.

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Without that capacity to filter and actively re-interpret in terms of the wider context, replacing meaning with pattern recognition creates something that’s both eerily almost-intelligible but also deeply disturbing. It is, as Macbeth says, “a tale told by an idiot”.

So what, you might say. GAN ‘art’ isn’t art. It’s a game, to amuse us for a few moments online when we should be doing something else. But absurd as it is, the idea of AI ‘art’ only takes a pervasive contemporary dream to a slightly more absurd conclusion: that of eliminating individuals from human culture.

The positive version of this dream imagines that we could promote equality by minimising the role of specific, individual contributions to human society. You see versions of this in the widespread academic effort, for some decades now, to downplay the study of ‘great’ individuals in favour of mass movements or widespread sociocultural phenomena.

Well-established in disciplines such as history or literature, this has percolated even as far as the quintessential study of great individuals, the ‘Grand Strategy’ course at Yale. Here, the course director Professor Beverley Gage prompted debate last year when she shifted the course curriculum away from individual political actors toward grassroots activism and civil rights.

We see same the effort to de-emphasise leadership in favour of the collective in the rise of technocratic forms of government. This is often well-meant: this study shows populations support technocracy in proportion to how incompetent their elected government is perceived to be. In other words, the more disillusioned we grow with the ability of our elected leaders to govern, the more longingly we look to ‘neutral’, depoliticised ways of running our affairs.

And confidence in human leadership is waning across the board. Angry populists condemn the ruling class as out of touch; critics decry the current government as incompetent; others dismiss the electorate as ignorant or racist. The problem, across the board, is: us.

Faced with our manifestly disappointing powers of human self-governance, the dream of eliminating leadership can’t but seem appealing. And it’s in this light that we should view Tuesday’s vote by our MPs, to entrench vaccine passes in British domestic life.

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This has been presented as a measure to control Covid — or, as George Osborne put it, a matter of “citizenship”. But it’s worth bearing in mind that emergency powers have a way of sticking around. Anti-terror measures enacted in America in the wake of 9/11 massively expanded US surveillance and are still in force. Once the infrastructure and social norms are in place for digital ID, they are unlikely to go away again — especially given the Government has already signalled a desire to introduce such a scheme.

From some perspectives, digital ID is an obvious and sensible move. In a 2020 video, the aerospace and weapons manufacturer Thales offers an enticing picture of how much easier many ordinary interactions could become with a ‘Digital ID Wallet’. Controlled from a smartphone by each individual user, Thales imagines this centralising a user’s personal data, eliminating the messy business of individual assessment and human error from ID checks and record-keeping across all areas of life.

The power of such tools is evident, as is their appeal from a governance perspective. But once they’re in place, the scope is infinite to extend them beyond simply logging driving licence records.

Once identities are held digitally, our behaviour can be tracked — and ‘nudged’ — digitally as well. And our elites, habituated by university courses that highlight the importance of large-scale social and cultural patterns over the specifics of individual experience, already look eagerly toward the potential offered by AI pattern recognition. But machine learning systems are only as good as their inputs. And pattern recognition isn’t the same thing as interpretation.

In an AI ‘art’ generator, this has little impact beyond creating creepy kitten-images. But in contexts that affect people’s lives more directly, machine learning has more serious implications. Imagine, for example, that we embraced a ‘prevention’ oriented public health system, using citizen data collected around a Digital ID Wallet. This isn’t so far-fetched: a data-driven pilot scheme aimed at tackling obesity via measures including tracking scheme members’ shopping history was launched earlier this year.

And while the existing pilot scheme focuses on rewards, a unified ID would make it easy to implement sanctions too. The Health Pass now required for entry into bars, clubs or venues to combat the spread of Covid-19 could without great difficulty be extended to other behaviours or linked with purchase history. What this change means is the arrival, likely for good, of a mode of digital-era governance where for the first-time participation in public life can be made conditional on ‘healthy’ behaviours.

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The mutant kitten is a vivid illustration of what happens when you task a computer with doing something human, without the capacity to understand what humans actually care about. Applied to real lives, the blind brilliant-idiot quality of AI pattern recognition is already causing miscarriages of justice.

Now imagine extending that deep into your life: having your Health Pass suspended because you’ve bought too many units of alcohol this week, perhaps, meaning you can’t access essential services. Never mind that you were shopping for an event at your local social club. The computer sees a pattern. And unlike for a human, for machine intelligence there’s no difference between pattern recognition and meaning.

The slow collapse of social meaning into computer-legible pattern is reshaping us into a post-political, post-individual human order — one resisted most vigorously, to date, by conservatives. It was chiefly conservative politicians and voters who framed Brexit as pushback against technocracy. At Yale, conservative donors including Henry Kissinger forced Professor Gage to resign earlier this year. And on Tuesday 98 Tories — nearly a third of elected Conservative MPs — rebelled on Covid passes. Boris owes his victory to Labour Party support, and is probably a dead man walking within his own party now.

But Boris’s loss of face in his own party is one fraction of a far more deadly bleeding of authority: our downward spiral of disintegrating trust in human government full stop. As long as this continues, the temptation will persist to solve the crisis of authority with ever deeper rule by AI: the only compromise option left when we can’t agree on which human or humans should be in charge.

Fittingly, while writing this, I stumbled on another, current digital art project titled Headless. This one doesn’t depict the impersonal nature of finance — it’s trying to harness decentralised digital technology to human ends, by embracing it as an engine of creativity.

I hope its creators are right to think this can be done. For we’ve just taken another step closer to a world ruled by machines; machines that are brilliant at detecting patterns, but idiots when it comes to understanding what those patterns mean. And unless we’re able to humanise those technologies, this dawning age of digitised governance will digest the patterns of our social order and regurgitate a world of idiotic, inhuman cruelty.

The dog issue in our family had been a growing controversy for some time, but I had never expected it to become a real one. I refused every plea. We have three children in a not-very-big flat, so compact that all of them were in the same room for a while. Why on earth would I want yet another living creature to look after? More responsibility? More reasons to be woken up in the night?

But then, just once, when I had had maybe slightly too much to drink, I said it would be fine and maybe it was even a good idea. By the time I came to my senses and relented, it was too late: the wheels were in motion, like the build-up to war. There was no stopping it.

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I’m not a natural dog person. I grew up in Zone 2, in a flat, and for 11 years we had a cat, Suzie — who I wasn’t wild about, if I’m honest. My only experience of looking after a dog was occasionally taking my father-in-law’s elderly Dalmatian for a walk on Hampstead Heath. We had a few miserable strolls in the rain during which Jasper would crouch down and deliver an almighty deposit out of his grotesque canine digestive system, a monstrous Mordor of a place filled with sulphur and God-knows-what toxins. Jasper would then wait there, giving me a look as if to say, “well it’s not going to pick itself up, is it?” And on we would go.

Alas Jasper is now in the great hall feasting with his ancestors, and my wife’s extended family — many of whom live nearby — longed for a replacement. They’re dog people: they crave the companionship and the love the animal gives you, the dog-chat about dog things, even the dog smell. It leaves me cold.

My wife started browsing those websites where they advertise homeless animals from the Mediterranean and former Soviet bloc, who are then shipped away from their hellish existence on the streets of Kiev or Chișinău and taken in by families in Remain-voting areas of southern England. Our future pet had been found along with her five siblings just outside Lisbon, orphaned after the horrendous forest fires of summer 2018. They were lucky: all six of them ended up being flown over to England, where they found homes somewhere between Crouch End and Bristol.

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I must have been busy writing my book while all this happening. All I remember is, later, returning from the cinema to find this small animal in our flat. It looked more like a fox than anything, although it is apparently some sort of lurcher — a common type found on the streets of Lisbon.

My children were instantly delighted, and from a utilitarian point of view the dog has made our house far happier. Everyone else is about 20% happier; I’m about 50% less happy. So it’s a big win for the West family.

The dog and I immediately didn’t hit it off. The animals are perceptive, I suppose, and “Twiggy” (no particular reason for the name) soon learned that I am the lone canine-sceptic in the house and that I don’t want to be licked, don’t appreciate barking and am especially not too fond of stepping in urine on the floor first thing in the morning. It’s not that I wish the dog any ill, I just don’t want it anywhere near me.

As I have children and pretty much everyone loves children, I sort of assumed people were the same with pets. In fact, I’d say about one in five people really dislike dogs, and get angry or scared if you let yours go near them. If you go out with your baby to the park or shops, you often receive smiles or compliments. You’re certainly not going to get abuse from random strangers. With a dog, you do.

It’s often by other dog owners, to be honest. Twiggy is some sort of sighthound, so she’s designed to run after anything vaguely resembling a rabbit. That includes cats and smaller dogs, and Hampstead Heath is full of these delicate little fluffballs that get scared whenever even a medium-sized dog chases them. And their owners end up shouting at us. It’s like having some adolescent tearaway.

Twiggy reserves special animosity for cats, and for the poor creature living next door to us life has all of a sudden changed dramatically. In our gloriously happy pre-Twiggy days, I used to occasionally stroke this perfectly harmless animal as I walked the kids to school, the cat basking in its good fortune in life: a nice quiet suburban road in north London; free food; adoring humans; absolutely nothing to worry about. And then a dog moves in next door.

Every day Twiggy howls and screams at this cat, which runs off in terror. Perhaps the most stressful thing about Twiggy is that noise she makes. It is truly horrendous, like the screaming of the damned in hell. It genuinely shakes me to the core. So God knows what the cat must think.

But as bad as all this animal violence is, I find the dog-chats with dog-people even worse — the stilted, three-minute pauses while people compare breeds and characteristics and personalities and say “oh, they’re so loyal, aren’t they?” But they’re all loyal, I want to laugh, they’re programmed that way! You don’t get dogs cynically manoeuvring around their master like they’re scheming courtiers in Renaissance Italy, do you?

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At the end of the day, once work and house drudgery are all done, I like to read on the sofa. This is my precious space where I can relax, and I’m quite particular about hoovering the carpet and ensuring the place is clean. Even with children, I’d managed to win the battle.

Well, that all went. If I wanted to sit down on my sofa, there would be animal bones all over the floor, like someone had emptied a KFC rubbish bin on my carpet, alongside ripped up furry toys, pencils, bits of wood and chewed up tennis balls. (She has got better since, in fairness).

I’m not anti-animal, I just don’t get the rewards other people enjoy. I don’t want a creature that follows me around all day, or licks me, or wants its tummy stroked. The only quality I want in a sycophant is someone who praises my writing. I just want a pet that says “great piece today, Ed”, “love your book, Ed” and “you’re so much better than [much more successful journalist], Ed”; I don’t want one that tries to sniff my crotch after it’s just eaten some vomit off the pavement.

I would like this to be one of those stories where we actually learn to love each other. But sometimes there are no happy endings, only extended periods of begrudging tolerance and acceptance.

Ed West’s Tory Boy: Memoirs of the Last Conservative is now available in paperback

Many years ago, the late Alan Coren observed that three categories of books seemed to be surefire bestsellers: books about Nazis, books about golf and books about cats. In 1975, therefore, he published a book called Golfing for Cats, and put a swastika on its cover. It was a huge success. It’s with similar thoughts in mind, I suspect, that John Gray’s perspicacious editor at Allen Lane, Simon Winder, will have encouraged the great philosopher to produce his new little book, Feline Philosophy. 

It is, in its way, a more whimsical and till-point friendly companion-piece to Gray’s 2013 The Silence of Animals. And with it John Gray — for whom the idea of progress is a myth, morality a vain imagining, reason an ignis fatuus and the search for truth a fool’s errand — even dips his gnarled toe into the listicle-infested waters of self-help, supplying in his final chapter “Ten Feline Hints On How To Live Well”. Actually, it’s very charming. And, despite his gloomy worldview, he clearly loves cats, the big softy.

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Gray has one central idea, around which he circles like a cat preparing to settle in a laundry basket. It is that what marks humans out from other species is our reflexive thinking and our abstract awareness of our own mortality. Humans are miserable because we try to find meaning in something larger than ourselves – be that systems of philosophy, religious devotion or abstract ideas about the thriving of our species. All of these are, one way or another, unsatisfactory displacement activities: we are, in the cat-loving T. S. Eliot’s phrase, “distracted from distraction by distraction”, constantly trying to push down the terror of the meaningless and inevitable extinction that awaits us.

Cats don’t worry about that stuff, Gray says. They don’t tell stories to themselves about themselves. They accept their own natures, rather than seeking to change or understand them. They live in their bodies and in their sense-worlds, moment to moment. “Unless they are confined within environments that are unnatural for them, cats are never bored. Boredom is fear of being alone with yourself. Cats are happy being themselves, while humans try to be happy by escaping themselves.”

The whole project of philosophy, Gray says in the first few pages, is essentially misconceived: “posing as a cure, philosophy is a symptom of the disease it pretends to remedy”. We are made miserable by our faculty for thinking, in other words, and we try to make ourselves happy with… more thinking. As the title of Boethius’s most influential work expresses it, we look for “consolations” in philosophy, and we look in vain. “Throughout much of its history, philosophy has been a search for truths that are proof against mortality,” Gray writes — from the idea of an eternal realm of Platonic forms onwards — but as Freud was to show, the repressed tends to return.

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The three main schools of ancient philosophy — Stoics, Sceptics and Epicureans — all promised to bring their followers to the tranquil condition of ataraxia. Epicureans said you could achieve inner peace by adjusting your circumstances; Stoics by adjusting your reactions to the world; Sceptics by ceasing to try to make sense of it altogether. But even if you get a measure of relief through one of these approaches, asks Gray, is the life you end up with one much worth living? Gray dismisses Marcus Aurelius’s thinking as “not an affirmation of life but a pose of indifference to life”.

Rather, he says, there’s a sideways jump to be made: out of language and away from thinking altogether. Though he deplores the ruinous anthropocentrism of Aristotle and the Western tradition, Gray has a certain amount of time for the Taoist notion of tao and te — that is, the key to existence is for each creature to obey its own nature. The nearest parallel he finds in Western philosophy is Spinoza’s idea of conatus — which he glosses as “the tendency of living things to preserve and enhance their activity in the world”. Just be yourself, you could say.

Cats, having no choice but to be themselves and nursing no illusions that they do have a choice, find this quite unproblematic. They are, as Gray puts it, “selfless egoists”. Indeed, they even escape the charge of cruelty, which Gray calls “negative empathy”, because empathy itself is alien to them.

All of this is set out not just through vignettes of Schopenhauer, Montaigne and Descartes (dreadful cat-torturer, that last one: chucked them out of windows in a spirit of philosophical inquiry) but through a number of anecdotes and encounters with cats in history and literature. My to-read list now includes lesser-known short works by Colette, Junichirō Tanizaki, Mary Gaitskill and Patricia Highsmith (in the last of which a cat does a murder).

The standout is a real-life cat, the excellently named Mèo, rescued as a kitten from the Vietnamese city of Hué ahead of the Tet Offensive by the American journalist Jack Laurence. As this whisky-drinking feline refugee moved to Connecticut, Manhattan and later the UK with his traumatised rescuer, his adventures seem to present an example of feline virtue. He passes through horrors without internalising them. Taking pleasure in a sunny windowsill even as the bombs fall, he “flourished wherever he found himself”. And he offered comfort and companionship to humans not by saying or by doing, but simply by being.

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Where Gray makes a bit of a leap, of course, is in his confident assertion that cats think, or rather don’t, in the way he supposes. In truth, we have no idea what goes on in a cat’s furry little head, and that alterity is what makes them so attractive. When my cat sat on the end of the bed, perfectly still, staring at nothing, how am I to know that she wasn’t wondering intently about whether existence precedes essence? Indeed, in insisting that it’s vain of philosophers to see humans as different from the rest of the animal world, and at the same time insisting that we are uniquely cursed with self-consciousness, Gray seems to me slightly to be having his Whiskas and eating it.

And what of their ethics and affections? Gray concedes that cats show affection to humans, but he says — probably rightly — that it’s a fleeting and essentially self-interested thing. A cat won’t spend much time mourning you if you die. He concedes that a mother cat will risk death to protect her kittens, but that perhaps falls under his rubric of a beast following its nature. And he doesn’t develop what seems to me an interesting point — which is that the adult cat’s meow is an inter-species communication. They don’t meow at each other: only at us. That bears exploring, I think.

You finish reading Feline Philosophy with much to chew on — and a firm sense that no self-respecting cat would have felt the need to write such a book.

When cats come up against human stupidity, they don’t try to change it. They simply walk away. The cat that was the subject of a philosopher’s experiment in moral education was out of doors much of the time, I discovered. As well as hunting for her food, she had most likely found a second home. If the philosopher persisted in his moralising enterprise she would depart permanently. The follies of philosophers are entertaining, for a time. But they are also rather repetitive, and after a while it seems best to move on. Part of the purpose of my book is to deflate the anthropocentrism of philosophers, but it’s not philosophers I’m concerned to persuade. Rather, my aim is to dispel some illusions regarding philosophy itself.

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Of course philosophy has served many human impulses. Contrary to what is commonly supposed, an interest in truth has rarely been dominant. In its western variant, the subject seems to have begun as a search for ataraxia — a state of mental equilibrium that cannot be disturbed by the accidents of life. In other words, philosophy is used as a calmative throughout much of its history. There is some evidence that the ancient Greek Sceptics may have been influenced by contact with Indian practitioners of meditation they called gymnosophists (“naked sages”); the Epicureans and the Stoics followed the Sceptics in making tranquillity the endpoint of philosophising.

The Meditations of the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius reads more like a funereal ode to resignation than a guide to living well. Epicurus was more cheerful, but his philosophy of reducing human desires to a satisfiable minimum would cut out much of the passion that makes life worth living. Knowledge would not be pursued for its own sake; sex would be engaged in medicinally, as a form of exercise. Happily, most human beings cannot sustain ataraxia for very long.

That philosophy originated as a search for mental quietude tells us something important about human beings and how they differ from cats. 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.

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A few philosophers have recognised that there may be something to be learnt from cats. The greatest among them, the sixteenth century essayist Michel de Montaigne, famously asked: “When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?” Montaigne is conventionally classified as a humanist philosopher. In fact he was as sceptical of “humanity” as he was of the Deity, and considered other animals to be superior to humans in their inborn understanding of how to live. He was also refreshingly sceptical about the claims of philosophy. He questioned any idea that practising it could produce inner peace. Even the Sceptics, who believed inner calm could be attained by suspending judgement, attributed to philosophy a power to heal the soul that it does not possess.

Instead Montaigne recommended relying on nature, together with a little artful diversion, to give us balance in life. He recovered from the melancholy that followed the death of a beloved friend, he writes, by allowing himself to fall in love again. Thinking provided no remedy, and too much thought could be harmful. A cat can leap across an abyss without turning a hair. The more a human being thinks about the fearful drop beneath, the more likely they are to fall into it. An examined life may not be humanly liveable. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein some centuries later, Montaigne seems to have thought the chief purpose of philosophy was to rid oneself of the need to philosophise.

Cats have no need of philosophy because they already know how to live. Dull, commonplace folk will say the reason cats do not philosophise is that they lack the capacity for abstract thought. But imagine a species of cats that possessed this capacity while retaining the ease with which they live in the world. They might even give humans guidance on how to live. My book contains a list of 10 feline tips or hints on the subject. Of course these are not pieces of moral advice. Cats know nothing of morality as we understand it. They obey no commandments and feel no obligation to improve the world. Yet if we think of ethics as living according to one’s nature — as the ancient Greeks and Chinese Daoists did, along with Montaigne and also Spinoza — these feline philosophers could have something useful to tell us about the good life. To be sure, they would not expect us to follow their advice, nor would they care if we did. If they engaged in philosophy, it would be as a form of play.

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Can they really arrest you for walking the dog?

By Adam King

Why humans suffer chronic disquiet is a deep and difficult question. Pascal thought it pointed to the divine origin of the human soul. Inherently restive, human beings spend their lives escaping from themselves in what he called diversion — activities such as sport and war, love and politics — when their true home is beyond this world. Montaigne also believed humans spent much of their lives in diversion, but regarded this as a flaw in the human animal. Enough of a sceptic to leave open the possibility of religious faith, he nonetheless thought human beings could temper their anxiety by learning how to surrender to their natural condition. Here I side with Montaigne.

One source of human unease is the awareness of mortality. In order to stave off the fact of death, we make stories of our lives and these stories become the meaning of life for us. But time and chance break up the tales we tell, so our days pass in fear of tomorrow. Humankind is the death-defined animal. In contrast, cats show signs of knowing when they are nearing death, but they do not spend their lives in dread of dying. Cats do not turn their lives into a story. Instead they know only the day, and seek no meaning beyond it. If the soul is untouched by death, the feline soul is closer to immortality than the human soul can ever be. That may be why cats have been worshipped as gods. Immortal mortals, they live without thinking of death. We humans cannot forget our mortality, but by observing the ways of cats perhaps we can forget some of our fears.

The best way to learn from cats is by living with them. My book reflects 30 years of feline company, 23 of them with a cat who was with me, still enjoying his long life, when I was writing it. But as I detail in the book, memoirs and fiction can be very illuminating. An eminent war correspondent writes of how he adopted a hungry kitten in the ancient Vietnamese city of Hue (soon to be destroyed in the course of the war). The cat grew up to be an intrepid traveller, accompanying the war correspondent across the world and living out its fierce, joyful life in New York and London. An American writer tells us how her world was undone and remade when she lost a tiny, dauntless, one-eyed cat she adopted in Italy. The pleasure cats take from our company, she suggests, may be a truer kind of love than the mixture of dependency and vanity, neediness and resentment, which so often shape the attachment of humans to one another.

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For those of us who love them, a large part of the charm of cats is that they are not domesticated. They live with us and may cherish our company. But unlike dogs they have not become part-human, and while they may come to love us they do not at bottom need us. If they can no longer rely on human beings they soon re-wild. Rather than being domesticated by humans for their practical usefulness, cats domesticated humans by teaching us to love them. They seem to have begun co-habiting with us around twelve thousand years ago, when they discovered rodents in grain stores that humans had created, in shifting to our more sedentary way of life. Cats have been prized for their skills in pest control ever since, though they are not always very efficient in this capacity. There are photographs of cats and mice together, with the cats showing no interest in the mice. In return for our giving them a home cats give us their company, but never become our servants.

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.

Cats teach a paradox. If you pursue ataraxia you will spend most of your life in turmoil. Not craving inner quietude, cats revert to it whenever they are not practically threatened. Not looking for meaning in their lives, they are free to live them as they come, without looking for distraction or consolation. It is life itself that they value.

Human beings may be too frail to emulate the fearless lucidity of the feline mind. Philosophy, after all, is testimony to human infirmity. Better take up a religion, or return without regret to the common world of diversion. But whatever you do, consider: you will live more lightly if you pass some of your time with a cat.

Feline Philosophy: Cats and the meaning of life will be published by Penguin