哲學家約翰．格雷現在改研究貓咪了！？

停止庸人自擾，向貓咪學習就對了！

 

　　綜觀哲學史，就是一帖撫平人們不安的安慰劑。幾個世紀以來，人們一直想知道如何獲得幸福、如何被愛、如何在充滿變數與遺憾的世界生活，史賓諾沙和別爾嘉耶夫等思想家也一直想找到這些問題的答案。但或許，比起向這些偉大的思想家尋求解答，我們反而可以從帶給我們無限想像空間的貓咪身上看見一些端倪。

 

　　貓咪從來不會想他們的生活過得如何，反而無憂無慮，約翰．格雷從貓咪身上發現，原來生活可以免受焦慮及自我意識之苦，並找到了關於愛、親密感、死亡、道德與自身的解答。

 

　　從貓咪的習性中，格雷帶我們看見人類的自我中心論有多愚蠢，還有人其實是多麽脆弱又易感寂寞，他指出了一條擺脫幻覺與妄想的道路，讓我們得以在充斥危險及驟變的世界中自在生活──就像貓咪一樣。(文/博客來編譯)

 

　　The author of Straw Dogs, famous for his provocative critiques of scientific hubris and the delusions of progress and humanism, turns his attention to cats―and what they reveal about humans' torturous relationship to the world and to themselves.

 

　　The history of philosophy has been a predictably tragic or comical succession of palliatives for human disquiet. Thinkers from Spinoza to Berdyaev have pursued the perennial questions of how to be happy, how to be good, how to be loved, and how to live in a world of change and loss. But perhaps we can learn more from cats--the animal that has most captured our imagination--than from the great thinkers of the world.

 

　　In Feline Philosophy, the philosopher John Gray discovers in cats a way of living that is unburdened by anxiety and self-consciousness, showing how they embody answers to the big questions of love and attachment, mortality, morality, and the Self: Montaigne's house cat, whose un-examined life may have been the one worth living; Meo, the Vietnam War survivor with an unshakable capacity for "fearless joy"; and Colette's Saha, the feline heroine of her subversive short story "The Cat", a parable about the pitfalls of human jealousy.

 

　　Exploring the nature of cats, and what we can learn from it, Gray offers a profound, thought-provoking meditation on the follies of human exceptionalism and our fundamentally vulnerable and lonely condition. He charts a path toward a life without illusions and delusions, revealing how we can endure both crisis and transformation, and adapt to a changed scene, as cats have always done.

 


John Gray is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including The Silence of Animals, The Immortalization Commission, Black Mass, and Straw Dogs. A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, he has been a professor of politics at Oxford, a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale, and a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics. He now writes full-time.