[BRIEF NOTE] Fudge, Montaigne, and Cats

[rfmcdonald]

One thing that I've noticed since I got Shakespeare is the degree to which he's a sentient being. I certainly don't mean that he has a human-level intelligence--my experiment to get him to process spreadsheet was an ignominious failure--but he has desires, he can learn, he has memories, he has a personality (he really likes rubbing the side of his face against mine). That's why I was interested in Erica Fudge's Pets, an examination of the philosophy of pets. She has interesting things to say about cats.

Famously, for example, the late-sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne condensed his enquiry into the nature and limitations of human knowledge into a brief glance at his pet cat: "When I play with my cat," he asked, "who knwos if I am not a pasttime to her more than she is to me?" Who, he pondered, is the passive party in this relationship, and who the active one? Such scepticism about human power and animal inferiority, and about the human capacity to make the world (what would it mean for human status if a human is simply a cat's plaything) can be traced in much current thinking (8)[.]

Fudge returns to this theme later in her tome.

But why a cat? What is it that a cat offers to Montaigne and his philosophy that a dog cannot? We should bear in mind that Montaigne has no interest in symbolism; he really is thinking about a real cat. The answer is surprisingly simple, I think, and persists today in some of the clichés repeated about the difference between dogs and cats. If a dog is trainable, then a cat is much less easily tamed; it is a much more independent--less homely--animal. Indeed, rather than constructing the domestic sphere a cat might well be understood to challenge it; it is, indeed, in his interaction with his cat that Montaigne is brought to contemplate his own lack of power.

[. . .]

Our limited knowledge of the universe--what [Vicki] Hearne calls "our epistemological heavy-handedness"--is challenged by a cat's refusal to be absorbed into our worldview (79-80).

[. . .]

For a sceptic like Montaigne, who doubts whether the human imagination can be anything but anthropocentric, who wonders what if anything can really be known, a discussion of the nature of human knowledge takes the form of questions: what do I know? How do I know it? These are questions asked of the most homely as well as the most abstract issues. "What do I know about my cat?" is inseparable from a meditation on the nature of human knowledge itself. Indeed, animals are central to scepticism because it is when we confront the non-human that human power so clearly unravels (81)

Shakespeare certainly places enough demands on me to make me think that Montaigne was onto something.