4
OTHERNESS

I’ve had cats in my life since I was fostered at the age of fifteen. When I arrived at the house in London, the woman who was fostering me greeted me at the door, holding a small grey kitten under her arm.

‘This is Grey Cat,’ she said. ‘I only got her yesterday.’

Grey Cat and I were co-fosterlings. She was supposed to be my cat to help me settle in and she behaved impeccably. She slept in my bed, had her first kittens in the cupboard in my room. Then she became a mature, independent cat. Perfectly friendly, but being an intelligent animal she chose to belong, in the sense that cats belong at all, to our mutual foster-mother: the one who always remembered to feed her and was available (as a teenage girl was not) for petting and stroking according to Grey Cat’s timetable.

Since then there have been other cats, with very few periods without one or more. Black Cat (I had the impression that all cats were to be given names for their colour), Sniff (for his wayward sinuses), who adopted me and sat outside my back door for days with immense patience but sneezing a lot, I can only say doggedly, because I thought I didn’t want another cat, until I understood that I did and let him in. There was Mungo, Phoebe, Flora (named, my small daughter told her friend, ‘because she had short legs so she was close to the floor’), and over the past twenty years the three most recent, who have overlapped. Oscar came first, then Darcy a couple of years later, and finally Bunty arrived, the smallest and youngest, fourteen years ago. Bunty is the last remaining cat. Until 2001 they lived with me in London, then the four of us moved, with robust complaints (vocal and faecal) from the cats in the back of the car, to Cambridge. They settled in well enough, although Bunty always hated Darcy who tried to play with her and got mercilessly screamed at as if every approach were a life-threatening attack. Bunty is a bit of a drama queen. After a couple of years I threw caution to the wind and moved into the house directly opposite to live with The Poet, the reason for the shift to Cambridge in the first place, and I had to explain to the cats that they lived here now, too.

Something happened to Darcy. Although he’d been crossing the road back and forth as comfortably as I had for two years, spending evenings at The Poet’s house, returning to feeding base in the morning with me, once I finally left the house across the road he refused to move in with us. New people moved into the old house and Darcy disappeared for several days. Then he started coming into our house at night, sleeping in the newspaper basket in the kitchen, but every morning, as soon as we got up, he shot out of the cat door. Sometimes he came into the garden and when I saw him, I went out and tried to talk to him, to offer him food, but he behaved as if he were terrified. He stood off at a distance, frozen, and stared at me while I spoke, put down a bowl of food and extended a hand to him. I would say he looked as if he were in desperate conflict, but cats don’t really have expressions on their faces, they don’t have the musculature and it’s not how they communicate – so I can’t say what he was thinking. He’d approach a few steps and then turn and run off as if he’d hit a wall and something had terrified him. He came less and less, although he always looked well fed and healthy. I spoke to the vet and described his behaviour.

‘There’s new evidence that cats can get a form of Alzheimer’s disease. The stress of another move might have triggered it, or maybe it was just a coincidence.’

It made peculiar sense. Darcy had always been a gentle, friendly soul, whatever Bunty thought, who only wanted to spend his time sharing a chair with me or anyone willing to give him a stroke. Now he seemed angry and confused. A transformed, unhappy creature. Something sudden and catastrophic had happened either to him or with him. The vet was doubtful about catching Darcy and bringing him in for an examination. The stress would make things worse. Eventually, Darcy stopped coming to the house altogether. At around the same time, I noticed that some people a dozen or so houses down the road had moved away. I’d seen Darcy sitting outside their door, and knocked several times to see if he was being fed by them, but I never got an answer. I think that Darcy had adopted them, or they him, as Sniff had adopted me, and when they left, they took him with them, thinking him a stray who was now their cat. At least, I hope so.

Oscar was given a killing injection when he was seventeen and his kidneys failed. I held him for the injection, as I had Mungo, years before, who had cancer. As with Mungo, the vet had to say that Oscar was dead now, I could stop holding him. I knew of course. When you hold a live animal in your arms and he is given an injection that stops his heart, there is an instantaneous transformation, and you can feel the creature you are holding to be lifeless. Not to be losing life, but abruptly to be no more than a body, without any muscle tension. The limpness of a dead cat, which a moment ago had been alive, is very disturbing. The weight in your arms increases, but there is no resisting, responding life in it. It is absolute. Even so, I held them both until told to stop, and murmured close to their ears comforting words I had spoken often to them: that it was all right, all right, that they were so beautiful, such clever cats. How strange it is to say such things to a live purring cat, let alone to the dead creature in your arms. The feeling of their toneless weight stayed on my arms for weeks. You realise that all our contacts with other people, from the children we cuddle to the hands of strangers we shake, depend on the meeting of tensions, muscle against muscle. Response. Being post-domestic as I am, I have only held cats in my arms, not people, while they made an instant transition from life to death. It would be a less extraordinary experience for anyone born a few decades before me for whom death was a more common and closer event. But the limp body I held on both occasions were animals that I had lived with for years. So now only Bunty remains, a transformed cat herself, now that she’s on her own, much more contented without Darcy and Oscar sharing the house and the available cat-affection: less nervy, curled asleep in her habitual place, her head resting on her haunch or on the edge of my warm laptop, pressed close against my leg on the sofa as I type.

I’d say in a casual sort of way that I’ve known all my cats, in much the same way that I’ve known other people; better, really, because the cats each lived with me for much longer than any human beings except my daughter and now The Poet. But, of course, thinking about it more carefully, I haven’t known them at all. I could even doubt how well I really know my daughter and The Poet, on the level at which I mean, but my best guesses – what we call empathy – help with them. I make the same best guesses with cats, but if I empathise with cats to try and discover who they are and what they experience, I’m likely to fail on the grounds, very simply, that they are cats and I am not.

The common ground they and I have is where we live. Cats have not actually been domesticated, as dogs were, bred from packs of wild wolves that accompanied groups of early humans to benefit from their leavings. The more friendly ones were kept around and bred with each other. People and dogs have more in common than people and cats. Dogs, if bred for their juvenile characteristics (the friendly, learning ones) easily become dependent on human society. Cats turned up in human settlements and benefited from the rats that benefited from the stored grain. The people benefited from the cats killing the rats – look, we’re back to the Pied Piper – but until very late in our symbiosis they didn’t try to breed cats into the useful or decorative and crippled creatures that dogs became. Those flat-nosed snuffling Persian horrors, bred only for show, are a very recent development. So cats learned to live with people, enjoyed the warmth and comfort the humans provided, ate the food which kept them around and on the prowl when rats and mice were scarce, and didn’t mind at all being petted, somewhat. And so they are now. A cat turns feral very easily, and lives quite successfully outside human habitation. If you draw one of those diagrams of two circles with a shaded section of each overlapping – a Venn diagram – the intersection area is the space where humans and cats live together. Our houses actually. The rest of the two circles, by far the largest area of both, are humans and cats quite uninvolved with each other. But if there were a way to draw a Venn diagram so that one circle overlapped the other circle more than the other circle overlapped it, then this would better describe the situation. Dogs would overlap humans more – thinking themselves more part of the human world than they are (because they have been bred to think and be so), while humans would overlap the cat circle more, humans thinking we are more part of the cat world than we are. But that, of course, is still just a fantasy I have, rather than anything I really know about cats. It seems impossible to find a less anthropocentric way to think about the creatures with whom we share our daily space.

We have returned to that awful film of Dr Dolittle and his longing:

If we could talk to the animals, learn their languages

Think of all the things we could discuss.

Dolittle has to prove himself sane in court (and fails) on account of his desire to communicate with non-human animals, and though he is rescued from the madhouse, he is never more than that typical, harmless and faintly ambiguous eccentric with which literature and showbiz like affectionately or sentimentally to toy. I take Dolittle’s fancy perfectly seriously, as a proper and not at all mad longing. I recognise the longing in myself and I think it represents a general ache that we popularise and render quaint because we know it to be unachievable. Dolittle’s desire is an expression of our own. If we could talk to the animals, if they could talk to us. The massive black hole in our understanding of the creatures with whom we share the planet, as vast and compelling a mystery as the universe, is intolerable, not just because we can’t talk to the animals, but because it reminds us of how we can’t really know any other consciousness, not even those of our own species. Not even those we are closest to: our parents, our lovers, our children, our rivals. Best guess is best we can do, and it won’t do. It doesn’t scratch the itch. It reminds us that each of us is inescapably alone inside our heads. Make yourself think about that fact, force yourself, even as your mind swerves away from what it can’t deal with, insist on thinking it, and a quiet terror descends. Whoever you are, whatever you do, you are alone, not known, not knowing. It’s impossible to hold that thought for long. So the otherness of animals matters to us enormously, even if we are not whimsical professors or metaphysical philosophers.

But, being adaptable creatures, we behave most of the time as if we were convinced and content simply to think of ourselves as masters of the universe and to consider the space between us and ‘animals’ unbridgeable for perfectly knowable reasons that have, admittedly, changed and been argued about for millennia. The single category ‘animals’ covers a multiplicity of species as the category ‘human’ doesn’t. That animals are different from us goes without saying; indeed ‘animal’ essentially means ‘not human’, even if we do the modern liberal thing and call ourselves ‘human animals’. Our unquenched thirst for knowledge coexists (though not comfortably) with our assumption that the world is essentially at our command, to think and do with what we want. Even when we get excited about having overused the planet’s resources, and some clamour to use it less or differently, the fate of the planet is still believed to be in our control, to save if not destroy. Exploit it or conserve it, we’re in charge of it. Those who want to use it well want to keep it going, to preserve it, as we want to preserve rare species, and to feel that it will be there, and bountiful for our great-grandchildren. Yet planets come and go for all sorts of reasons, and if rampant, self-serving Homo sapiens are what evolved here to consume everything and therefore succeed spectacularly as indeed we have as a species, then our consumption of the earth may be just another way planets live and die. I am not, let me say hurriedly, allying myself with anti-ecology movements, only suggesting that we always assume (doubtless rightly and wrongly) that we are and should be in charge of the planet’s salvation. Even if we allow ourselves the possibility of going beyond species-survival behaviour as a further cultural evolutionary development, we remain the supreme beings on little earth, in charge of whether it becomes a garden or a wasteland.

There’s no way out of anthropocentrism for us. The only world we can live in is the world in which we evolved to live in; the only way we can see our world is through our own planet-earth-evolved eyes and consciousness. It is a trap consciousness lays, a game of everlasting mirrors, which we can’t escape – though some people don’t want to, or see no reason why we should. If it’s a problem at all it’s a metaphysical one, and probably a waste of time. But me, I’m hooked on unanswerable questions. The matter of Them and Us intrigues and teases me.

It has been perfectly clear to some people for thousands of years that they are them and we are us, and why that is so. Ever ambivalent about animals, we have nevertheless used them to define what we most fear in ourselves. ‘Consider your origin; you were not born to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge’, writes Dante in the Divine Comedy.¹ The brute, the beast in us, always lurks, always needs suppressing and is the main target of religions and governments everywhere. It is the animal in us that threatens to destroy the very planet on which we live. Therefore, the great distinction must be made between the savage and the civilised inside and outside our own being. We choose animals to represent our savagery (although they bear little resemblance to it) so they can’t be us or our whole project is in trouble. They become a categorical ‘not-us’, a thought so familiar that it hardly needs saying. Individuals or groups who transgress civic norms are animals, beasts and brutes (sometimes monsters) and we wonder, amazed, that they have no ‘humanity’. Animals/savages are instinctual, while humans are thoughtful; animals/savages act without exercising control over themselves, where exercising control is quintessentially what it means to be human. We have the old animal brain, low down, and above it the new frontal lobes that particularly define the human. We have consciousness, self-reflection and all sorts of useful ways of making a clear distinction between ourselves and the brutes. But still we remain troubled because, even though our knowing is how we differentiate ourselves from animals, we cannot know them.

Jacques Derrida suggests a very particular distinction between man and animals (although note how he qualifies ‘generally thought’ with ‘though none of the philosophers I am about to examine actually mentions it’), but he also helpfully lists most of the other differences that have been noted over time:

It is generally thought, though none of the philosophers I am about to examine actually mentions it, that the property unique to animals, what in the last instance distinguishes them from man, is their being naked without knowing it. Not being naked, therefore, not having knowledge of their nudity, in short, without consciousness of good and evil … In principle, with the exception of man, no animal has ever thought to dress itself. Clothing would be proper to man, one of the ‘properties’ of man. ‘Dressing oneself’ would be inseparable from all the other figures of what is ‘proper to man’, even if one talks about it less than speech or reason, the logos, history, laughing, mourning, burial, the gift, etc.²

Most of those more spoken-of aspects of humanity that are said to distinguish us from brutes have by now been acknowledged to exist in some form or other in animals. Even if you argue about the use of the word ‘language’ to describe the way animals employ sound and gesture to communicate with each other, the once absolute barriers are now much fuzzier than they have ever been. Mourning, concern for the dead, tool use, playfulness, symbolism, generational learning, non-reproductive sex and even mirror self-recognition has been witnessed in one or several species of ‘animal’. But what of the nakedness Derrida speaks about – the ‘last instance’ that distinguishes them and us, which nonetheless is not mentioned by those thinkers he wishes to talk about?

He is referring, in this late lecture, to a very particular confrontation between animal and human, and a very particular nakedness. Specifically, the fact that his pet cat has a habit of following him every morning from the bedroom into the bathroom and staring at Derrida without his clothes on. Derrida stands naked in his bathroom. The cat stares at his genitals. Derrida, the man, is naked as animals apparently can’t be, which is consciously naked, selfconsciously naked, knowing good and evil and therefore finding himself filled with a difficult-to-define sense of guilt.

But the matter is more interesting than Derrida’s unease at having his genitals exposed to the gaze of an animal. He is not, he insists, talking about ‘an animal’, a generality: he is talking about a real, here and now, pussy cat:

I must immediately make it clear, the cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the bedroom as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse our myths and religions, literature and fables.

It is his own cat that sees him naked. ‘If I say “it is a real cat” that sees me naked, this is in order to mark its unsubstitutable singularity.’ And

it comes to me as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, into this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked. Nothing can ever rob me of the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualised [rebelle à tout concept]. And a mortal existence, for from the moment that it has a name, its name survives it. It signs its potential disappearance. Mine also, and that disappearance, from this moment to that, fort/da, is announced each time that, with or without nakedness, one of us leaves the room.³

This moment between Derrida and his pussy is both disturbing and perfectly familiar – which makes it what Freud defines as ‘uncanny’. At the start of every day the cat follows Derrida into the bathroom; it is morning, she wants her breakfast, but as soon as she’s in there, the door having been closed, and Derrida is naked, on the lavatory, showering, towelling himself dry, brushing his teeth, or spraying deodorant at his armpits, all the business of getting ready for his day, she demands to leave the bathroom. Derrida wishes to get on with his morning routine. The cat looks at him, and waits.

This is pretty much how the day starts for you and me and our cats. Every cat in the world hates having a door shut behind them as they enter a room. I’ve given up shutting the door to my study. Bunty (my named, irreplaceable living cat being) follows me into my study, after we’ve done the bathroom thing and I’m ready to start work, and settles herself comfortably on the sofa, but if I then shut the door, she gets up and sits at attention by the door, looking back at me where I’ve settled myself on the sofa with my laptop. So I get up and open the door for her. Bunty leaves the room for a moment and then comes back in, returns to the sofa and gets comfortable. I close the door and sit down. Bunty gets up and sits by the door … We could repeat this sequence all day and it wouldn’t change. If, in an attempt to circumvent the routine, I close the door when Bunty isn’t in the room, she will scratch outside, claw up the carpet by the door trying to get in. I get up and let her in, and if I close the door I have to open it to let her out again. So in the name of getting work done, and getting comfortable on the sofa myself, I no longer close the door, although I like to work in a room with the door closed.*

Derrida’s cat seems to be looking at him with a purpose. Let me out. She seems to be looking and waiting, just like Bunty does. Derrida’s nakedness, his vulnerable genitals and his feeling about being seen unclothed by his cat are entirely his own concern. The cat has other things on her mind. Looking, waiting, in order to get the door opened. Looking-waiting is the method cats use to demand that people do what they want. Or so I suppose. Derrida supposes the cat looks at his genitals; I suppose the cat looks to have the door opened. Neither of us can be sure what the cat supposes. We can’t even be sure that while she looks, she is waiting. Waiting is what we would be doing if we were a cat sitting, looking at a person, in front of a closed door that we will go out of when it is opened. But the cat is opaque to our human interpretation of her behaviour.

There is no doubt that cats look at you, that much is certain. Among other times, when they want you to open the door they look at you long and hard. Does the look mean ‘Open the door’? Does it mean ‘What to make of that creature who feeds me and opens the door, strips off its outer skin and underneath has a dangly thing just there, not quite within reach, almost like a half-dead mouse, and it moves a little, quite unpredictably’? Does it mean ‘Here is another form, different from the one which I followed from the bedroom. I wonder how it got here and if it’s well-trained enough to know that when I look at it, it must open the door’? Or is it a look that doesn’t mean any words we impose on it, because cats don’t have words and therefore, although we might sometimes be able to translate their conceptual world into wishes we can fulfil, most of the time we have no idea what goes on inside their heads? I’ve been trying to avoid mentioning Wittgenstein, but I can’t hold out any longer: if lions could talk, we wouldn’t understand them. He means surely: even if they could talk in our own language, we still wouldn’t understand them because they are lions and we are not.

What about the look that cats give you when (it would seem) they don’t want anything at all? Sometimes Bunty is beside me on the sofa and when I glance at her she is sitting, or lying there, looking directly at me, staring hard and purposefully at me; it seems, at any rate, her eyes are fixed unblinking on my face. It happens in the bathroom, in the study, while I’m watching TV with her on my lap or on the arm of the sofa, on the stairs. She looks at me, long, hard and quite often. And for extended periods. Eventually, if I look back at her for long enough, she will look away, but it is as if I’ve interrupted her stare with my own, not that something else has caught her attention. Sometimes I talk to her. ‘What? What do you want?’ but she never answers, just carries on looking, often, it seems to me, even more intensely. Why does she look at me? The expression on her face is the only expression her cat face can have. But her eyes seem intently, intentionally staring, meaningfully, I’d say, but I can’t say why or what they mean. It looks as if she has something urgent to tell me, if she could only find the words, or if I could only find the comprehension of her glance.

It can be perfectly clear. If I go into the kitchen and she wants me to put more food in her bowl, she will follow me, look up at me and miaow.

‘Hungry?’ I say.

‘Miaow,’ she’ll say, while I get the food and put it in her bowl.

She goes to the bowl and eats, and our transaction is over.

She has a cup of water in the study. When she wants more, she sits on the chest above it, beside the bathroom door where the water comes from and miaows. Again, I do what she wants, she jumps down and drinks the fresh water. Mission accomplished. This is communication with a purpose. Or at any rate something I can assume has a purpose (can I be sure that Bunty doesn’t miaow and eat because she believes that is what I would like her to do, and she’s merely being kind? Or that she hates drinking from the glass cup in the study, but goes along with it, to keep me happy or because she can’t find a way to explain that she’d rather have a pottery bowl?). Does she have a purpose when she seems just to be looking at me with no particular want, one that I can’t fathom? Or is she just looking, her eyes open and gazing in the direction her face is pointed? Sometimes, in exactly the same way, she sits with her back to the room and stares just as hard at the blank wall. Nothing is crawling on it, that I can see – it is a wall, uneventful and a shade of white. She sits alert and just looks at it. What could just looking possibly mean? Meaning, a word, a concept, that as far as I know only humans have. She looks at me, and I don’t know what she means by it, and if she doesn’t mean anything at all by it, she’s just sitting there, what is she doing, why, what could that possibly mean? Are you looking at me? It drives me crazy. It has always driven me crazy. It’s partly the reason for writing this book.

Derrida qualifies the ‘irreplaceable living being’ of his cat by declaring that her name gives her a relation to him and to time (another human invention that cats might have no truck with). The name that survives her, that makes her not there (but somewhere) when she walks out of the room. ‘Bunty isn’t here’ therefore she is. This is again a Derridian world view, not at all necessarily a cat world view. T. S. Eliot understood that cats might also have their own ineffable and secret name.

The name, whether it’s ‘cat’ or ‘Tootles’, is given to her by the human name-giver: Adam-Derrida-Diski. We name animals, as we name everything, because it allows us to relate to them and to bring them into our world of time. Though sometimes some animals respond to the sound we make when we call them by name, we have no way of knowing what it means to them. Certainly, it doesn’t survive them from their point of view. Neither Oscar nor Bunty (as far as I can possibly know) have a concept of ‘Oscar’ who is dead. Only I do – and now you. And it’s true that this gives them a place in our world, but tells us nothing about how they understand their place in our world, or possibly our place in their world.

What Derrida and I agree on is that we believe something is going on in the staring creature’s mind, even if we can’t grasp it. What we acknowledge, with or without specifying it, is that the creature has a mind. But, of course, that’s just another name we give to what we still do not really comprehend. Descartes had no trouble with this. Mind meant soul, inner being, and animals did not have one. The greatest divider after God, Descartes codified the distinction between man and beast. They are automata, which function without self-reflection. They do not deliberately do anything or feel anything, because they can only respond to stimuli. Hungry, they seek out food; tired, they sleep; while human beings, us soul-owners, can deliberate and decline on occasion, for a reason, to follow our instincts. Reason. We have it, they do not. I am because I think, they are not because they don’t. Or so Descartes thought. And no animal contradicted him because they did not have his language and he didn’t look at them in such a way as to possibly guess that they might have something like mind themselves, because he had already worked out from first principles (human reason, the only sort we know) that they did not.

So, why do Derrida and I accept that animals have minds, consciousnesses? It just seems to be the case from our observation of the animals who live with us – neither of us being zoologists, ethologists or behaviourists, we have no evidence that science would approve of one way or the other. It seems to be the case that Bunty is a cat and that she has an individuality, I would dare to say consciousness. She is certainly different from me. Derrida would call it an abyssal difference. I don’t understand her sometimes when she stares at me, and although I don’t understand people sometimes when they stare at me, they usually have a way, if they want to, to tell me what it is they are thinking. A man stared at me the other day in a chemist shop. I looked back at him. ‘I’m not drunk, I’m mental,’ he said, explaining exactly what he wanted me to know. But there are some who don’t or can’t explain. There are people who don’t have the speech, or social skills, or the capacity for cultural learning that we think of as precisely human. We have always given those people born without what we think of as essential human capacities the benefit of being human because they are our species. In much the same way, but in spite of differences of species, Derrida, I and every other cat owner in the world, give their feline the benefit of consciousness, and since we don’t know what their consciousness is like, we impose on them a watered-down version of our own. What else can we do unless we are to live entirely separated, parallel lives under the same roof?

In 1677 Spinoza explained that it was the degree of otherness that made us the masters of the animal world:

It is plain that the law against the slaughtering of animals is founded rather on vain superstition and womanish pity than on sound reason. The rational quest of what is useful to us further teaches us the necessity of associating ourselves with our fellow-men, but not with beasts, or things, whose nature is different from our own; we have the same rights in respect of them as they have in respect of us. Nay, as everyone’s right is defined by his virtue, or power, men have far greater rights over beasts than beasts have over men. Still, I do not deny that beasts feel; what I do deny is, that we may not consult our own advantage and use them as we please, treating them in the way which best suits us; for their nature is not like ours, and their emotions are naturally different from human emotions.⁴

By 1870 Thomas Huxley (referred to then and now as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’) had written a paper asking ‘Has the Frog a Soul?’ responding to the ubiquitous use of frogs as experimental animals. They were, it was commonly accepted, mere machines, whose main use in the world was to be dissected in the laboratory to uncover the workings of muscle reflexes. Claude Bernard referred to them as ‘the Job of physiology’. Paul S. White describes their trials in his essay on ‘The Experimental Animal in Victorian Britain’:

The frog was clearly a creature driven from below. Its ability to perform without limbs, without its head, or indeed to be practically decomposable into parts was a central feature in physiological experiments throughout the nineteenth century and long before.⁵

But were the twitching muscles in the amputated leg or the decapitated body evidence of purposive behaviour? Was the leg thinking when it tried (is that the right word?) to wipe an irritant off its back, while its head was somewhere entirely else? If separated into its component parts, where, exactly, did the soul of the remorselessly active bits of the frog reside? The experimenters discovered the autonomic nervous system, and although they debated the possibility of the froggy bits having a soul, or at least a purpose, that didn’t mean that the experiments should stop. A frog’s soul, even if it had one, was not a matter for consideration in the way that a human soul was.

There were those who held views in advance of their time and show what looks like a basis for the contemporary concern for animal welfare, nevertheless they do not question the otherness of animals as many modern radical animal-rights proponents would. Jeremy Bentham, perhaps the founding father of the animal rights movement, wrote about the need to treat animals with consideration, whether or not they possessed soul or mind:

The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognised, that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacru, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the faculty for discourse? … The question is not, Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?⁶

There are ethical reasons for respecting the lives of animals. Blake howls: ‘A robin redbreast in a cage, puts all heaven in a rage.’ Kant says of Leibnitz that he ‘used a tiny worm for purposes of observation, and then carefully replaced it with its leaf on the tree, so that it should not come to harm through any act of his. He would have been sorry – a natural feeling for a humane man – to destroy such a creature for no reason.’⁷

We do not wish to hurt animals when there is no reason to because we are humane, but that is because we are human and they are ineluctably other and under our control. They are other as plants are; the question is, can plants feel, can they suffer? We are sure they can’t. They don’t move, they don’t remind us of us in any way. Animals are other, but even before Darwin, everyone knew that there was something about them that was like us. Descartes said they were automata, but nevertheless he felt the need to make that distinction between us and them; the question didn’t arise about the nature of plants. Thomas Huxley, discussing Edward Tyson, who in 1699 suggested the closeness of man and ape, is not over-impressed with his precocity:

Tyson, in other words, did not place his chimp on the rung just below ourselves because he had freed his mind from the cultural habit of interpreting animals in human terms, but for quite the opposite reason – because he longed to affirm a conventional view of human superiority.⁸

And once Darwin had shown what many people were already aware of without the actual theory, that there was a physiological continuum between them and us, it became all the more essential to mark the differences. Even those who didn’t resist the idea of evolutionary theory retained the laddered view of the Elizabethan chain of being. In the twentieth century, most philosophers have been certain about the differences between humankind and the animals. Heidegger has a chain of being of his own: ‘the stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, man is world-forming’.⁹ Derrida describes Heidegger’s version of the cat in the house:

What is ‘living with the animal’? What is ‘cohabiting’ with the animal? That is the question of mitgehen and mitexistieren. The animal can mitgehen with us in the house; a cat, for example, which is often said to be a narcissistic animal, can inhabit the same place as us, it can ‘go with us’, ‘walk with us’, it can be ‘with us’ in the house, live ‘with us’ but ‘it doesn’t exist with us’ in the house.¹⁰

This is all about language, of course, and the way in which it structures consciousness for us. Heidegger explains: ‘When we say that the lizard is lying on the rock, we ought to cross out the word “rock” in order to indicate that whatever the lizard is lying on is certainly given in some way for the lizard, and yet it is not known to the lizard as a rock. If we cross the word out … we imply that whatever it is is not accessible to it as a being. The blade of grass that the beetle crawls up, for example, is not a blade of grass for it at all.’¹¹ Then again, neither is it ‘lying’ or being ‘on’ the thing which is not a rock to the lizard. It doesn’t seem to me to get us very much further than saying that lizards don’t speak our language. In fact, Heidegger doesn’t actually quarrel with the word ‘rock’; he speaks in German, of ‘felsplatte’. So when I’m lying on a felsplatte, like the lizard, I’m not lying on a felsplatte, which Heidegger, should I be lucky enough to have him lying beside me, is lying on, but a rock. It says no more than that we cannot know exactly how the world is to another who does not have our language. It doesn’t make them poor in world, even if they don’t have a word at all for what they are lying on. Yet, so poor in world are animals, indeed, to Heidegger that he doesn’t consider that they can die. Not as we can. They, having none of the knowledge of death that language brings, merely ‘croak’ (crève) as the translation of Derrida from the French to English puts it.¹²

According to Levinas, animals don’t even have a face.

I cannot say at what moment you have the right to be called ‘face’. The human face is completely different and only afterwards do we discover the face of an animal. I don’t know if a snake has a face … You ask me at what moment one becomes a face. I do not know at what moment the human appears, but what I want to emphasise is that the human breaks with pure being, which is always a persistence in being … A being is something that is attached to being, to its own being. That is Darwin’s idea. The being of animals is a struggle for life. A struggle for life without ethics. It is a question of might.¹³

A face, which according to Levinas, dogs might have and snakes probably don’t, is what is required to address the other, and the address says, basically, ‘Don’t kill me.’ Without a face, there is no plea, no ethical requirement beyond our own benevolence, so humans should not mistreat animals because they suffer pain, not because they are to be considered as we would consider ourselves. They are increasingly them, alien and at our mercy or otherwise, according to their owning of a face: the capacity to allow us to think they are thinking as we do. Animals don’t require us to be thoughtful towards them because they don’t merit the attention that our own kind do, having a sense of our own being, who struggle with life but have ethics. Levinas is suggesting that there is not all that much to know about animals, not that much to think about. They deserve our consideration because we are ethical beings, not because of what they are.

This is not the same as saying that we can’t know them. Being unable to know animals allows for the possibility of animals being different, but not lesser, beings. It says nothing about a scale. When Thomas Nagel sets out to show that we can’t possibly know what it is like to be a bat,¹⁴ he isn’t making any claim about what bats are, or what we are. Only what we aren’t, and therefore can’t know. We don’t do sonar. How can we imagine being a creature whose being in the world is based on possessing such an unfamiliar mechanism to apprehend their environment? We can analogise about the sonar we use for finding what we can’t see, but those are machines that compensate for the senses we rely on. The world of the bat is not our world, not even accessible to our imagination, nor even our language. We can, he says, only imagine what it would be like for us to be a bat, not what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Perhaps it is only possible for me to imagine what it would be like for me to be you, not for you to be you. This isn’t an ethical distinction between bats and me, or you and me, but an abyss of knowledge that we simply can’t cross. It is not, in itself, a quality distinction.

Animals do things we know in ourselves. They run, walk, sleep. But what is it like for them? What is their running world like? Bunty dreams – I see her sleeping and she twitches and mews. Sometimes she bursts awake, actually leaps to her feet and stares around her, as if transported from somewhere where things were quite else and she was doing something different. It takes her a moment to settle down, and recollect where she is. All this I recognise from my own dreaming and waking. But if she dreams, what is it like being a cat dreaming? We turn our firing synapses into narrative either when we are sleeping or when we recollect the images when we wake. Cats? I don’t know, though I am clear that there is a waking state and a sleeping state and sometimes an indication that something is going on in the cat’s brain in her sleeping state. Still, when she jolts into wakefulness, I stroke her, calm her down with whispers, remind her which world she has suddenly arrived in, as if I knew what she was going through, and she settles down, as if she were reassured. Even less than what I know about her, is what I think she knows about me. I have language to imagine her world. I don’t know if cats imagine anything at all. What I don’t know, and what I don’t know about what she knows, is almost everything. Nevertheless, we get along well enough together, sharing the house and the world, however differently. As far as I can tell.

Jacques Derrida, convinced of the singularity and consciousness of his little cat, also knows that not only are they not like us, and that the differences are not about this or that faculty. He considers there to be an absolute rupture. ‘I have … thus never believed in some homogeneous continuity between what calls itself man and what he calls the animal.’¹⁵ There is an abyssal difference between us and them, he insists: between the ones who give names, and the ones who are named. The very fact that we see them from our point of view, our very interaction with them creates the differences: ‘The relations are at once intertwined and abyssal, and they can never be totally objectified.’ We can’t really know animals, though we can make educated guesses by watching them in various ways – we know that animals are beyond us because we are doing the looking. We ‘cannot look around our own corner: it is hopeless curiosity that wants to know what other kinds of intellects and perspectives there might be’ says Nietzsche.¹⁶

But it is irresistible to wonder nevertheless. When Bunty looks at me, and I look at her, we are perhaps each gazing into the abyss and by acknowledging it – through the looking, the staring, the mutual muteness – we are also acknowledging the fact of the other. Derrida says that there are some

texts signed by people who have no doubt seen, observed, analysed, reflected on the animals, but who have never been seen by the animal. Their gaze has never intersected with that of an animal directed at them (forget about their being naked). If, indeed, they did happen to be seen seen furtively by the animal one day, they took no (thematic, theoretical, or philosophical) account of it. They neither wanted nor had the capacity to draw any systematic consequence from the fact that the animal could, facing them, look at them, clothed or naked, and in a word, without a word, address them. They have taken no account of the fact that what they call ‘animal’ could look at them, and address them from down there, from a wholly other origin.¹⁷

This text, the one you are currently reading, is signed by someone who even admits that it is an intermittent but continuing surprise to her that other people actually exist within their own consciousness. I confess that I have sometimes to remind myself that everyone I come across, those I am close to, those I pass by on the street, has an inner life of their own. I suppose it without thinking about it, but when I do actually think about it, I am brought up short, quite taken aback by the fact of all that inner reality, so many inner realities going on around me. So too with Bunty. When I catch her looking at me, I am sharply reminded of her innerness, though I know I can’t really grasp it. What she is thinking I will never apprehend, and yet I look back into her eyes for as long as she will allow me to and wish, hopelessly, as Nietzsche quite rightly says, I could get a clue.

‘What, what, what?’ I say to her, pleading. But, like Alice’s Cheshire Cat, she just looks at me from inside her head, and, even as I look back at her, disappears from view.