The Happiness of Dogs

1. Shadow's Rock

• Dogs as happy Sisyphus

2. The Unexamined Life

• Reflection occurs when your mental acts turn back ether on you or on some part or facet of you, a part or facet that you recognize as yours, whether this is mental or physical.
• Shame is only possible for a creature capable of reflection. Shame is shame in the eyes of a nominal other - whether that other is someone else, or you, or some non-existent alternative.
• The humble sea squirt eats its own brain.
• A brain, fundamentally, is a biological strategy, and any strategy stands or falls on the relative weight of its costs and benefits. Sometimes, the costs of brains can outweigh their benefits.
• With the development of literacy our outstanding natural memory started to wither.
• Existential phenomenology - Its goal is to understand the fundamental structures of consciousness by virtue of which a conscious creature exists in the specific way it does.
• Reflection is consciousness turning back on itself and thus turning away from the world, turning inwards rather than outwards. Reflection pulls us out of the world and into ourselves.
• Our lives are eerie in the sense that we have no real home. Because of reflection, we are unhomed creatures: never quite a home in the world, never quite comfortable in our skins any more.
• The highest expressions of human creativity are flow experiences where the reflective sense of self is at its most attenuated.
• Sports take us back to a time before the Fall, when we were creatures untainted by reflection. When we play, and all is going right, and we flow from one movement into the next, never thinking about ourselves and what we are doing, because we know thinking would be flow's death, that is when we are most like our dogs.
• Reflection is a wound that cannot be healed. It neatly severs us in two, and has left us uneasy, troubled creatures.

3. Mirror, Mirror

• A creature capable of pre-reflection is necessarily aware of itself, but pre-reflectively rather than reflectively. Any animal - human, canine, or otherwise - that is conscious of the world at all will be pre-reflectively aware of itself too.
• Seeing is a predictive process (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, through to modern neuroscience) and there is a kind of implicit, tacit awareness of self that is built into the process of seeing).
• Awareness of one's body and awareness of one's mind are two very different abilities. There is nothing in mirror self-recognition that demonstrates an ability to engage in the second - meta-cognitive - form of reflection.
• You first learn to understand what it is for someone else to think something, or to want something, and then you learn to apply the concepts of thinking and wanting to yourself.
• Split in two, we can never again be whole - single, undivided, of one heart and one mind. Thus we live and at the same time we watch ourselves doing this. We can never be fully immersed in our lives; never be quite fully committed to what we think and do.
• Our commitment is always conditional. It is what we might call troubled commitment. For we are troubled creatures.
• A dog's mind is serene: unruffled, untroubled, an early-morning sea on a summer's day. But the minds of creatures of reflection are choppy and never calm.
• It is no coincidence that ancient philosophy from Socrates on and modern philosophy from Descartes are obsessed with radical, methodological doubt. Doubt runs deep in us.

4. A Gambler's Freedom

• For a dog or any animal untainted by reflection, freedom is to act according to necessity, on the insistent commands of his nature.
• What is your nature, ultimately, if not your place in the world? Your nature picks out an identifiable portion of the universe and says: This is me. This is what I am. This is my place. This is my home. The resulting picture of freedom is, then, clear. Freedom results from your connection to the world. Freedom results from all the things that bind you to the world, pull you into the world, hold you tight in that world. Freedom is the world's embrace. This is the freedom of a belonging. For a dog, there is no other sort.
• For Sartre, consciousness is a hole in being - akin to a clearing in a forest. A clearing can only exist if there are trees around it.
• Sartre's insight, shared with Wittgenstein, was that if you are aware of something, then it does not have meaning on its own. If it means anything at all, this meaning must derive from your interpretation of it.
• Pictures, even realistic ones, do not mean anything - are not about anything - in themselves. Any picture might mean many things, and what it in fact means always depends on an interpretation supplied by the viewer.
• As an object of my awareness, a motive, resolution, decision or choice has no meaning in itself. For it to have meaning, I must interpret it, and whatever meaning it then has will depend on precisely how I interpret it. This, according to Sartre, is why I am free. And this freedom is very different from the Spinozist freedom of dogs. In fact, whether this is a freedom worth having is a legitimate question.
• The reformed gambler understands that his resolution not to gamble is useless (ultimately baseless), and it is useless precisely because he is aware of it. This realization Sartre calls angst.
• Nothing can compel any interpretation.
• We are free in the sense that nothing that we decide, nothing that we resolve to do, nothing that we choose can ever make us do a thing. The realization of this fact - the recognition of our freedom in this sense - is anguish.
• The only thing we cannot choose is not to choose, for this is itself a choice.
• Our actions are not free, not in any sense of freedom we would recognize. Our actions are groundless. And there is nothing we can do to ground them.
• We use bad faith to combat the groundlessness of our existence. It is a little story we tell ourselves about how we are not free.
• Human freedom is the freedom of exile.

5. Good Dogs

• In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that to act virtuously you must be able to ask yourself: is this the right thing to do? And if you decide that it is, you must do it because you want to do the right thing.
• Kant's categorical imperative says: Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
• Anthropofabulation - A pronounced human tendency to provide overcomplicated accounts of how we manage to do things.
• If Sartre is right, critical scrutiny of one's motivations does the opposite of supplying one with control over them. Becoming aware of one's motivations means that they no longer have any intrinsic meaning or intentionality.
• Empathy is not a feeling but an ability to feel what is going on in the mind of another.
• Projective empathy involves imaginatively putting yourself in the shoes of another
• Receptive empathy is a sophisticated form of what's called emotional contagion, which is likely endemic in all or most social creatures.
• If a dog's distress at a baby's cry is simply caused by the baby's distress, then they could mitigate their distress by vacating the immediate area. But if they are distressed that the baby is distressed, they can only mitigate their own distress by mitigating his.
• The distress of another is not simply the cause of your distress, it is what your distress is about. When this occurs, an inclination to help is automatically triggered precisely because you are concerned with their distress rather than with your own.
• The neural basis for this type of emotional contagion is what is sometimes called a shared representation system. In humans, other apes and, very likely, dogs too, this system is underwritten by what are known as mirror neurons, whose function is to mirror what is going on inside another. They do this by recruiting the same neural mechanisms in both self and other.
• Morality always involves inconvenience. Morality is a restriction one voluntarily places on one's behavior in the quest for survival, and morality always has the potential to cost you. In morality, what you don't do - even though you really want to - can be as important as what you do.
• The morality of a dog rests on two pillars. One of these is empathy, the ability to take the distress of another and make it one own. The other pillar is inhibition, the ability to make ones behavior conform to one's values. We find both pillars in dogs. Empathy is primary. Inhibition occupies the interstices left by empathy, and only works is a foundation of empathy has already been established. What a dog lacks in one, it will have to make up for in the other.
• This is true of humans too. The urge to help and the urge to hurt are both moral emotions. We act on these emotions, or we inhibit them, and out of these patterns of action and inhibition emerges the moral character of a person.
• The critical scrutiny of choice promoted by Aristotle and Kant is a morality devised for a creature of a certain sort, a timid, indecisive creature, prone to the habitual second-guessing of itself. A dithering, faltering, neurotic creature, a creature of doubt rather than of conviction. Sometimes we are damned not by what we do but by what we think we should do.

6. A Design for Life

• Dogs can reason logically. It is just that, all things being equal, and if they can possibly help it, they would rather not.
• Dogs find reading human faces much easier than executing disjunctive syllogisms.
• Through domestication, dogs found a way of offloading one of the most difficult and unpleasant aspects of life: thinking.
• In effect, we became part of the dog's extended mind.

7. Just Dogs with the Yips

• Why do dogs love life so much more than we do? The answer, I think, is that life is always more precious for a dog than for a human because we have two lives and dogs only have one.
• There is the life we live from the inside, and there is the life we live from the outside. But for a dog, life is something lived ineluctably from the inside alone. There is only an inside to the life of a dog, and it is a life that has no limits - in the way that a visual field has no limits.
• It is not possible, as Wittgenstein pointed out, to see the limit of your visual field. The limit is where the seeing stops and not seeing begins.
• Similarly, he claims, death is not an event in life. It is the limit of a life and so cannot be part of that life. Unfortunately, however, this is only true of a life seen from the inside - a life as it is lived. Since dogs live only this sort of life, their life has no limits in Wittgenstein's sense. But it is not true of human lives. We live our lives from the inside and from the outside, simultaneously. And when viewed from the outside, life has clearly identifiable limits. Death is an event in a life viewed from the outside.
• The body-as-lived is not so much an object as an activity or process - a process of disclosure or revelation broadly understood. It is, we might say, the body understood from the inside, the body as it is lived rather than as it is seen or thought about.
• The life-as-object is the life I think about, about which I have hopes and fears, satisfaction and regret. It is my life viewed from the outside. It is a series of events that I orchestrate or that happen to me, a sequence of actions and consequences.
• In my life-as-object, I am an insignificant speck in the great scheme of things, finite and mundane. We all are when we view life from the outside.
• My life-as-lived matters. The things that happen in my life-as-lived matter - at least to me. And even if I were to try, I cannot stop them mattering. It is a hub of meaning and purpose.
• Both perspectives can't be true. But I cannot rid myself of the view from the outside because, among other things, I am pretty sure it is true. However it is psychologically impossible, requiring a depth of nihilism beyond most people's capacity, to dispense with the view from inside.
• Philosophy is a little like the measles. No other animals can catch it, for no other animal can be absurd the way humans can. It's like a rash that you can't ignore, because it itches. From the outside innocuous, but from the inside, maddening. And, as such, is a perfect allegory for human life.
• Moritz Schlick: "The meaning of life is play."
• Choking denotes a general collapse in the face of pressure exerted on you by an opposition player or team.
• The yips is a specific form of choking centered around reflection. If one focuses too much on the details of technique and execution, rather than simply getting on with the business of playing, then one is suffering from the yips. It is a kind of paralysis through analysis.
• When the yips appears outside of a sporting context, it is often called shame. The essence of shame lies in the inexperience of oneself as an object for another (Sartre at the keyhole).
• Most of the time, happily, one does not experience one's body as an object of awareness. Rather one lives through one body or lives one's body. Undue focus on yourself is a sign that somewhere things have gone wrong.
• Reflection is the death of commitment, and commitment is just another word for love. The pathological overuse of our ability for self-reflection, therefore, tears love out of our lives.
• Humans are all just dogs suffering from the yips.

8. Sometimes Toward Eden

• During writing, it's when you are exhausted, when your thoughts are tired and no longer recognize their customary, agreed-upon rules and avenues, when they start stumbling down paths they never would have travelled down if your brain was working properly - that is when the interesting things happen.
• Writing only really begins when it starts to hurt.
• We humans left Eden long ago, but dogs never did.
• Meaning in life is not essentially a moral phenomenon.
• Meaning in life is deeper than engagement. It is deeper than attraction, deeper than grip. It is need. Meaning in life arises from need. And deeper than need, always deeper than need, is love.
• The more love there is in a life, the more meaning this life thereby contains. The more you love your life, where this love is an expression of your nature, true and untainted, the more meaning there is in your life. To love what you do, when what you do is an expression of what you are, is at the same time to love yourself. Dogs love their lives more than we love ours. That is why their lives are more meaningful than ours.
• A dog has only one life, and of it he is actor and not spectator, author and not critic.
• The nature of a dog is heavy, a granite slab of essence. Our natures, however, have fractured beneath reflection's hard stare. To the extent that any of us have a nature at all, it is insubstantial, diaphanous, perhaps even gossamer thin. What we call our natures are, for us, merely an initial basis for further negotiation. We are self-interpreting creatures, and as such we have the most attenuated natures of all animals.
• Meaning in life is happiness that erupts from nature. But there is little in my nature that is fixed. My nature is soft, pliable. It is, more than anything, labile: the attempts of others to interpret me might easily feed into my own interpretative efforts. There is no firm foundation in my nature to provide a springboard from which happiness might spring forth.
• Some of my memories have a grim destiny. They will live on - re-emerge into the world - as ideas. For me, an idea is just a perfunctory summary of a memory I once had. An idea is just a memory drained of life; a memory that must be reanimated. The fact that I have chosen a life filled with ideas, I suspect, shows just how hard I must have tried to hold on to my memories.
• This is the idea my memories have become: meaning in life is authentic happiness. Meaning in life exists wherever happiness erupts from nature. If you want to know the meaning of life, get a dog.
• Without uttering a word, my dogs tell me of a time before The Fall. Through them, I remember a time before reflection's canyon had opened within me, a time when I was one man and not two, when I had but one nature, one history and one life, a life that I loved with one heart and one mind, undivided. I will never walk in the Garden again. My exile is complete and irrevocable. Yet my dogs occasionally allow me to glimpse it, veiled, a distant shimmering on the far bank of the Jordan. As I walk with my dogs in memory, I find myself gazing sometimes towards Eden.