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

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6. A Design for Life

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7. Just Dogs with the Yips

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8. Sometimes Toward Eden

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