Woof

From The Sunday Times

November 23, 2008

The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness by Mark Rowlands

A wolf-dog is fighting with a pit bull terrier, probably to the death. A man, who has been pumping iron in order to keep pace with the power of his wolf-dog, grabs the embattled 120lb animal by the scruff, lifts it off the ground so they are eyeball to eyeball, and whispers, “Do you want a bit of me, son?”

By way of full disclosure, I should say that I am one of the older ladies with cats that Mark Rowlands refers to in passing in this emotionally lamentable memoir and meditation about himself as a young man with his dog. Rowlands was in his twenties when he bought Brenin, a hybrid wolf-dog puppy. It was the early 1990s and he was lecturing in philosophy at Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In his spare time he hung out with the students, getting through a bottle or two of bourbon a night, playing rugby and lending Brenin to his team mates because, of all their big, bold dogs, Brenin was the best “chick magnet. In fact, they used a slightly different expression: more colourful, but not really repeatable”. There is a good deal more testosterone in this autobiography than an older cat-keeping lady can easily relate to. The book is largely a distillation of Rowlands's personal philosophy (evolved during his decade-long relationship with Brenin) but even the philosophy seems to drip with male hormone.

Rowlands's initial training of Brenin is a serious business, which he justifies with Nietzsche's comment that those who cannot discipline themselves need someone to do it for them. Choke chains and a knee sharply in his side when he goes the wrong way show Brenin “the consequences of his actions”, after which the wolf-dog is not enslaved, but ready to participate in the ancient man-and-dog pack relationship, so much better, more decent than our usual apelike human social contract. Perhaps it is not a surprise to discover that parallel to the testosterone, misanthropy and hard-man philosophy here, possibly even an essential part of them, lies a gross sentimentality. The wolf, Rowlands believes, speaks to a part of the human soul that was buried deep when mammalian evolution branched out to our own ancestral primates. They are our ancient, noble-savage selves.

He proposes one of those great simplifying divisions people love so much (Mars/Venus, us/them) and pits our Machiavellian simian intelligence against the way of the wolf. Apes: bad, wolves: good. Humans, being apes, suffer from the requirements of social relations that caused us to develop the capacity to deceive, the necessity to lie, an addiction to sex as pleasure, the compulsion to make alliances and to scheme with and against our fellows. Yes, we have a well-developed moral sense and laws to go with it but, Rowlands explains, “Only a truly nasty animal would have need of these concepts.”

Wolves, conversely, don't require social contracts, they have pack loyalty, the philia of the Greeks, no need for deception and a capacity for passion that might cause them to kill each other in a fight, but not to scheme against their fellows. We humans make excuses for our wrongdoings (deprived childhood, mental disorder), while wolves commit only crimes of passion and take whatever violent punishment results. These temper tantrums, claims Rowlands, deserve less condemnation than crimes of intention, though it's always struck me that the victim is just as dead or crippled whatever the degree of spontaneity involved.

Rowlands's thesis is that the wolf exists solely in moments, while we are cursed by a knowledge of time and, therefore, an awareness of inescapable death. Withdrawing from society (“I was sick of humans. I needed to get their stench out of my nostrils”), he went off with Brenin and attempted to learn the lesson of the wolf. I'm not unfamiliar with Rowlands's sense of disgust for humans, but the question is whether one can exclude oneself from the disgust by taking on the supposed way of the wolf.

Living in moments does not require the wolf or the wolf-living man to find an overarching meaning in life, unlike the rest of us humans who search incessantly for purpose, setting and trying to achieve goals that can only result in disappointment. We know that in the end we will be extinguished. This makes us weak: “The ape that I am is a crabbed, graceless creature that deals in weakness; a weakness that it manufactures in others, and a weakness with which it is ultimately infected. It is this weakness that permits evil - moral evil - a foothold in the world. The art of the wolf is grounded in its strength.” If this has an Ubermenschian chill, Rowlands is clear that you must, when the chips are down, “live your life with the coldness of the wolf”.

The passionate and unswerving pack loyalty Rowlands learnt from his wolf would mean, he tells his students, that if one of them found themselves in a two-person lifeboat with Brenin and his master, Rowlands would pitch the student overboard. The students think he's joking. He isn't, but the other possible solution, that he himself go overboard to save dog and student, doesn't seem to occur to him.

Rowlands goes through a dark, epiphanic month of hell when Brenin gets an infection and needs constant care that still may not save his life (he survives the infection, but dies a year later of the cancer that caused the infection). This is what life is all about, apparently. Not the good moments, but the moments when you are the best of yourself, regardless of hope for a desired outcome. Brenin's moment was as a two-month pup, when, pinned down by a pit bull ready to kill him, he growled his “defiance” at being overcome, and scorned death and its agent.

Maybe us cat ladies just don't get it, but it does strike me that we might respect the dignity of animals more by recognising their otherness than by romanticising and making morality out of them. If we see animals as having lessons for us, or providing us with a way out of our culpability for overmastering the natural world, then aren't we using them as surely as when we eat their flesh?

The Philosopher and the Wolf by Mark Rowlands
Granta Books £15.99 pp256

Comments

[air jordans]

This book is a story about a young, confused man trying to find his place in the world with a wolf. And in the process he shares this very human story of love, loss, testosterone, excess in a disarmingly honest tale. I'm sure he would have preferred not to be so frank, but he has tried to be honest.

[Steven Augustine]

Something like Tuesdays With Morrie with more ball-slurping and butt-sniffing, then.

[Mahon O Brien]

What the author perhaps forgot to mention is that Rowlwands has written very serious academic books as well. This is a more approachable book, that discloses the author's own emotional entry points into famous, long standing and provocative philosophical questions. Rowlands does not adovace the kind of populist misreading of notions such as the ubermensch that the reviewer alludes to. If one took the trouble to read his world renowned philosophical contributions, one would know that he is far too sophisticated for such juvenile misreadings. The book has indeed a strong anti-humanist thread, but the philosophical backdrop to many of the stories is not so easily dismissed. Rowlands has long been recognized as a thinker of the first rank. This book is a story about a young, confused man trying to find his place in the world with a wolf. And in the process he shares this very human story of love, loss, testosterone, excess in a disarmingly honest tale. I'm sure he would have preferred not to be so frank, but he has tried to be honest. I wonder how many of us would be so honest about the world of our 20s? Furthermore, there are fantastic glimpses into how one moves from the immediate everyday world of our experience to the level of ideas as found in Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant, Husserl and so on...

[bon mot]

Wow. What a horrible review. Great job not treating the book seriously - and just spewing dislike for the author and his straight forward style. The reviewer made me think of an old lady peeking through her curtains, being shocked by the masculine twenty-something walking a wolf around the block.

[Sue]

Quite to the contrary, the knowledge of our mortality is that which makes us strong. Moreover, evil in humanity is found primarily among those who would deny mortality, or attempt to circumvent it - inevitably wreaking mortal havoc on others.

[Charles Lambert]

Presumably wolves also don't drink too much bourbon with their beta companions and use their human owners as 'chick-magnets' or whatever the original term was (and I think I can guess). These may be their most lovable characteristics...