What would a book of philosophy contain if it were written by a dog? Dogs are natural philosophers, and I am convinced they can answer some important questions for us – about life, what is important in it, and how to live it. Philosophers have done their best to address these questions, with limited success. But dogs answer them effortlessly and decisively. Humans think about these questions, but dogs live them. It is in their lives we find the answers we need.
Here is a very recent philosophical lesson, being imparted as I type these words. I have just asked Shadow, a German shepherd, a question: “Do you want to come with?” This has caused him to explode into a customary expression of delight: jumping, spinning, then running to fetch his leash. He doesn’t stop there. Tossing the leash in the air, he will try to insert his head through the noose (it’s a slip leash) as it falls.
We are going to collect my younger son from school. We do it at this hour every weekday and Shadow is keenly attuned to the day’s rhythms. He has been staring at me for the last 20 minutes, willing me to say the magic words. He knows little of interest will occur on this journey. He won’t get out of the car. He is not going to meet other dogs. We will drive, collect my son, and return to the house. Shadow knows exactly how this will play out. Nevertheless, his reaction is always the same. Unparalleled excitement. Barely containable, frequently self-leashing, exuberance. If I exhibited this kind of excitement, you could be certain that I was having the best minute of the best day of my life. Whenever this happens – and it happens every school day – I think to myself: why can’t I feel like that?
Some may think dogs behave like that because they are stupid (if so, please sign me up!) but I see something else: the ability to take pleasure in the smallest things in life. To love life so much that whenever anything good happens, no matter how marginally positive, one thinks: this – this! – is the best thing that has ever happened to me! That doesn’t seem stupid at all. Life, as we all know, can be cruel. In the end, it always will be cruel. To find such happiness in the smallest things seems to be a magnificent triumph over cruelty and despair. A triumph, ultimately, over life. Why, I often wonder, can’t I triumph over life?
In all of this, there is a lesson, repeated every school day – dog pedagogy involves a lot of repetition – about life’s meaning. Albert Camus, the existentialist philosopher, claimed that there is only one serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide: deciding whether life is worth the trouble is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. Without even understanding that there was a question to be answered, Shadow has answered it, and has done so with a conviction of which Camus and I are incapable. What makes life worth the trouble? Everything!
The meaning of life is far from a dog’s only excursion into philosophical waters. If you know how to look, you will find them weighing in on such questions as the nature of consciousness, what it means to be moral, freedom and its scope and limits and the nature of rationality. They do this effortlessly, without understanding that they are weighing in on anything at all, let alone a philosophical dispute. Rather than think about the answers to these questions, they live them, and if there is one thing that animates all their answers it is love: the love of life and action.
In the authentic happiness Shadow finds in the most banal of activities, his commitment to life and action is one that we humans find so hard to emulate. This is because of something that happened to us: a great schism in consciousness that we know as reflection. We humans are the world heavyweight champions of thinking about ourselves, scrutinising and evaluating what we do and why we do it.
This schism breaks us in two. Henceforth we are all divided into one who thinks and one who is thought about; one who sees and one who is seen; one who reflects and one who is reflected upon. This bifurcation in our consciousness robs us of the possibility of a certain type of happiness, the happiness that accompanies being whole. Shadow is whole in a way that a human can never be. As a result, he is a creature of commitment while we are anxious, troubled creatures – creatures of doubt. For a dog such as Shadow, happiness comes effortlessly, but for us it is a hard-won, sometimes bitter, achievement.
We humans think and we think, and we think some more; we are unnatural philosophers. We devise answers to our questions, and sometimes these satisfy us, but only for a while. Dissatisfaction is always our eventual lot. The stench of doubt pervades our efforts, and it is no coincidence that when philosophy was born, in ancient Athens, it was born in doubt – in Socrates’s claim that he knew nothing. Philosophy has always been concerned with what we can know because, deep down, we suspect we don’t know very much at all.
Dogs are natural philosophers. Socrates was only joking when he said this, but he should have taken the idea more seriously. What we know, we know through thinking; dogs in comparison know through living. And in the unbridled happiness of dogs – in their love of life and their utter commitment to their actions – we can find answers to many of the traditional problems of philosophy, including Camus’s one fundamental question of philosophy.
The answer to Camus’s question of the meaning of life is played out, daily, in front of my eyes. Each morning, Shadow and I exit the gate at the bottom of the garden and walk out on to the bank of the canal behind our house. As I prepare to unleash him, he thrashes his head and shoulders back and forth, the excitement too much to contain. Then he is gone, a bullet from a gun. North. One hundred metres. Two. Three. Four. Before slowly coming to a halt, turning around, and trotting back to me. As he gets closer, his pace gradually increases. To me. And past me. South. One hundred metres. Two. Maybe three – it depends on how he is feeling. He rarely makes four on the second leg these days. Neither of us is as young as we used to be.
We are immigrants on this canal in Miami. I am from the United Kingdom, but this is my 16th year of South Florida sunshine. Shadow, an East German working-line shepherd, has lived here for six of those years. He was born near Saarbrücken, on the westernmost edge of Germany. As is common for the East German line, he’s big, pushing 75cm at the withers, and weighing in just a little shy of 45kg.
The other émigrés on this bank are the green iguanas that hail originally from South and Central America. They are the reason for Shadow’s frenzied charge up and down the canal. Later, in the heat of the afternoon, they will form the sprawling mess that spawns their collective noun. But at this time of the morning they line the banks, spaced at semi-regular intervals. On Shadow’s initial northerly sortie there may be 30 to 40 iguanas lined up around 10m apart. As Shadow’s thundering footsteps draw unacceptably close, the iguanas successively peel off into the water, one after the other.
The result of Shadow’s efforts is that scores of iguanas are exiled to the far bank of the canal. The afternoon walk will see him bouncing along his side of the bank, scowling at the hundreds of iguanas that now lie on the other side. However, for iguanas, the night is a time of forgetting. Come the morning, they will have returned to Shadow’s bank of the canal, and this little piece of theatre will be repeated, down to the minutest of details.
This unfolding daily drama is recognisably Sisyphean. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a mortal who offended the gods. He paid the price with the eternally repeated, monotonous task of rolling a rock up a hill. The rock would slip from his grasp and roll back to the bottom of the hill, and he would have to roll it to the top again. And that, for Sisyphus, was that, for all eternity. The afterlife of Sisyphus is usually understood as the perfect embodiment of a meaningless life.
The cruelty of his punishment is not its difficulty but its pointlessness. No matter what Sisyphus does, he can never succeed, because there is nothing that would count as success or failure. Whether he reaches the summit or not, the rock will always return to the bottom of the hill, where he must begin his task all over again.
In its portrayal of meaninglessness as repetitive activity that aims only at the continuation of itself, the myth of Sisyphus is often taken as an allegory of human life. On any given day, any given human might wake up, fight their way through the daily commute, board the same train today as they did on countless days before, reach an office where, minor details aside, they do the same things today as they did yesterday, and will do tomorrow. The result of all of this? Probably very little. Each step Sisyphus takes up his hill is like a day in the life of such a person. We are all, in this sense, Sisyphus. The challenge posed by the myth is, then, this: a Sisyphean life appears to be meaningless, and our lives appear to be Sisyphean.
Each morning, Shadow exiles the iguanas to the far bank. The next morning, they will have returned, and Shadow must begin his efforts anew. The iguanas are Shadow’s rock. But not only does this seem to be one of the most enjoyable parts of Shadow’s life, it is also, I suspect, one of the most meaningful parts of it. We cannot understand how a Sisyphean life, defined by repetitive activity that aims only at its own repetition, can be meaningful. But this is because we think about such meaning. Shadow does not think about this meaning but lives it every day. This is why he understands it better than we do.
Finding meaning in life is hard for us, but easy for dogs. Meaning in life exists wherever the love of life emanates from a nature that is whole and undivided. Being undivided by reflection, being whole and entire, a dog has only one life to live, whereas we – in whom reflection’s canyon is deepest – have two. For us, there is both the life that we live and the life that we think about, scrutinise, evaluate and judge.
A dog will inevitably love its one life more than we love our two lives. Meaning in life is easy for dogs – and hard for us – because meaning is simply the joyful expression of a nature undivided against itself. I have been fortunate enough to spend my life with many dogs. I have loved them all, but, perhaps more importantly, in them I glimpse, obscurely but resonantly, what it is to love life.
The Happiness of Dogs: Why the Unexamined Life Is Most Worth Living by Mark Rowlands (Granta, £16.99) is published on 12 September