The Program You Are Watching Has Been Prerecorded

Brad Zellar

September 9, 2005

I don’t read philosophy for answers to the meaning of life or any of the other ridiculous questions that have caused lunatics to bang their heads against the wall for as long as humans have been able to babble. What attracts me again and again to books of philosophy is the marginalia, the odd biographical details and digressions and just plain absurd minutiae that these old fools cough up on such a regular basis. The best biographies –hands down– are of the philosophers. The unhappy little hunchbacks who waddled around the streets of their towns and endured the taunts of rock-throwing children (Kierkegaard). The closet gnomes, martyrs, and maniacs. Empedocles wrote, “Wretches! Utter wretches! Keep your hands from beans!” Three of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s eight siblings committed suicide. Kant wrote a treatise on rainbows. And the great master of gloom Schopenhauer took issue with Spinoza’s Ethics over what he perceived to be their disregard for the virtue and dignity of dogs.

I was reading Schopenhauer’s History of Philosophy last night when I discovered the old crank railing against Spinoza for “his as unworthy as false deliverances about animals.” From assertions in the Ethics Schopenhauer concludes, “Dogs [Spinoza] seems not to have known at all. To the monstrous proposition with which the 26th appendix [of the Ethics] opens…the best answer is given by a Spanish literateur of our day (Larra, pseudonym Figaro), ‘He who has never kept a dog does not know what it is to love and be loved.’”

I went and dug around in my basement for a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics to locate the passage that so offended Schopenhauer. Here it is: “Besides men, we know of no particular thing in nature in whose mind we may rejoice, and whom we can associate with ourselves in friendship or any sort of fellowship; therefore, whatsoever there be in nature besides man, a regard for our advantage does not call on us to preserve, but to preserve or destroy according to its various capabilities, and to adapt to our use as best we can.”

I’m officially on the side of Schopenhauer on this important argument, by the way, and was pleased to later run across this additional tribute to dogs (in his own Ethics): “Hence comes the four-legged friendships of so many of the better kind of men, for on what indeed should one refresh oneself from the endless deceit, falseness, and cunning of men if it were not for the dogs into whose faithful countenance one may look without distrust?”