出版社: Granta Books
副标题: Lessons From the Wild on Love, Death And Happiness
出版年: 2009-5-4
页数: 256
定价: GBP 8.99
装帧: Paperback
ISBN: 9781847081025
内容简介 · · · · · ·
Why should the pet, if it does, obey our instructions? When does punishment suppose a moral sense that is ridiculous to attribute to this other animal? What does it mean when we watch a dog, say, cavort through being a puppy and then, so much faster than we do, age and ultimately die? Are we really such different creatures?
Answering questions of this order is the mission of En...
Why should the pet, if it does, obey our instructions? When does punishment suppose a moral sense that is ridiculous to attribute to this other animal? What does it mean when we watch a dog, say, cavort through being a puppy and then, so much faster than we do, age and ultimately die? Are we really such different creatures?
Answering questions of this order is the mission of Englishman Mark Rowlands's The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons From the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness . The pet in this case is not a dog but, true to the book's title, a wolf called Brenin. The author, a philosopher, purchases the wolf cub on something of a whim while teaching in Tuscaloosa, at the University of Alabama. The Philosopher and the Wolf is a memoir of their relationship and a catalogue of the epiphanies and contemplations that their living together leads him to. His book is a ruminative and often challenging set of reflections about the meaning of life.
Early on, Rowlands makes an early distinction between wolves' ways of living and “simian” ways – those of the ape family to which we, as humans, belong. “Dogs,” Rowlands writes, “call out to something in the deepest recesses of a long-forgotten part of our soul ... a part of us that was there before we became apes. This is the wolf that we once were.”
In the fork of his evolutionary schema, we simians come off badly – this despite the students' lunches Brenin eats, the fights he gets into and the damage he wreaks if ever he is left alone for more than 20 minutes.
Relying in large part on the work of celebrated naturalist Frans de Waal – he of the sex-mad bonobos and our “inner ape” – Rowlands concludes that the ape family is the one less to be admired. It is less dedicated to the welfare of the group and inherently more calculating, and so capable of premeditation and, subsequently, evil.
“ What is most important when the time comes – and it always will – is to live your life with the coldness of a wolf ”
— Mark Rowlands
And what is the driver? Lust, of course, and the urge to power over our brethren. These two appetites are, to his mind, the consequence of our inversion of the importance of the reproductive function and pleasure as the actual point of sex . (A wolf may have it only once a year, and blithely.) As a result, we simians are scheming and nasty and dishonest, whereas, Rowlands says, “A wolf cannot lie to us; neither can a dog. That is why we think that we are better than them.”
Rowlands is hardly the first to romanticize beasts (“Sometimes I get a feeling: it's the strangest feeling. It's that I used to be a wolf and now I'm just a stupid labrador”) and he is in a long line of thinkers using the animal world to explore the thorny question of what, if anything, distinguishes our species. It has been argued, for instance, that humans, but not animals, are capable of free will, or that we alone are the species that can imagine love and our eventual deaths.
But Rowlands will have none of these constructs in humans' favour. He sees our striving for some way to scientifically explain our superiority as an act of wishful thinking designed to explain away and excuse our dominance over animals, and our dependence on them for food.
Rowlands argues, pushing philosopher John Rawls's “original position” one step further, that even our social contract with one another fails because it is less about equality than about forgetting the weak, and it is hugely flawed because usually it does not include animals at all. Rowlands becomes a vegetarian, though his attempts to make Brenin one fail.
Alongside the moral questioning and a gamut of disturbing moments – Brenin's fights with dogs, a road accident – there are amusing ones. All those who have put up with table kegs gnawed by a normal puppy will consider themselves lucky reading about the author's destroyed living-room curtains, lacerated car interiors and, after the wolf cub scurries under the house when he is first brought home, $10,000 worth of destroyed air-conditioning pipes. Rowlands, who has “already started to tune out human beings,” is gloriously undeterred. Tending to and accepting the havoc Brenin wreaks is but a small demonstration of the loyalty he feels is the highest expression of his love for a companion he nurses through illness and eventually must euthanize.
Death, of course, is the hardest lesson and, as the wolf's final days approach, Rowlands decides that we are what we leave behind in stories, and in the changed behaviour of others – this, despite a world view that is jocular and even … well, brutal. Happiness, not purpose, and therefore the wolf's being in the moment and not the ape's future perfect, is, Rowlands decides, the point of life. He draws succour, even, from the memory of the “deep and calm and sonorous growl” that Brenin emitted once when another, stronger dog had the young wolf cub by the throat. It indicated, to him, defiance and “a recognition that pain is coming, for pain is the nature of life.”
And yet Rowlands still does not take Brenin's loss easily, and he almost drinks himself to death over the spot in France where he buries him. His eventual epiphany is that “a life lived in the rosy warmth and kindness of hope is the one any of us would choose if we could,” but that “what is most important when the time comes – and it always will – is to live your life with the coldness of a wolf ... because in the end, it is only our defiance that redeems us.”
Rowlands is not an altogether savoury person. By his own admittance, he is something of a rugby-playing, carousing womanizer who is aware, at opportune moments, that the wolf by his side adds to his cachet. (He is a simian, therefore he schemes.) It is not difficult to see how such reasoning does the English philosopher, enjoying his time as a young professor in the American Southwest, a good turn, and leads him to the curious and not altogether convincing conclusion that although the wolf (and the part of himself he sees in it) “in the right circumstances might quickly and efficiently kill your dog,” the animal has no place in a civilized society not because he is dangerous, but because he is “nowhere near dangerous, and nowhere near unpleasant, enough.”
“Civilization,” Rowlands declares, “is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized.”
I'm still not sure what this actually means; elsewhere the implication is that sappy dogs, relying on humans, are wolves that have succumbed to the civilizing path, and that his own inner wolf is only latent. Neither is it clear, even in death, that Brenin has made the author a better person, though he does shack up with another simian, finally.
But there is no question that Rowlands's thoughtful and provocative memoir is an engrossing bit of story left to the rest of us, and in this much Rowlands is certainly right: Story is the only way any of us can hope to live on.
The Philosopher And the Wolf的创作者
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马克·罗兰德 作者
作者简介 · · · · · ·
作者
马克·罗兰兹(Mark Rowlands)
英国人,牛津大学哲学博士,美国迈阿密大学哲学系教授,著有多部哲学畅销书,如《动物权利》《宇宙尽头的哲学家》《跑着思考》《像狗一样快乐》等。
译者
路雅,翻译此书时为北京大学梵语巴利语专业本科生,现为德国马克斯普朗克研究所社会人类学所博士候选人。
The Philosopher And the Wolf的书评 · · · · · · ( 全部 21 条 )
《哲学家与狼》读书笔记
WIKI上关于作者的一段介绍
《开卷八分钟》里的小故事
与狼共同生活的第一条规则!就是…
这篇书评可能有关键情节透露
与狼共同生活的第一条规则!就是… 就是:永远要期待着你期待不到的事情。 想象你在大学的哲学课堂上,与大多数课堂一样,你与你的同学们听得昏昏欲睡。但这次也与你所熟知的课堂有那么一点点不同,与你们一起昏昏欲睡的,还有一只狼! 你的狼同学果然有着超出常人的勇气,它突... (展开)养了头狼?,这个哲学教授悟了人性
精神内耗必看!狼比人类更懂怎么好好活着
> 更多书评 21篇
论坛 · · · · · ·
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0 有用 多肉喜 2020-11-13 09:16:52
"What’s important is not what we have, but who we were when we were at our best. Our moments - our most wonderful and most terrifying moments - these become ours only through our memories of others...... "What’s important is not what we have, but who we were when we were at our best. Our moments - our most wonderful and most terrifying moments - these become ours only through our memories of others... Our moments belong to the pack and we remember ourselves through them." (展开)
0 有用 SnapeFleur 2025-10-14 20:49:05 浙江
罗兰兹提出人类的猿类思维因有未来与欲望而陷于痛苦与狼的当下的生是对立的,他因此推崇狼的真实与自由,视之为幸福的象征。但问题在于这种比较始终是由人类单方面完成的,狼被不断赋予象征意义成了哲学思辨的道具而非真正的他者,实际上也只是被利用来确认罗兰兹对现代人性的厌倦。哲学被情感化,动物被人类化,思想因此陷入循环,一边谈动物的尊严,一边又养狼为实验,这种浪漫式主宰本身就带着矛盾,虽然对于情感的书写挺令人动... 罗兰兹提出人类的猿类思维因有未来与欲望而陷于痛苦与狼的当下的生是对立的,他因此推崇狼的真实与自由,视之为幸福的象征。但问题在于这种比较始终是由人类单方面完成的,狼被不断赋予象征意义成了哲学思辨的道具而非真正的他者,实际上也只是被利用来确认罗兰兹对现代人性的厌倦。哲学被情感化,动物被人类化,思想因此陷入循环,一边谈动物的尊严,一边又养狼为实验,这种浪漫式主宰本身就带着矛盾,虽然对于情感的书写挺令人动容的,但这种动物崇拜背后隐藏的是现代知识分子惯常的自恋,挺口区的 (展开)
0 有用 泪雨☆无痕♀ 2010-03-06 16:18:38
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