Thou hast no speculation in those eyes ...[1]
It's disconcerting enough when Phoevos the cat sits and stares at me, particulary if naked like Derrida [2], so it must be almost unimaginably awkward (and significantly more frightening) to be caught in the gaze of a tiger ...
I'm told that thanks to a mirror-like structure behind the retina called the tapetum lucidum their night vision is far superior to ours, but that they don't see such a wide range of colours. It's movement that catches their attention and shape that they focus on; not hues, tints, and tones. But then, tigers are primarly concerned with stalking prey, not admiring the chromatic splendour of their environment.
According to D. H. Lawrence, who knows a good few things on the subject of animal vision, the tiger is, in a sense, almost blind to the rest of the world, absorbed as it is in its own fullness of being:
"The eyes of the tiger cannot see, except with the light from within itself, by the light of its own desire. Its own white, cold light is so fierce that the other warm light of the day is outshone, it is not, it does not exist. So the white eyes of the tiger gleam to a point of concentrated vision, upon that which does not exist. Hence its terrifying sightlessness." [3]
The tiger, inasmuch as it sees us at all, sees nothing but a rather insubstantial meal. The superior being which we like to think we are, is rendered null and void; we are almost hollow in his eyes, like animated scarecrows, or, at best, creatures that have lost their healthy animal reason [4]:
"It can only see of me that which it knows I am, a scent, a resistance, a voluptuous solid, a struggling warm violence that it holds overcome, a running of hot blood between its teeth, a delicious pang of live flesh in the mouth. This it sees. The rest is not." [5]
Notes
[1] Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 3, scene 4, line 94.
[2] See Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (Fordham University Press, 2008).
In this work, Derrida discusses his experience of being stared at by his cat, Logos, whilst undressed. He describes a sense of discomfort - even shame - of being gazed upon in his all too human nakedness and all too naked humanity.
See also the post on TTA dated 5 Jan 2018 entitled 'When I Play With My Cat ... (Notes Towards a Feline Philosophy)': click here.
[3] D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 118.
[4] I'm thinking here of a famous section in Nietzsche's, The Gay Science (III. 224), where he writes:
"I fear that the animals consider man as a being like themselves that has lost in a most dangerous way its sound animal common sense; they consider him the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal."
This is Walter Kaufmann's translation of the original German text (Vintage Books, 1974), p. 211.
[5] D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy ... p. 118.
Readers interested in what else Lawrence writes about tigers, might like to see the post on TTA dated 4 Oct 2023: click here. Although not one of Lawrence's totemic animals, nevertheless the tiger often appears within his work and held an important place in his philosophical imagination as one of the great realities of reality; i.e., a living thing that has come into its own fullness of being.
