Phoevos the Cat giving his opinion of Sam Austen's
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (For Your Cat)
(The Meow Library, 2023)
I.
As a cat, I would like to make it clear that I possess a wide and sophisticated range of vocalisations, including purrs, chirps, and hisses, which I use to communicate with humans. In fact, we cats have a more developed and complex vocal repertoire than most other meat-eating mammals - including man's best friend, the dog! [1].
And so, whilst I may often miaow - when requesting food, or expressing a desire to go out, for example - that is certainly not the only sound used to convey my needs and feelings and, as Mildred Moelk, one of your own kind, noted many years ago, there are several variations of meow, so even that isn't just a single sound [2].
Thus, to deliberately create the impression that I am, as a cat, essentially monoverbal is not only insulting, but sadly reflective of an all-too-common and all-too-casual form of speciesism (i.e., the assumption of animal inferiority on the part of humans that leads to their exploitation and abuse).
I miaow because, like other cats, I have learnt that this is the most effective way of gaining the attention of those lacking tails and whiskers who are neither sensitive nor intuitive enough to pick up on more discreet non-verbal signals and scents. I rarely miaow to communicate with my fellow felines, because I have no need to do so.
II.
Let me now offer a few remarks about Sam Austen, a so-called feline linguist and professor of feline psychology [3], who founded The Meow Library with the aim of translating every major work of Western literature into language that can be 'understood and appreciated by the common housecat', including the text I have in front of me now, a feline-friendly version of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Firstly, there's no such thing as a common housecat. We may be prevelant in human communities worldwide - there are hundreds of millions of us living alongside you - but each cat is a rare and refined being to whom the ancient Egyptians accorded semi-divine status, recognising them as magical creatures.
Secondly, the favoured spelling of the word miaow is miaow and not meow: this mid-19th century Americanism may now be the predominant spelling, but the traditional British spelling is the one that the majority of cats prefer to use and which is closest onomatopoeically to the sound we make for the benefit of unmuscular (and half-deaf) human ears [4].
Thirdly, to claim that one is translating a work of human literature into language that can be understood and appreciated by a cat by simply repeating the word meow on the page tens and thousands of times, over and over again, is - once more - a sign of speciesism which betrays a contempt for the intelligence of cats bordering on the ailurophobic.
Some humans may find it funny - though surely even for most of them the joke soon wears very thin - but I do not. Far from 'shattering the boundaries of human language', it merely empties the word meow of any power, any meaning, or any poignancy that it may possess [5].
It's a shame and something of a missed opportunity, because Nietzsche undoubtedly does have something to say to cats and other intelligent non-human species. For Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers to call into question the traditional privileging of the human over other animals and thus to place man back amongst their number.
In other words, for Nietzsche, man is certainly not the high-point of evolution; rather, he is the most depraved of all beasts. Which is to say, man is the animal that has strayed furthest from its sound instincts; "the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal" [6].
Notes
[1] As a matter of fact, cats have a much greater number of vocalisations than dogs; capable as they are of producing over a hundred different sounds compared to just ten made by the average dumb mutt who has very little to say about anything.
[2] Moelk claimed that cats had six different forms of meows, signalling friendliness, confidence, dissatisfaction, anger, fear, and pain.
See Mildred Moelk, 'Vocalizing in the house-cat; a phonetic and functional study', in The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 57, No. 2, (University of Illinois Press, April 1944), pp. 184-205.
Her study, the first of its kind, concluded that a cat's vocalising is not a symbolic language, but is rather a somatic response which has a functional relation to certain situations in the cat's life. It can be read online via JSTOR: click here.
[3] Austen also hosts Meow: A
Literary Podcast for Cats, which reviews and contextualises the work of contemporary authors for cats and cat-adjacent humans. This weekly podcast is available on Spotify: click here.
[4] Acceptable spellings and pronunciations also include the French (miaou) and German (miauen). As a kitten born on the streets of Athens, I will also allow the Greek variant (νιάου νιάου).
[5] This phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to become detached from meaning and become merely an unintelligible sound is known as semantic satiation. Perhaps that is something Sam Austen is interested in exploring in his work, but, knowing very little about him, I cannot say that for certain.
[6] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books, 1974), Book III, §224, p. 211.
See also the post written by Stephen Alexander and published on 8 November 2013 - 'Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy' - click here.
