The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life
By Mark Rowlands
Published by Liveright, £22.10, on January 28
I write all my pieces, including this one, with my faithful ghostwriter in tow. Usually, he sits next to me, reading over my shoulder; sometimes, he naps on my lap; today, perhaps because this week’s book interests him more than most, he made a dramatic showing, lunging to remove a half-finished burrito from the trash.
My ghostwriter is Kafka, a two-year-old English shepherd who joins me on all my escapades - a dog who evinces a love so pure, so unsullied by even the possibility of ill will, that I can barely fathom it.
English shepherds are often jokingly called ‘English shadows’ because they trail their owners so closely, and Kafka is an exemplar of the breed’s fabled loyalty: He follows me everywhere, even braving the bathroom - where he has endured the trauma of his bath time - to keep me company while I brush my teeth. He is the most loving creature of any species that I have ever met.
“Dogs lead more meaningful lives than we do,” writes the philosopher and dog enthusiast Mark Rowlands in his new book, and it is not hard for me to see why he might think so.
‘The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life’ contains a smattering of memoir and hefty doses of cognitive science, but it is primarily a work of philosophy.
By meditating on the many beloved dogs with whom he has shared his life, Rowlands sketches their profoundly alien and distinctively ebullient way of navigating the world. There are already a number of books about canine cognitive capacities - among them ‘The Genius of Dogs’ and ‘What It’s Like to Be a Dog’ - but this is the only one I’ve read about canine agency.
In ‘The Word of Dog’, Rowlands asks not just whether our dogs can experience love (yes) or guilt (doubtful, as evidenced by Kafka’s gleeful insouciance about his attempted burrito theft) but whether they are free (in his view, yes) and moral (in his view and mine, emphatically so).
Dogs lead more meaningful lives than we do
— Mark Rowlands
Of course, they are not free and moral in quite the same way we are, and Rowlands’s book is therefore as much an inquiry into the nature of humanity as it is a celebration of dogs and their virtues.
It does not, however, paint a very flattering portrait of dogs’ handlers. We have a tendency to favour our own species, seeking evidence of our superiority at every turn, but Rowlands emphasises that ‘The Word of Dog’ is “not a book about the benefits of being human; rather, it is a book about its drawbacks”.
In other words, it is a charming confirmation of my heretofore inchoate suspicion that Kafka is infinitely better than I am.
Dogs are often better moral agents than we are
Socrates famously said that “the unexamined life is not worth living”, but dogs call this dictum, along with many other nuggets of conventional wisdom, into question.
Reflection - defined by Rowlands as “thinking about thinking, thinking about thoughts, and about the thinker of those thoughts” - is a double-edged sword: It is the basis of self-examination but also of fragmentation. It splits “the reflective creature into the one that is reflecting and the one that is reflected upon”.
And so, “split in two, we can never again be whole - single, undivided, of one heart and one mind”. Dogs, in contrast, throw themselves into their pursuits with wild, wholehearted abandon. They are “creatures of commitment”, Rowlands writes, whereas we are “creatures of doubt”.
Many eminences, including Frans de Waal and Charles Darwin, have argued (or more often assumed) that morality requires reflection. “A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives,” Darwin wrote in ‘The Descent of Man’. What, then, are we to make of the feats of selflessness and heroism performed by dogs - of the Doberman who rescued a human baby from a deadly snake, or the stray mutt who brought food back to her hideout to share it with other animals?
By Rowlands’s lights, these acts of devotion give us reason to question the traditional picture of morality advanced by thinkers like Darwin. Perhaps empathy, not critical scrutiny, is the key to ethical achievement.
Dogs throw themselves into their pursuits with wild, wholehearted abandon. They are ‘creatures of commitment’, Rowlands writes, whereas we are ‘creatures of doubt’
There are biological grounds for supposing that dogs are capable of putting themselves in our shoes - if the wealth of anecdotal data weren’t sufficiently convincing. On the many occasions when Rowlands’s dogs woke him up in the middle of the night to inform him that his infant son was crying, the animals were evidently upset that the child was upset: In Rowlands’s words, “his distress had infected them”.
Indeed, dogs are often better moral agents than we are. As Rowlands points out, they never make resolutions that they fail to keep; they never ask why they are running after squirrels or realise, to their chagrin, that there is no definitive reason to prefer hunting to herding or Frisbee. They are never paralysed by indecision, despair or existential malaise. When they see their cherished humans in danger or they perceive a squirrel scurrying by, they act without a moment’s hesitation.
Dogs also prompt us to revise our conception of meaning. In the face of the realisation that many of our pursuits are repetitive and serve no ends beyond themselves, Rowlands writes, we can either “deny that our lives are Sisyphean, or we can deny that a Sisyphean life is necessarily a meaningless one”.
Our dogs teach us to think of humanity differently
Dogs opt for the second strategy, and they do so with an exuberance and aplomb we could never muster, exhibiting a kind of amor fati. No matter how many times Kafka catches a ball in the air, no matter how frequently Rowlands’s German shepherd chases local wildlife, their unabashed joy never abates. And why should repeating a cherished activity make it any less cherished?
Sometimes, ‘The Word of Dog’ is a bit in the weeds, which I mean as a compliment. Rowlands is at his best when he refrains from simplifying or sugarcoating and dives headfirst into some of the thorniest arguments in the history of philosophy.
He is at his worst when he adopts a chatty and patronising tone. In the middle of an extended discussion of a knotty passage in Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’, for instance, he pauses to exclaim: “If you are still with me, many congratulations on getting this far! This stuff is really, really hard!” Why insult the reader by assuming she doesn’t enjoy a bout of rousing Sartre exegesis?
For the most part, however, ‘The Word of Dog’ is an entertaining and affectionate exploration of dogs and their distinctive mode of being. The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch once wrote that “love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real”. Dogs are acutely and sometimes bafflingly other than oneself, at least when oneself is human, which may explain why we love them so fiercely.
Yet sometimes I wonder if we are more like them than Rowlands lets on. I am accustomed to defining myself in terms of my intellectual capacities. Kafka is illiterate, and yet it is no exaggeration to say that no-one has ever resembled me so closely.
“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” Catherine says of Heathcliff in ‘Wuthering Heights’. Ridiculous as it may sound, I would say the same of my dog. We are both obsessive, stubborn, bossy and endlessly energetic; we are both antsy when we do not get enough exercise or mental stimulation.
The ways in which we are different are the ways in which I am worse - less beautiful, less aerodynamic, less steadfast, less easily delighted. Rowlands is right that Kafka has taught me to value the aspects of the canine sensibility that we humans do not share.
But Kafka has also taught me to think of humanity differently - to conclude that we are not as cerebral as we often wish we were and that I, too, can be an exuberant animal.
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of ‘All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess’
- Washington Post
