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Straw Dogs

  
 
misterpc
11:49 / 09.04.04
I'm loathe to start this discussion (if it turns into a discussion). I just finished reading Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, and I found it to be terrifyingly bad. I wasn't expected a unified theory of everything, but what I got was a series of half-baked epigrams, muddled thinking and decontextualised attacks on every philosopher under the sun.

Gray's Professor of European Thought at LSE - the reviews of his books are glowing (if not verging on sycophantic) - and it's published by the extremely reputable Granta. So why are we being subjected to this dull, dull pop philosophising? Many of his points are interesting, but he completely fails to make them work for his overall theme.

In fact, I'm not sure what his theme is. He wants to argue that humanity is just another animal (whoa, now there's a revolutionary thought - for anybody who hasn't seen any of the three million documentaries on how closely related we are to the great apes), but spends most of the book making points that illustrate that the reason that humans are fucked up is because we're not like other animals.

My loathing to start the discussion is because by starting it, I'm effectively validating his work (i.e. "at least it made you think"). In fact, I just wish that it would be recalled and nobody else would have to read it. Just wanted to make that clear.
 
 
johnj
13:22 / 17.04.04
When I read straw dogs I was pretty underwhelemed too - especially given that the blurb on the back had made him out to be solving nearly every single problem of philosophy. He attempts to do it but it seems to consist in him rubbishing past philosophers (Wittgenstein was "basically an idealist") and like you say, likening humans to animals. Was pretty poor philosophising and the whole lessening of other philosophers seems a bit, I don't know, bad.
 
 
Tom Coates
14:12 / 18.04.04
Can someone provide a summary of his thinking or the core of one of his major arguments - if such arguments are clear enough to rearticulate. If you could pull out one or two related questions from around the subject area itself, that might also be useful in getting a conversation going and/or getting people more interested in exploring John Gray's work.
 
 
lysander
09:27 / 22.04.04
I thought the book was pretty good, I lent it to a friend with
my reccomendation. I guess for those hard core philosophers it may be stating the obvious, but it read well and contained a few interesting nuggets, having lost the book in a bar I can't
recount the notes I made
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
11:28 / 22.04.04
Well, I haven't read it, here's what I yanked from Amazon.

John Gray's Straw Dogs attempts to present a world view in which humans are not central and which argues against the humanist belief in progress. The heart of the book is summed up in the idea that modern humanists have still not come to terms with Darwin, still not come to terms with the idea that humans are like other animals. Christians and modern humanists in the Platonic-Cartesian tradition typically think of humans enjoying a special relationship to God, or a special status in nature in a way that other animals do not. Even the great debunkers--philosophers such as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Heidegger--end up making human beings the centre of things or the end point of some world-historical process. By contrast, in a Taoist, Shinto, Hindu or animist culture Darwin's discovery would have been easily accommodated since these faiths see humans and other animals as kin.
In short, for Gray, humanism is nothing more than "a secular religion thrown together from decaying scraps of Christian myth". Gray champions James Lovelock's view of the Earth as a self-regulating system whose behaviour resembles, in some ways, that of an organism. The Gaia hypothesis is the backdrop to Gray's apparently relentless pessimism about the fate of humankind. What it teaches us is that this self-regulating system has no need of humanity, does not exist for the sake of humanity, and will regulate itself in ignorance of humanity's fate.

Straw Dogs can be usefully compared with Mary Midgely's excellent Science and Poetry since both take off from the view of man as animal while sharing similar views about the cultural role of philosophy. Both encourage us to overcome the Platonic-Cartesian-Kantian philosophical tradition while stressing the importance of Gaia in emphasising our essential continuity with the physical and natural world. For Gray, humans "think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals". Straw Dogs could have been made to stretch for 500 large pages. Instead you get 200 small pages of gold; simple, concise, riveting.--Larry Brown --

A review from one Diana Judd.

Guardian review.

Spiked review.

I haven't read it but the reviews all point towards it being from the "we're all fucked" school of philosophy.
 
  
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