One day, the eye of the philosopher Mark Rowlands was caught by an advertisement in his local newspaper, the Tuscaloosa News: “Wolf cubs for sale, 96 per cent”. Rowlands was eyeballing the father of those cubs just an hour later, the wolf’s yellow eyes on a level with his own, the beast’s enormous paws propping it up against a stable door. This encounter had the opposite effect to that which it would have on most human beings, who fear wolves with a primordial terror. Rowlands purchased one of the cubs and his life changed. Within hours, Brenin had savaged his furniture and destroyed the air conditioning.

When Brenin was alive, he was the centre of Rowlands’s life; each day the creature had to be exercised, fed and settled before the philosopher could embark on anything else. The demand the wolf made on him reminds Rowlands of the myth about St Francis and a wolf that terrorized a village. St Francis made a deal with the wolf, whereby the creature would cease his hostilities if the villagers promised to feed him regularly. The arrangement worked, and firm arrangements are what you need to make with wolves if the relationship is to flourish. Now that Brenin is dead, the philosopher still thinks of his “brother wolf” every day. He misses the relationship that was one of the most formative in his life, and confesses to worrying about Brenin’s bones, now that they lie buried in a lonely spot in the South of France.

In his professional life, Rowlands is known for the idea that consciousness is embedded in the world around us as much as within us. For example, our intelligence stems in part from our ability to use language, and language itself exists apart from any one of us. Brenin, he decides, has “mechanical intelligence”: the wolf lives in a mechanical world, solving problems like opening doors in a flash. This differs from dogs who, he argues, have “magical intelligence”: a dog lives in a magical world, in which it deals with doors by looking at them and waiting for its owner to do the opening, though in ways that are entirely mysterious to the dog itself. Rowlands’s thoughts on “externalism”, as his view of the connection between mind and world is called, developed in part because of his relationship with Brenin: “I think there are certain thoughts that can emerge only in the space between a wolf and a man”.

Other fascinating speculations are concerned with human intelligence. It is rational and moral – for all that we can be irrational and amoral, and profoundly affected by emotions. That would suggest that there is a rational and moral world external to us. Inasmuch as that is embedded in language, it might be argued that we create that rationality and morality, on the grounds that we are the makers of the language we speak. An alternative view, though, is that language is a mirror of a deeper reality: might rationality and morality exist externally to and independently of us too? Rowlands, for one, is open to this possibility. That said, wolfish or “canine” traits almost invariably come off better than human or “simian” traits, in Rowlands’s view – at least in this book. This misanthropic thread is partly a reflection of the discontent Rowlands felt about himself over the period the book covers, about which he is painfully honest, notably when he muses on the failed human relationships in his life and his tendency to drink too much.

Rowlands needn’t have been so negative about his conspecifics. Apart from anything else, studies of bonobos, conducted by Frans de Waal among others, have revealed astonishing capacities for kindness and empathy among higher primates. Taken as a whole, though, Rowlands’s memoir is life-affirming, engrossing, thoughtful and moving.

The subtitle is “Lessons from the wild on love, death and happiness”, and I found the lessons on consciousness, animals and knowledge as engaging as the main current of the memoir. The Philosopher and the Wolf could become a philosophical cult classic.

Mark Rowlands
THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE WOLF
Lessons from the wild on love, death and happiness
246pp. Granta Books. £15.99.
978 1 84708 059 2

Mark Vernon is the author of Wellbeing, part of the new Art of Living series, and Teach Yourself Humanism, both published in 2008.

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