Product Description

A radical work of philosophy, which sets out to challenge our most cherished assumptions about what it means to be human. From Plato to Christianity, from the Enlightenment to Nietzsche and Marx, the Western tradition has been based on arrogant and erroneous beliefs about human beings and their place in the world. Philosophies such as liberalism and Marxism think of humankind as a species whose destiny is to transcend natural limits and conquer the Earth. Even in the present day, despite Darwin's discoveries, nearly all schools of thought take as their starting point the belief that humans are radically different from other animals. John Gray argues that this humanist belief in human difference is an illusion and explores how the world and human life look once humanism has been finally abandoned.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17936 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 246 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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

Review
'This powerful and brilliant book is an essential guide to the new Millennium. Straw Dogs challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be human, and convincingly shows that most of them are delusions. Who are we, and why are we here? John Gray's answers will shock most of us deeply. This is the most exhilarating book I have read since Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene' - J.G. Ballard 'My book of the year was Straw Dogs. I read it once, I read it twice and took notes. I arranged to meet its author so I could publicise the book - I thought it that good... a devastating critique of liberal humanism, and all of it set out in easy-to-digest (although hard-to-swallow apercus)' - Will Self, New Statesman 'One of the most important books published this year, and will probably prove to be one of the most important this century... nobody can hope to understand the times in which we live unless they have read Straw Dogs' - Sue Corrigan, Mail on Sunday 'There is unlikely to be a more provocative or more compelling book published this year than Straw Dogs... Gray is one of the most consistently interesting and unpredictable thinkers in Britain' - Jason Cowley, Observer

Will Self
‘That rarest of things, a contemporary work of philosophy, wholly accessible, and profoundly relevant to the rapidly evolving world'

Customer Reviews

We cannot make the world to be for us.
It is over a hundred years since Darwin revealed to us our animal lineage, and yet the human primate is still having difficulty coming to terms with its animal origins. All bar creationists may indeed now accept that we are descended from apes, but most of us still cling to the belief that we have somehow become different to the rest of the animal kingdom. Our ability to use language and reason, to see ourselves as selves, selves that move forward in time and, with other selves, progress by building a culture based on moral rules and a technology that seems to give us ever increasing control over our environment. Surely this is enough to set us apart from the rest of nature? No. Thankfully, a British philosopher who lives and breathes today but who speaks with the depth and clarity of a modern day Schopenhauer is here to rid you of this delusion.

Human beings are still animals claims Gray, but the more profound insight that he delivers, and that his critics seem unable to grasp or admit, is that humans, and even whatever intelligence that might emerge in a 'posthuman' future, will always be inescapably rooted in the natural world as much as the lowliest of slime moulds.

We believe that language and reason are what differentiates us, forgetting that we acquired these abilities through the blind mechanisms of evolution. This means that they are, as Hume, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche declared long ago, mere tools in the brutish struggle for survival. These same tools enabled the human animal to create the illusions of free will, self and morality and the delusion to think that with these, man has the ability to stand apart from the animal world and choose his own fate. But the fundamental import of Darwinism is that it tells us that 'we' were 'made' for the world. The world was not made for us, nor can we ever make it, nor indeed any world, to be for us.

Some rather simple-minded criticisms of Gray's outlook are floating around the Internet, including on this page, so lest they deter you from reading this book, here are a few brief rejoinders that can be made to them.

1/ 'Gray teaches us nothing new. Postmodernism has been around for 40 years now.' Gray clearly isn't giving just another rehash of postmodernist thought. In fact his book is a savage attack on some of the postmodernist thought that has now been neatly incorporated into liberal thinking. The belief that the world is entirely a social construction, that this construction is determined by power relationships and that therefore by changing those power relationships society can mould the world into whatever form it chooses. The way that humans see the world may indeed be due to power relationships within society, but these arise because of the fact that humans are biological animals in an inherently competitive natural world. Postmodernism is, as Gray says, 'just the latest fad in anthropocentrism'.

2/ 'Gray criticises science as a faith but seems to hold Darwinism as a faith.' Gray is primarily attacking the faith that scientific progress leads to moral and social progress. If anything is right in science it is the broad theory of Darwinism. Yet people believe that science can enable man to take control of his destiny, when one of the most fundamental tenets of modern science teaches us that science and its consequences (as with any other sphere of human activity) is ultimately determined by the same laws that govern other animals' behaviour.

3/ 'No-one seriously believes in progress anymore'. Well the western world is without doubt led by two men who wholeheartedly believe in the vision of moral progress, as we are seeing with disastrous consequences in Iraq. As both have been re-elected as their heads of government, presumably a lot of the people who voted for them share that vision. The idea that western society is not still dominated by the belief in moral progress is absurd. A generation ago homosexuality was illegal and homosexuals were routinely sent to prison. Today, someone can be sent to prison for simply arguing that homosexuality is wrong. For this to be the case, society clearly has a conviction that the moral attitudes of today are without question a progression on the attitudes of yesterday. To give a different example, on the 10th of September 2001 not one person in a hundred could have believed that America would soon be holding a serious debate on whether or not to legalise torture.

It goes without saying that I found Straw Dogs to be an utterly rewarding intellectual experience. Read it and it may change the whole way you look at yourself and your universe...though probably together with a feeling that, like all great writers, Gray has articulated for you something profound that you always suspected about the world.

Electroshock therapy for the status quo.
Its not hard to find fault with Straw Dogs but that doesn't stop you reading. I read it in a largely uninterrupted single sitting of 6 hours. The prose is assertive and intoxicating and maybe its the delivery that keeps you reading, the desire to see where this glut of attitude is going to lead. Gray is self assured, well read and referenced but the scope of the books 200 pages is ambitious to say the least. Some critics say its philosophy for the commuting classes, an eclictic grab bag of philospohical snippets and quotes to give the reader whose attention span is challenged the sensation of something profound. If what you are after is a sober systematic arguement look elswhere (this is the acedemics moan) but I think that Gray is more mischevious than that and less interested in the glory of publishing notoriety. His motivations derive from a life of observation of the folly of human enterprise and a broad reading of history. And this is the strength of the novel, it drags you screaming into another perspective, one in which the accepted conventions and positions on our motivations are deeply challenged. He says we are simply animals with highly developed delusional skills and although you don't agree ( I don't) you can't help feeling that he is right or at least History is more supportive of that position than the common faith that we are somehow moving toward some vision or goal of perfection. Other critics say that he ofers no solution or maybe a half baked neo-taoist angle but I disagree. This book is not about self help. Its about self awareness, and for humans that is a bitter pill indeed.

kinda loopy, but well worth it...
If you like your philosophy analytical, in the Anglo-American tradition, this is not for you. If, on the other hand, you're prepared to give a philosophical work the latitude to be completely bats, as long as it's stylish and thought provoking, this is for you.

Gray's book is a series of only loosely connected mini-essays which - as other reviewers point out - argue against a sort of anthropocentrist exceptionalism and in favour of a sort of misanthropic, deep-ecological nihlism. Will Self, predictably enough, loves it.

Whether or not you think the evidence is as strong as it claims to be (it isn't, quite); or whether you think, even if true, it necessarily supports Gray's conclusions (it doesn't); this is nevertheless an absolutely wonderful book. Read this as a work of literature, not philosophy. Some wonderfully challenging and thought provoking questions are lobbed at the reader in volly of intellectual non-conformism. From Lord Jim, to the organisation of ant societies, the Rwandan genocide to what it is to think of one's self as a coherent person, Lao Tzu to Karl Marx and pre-modern anthropology... just read it, it's fun!