The Philosopher's Cat

Another crosspost from CLA, as are all the below---   Cat Lovers Almanac  . One reason is I did not want to burden posts like below with philosophical stuff--- like that the analysis touches on what might be the basic question in the history of philosophy: the relation of words to ---- whatever. So, here's the post---- Francisco Goya has life span dates (March 30, 1746 to April 16, 1828) which are interestingly similar to those of William Blake (November 28, 1757 to August 12,  1827). I say interestingly since they are both the type of genius whose originality can still astound. There are of course other parallels, --  Shakespeare and Cervantes comes to mind; the effect can be that of something you think can be learned by the conjunctures, though conclusions never seem to eventuate. Goya was famous and mostly, paid; Blake not so much. That Blake's cats are fewer than Goya's is merely of local interest. The cats below, Goya's, are models of the unsentimental. Here are

[This note on Fromm I left at CLA without pointing out that his ideas are more typical than not of the modern assumptions about human nature as something that can be constructed, that human nature is plastic. That at least was one mistake his authority Freud did not make. His ideas are especially lacking in that those sad years of German success, were formative for several great thinkers, like Karl Jaspers, but that is not a group in which we could place Fromm] Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900 to March 18, 1980) is labeled a sociologist and a psychoanalyst in the history of Freudian thought. According to one  web site  on this history, Fromm's significance is stated this way: Today, Erich Fromm is widely regarded as one of the most important psychoanalysts of the 20th century. While Freud had an early influence on him, Fromm later became part of a group known as the neo-Freudians which included ... Carl Jung. Fromm was critical of many of Freud's ideas including the Oedipus comple

The title of this article below -- Confessions of a Vicarious Person -- caught me, but the phrase is not really  meant alas, to characterize human intelligence. Here because I still like the title. cit--- The Bookman, Volumes 15-16-1903 q Possibly some people are born vicarious. Certainly, some other people have vicariousness thrust upon them. In proof take these experiences of a person whose ruling principle it is to mind her own business. The first of them came to pass in my salad days, when the prophetic shadow of a literary career earned for me a certain pitying tolerance faintly touched with envy, and—to be wholly frank—admiration. Back in my province, white blackbirds were jfienty compared with folk who wrote things. Judge, then, the sensation caused by a summer visitor to one of the first families, who, it was given out, had a novel nearly ready for the press. There was a delicious vagueness as to publishers and date of issue, but doubt was impossible, to even the

Norbert Elias (June 22, 1897 to August 1, 1990) was a Jewish German scholar who managed to get to England by 1935. He had studied with Karl Jaspers, but later switched from philosophy to sociology. In 1939 the work which later established his reputation, was published in German, (but not, apparently in English til 1969). This was The Civilizing Process , Vol.I.  The History of Manners , (1969), and  The Civilizing Process,  Vol.II.  State Formation and Civilization,   (1982). Norbert was concerned to trace and understand the change in people between the medieval period, and current times. He seems to have understood it as a critical change in manners: that is, to use his examples, how men learned to use a handkerchief rather than their own sleeve to blow their nose, or, another example, which Elias may (I am not sure) have been the one to bring back to popular consciousness, the torture of cats and its falling out of fashion. This went from a popular pastime to a repugnant thought for