Dog As Master: The Philosophy of Mark Alizart’s “Dogs”
The first dogs to have genetically diverged from wolves and to become domesticated, if possessed of the hindsight to analyze their situation, might wonder if the reward for this millennia-spanning partnership has been worth it. For all the survival advantages dogs may have won in making their pact with humans, there has been a relentless campaign to either impose human attributes on these animals, or to see them from any possible perspective than their own. As they are given the attributes of both man-made gods and consumer toys, it’s hardly surprising that a phenomenon like the “doge” meme would become one of the very few enduring and iconic images from the memetic theater of the micro-attention span, lasting for nearly a decade’s worth of use and effectively becoming the arbitrary but omnipresent “Kilroy was here” of its generation. Likewise, YouTube channels and social media feeds either exclusively about or hosted “by” dogs have fan bases numbering in the millions. In all cases, these phenomena succeed by literally putting words in the mouths of their canine subjects (given the inconvenient propensity for dogs to communicate with their eyes rather than their tongues), in the process inventing an entirely new dialect with which to caption their more memorable moments.
Like seemingly everything else that can be given an allegorical value, the dog has also been cast into the miserable arena of human identity politics, with — for example — overly simplistic arguments over the relative merits of breeder bought or adopted animals often acting as a surrogate for more controversial discussions about human breeding habits and eugenics. The more commonplace argument about the relative merits of dogs’ personalities vis a vis those of cats is another perennial powder keg of an argument to have, given the conflicting sides tend to believe in fixed and irrevocable personality traits shared by each member of their respective species (e.g. all cats are supposedly disloyal and indifferent while affording their owners a superior insight into their own lives, whereas dogs provide the same via a completely unthinking loyalty). Anyone to have engaged in one of these debates knows how the cat and dog factions delight in ascribing character deficiencies to one another: dog ownership signifies a desperate need for acceptance by even the most apparently undiscriminating forms of intelligence, and cat owners base their allegiances on cold practicality (e.g. the relative ease of caring for a cat) rather than deep emotional connection.
But maybe the most visible evidence of humans’ emotional investment in dogs (and the desire to remake dogs in their own image outright) has been the swelling consumer market for accelerators of anthropomorphic qualities. These take the form of, according to Bêtes de Style [Animals with Style] exhibition curators Chantal Prod’hom and Magali Moulinier, “a copious amount of improbable objects created for them, yet contrary to their needs, from famous-label cardigans to films for dogs, and to the benefit of new professional figures who are just as questionable; from the pet psychoanalyst to the canine beauty salon.”[1] Professor Daniel Cherix, in the same volume, counsels against the sentimentalizing of animals in general, and uses the specific example of asymmetries in the sensory perception of dogs to prove that — although “our biological behavior is in part based on that of species that preceded us”[2] — there are simply far too many phenomenological differences between us to understand what dogs would say if they could speak.
While philosopher Mark Alizart also shows concern over the incorrect perceptions of dogs’ life worlds in his recent book — titled simply Dogs — he takes a somewhat different tack. Alizart’s bold proposal, which he constructs from a continuity of historical moments in which either real or fictional dogs had a tutelary role, is that the logical end game of humanizing dogs should be a kind of wholesale role reversal. That is to say, the progressive placement of dogs in human roles demands that we consider their value as intellectual superiors rather than just moral equals or allegorical representations of qualities like loyalty and courage. To wit:
Dogs genuinely seem to have become ‘philosophers,’ if we accept the idea of the Stoics, the Buddhists, and Spinoza that wisdom consists in accommodating oneself, with simplicity and gratitude, to what life has to offer.[3]
As Alizart surely knows, though he devotes just a few brief asides to the subject in Dogs, there existed since Greek antiquity a school of philosophy that looked to the dog as its (a)moral instructor: the “kynicism” attributed to Diogenes of Sinope, itself deriving from the Greek κυνικός (“doglike”), saw the loose formalization of a lifestyle based upon an idealized conception of the dog as both ardently faithful and shameless. It was a worldview that “privileged satirical laughter, sensuality, the politics of the body, and a pleasure-oriented life as forms of resistance to the master narratives of Platonic idealism, the values of the polis, and the imperial claims of Alexander the Great.”[4] This is already a too-sterile sketch of kynicism, though: it cannot be thoroughly distinguished from other philosophical schools without alighting on such provocative thoughts as Diogenes’ flippant remarks on masturbation (wishing that his hunger could be satiated by “rubbing his belly”), and similar attitudes that seem the direct antecedents of our observations that dogs publicly lick their genitalia “because they can.”
Diogenes’ philosophical champion Peter Sloterdijk, while not calling out dogs by name in this particular passage of his kynical magnum opus, nevertheless attributed to them a philosophical breakthrough when insisting that a refusal to “get nauseated” was one of the key enlightened characteristics of a kynical philosopher. As dogs’ nonchalance towards the act of publicly “relieving themselves” found its way into Diogenes’ own lifestyle, Sloterdijk lauded this as an act that should earn him enshrinement in “the Ancestral Gallery of Ecological Consciousness,” and a brazen challenge to “those who do not want to admit that they produce refuse”; who will in fact “risk suffocating one day in their own shit” for this fact. Throughout Sloterdijk’s panegyric there is a recurring sentiment that such behavior is not indicative of a cognitive defect, but rather an advanced propensity for seeing things as they truly are: a commitment to a stripped-down, essentialist and deception-free life code that prioritizes dog-like freedoms of movement and exploratory ability. The kynic sees “self-torture” in the service of an enlightened mind as pointless idiocy, and, while not denying material luxury and social status outright, nevertheless refuses them when he can be “made a fool of by so-called needs” (to wit: “Diogenes taught that the wise man too eats cake, but only if he just as well do without it”. [5]
At only 100 pages in its English-language version (translated by Robin McKay), it’s unfair to criticize Dogs’ not being be an encyclopedic reference guide for “canine studies” completists. Having said that, the relative absence of the above discussion prevents this from becoming at least an essentialist read. In conferring an occult philosophical authority to dogs, Alizart makes sure to foreground those characteristics that we would see as universally graceful and noble: true, dogs’ “joy” is remarked upon as being “definitely on the side of violence and sexuality” (at least if theorizing from the transgressive perspective of Georges Bataille), but significantly more time is spent on discussing their immutable faithfulness, their ability to receive beatings without complaint or with a sort of stoic detachment, their propensity for being instructive even in their more villainous incarnations. Within such a moral framework, in which dogs are seen as “the great civilizer,” Alizart can speculate wildly that Aktionist artist Hermann Nitsch, who was “fond of bloody ceremonies,” can wildly speculate the he might have been partially inspired by the Old Testament account of “Balak, the dog who licks the blood of Israel.” Yet the kynical campaigns of public defecation, urination and masturbation carried out by Nitsch’s fellow Aktionists, explicitly stated as a “means for healing society of its genital panic,”[6] go completely unmentioned. Alizart claims that “dogs know our shame: this is their secret, and the reason why they say nothing,” but presumably this is a shame that relates to our techno-scientific abuses of the biosphere rather than a shame over our own bodily functions.
Whatever one thinks initially of Alizart’s main argument, there are a number of missed opportunities for him to make his case as he jumps across historical epochs and regionally distinct dog legends. For one, while bringing up the fact that Inuit culture derives its namesake from the Japanese term for dog (“inu”), there is no mention of maybe the most respected “inu” in recent history, and moreover one which could have been highly illustrative of Alizart’s thesis. Chūken Hachikō [lit. ‘faithful dog Hachiko’], the celebrated Akita dog that waited nine years at Tokyo’s Shibuya train station for its master to return, and in the process taught generations of Japanese citizenry that a dog could beat them at their own game of filial piety, is just one conspicuous absence. Elsewhere, Alizart commits a more unforgivable offense by ignoring salient aspects of that dog-lore which he does alight upon. For example, Alizart invokes Cerberus at the gates of Tartarus and laments how monotheism’s subjugation of paganism caused the latter to relinquish control of the “thresholds and passages which were once the preserve of the dog [italics in the original]” (concluding that this process “made religion into an enterprise of domestication”). This is all fine and good, until we realize that the original story arc of Cerberus from pagan antiquity also involved that creature’s domestication, and that this act was actually one of the defining feats of the ancient Greeks’ most revered hero. Heracles, via his subjugation of Cerberus,
Attains the extreme limits of heroism, braving the terrors of death and demonstrating that human courage and intelligence — when supported by the gods (Athene and Hermes act as his guides) — may accomplish the impossible.[7]
These shortcomings aside, the problem I have with this text’s central concern is that wishing for the dog to “ultimately be our master”, if only in the form of a philosophical maître à penser, itself affirms the anthropocentric order of things. What, we might ask, is wrong with merely continuing to expand upon the symbiotic relationship commonly attributed to dogs and humans? A growing body of literature has made the case for partnerships of reciprocal dog / human exchange, rather than using language which simply inverts the current master-subject relationship: this includes works from within Alizart’s own theoretical / philosophical community (e.g. Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto, which is acknowledged in the book) to well outside of it (e.g. the training guides from the Monks of New Skete, which aren’t). Alizart himself seems to understand this, as he remarks in a Darwinian musing on how dogs and humans co-evolved, but he then immediately deduces a hierarchical relationship from this state of mutual arising (“what does this mean if not that the dog is our parent?”)
Dogs may be more linguistically sophisticated than the latest memetic burst of “doggo lingo,” but is really not that different from this more cutesy subcultural phenomenon, in that it comes to a solidly anthropocentric conclusion after pondering what the true value of dogs might be. Alizart and the packs of doggo meme enthusiasts all seem to want them running the show, and the possibility that they might have a “kynical” indifference to exercising authority over a life form already tending to all their needs is an outcome that deserves much more consideration. This is particularly true when also considering what was suggested prior by Uexküll (namely, that dogs’ “magical” perception of the world refuses the very logical foundation required to understand the bases for human hierarchical structures).[8] To be sure, the “joy of dogs” does derive in part from their teaching us something about ourselves. They generally do this, however, by non-participation in the kind of ambitious struggles demanded by power and control, and in their lack of anxiousness to invent new needs once reliable means toward optimal contentment have already been attained. Dogs do not need to be in self-justifying authoritative positions (either as politicians or philosophers) where they create the very problems that they then solve, and the more I re-read Dogs, the more I am grateful that this insanity is limited to humans.
[1] Prod’hom, Chantal and Moulinier, Magali (2006). Bêtes de Style / Animals with Style. Lausanne: Mudac.
[2] Daniel Cherix quoted in Prod’hom and Moulinier (2006).
[3] Alizart, Mark (2020). Dogs. Trans. Robin McKay. Cambridge / Medford: Polity.
[4] Sloterdijk, Peter (1987). Critique of Cynical Reason. Trans. Michael Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Günter Brus and Otto Mühl quoted in Writings of the Vienna Aktionists, ed. Malcolm Green (1999). London: Atlas Press.
[7] Harris, Stephen L. & Platzner, Gloria (1995). Classical Mythology:Images and Insights. Mountain View: Mayfield Publishing Company.
[8] “The role played by the master in the dog’s environment is surely grasped magically and not divided into cause and effect.” Von Uexküll, Jakob (2010). A Foray Into the World of Animals and Humans. Trans. Joseph D. O’Neil. Minneapolis / London: University of Minnesota Press.
