In Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, 14-year-old Sophie Amundsen begins receiving mysterious letters from a philosopher, encouraging her to consider deep questions about life, the universe, and what it means to be human. One day, she is tasked with considering the differences between humans and animals, and reflects on the differences between her cat and herself.

Sophie was convinced that her cat, Sherekan, could think. At least, it could be very calculating. But could it reflect on philosophical questions? … A cat could probably be either contented or unhappy, but did it ever ask itself if there was a God or whether it had an immortal soul? Sophie thought that was extremely doubtful.

Sophie is challenged throughout the book to explore these big questions, to not settle for the easy contentment of blissful ignorance, or what Socrates might call “the unexamined life.” And yet philosopher Mark Rowlands, in The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living A Good Life, suggests that it might just be that lack of examination that makes our lovable pups as capable of feeling joy at the simplest of things.

Americans are increasingly crazy about their pets. I don’t say this in a negative way—I count myself among the crazies. My old Golden Retriever Wally felt like the center of my universe during my years with him. Most American pet owners view their pet as part of the family “as much as a human member,” according to the Pew Research Center. For all the brouhaha over “childless cat ladies” in the last election, there is some evidence that suggests Millennial women without kids outright prefer the company of their pets to children.

Rowlands, too, is crazy about his beloved dog, Shadow, and it is initially through Shadow’s imagined experience of the world that Rowlands reflects on how we humans might learn a thing or two from dogs. Shadow is a German Shepherd, a 100-pound East German immigrant with an aggressive streak. Rowlands describes himself as the sort of dog owner who only really goes to dog-friendly restaurants, who brings his dog to his lectures at the university where he teaches, who can’t bear the thought of boarding his dog at a kennel to go on a vacation.

Shadow’s aggression makes it hard to let him off-leash much of anywhere besides the canal near Rowlands’s home, where he finds bliss and something approaching purpose every day he gets to chase the iguanas into the water. Rowlands invokes Sisyphus and asks: Were a person to do a task every day without progress, repeating it over and over, would they not find that unfulfilling? And yet Shadow greets each new iguana chase with the same thrill as the last.

Rowlands identifies part of the reason humans may find simple bliss harder to achieve is our penchant for reflection, for making ourselves the focus of our own thinking. “Reflection, most fundamentally, is a wound that cannot be healed. It neatly severs us in two, and has left us uneasy, troubled creatures,” he writes, describing the reflective person as both actor and observer. But much as Sophie Amundsen thinks her cat is unlikely to contemplate its own role in our universe, Rowlands too suggests the dogs who are our companions are “like us in many ways … but whose capacity for reflection is, compared with ours, nascent at best.” In this, Rowlands writes, perhaps we have something to learn.

I am not sure my beloved Wally did a great deal of deep thinking about himself or his place in the universe. There’s a reason for a delightful subreddit called r/onegoldenbraincell. Frequently, Golden Retrievers often behave as if that’s all they’ve got going upstairs. Yet Wally was clever when he needed to be, sneaking unsecured food and opening lever-handled doors like a velociraptor. The look of pride on Wally’s face after breaking out of a hotel room or swiping a pie convinced me he was surely closer to a human in his experience of the world than a fish or a bird.

And yet The Word of Dog highlights many ways in which dogs do not behave at all as we flawed humans. For instance, if humans spend time agonizing over their own appearance, dogs clearly do not, as Rowlands notes when analyzing why one of his dogs loves rolling around in excrement. Throughout the book, Rowlands tries to infer what is going on inside a dog’s brain not through neurobiology but through observations about how a dog behaves in the world, and uses philosophical questions to evaluate what separates humans from dogs.

For instance, a dog does not doubt that he is meant to chase a lizard or steal a pie, while a human contemplates her actions and intentions, and can feel anguish over them, or wonder if any of what we do here in this mortal life means anything in the end. Our dogs may be Very Good Boys and Girls, but do not necessarily experience questions of right and wrong in a way that Immanuel Kant might agree that they are moral.

And yet, Rowlands argues, our dogs are still good boys and girls, because they can experience empathy and live by something approximating a value system. Our dogs can experience a rich freedom because they simply live their true nature. The overarching theme of all of this? Dogs don’t overthink it. Humans are doomed to overthink it, because by nature, we are capable of reflection.

We generally seem to think reflecting on ourselves and our thoughts is something to be celebrated. A wide range of data points suggest we are increasingly interested in the subject of understanding ourselves. And yet, is more self-reflection and self-analysis really what we need? Even as more people report going to therapy than 20 years ago, we also see more and more people reporting mental health challenges, feelings of anxiety and depression and more. As Rowlands notes, “the general human consensus is that reflection is a good thing … [but] any capacity, especially when it is excessively exercised, will have its costs as well as its benefits, and reflection is no exception.”

In Ted Lasso, the eponymous coach encourages one of his players to shake off a bad practice and “be a goldfish.” He argues that having a brain capable of holding memories for only 10 seconds is what makes it the happiest of the animals. But happiness is not the same as meaning. But there is, of course, obviously value in our ability to think deeply, to feel deeply. Rowlands finds clear meaning in the memories of his beloved dogs who have passed, as I do the memory of my beloved Wally.

The Word of Dog argues that perhaps it is dogs, rather than people or goldfish, who are most able to achieve happiness, yes, but also to feel the greatest depth of meaning in life, by being utterly incapable of doing anything but living out their true, authentic nature day in and day out. Dogs are never the spectator looking inward on their own life. They simply live. And in that, in our world of perpetual distraction and navel-gazing, Rowlands suggests they may have the key to how we might find a meaningful life too.

The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life
by Mark Rowlands
Liveright, 256 pp., $26.99

Kristen Soltis Anderson is a pollster and cofounder of Echelon Insights.

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