Reprise For Sammy
Brueggemann’s Cat, Sammy
Some readers may remember that I recently wrote about cats. My discussion included reference to our well beloved tabby Sammy whom we lost a while ago, Montaigne’s secular cat, and Buber’s Jewish cat. Of late, I have read yet another compelling reference to cats.
I have been reading The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut Rosa, a German sociologist. Rosa takes as his thesis the proposition that a viable human world will be and must be ultimately uncontrollable in order that there can be free, honest, and authentic interaction. A capacity to reduce all of life to certitude would banish all mystery, all surprise, all openness, and all freedom. Rosa cites two cases of uncontrollability that make the point. First, the fall of snow is uncontrollable. We cannot initiate the fall of snow, nor can we stop it. It just happens and we may be awed and surprised by it. Second, falling asleep is uncontrollable. We cannot will to fall asleep. Sleep comes upon us when it comes. Rosa, moreover, suggests that one’s life depends upon “resonance” with another, and resonance depends upon the capacity of the other party to respond in freedom and agency. Complete control would inevitably reduce the other person to muteness, and there could be no genuine interaction at all.
And then, in the midst of his quite learned exposition, Rosa writes of his pet cat:
I experience her purring and trustfulness as events of genuine resonance precisely because she can also evade, because she sometimes doesn’t purr, but scratches or even bites me—in short, precisely because I cannot completely control her. My argument is that, if I could make it snow at will, then I could never experience being called by the falling of snow. If my cat were a programmable robot that always purred and wanted to be cuddled, she would become nothing to me but a dead thing (43-44).
It is the agency of the other—falling snow, sleep, a cat—calling for me whereby I am impelled to response and engagement. It would very different if the other were completely controlled.
It seems to me that there must be an aspect of inherent uncontrollability not only in our experiences or in our relationship to the world, but also in things themselves, if we are to be able to enter into a resonant relationship with them (44).
Once more he returns to his cat:
This is why, to come back to the example of the robotic cat, the uncontrollability inherent in any resonant relationship cannot be produced by a randomization program. If I were greeted in the evening not by my cat, but by a fluffy robot with big adorable eyes, a randomization program could well ensure that, on average, it would want to nuzzle and be petted by me nine times out of ten, while the other ten percent of the time it would hiss and run away from me (46).
Rosa sees that such a robot would allow for unpredictability, but
“there would be no responsive relationship between the robot’s behavior and my own.”…I would know that it isn’t trying to say anything to me, that it isn’t even acknowledging me at all, that its behavior has nothing do with me (46).
In the end, Rosa concludes that even the best programmed robot could not enact the resonance that is essential for real, engaged interaction.
A society that lives in deep anxiety craves certitude. We seek to find such certitude by way of theological orthodoxy, or by scientific data, or by technological control, or by economic tyranny, or by a dozen alternative ideologies. Happily, none of these efforts can succeed, because there is uncontrollability about our life. And this is because life at bottom is creatureliness sponsored by the creator God who wills a dialogical-covenantal relationship with God’s own “other” who can never be reduced to an automaton. All of this full creatureliness is embodied in a cat—or in a snowflake, or even in the instance of sleeplessness. As Rosa judges,
We can only resonate with a counterpart that in a way “speaks with its own voice” (47).
That “own voice” cannot be controlled. Our cats will not permit us to be ventriloquists who supply their speech, their purr, or their hiss. They will have their own say. And in having their own say, they are partners who purr and hiss themselves in our presence. We respond as we are able, as free in our response as our creatureliness as are they. Having our say, and resonating with the other who will have a free say is elemental to the will of the creator who call us variously to our full creatureliness. And if, dear reader, this is enough of cats for you, then check out the book by Rosa. It is a small volume, worth the effort. The book is a summons to engage knowingly the freedom that is constitutive of genuine creaturely existence.
Walter Brueggemann
January 2, 2022
