Notes a dog philosophy.(Literature)

RABELAIS REMINDS US, in his prologue to Gargantua, that Plato calls the dog, in the second book of The Republic, the most philosophical creature. Dogs love to gnaw bones, the cortex of which must be broken open to allow them to savour the perfect nourishment of the marrow--la substantifique moelle. As Sir Thomas Urquhart puts it, in his Scots English translation of 1653:

 
   In imitation of this Dog, it becomes you to be wise, 
   to smell, feele and have in estimation these faire 
   goodly books, stuffed with high conceptions, which 
   though seemingly easie in the pursuit, are in the 
   cope and encounter somewhat difficult; and then 
   like him you must, by a sedulous Lecture, and frequent 
   meditation break the bone, and suck out the marrow 
   ... for in the perusal of this Treatise, you shall finde 
   another kind of taste, and a doctrine of a more 
   profound and abstruse consideration, which will 
   disclose unto you the most glorious Sacraments, 
   and dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerneth 
   your Religion, as matters of the publick State, and 
   Life ceconomical. 

In dealings between dogs and humans, the human side of the account seems guiltily in debt. Even the ferociously smelly pirate who panhandles at our local market has a mutt with him, and not just to attract the sympathy coin. He needs the dog to overcome our cynicism (in its modern sense) at the theatricality of his self-presentation. No wonder Charlie Chaplin in A Dog's Life has to remember, at various junctures, not to mistake his own for one.

Dogs inhabit an exchange economy in which a caress is as good as a word.

In his short testimony The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights, Emanuel Levinas recounts the story of his internment in a forest POW camp after the rout of his French division in the Ardennes following the German invasion in 1940. His company of seventy men lived as if they "were no longer part of the world". For a few short weeks, however, they enjoyed the company of a stray dog, Bobby, who somehow managed to survive in a wilder part of the camp. Bobby was in the habit of jumping up in delight and greeting the prisoners with a bark when they lined up in the morning and when they returned from their corvee at dusk. "For him, there was no doubt that we were all men."

The irony of the situation, in which he and his fellow prisoners had become animals in the eyes of other humans who witnessed their plight but were acknowledged as human only by a destitute animal, was not lost on the philosopher, who dubbed the dog the "last Kantian of Nazi Germany". Bobby had noticed, without introspecting, that we are a species replicated entire in every individual. What makes us different from dogs, however, is that we do not in all circumstances acknowledge others of our kind as kind.

Flaubert, a close reader of Rabelais, intuited that the latter's advice to the reader was actually a plea to go into mourning for the mind.