That nocturnal, irreducibly animal faculty
A couple of fragments from the first chapter, “Murriana”, of Daniel Heller-Roazen’s The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation:
It is night, but a cat is awake and, if we take him at his word, he has never been more alert.
Alone in the dark, the principal if not sole narrator of E.T.A Hoffmann’s Opinions of Murr the Cat finds himself overcome by the most powerful of sentiments: ‘feelings of existence’, as he boldly calls them at the start of the record of his life and thoughts. ‘There is something so beautiful,’ the cat exclaims, ’so magnificent, so sublime about life!’ He recalls the hero of Goethe’s Egmont, who sought to summon the ’sweet familiarity of existence’ while preparing, in a ‘painful instant,’ to bid farewell to life. But the cat, unlike the tragic personage, is very much alive and well, fully immersed in ‘that sweet familiarity’ in the moment he names it, and he seems quite unable ever to imagine leaving it behind. All around him the cat senses the ‘the spiritual power, the unknown force, or however one wishes to call the principle that holds sway over us, which,’ he adds, ‘has in some way implanted in me the aforementioned familiarity, without my ever having consented to it.’ His sensibility has raised him to a ‘high point’ seldom, if ever, attained by poets. Moved by the force of his feelings and the agility of his four legs, he has easily ‘leaped - or rather, as he corrects himself, ‘climbed’ - up and over the rooftops of the city in which he lives, the better to gaze at it in its nocturnal splendor. […]
The reflections of Hoffmann’s cat are perhaps best considered in light of this ‘empty night’ [that Hegel wrote of as ‘terrifying’ in The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy]. It is not difficult to see that, poised above the towers and roofs of his city, Murr confronts a principle that could be called ‘absolute,’ an indistinct and insuperable force to that which he considers himself consigned, like every other living thing, ‘without having ever consented to it,’ and which he calls, with seeming philosophical naivete, by an old and familiar name: ‘life.’ Not that the feline creature succeeds in knowing that which Hegel had described as by definition ‘conscious-less, that is, without being, as an object presented to representation.’ At night, at least, Murr knows nothing: in the apparent absence of representation and cogitation, the dark night of the cat remains, by definition, utterly ‘conscious-less.’ The cat perceives ‘the principle that holds sway over us’ not by the organ of reason ‘that is supposed to sit in the heads’ of men but by an irreducibly animal faculty, namely, sensation, or, as Murr puts it, ‘feeling.’ He appears to need nothing else: one could say that for the cat, as for Faust, ‘feeling is everything’ (Gefuhl ist alles). For it is by sensing that Murr finds himself delivered over to the simplest and most universal dimension of all things, which is itself no thing: existence (Dasein).
