More than once, driving through the leafy suburbs where I live, I’ve stopped to watch a fox disappear into a neighbour’s garden. I’ve peered out of the bedroom window in the dead of night at a group of foxes in the street. And I’ve often mused on the ‘wild’ life of the fox – the ways in which, at one and the same time, it adapts to and resists the social and environmental changes it experiences. How different are we to the fox? What can the fox tell us about the ways we live, the values we hold, the ‘essence’ of who we think we are? Brenin wasn’t a fox but a wolf, and in The Philosopher and the Wolf Mark Rowlands reflects on the ten years he spent together with Brenin while at the same time teaching philosophy and writing books on social contract theory and ethics.

The Philosopher and the Wolf never claims to be a philosophy book. Instead it jumps through a joint autobiography with regular incursions into philosophical areas such as the nature of happiness and evil; the differences between ape and lupine intelligence; perceptions of time, memory, and death. Ultimately though, it’s a defence of animals and a corrective to the Enlightenment bias towards the human ape as being uniquely better, more intelligent – above and beyond the animal kingdom over which it governs. Rowland’s meditation, particularly on the deception and deceit which are the progenitors of our social intelligence and which ground our evil, forces a re-thinking of that claim.  Our greatest achievement – ‘our civilisation’ – is in fact a complex defence against our own bestiality, our own natures.

Rowlands engaged me both with the ‘whodunnit’ style of the developing relationship between the man and the wolf as well the philosophical understandings that relationship forces upon him. Clearly, living with a wolf is a life changing experience. The real nature of that relationship and the changes that it brought about are most clearly, and most beautifully explored in the final section of the book which describes Brenin’s death and legacy.

Half way through reading The Philosopher and the Wolf my father-in-law died suddenly. I remembered a passage I’d read two days before and returned to it:

It is in our lives and not, fundamentally, in our conscious experiences that we find the memories of those who are gone. Our consciousness is fickle and not worthy of the task of remembering. The most important way of remembering somone is by being the person they made us – at least in part – and ling the life they have helped shape.