Why do cats have us humans on a string?

These are towering and surely unanswerable mysteries. It is the essence of a great mystery that one senses one will never get to the bottom of it, that perhaps the best things in life are inexplicable. One half hopes to be forever bewildered by the mysteries of Scott Morrison's strangeness and of Charles' and Camilla's hetero - eccentricities.

And so, loving and valuing these Great Mysteries of Life I was worried when I began reading a piece about humans and cats in my latest online Philosophy Now that I was about to have cats' mystique demystified.

Professor Ansu Louis begins his piece, The Freudian Cat, with a kind of intellectual bustle as if he has come to sort out once and for all what it is that cats and humans see in one another.

Here I should declare that (without understanding why) I love cats and live with and dote on and admire a three-legged black cat.

There is a "mystery" in the "human-cat relationship", Ansu Louis argues.

"The cat's affiliation with humans has a history of more than 10,000 years. But we'd find it difficult to explain from a strictly scientific perspective precisely why we have been entertaining the presence of this particular animal in our households."

He insists that in the case of dogs, the matter is not so complicated. Dogs can be plainly be seen to have co-evolved with us to serve a range of human purposes.

"On the other hand," Louis continues, "the only purpose scientific research could attribute to the human domestication of cats has to do with the curtailing of rodent proliferation in the [first] agrarian communities."

For him this can't explain the extent, the strength, the endurance, of "human-cat bonding". He traces the way in which "human-cat bonding seems to have taken an interesting evolutionary trajectory involving a radical shift away from simple usefulness to a unique enjoyment [of cats' company and presence in our lives]".

So for Louis what we have here, in this bonding, is a "psychological mystery" of the kind described by the intellectually-sparkling French philosopher and intellectual Georges Bataille.

In a 1933 essay The Notion of Expenditure, Bataille challenged the utilitarian view that all worthwhile human activity is only ever about what's selfishly useful.

"Bataille highlights," Louis explains "humanity's heartfelt investments in a plethora of things 'that have no end beyond themselves', such as the sacrificial act of gift-giving illustrated by purchasing and then giving away an expensive piece of jewellery."

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He says the Bataillean notion of "unconditional expenditure" could explain many aspects of the relationship between humans and cats.

Any kind of material benefit we can expect from a cat (say, the killing of the odd mouse) pales into insignificance compared to what we can offer them. We are willing to share our resources with cats, including food, of which a cat often eats a human's share.

"From a materialistic perspective, therefore, human bonding with cats revolves around an economy of loss; but from a Bataillean point of view, this unprofitable exchange can nonetheless bring immense pleasure to our lives," Louis divines.

"I believe that human-cat 'friendship' is in fact a psychological mystery that has to be investigated from outside the scope of a hard scientific inquiry ... that it may involve possible interventions from unconscious human inclinations [without] conscious reasons involving utility or purpose."

So Louis says that instead of thinking any hard science will help explain the strange joy cats give us, we might turn (but only if we can be bothered) to see if we can find something in Freud's "categorisation of all human motives under the headings of three psychological agencies, the id, the ego, and the superego, yielding the pleasure principle, the reality principle, and the morality principle respectively".

Yes, somewhere in that maze of agencies there may be, in the shenanigans of his superego, a soft scientific part-explanation of Scott Morrison's manifold weirderies.

But the professor's good news for cat lovers is that even when peered at through Freudian spectacles, human-cat bonding remains (like all first-class riddles and enigmas) a "mystery".

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