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The wish to write a book that evokes fascination with ideas largely shaped the character of the book, from the arrangement of its general themes to its particular style. Although it is a scholarly treatise, written according to the accepted norms of academic rhetoric, it includes several aspects that differentiate it from the common academic monograph. For example, the book includes imaginary dialogues with my cat ("cat-logues") that aim to explore further the ideas presented in the chapters, from a humorous and reflective position. These cat-logues are a homage to Gregory Bateson's famous metalogues with his daughter. In contrast to Bateson, my children are used to their father's ideas and therefore the dramatic impact evident in Bateson's dialogue with his naive daughter cannot be repeated. Therefore, I chose my white cat "Bamba" (named for a popular Israeli snack), who is the true intellectual in our house, to be my partner for those conversations. However, there is another reason for choosing a cat as an intellectual partner for scholarly dialogue. As will later be presented in this book, several philosophers, such as Spinoza and Bergson, considered intuition the highest form of knowledge. Intuition as the ability to grasp the specific modes of reality in the context of the ultimate whole is evident in the life of animals². Animals in general and cats in particular live in what Merleau-Ponty describes as a pre-objective form of being. They are being-in-the-world as an integral part of it, without the ability, or the burden, to reflect on their existence through questions such as "Why is there something instead of nothing?" This primordial form of being clearly involves intuition rather than scholarly reflection. Since this book involves an inquiry into this pre-objective reality as the origin of our mind, the decision to choose a cat as my "alter ego" for discussing philosophical questions and the nature of being from a fresh perspective seemed a natural choice. These cat-logues do not dismiss the conventional form of scientific rhetoric. I support the ideas presented in the book with an arsenal of arguments that are supposed to defend my thesis. However, although I consider argumentation to be the sine qua non (a Latin expression which is itself an example of academic rhetoric!) of the humanities and the social sciences, I do not believe that we should confuse this process of argumentation with the intellectual work in itself. It is a common practice, particularly among professional academics, to repeatedly make this error by focusing on the quality of the arguments provided in favor of a thesis, rather than on the quality of the thesis or the quality of the experimentation process in which they are involved. Scientific work, or what may be better called "intellectual work," involves primarily curiosity and ideas. As Deleuze has already argued, the main task of philosophy is the generation of new ideas through which we can examine events in a fresh way. This is exactly the aim of this book.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4419-9078-5_1

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