My Philosophical Encounters with Cows

I.

One evening a couple of years back, I stood watching a cow tethered to a post outside a neighbour’s courtyard, just as the sun dropped low over the fields of Bidholi. Her tail flicked at flies, her jaw worked slowly, and her eyes settled briefly on me. And in that moment, I felt a strange exposure. I was being looked at, but not known. I was implicated, but not addressed.

Levinas has claimed that the human face is the ultimate site of ethics. In its vulnerability, it commands: Thou shalt not kill. But the cow’s gaze complicates this claim. It does not command or appeal; it does not even seem to “address” me. And yet, when I met those eyes, I felt implicated in a way Levinas’ formula does not explain. The gaze does not forbid killing, nor does it sanction it. Instead, it exposed me to the raw fact of another being. Perhaps its power lies precisely in what it withholds: the refusal to deliver meaning.

II.

I felt a similar jolt a few days later, in a dairy shed. Rows of cows were tethered, their heads bent toward metal troughs. One lifted her face as I passed, and her eyes caught mine. Unlike the first cow, this gaze carried a different resonance. Here was an animal absorbed into industry, her existence structured entirely by human need. And yet, in her eyes, there was the same opacity. She was not reducible to her function. She endured, and in that endurance, she exceeded the categories of milk, labour, or commodity.

Perhaps Plato anticipated this endurance when he insisted that the soul must rise beyond the realm of animals toward the Forms. Animals, for him, embodied a kind of stasis, a life turned toward necessity. And yet, when I stare into a cow’s eyes, I wonder whether that stasis is not itself a kind of transcendence: not upward toward the Forms, but downward into the immanence of being itself. If Plato elevates the ascent of the soul and Aristotle defines man as zoon logon echon (the animal endowed with logos) then the cow becomes a counterproof, suggesting that logos is not the only path to fullness, that being itself may overflow the boundaries of rational speech.

III.

Several months later, I was stuck in the tide of traffic on a Delhi street, when I noticed a cow standing calmly at the median. Buses roared, auto-rickshaws darted, scooters honked, and yet the cow stood, chewing steadily, her eyes soft and unblinking. Once again, I felt my own frenzy dissolve into that gaze. I had deadlines, messages waiting on my phone, and a mounting irritation at the gridlock, but the cow did not seem to care.

It would be tempting to romanticize this as serenity, as if the cow embodied the peace we lack. But such a projection would miss the point. What unsettled me was not the cow’s calmness but her alterity. Her gaze was not for me. It neither recognized me nor dismissed me; it simply persisted. In that persistence, I felt both excluded and exposed.

Heidegger has written that humans are world-forming, while animals are poor-in-world. But at that moment, it seemed to me that my world was impoverished. I was caught in acceleration, emptied of patience, while she seemed to inhabit a fullness unavailable to me. Perhaps what Heidegger calls “poverty” might, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, belong to the “flesh of the world”, a richness inaccessible to human striving.

IV.

A fourth instance of making eye contact with a cow took place a few days ago, when a meandering bovine stopped to scratch herself against the trunk of a tree that grows right outside my house. On spotting me, she paused and looked back. Her eyes were vast, dark as a pool, holding reflections I was forbidden from entering.

What exactly was it that looked back at me? If we follow the line of thought from phenomenology, we encounter the tension between ‘the gaze as subjectivity’ and ‘the gaze as projection’. I can think of no two philosophers who have captured this tension better than Sartre, who wrote that being-seen disrupts the world, revealing oneself as object to another’s subject and Derrida, who confessed that his cat’s gaze unsettled him with the silent question, “Can you see me seeing you?” For Sartre, to be looked at is to be objectified; for Derrida, to be looked at is to be exposed to an unknowable subjectivity. Yet the cow’s gaze resists both: it neither pins me as object nor declares itself as subject, but hovers in a strange third space.

This time I tried to hold the gaze longer than my comfort allowed. Unlike the gaze of a dog, eager for acknowledgment, or of a predator, sharpened by intent, the cow’s gaze neither demanded nor avoided. To stare into it was to discover my own compulsion: to read, to interpret, to wrest meaning that fit my human grammar. But the cow resisted. Her eyes remained inexhaustible, impervious to my need for reciprocity. 

To gaze into a cow’s eyes therefore, is not to discover what the cow is, but to discover the limits of what we are. It is to be returned, again and again, to the futility of human categories (sacred, profane, useful, expendable), and the fragility of the human claim to centrality. Perhaps that is the true task of philosophy: not comprehension, but the endurance of what resists it. Perhaps that is the true task of faith too: not comprehension, but humility before what resists it. 

“It is only the things we don’t understand that have any meaning. Man woke up in a world he did not understand, and that is why he tries to interpret it.” - Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.