The Cat Is His Own and Not His Own: Language, Selfhood, and the Autonomy of Being

The Cat Is His Own and Not His Own is a philosophical exploration of independence as an ontological event arising through language. The book examines the paradox that selfhood becomes autonomous only in symbiosis—with language, with the world, and with another independent state of being.

Through recursive and self-reflective structures, the text investigates the state of language as both form and birth: language is not merely a tool of expression but a living structure in which independence manifests and perfects itself. Autonomy is not given at the beginning; it becomes through repetition, manifestation, and return. The self does not precede language; rather, selfhood emerges in the perfection of language’s own independence.

The work develops a metaphysics of becoming in which the world, language, and the most autonomous person mirror and generate one another. Time and non-time, state and manifestation, beginning and completion are treated as structural conditions of independence rather than chronological events. Independence is revealed not as isolation, but as a paradoxical symbiosis of self with another self—each becoming autonomous through the other.

Positioned between linguistic philosophy and ontological anthropology, the book proposes that the autonomy of the human being is inseparable from the autonomy of language itself. The “cat” becomes a figure of radical selfhood: belonging to itself, yet never entirely self-contained.