Derek King in The Hedgehig Review:
College campuses have a literacy problem. According to many humanities professors, the current crop of students demonstrates significantly less interest in reading books, and they are generally unprepared to meet the reading expectations that were once the norm. Educators typically lay the blame on a culture-wide attention deficit disorder driven by smartphone and social media use.
If that’s right, this failure to read is, ultimately, a failure of attention. Formed by Silicon Valley and productivity advice, most of us reflexively conflate attention and focus. But attention can refer to something richer and deeper than this—and, faced with the potential collapse of a robust reading public, we would do well to give more attention to what it means to pay attention.
English writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch, borrowing from the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, thought attention should not be reduced to mere focus. Attention is the central moral category—“the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent,” as she put it. Her emphasis on attention came in response to what she deemed a failure of modern moral philosophy. Moral philosophy, she claimed, was mired in discussions about will, action, and moral deliberation. But for Murdoch, morality is fundamentally, prior to any act, a matter of seeing. Moral agents are only able to will and act in the world that they “see”—the world, that is, we attend to. But that is not just looking at the world, either. Attention, for Murdoch, expresses “the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” In comparison, our contemporary concept of attention looks emaciated.
More here.
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