by Rachel Robison-Greene
Sometimes it’s brave to lose control. We feel powerful when we can easily define, divide, and sort. We know what to do when we observe recognizable patterns and categories. It’s comfortable to have answers and the sooner the better. Contemporary technology brings ready solutions to problems we had yet to identify; we needn’t spend a moment in uncertainty. There is no need to pay careful attention. So much the worse for us, argue some philosophers. Attention is communion.
The philosopher Simone Weil was fond of encouraging the practice of attention in her students. She advised them to sit quietly and pay attention to the problems of geometry. In doing so, she was not asking them to seek answers—she wanted them to be attentive to the problems themselves. This involves an opening of oneself; a willingness to sit with the problems and take them in. In Reflection on the Right Use of School Studies with an Eye Toward the Love of God, Weil observed that,
Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort. If one says to one’s pupils: “Now you must pay attention,” one sees them contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles. If after two minutes they are asked what they have been paying attention to, they cannot reply. They have been concentrating on nothing. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles.
Real attention, for Weil, involves letting oneself go and becoming receptive. When we are told to focus, we often retreat further into ourselves. We’re inclined to think of focus as a kind of reflective introspection. When we introspect, we seek. When we pay attention, if we are lucky, we perceive. “Attention,” Weil says, “consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.” When we are attentive, we are vessels waiting to be filled. There is a subtle humility in this way of viewing the world. Because attention requires receptiveness in this way, we can be surprisingly resistant to it. Weil says, aptly, “Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue.” Perhaps we are afraid that receptiveness means vulnerability. We’re worried that vulnerability can lead to pain, exploitation, and rejection.
For Weil, it is only through practicing attention that we can prepare for taking in the goodness of God. For those of us with less religious and more humanistic leanings, an attentive attitude toward the world opens a pathway toward the affirmation of life. When we excessively focus on the self, we despair. When we are suddenly forced to pay attention, our orientation changes. As Iris Murdoch puts the point in The Sovereignty of the Good,
I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.
Understood in this way, attention brings us into genuine conversation with other beings. I like to bring my students to art museums. At times they seem openly hostile to this kind of activity. They object that they “don’t know anything about art” and therefore wouldn’t understand what they are taking in. Though knowing a bit of art history can be rewarding, I try to impress upon them that this isn’t the point. I’m not trying to induct them into some secret society of people who understand art. I want them to go into the museum and pay attention. Artists from across time and space are communicating. Listen.
When we read and write, at least when we do so authentically, we engage in the same practice. I know that my students don’t regularly engage with texts from, say, the eighteenth century. They don’t always know what is going on in every passage. Neither do I. Writing, and philosophical writing in particular, is a great conversation that occurs across the span of recorded human existence. Our ancestors are speaking. Pay attention. Respond.
Heavy use of artificial intelligence puts this practice at risk. AI is what we turn to when we don’t want to pay attention to primary sources. AI can do it for us—save us the headache. When we go down this road, who are we really listening to? Not each other. We abandon something priceless when we routinely approach the world in this way. Weil says, “Whoever goes through years of study without developing this attention within himself has lost a great treasure.”
Most importantly, attention is essential for love. I love a person only if I am truly willing to see them. Often, when one person claims to love another, they have invented a character in their own mind—just who the lover wants the beloved to be. In this case, the lover loves a figment of their own imagination. To love in authentic way the lover must, “know how to look at him in a certain way. This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth. Only he who is capable of attention can do this.”
Attention is critical, not only for personal relationships, but for caring for other living beings. We recognize suffering only when we put ourselves in a position to see it. We can exhibit care only when we are attentive to need. We see each other as deserving of love and respect only when we are willing to genuinely listen to one another. Weil says, “Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.” She isn’t suggesting that people who are suffering need nothing more than a kind stranger to pay attention to their woes. Instead, when we’ve really paid attention to another person, we can’t ignore them the way we might have before. Their suffering isn’t someone else’s problem. When we pay attention, we’re more likely to care.
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