Attention

You may have never been in the military, but if you have seen the same films as I have, you will remember the parade-ground command: ‘Attention!’ Except it is shouted more like this:

Atten - SHUN!

Which is how we hear the word in school, too. If you had gone to school in Ireland, as I did, you would have been told to ‘listen up’ in Irish, with the stern command:

Eistigi!

The teacher called this out as he or she fought a losing battle against classes full of distracted children.

Our early encounters with the idea of attention may have been like these, a command. But our actual experience of attending to something or someone is a very different thing. It is much richer, and worth thinking about for what it tells us about what it is to be human. And I think it is especially relevant now, at this time.

What does the word mean? ‘Notice taken of someone or something; the regarding of someone or something as interesting or important.’ Further, Wikipedia notes that it means ‘selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information … while ignoring other perceivable information.’

So if we attend to something we are attending away from something else.

As it applies to people we are talking about listening, and caring. But it also includes the dynamics of celebrity, of power, where we grant someone attention because of their perceived importance.

As it applies to information we are talking about one of the predominant topics of the age: we are aswim in information. We are children of the ‘attention economy’, where it is precisely our attention that is being competed for by the technology platforms. In today’s workplace, the ability to pay attention, whether in short concentrated bursts, or over extended periods, is a cognitive skill that is considered foundational. So this essential cognitive skill includes the development of filters that enable us to sieve the stream of information as baleen whales do to extract plankton.

But Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic, took the idea of attention to mean something altogether deeper:

‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’, she said.

She traced the meaning of the term to ‘attente’, waiting. If we attend to someone or something, we wait on them.

‘Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.’

Now, if it is true that we are all sufferers in one way or another, then this gift of attention is something we all seek. We are all ‘attention seekers’ in that sense. And Irish philosopher Iris Murdoch picked up this sense of the term when she spoke of the way art and nature have the capacity to take us out of ourselves by calling our attention. The person who catches sight of a kestrel in flight, she says, is so struck by the sight that they are temporarily ‘unselfed’. They set aside their preoccupations.

Weil and Murdoch are using a strong sense of the term ‘attention’. For Weil, this was an avocation, a mission, which demanded everything of her. It called her to do menial work in factories and farms, and to join up to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

Perhaps she is closer in this way to the classical Greek and Roman Stoics. Attention (prosoche) is the fundamental Stoic spiritual attitude. For them this means a continuous vigilance and presence of mind, a constant tension of the spirit. But while prosoche could be described as the baseline state of mind for them, it is less other-directed than for Weil. She interprets attention as compassion.

But what about the weaker sense of attention, the everyday sense of the word we use when we talk about ‘paying attention’? The US biologist EO Wilson said

‘We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.’

The general way we speak about attention is to see it as a quantum, such as a ‘resource’, a ‘span’, and a form of currency in the ‘attention economy’. The psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist challenges this one-sided account. He explains this in terms of the structure of the human brain: the brain’s left and right hemispheres ‘deliver’ the world to us in two fundamentally different ways. An instrumental mode of attention, McGilchrist contends, is the mainstay of the brain’s left hemisphere, which tends to divide up whatever it’s presented with into component parts: to analyse and categorise things so that it can utilise them towards some ends.

By contrast, the brain’s right hemisphere naturally adopts an exploratory mode of attending: a more embodied awareness, one that is open to whatever makes itself present before us, in all its fullness. This mode of attending comes into play, for instance, when we pay attention to other people, to the natural world and to works of art. None of those fare too well if we attend to them as a means to an end. And it is this mode of paying attention, McGilchrist argues, that offers us the broadest possible experience of the world.

The reason why I believe Simone Weil is saying something important to us now is because we are at risk of losing ourselves in abstraction and distraction: disembodied and out of touch. The answer lies in reaching out to each other and being present, rather than reaching for the mobile phone.