Simone Weil’s Radical Conception of Attention

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Author: Robert Zaretsky
Full Title: Simone Weil’s Radical Conception of Attention
Category: #articles
URL: https://lithub.com/simone-weils-radical-conception-of-attention

Highlights

The suspension of our thought, Weil declares, leaves us “detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.” To attend means not to seek, but to wait; not to concentrate, but instead to dilate our minds. We do not gain insights, Weil claims, by going in search of them, but instead by waiting for them: “In every school exercise there is a special way of waiting upon truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it… There is a way of waiting, when we are writing, for the right word to come of itself at the end of our pen, while we merely reject all inadequate words.”
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- Note: Behold!
As Weil notes, pity is unlike compassion in that “it consists in helping someone in misfortune so as not to be obliged to think about him anymore, or for the pleasure of feeling the distance between him and oneself.” Compassion, in contrast, means that I identify with the afflicted individual so fully that I feed him for the same reason I feed myself: because we are both hungry. In other words, I have paid him attention.
We do not fully understand a hammer, Martin Heidegger observed, simply by staring at it. Instead, understanding comes when we pick it up and use it. Weil gives this observation an unusual wrinkle: we do not fully understand a fellow human being by staring, thinking, or even commiserating with her. Instead, understanding comes only when we let go of our self and allow the other to grab our full attention. In order for the reality of the other’s self to fully invest us, we must first divest ourselves of our own selves.
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“Complete attention,” Weil declared, “is like unconsciousness.” As such, it is a state that does not entail a particular action or stance, but instead suggests a form of reception, open and nonjudgmental, of the world.
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Weil writes that when we translate a text from a foreign language into our own, we rightly do not seek to add anything to it. Ideally, this is how the student must approach the world. She must see and write about it as if she is translating “a text that is not written down.”
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Every time that a human being succeeds in making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it, even if his effort produces no visible fruit.”
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