The Ethics of Attention

Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil

Silvia Caprioglio Panizza

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000595925
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Philosophy
• Thema: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This book draws on Iris Murdoch's philosophy to explore questions related to the importance of attention in ethics. In doing so, it also engages with Murdoch's ideas about the existence of a moral reality, the importance of love, and the necessity but also the difficulty, for most of us, of fighting against our natural self-centred tendencies.

Why is attention important to morality? This book argues that many moral failures and moral achievements can be explained by attention. Not only our actions and choices, but the possibilities we choose among, and even the meaning of what we perceive, are to a large extent determined by whether we pay attention, and what we attend to. In this way, the book argues that attention is fundamental, though often overlooked, in morality. While the book's discussion of attention revolves primarily around Murdoch's thought, it also engages significantly with Simone Weil, who introduced the concept of attention in a spiritual context. The book also engages with contemporary debates concerning moral perception and motivation, empirical psychology, animal ethics, and Buddhist philosophy.

The Ethics of Attention will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, ethics and moral psychology, and the philosophy of attention.

1 What is ethical about attention?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003164852-2

You may find it intuitively true that attention is important for morality. If you have been immersed in Simone Weil’s world, or in Iris Murdoch’s, my task of explaining why it is so will start from some common ground, and the difficulties will lie in the specific reasons. But you may also find that your understanding of what attention is, your experience of paying attention, has little to do with morality—with goodness or responsibility or moral error.

We can say: we attend to a ladybird who has landed on our hand; we attend with satisfaction to the embarrassing faux pas of someone who had offended us; we attend to how our lower back feels as we lift a table while helping a friend move; we attend to the betrayals and reconciliations of the characters in the soap opera on TV. These are all ordinary uses of the verb ‘to attend’, some of them signalling a vicious activity, others a morally neutral one. We can attend in so many ways, to so many things. So what’s attention got to do with morality?

This is the kind of response I received as I attempted to explain the topic of my book to friends and family. It represents an important reminder that ordinarily we do not often think about attention as morally significant, and that the word ‘attention’, in noun, verb, or adverbial form, is not generally used in ordinary language to convey something that we find morally relevant.¹

For this reason, some of the (few) contemporary philosophical defences of the moral importance of attention have chosen to qualify attention. Dorothea Debus (2015), for instance, finds value in what she calls ‘full attention’, rather than attention tout court.² This may appear to be a strategy that the main philosophical proponent of the moral value of attention, Iris Murdoch, also employs. So does Murdoch’s source for the moral idea of attention, Simone Weil, who takes attention to have not only a moral but primarily a metaphysical and religious value.

There are indeed passages in both Murdoch and Weil where the idea of morally good attention is presented as attention which is qualified in some way. For instance, in ‘The Idea of Perfection’ Murdoch writes that ‘Virtue is au fond the same in the artist as in the good man in that it is a selfless attention to nature’ (IP 332), and elsewhere she talks about ‘just attention’ and ‘respectful and loving attention’ (MGM 377). Weil, on her part, offers a beautiful string of adjectives when describing ‘the sort of attention which can attend to truth and to affliction’: it is an attention that is ‘intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous’ and that is identified with love (HP 91–2); while in ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies’ she writes about ‘the highest part of the attention’ being that which ‘makes contact with God’ (RSS 105).

So the first question arises: is there a specific form of attention—‘moral attention’—which is morally relevant? Or, instead, are we ordinarily blind to some important aspects of attention and their ramifications into what we consider moral?

I think the latter is closer to the truth. There is a moral relevance—sometimes obvious, more often subtle, even invisible—that is present when we engage in what we ordinarily understand to be attention. One fundamental aspect of attention which makes it morally relevant, indeed morally good, is truth-seeking. While this element is not always considered to be present in all instances of what we call attention, it can be revealed to be there. We attend because we want to find out. There is something we don’t know. Our attention is captured by something that is salient, that needs to be known. As Jonardon Ganeri (2017) puts it, discussing the work of Brian O’Shaughnessy (2002), attention is what makes consciousness into a ‘reality-detector’ (Ganeri 2017: 10). Attentive engagement with reality, whatever its other aims or mood or contexts, seeks to discover something. Attention interrogates reality, it is stretched in the direction of—a ‘tension towards’—reality. That is why Murdoch, out of the various contrasts to attention one can draw (and, as we shall see, there are several), mostly contrasts attention with fantasy: a form of consciousness that projects, absorbs, or is uninterested in what is really the case. Of course, paying attention may not be sufficient for discovering what is true, and we may get things wrong despite our efforts. But attention’s aim is reality.³

It also matters what we attend to, in so many ways. Ignoring something or someone can harm. Attending to something or someone will focus our care and actions on them, to the exclusion of other objects. Our habitual objects of attention frame our world and interests around them. And so on. The presence of attention (as truth-seeking) and its objects will be the two ‘axes’ around which, in this chapter, I propose to analyse the moral importance of attention. A ‘vertical’ axis and a ‘horizontal’ axis respectively.

In what follows I aim to bring out the moral relevance of attention compatibly, to a large extent, with how we ordinarily talk about it, but also with psychological and other philosophical formulations beyond ethics—although I draw implications that go beyond such uses. The concept of attention under scrutiny mainly comes from Murdoch, and secondly from Weil. So do the ways I suggest the concept is expanded and refined. Perhaps radically, I propose that attention thus understood is not only morally relevant, but that it is morally good, and even that it is fundamental to morality.

Introducing attention in Weil and Murdoch

The idea that attention is fundamental to morality is a central and striking idea that can be found primarily in the thought of two philosophers: first in Simone Weil, and then in Iris Murdoch. Murdoch was impressed by Weil, and proceeded to make some of her concepts, including attention, her own. What follows is a brief introductory sketch of their ideas about attention.

For Weil, the value of attention comes from its capacity to join us to the world and simultaneously ‘undo’ our self (décréation), which is the obstacle to such joining. Attention is both union and withdrawal. Weil’s basis for this idea comes from her religious metaphysics, specifically from her view of creation. Since God is fullness of being, only self-withdrawal enables anything else to exist. So creation is withdrawal and the supreme act of love. Attention is an imitation of God’s act of creation: our selves are, for Weil, the obstacle to embracing reality, while attention is the way.⁴

Hence, attention is both a religious and a moral task for Weil. Through attention we come closer to God, but we also do what is right: that is, acknowledging—loving—the world, nature, and ‘our neighbour’.⁵ This acknowledgement is the starting point of ethics: the recognition of the existence of something else, and someone else, which can be obstacles to our will, a recognition which is expressed in the ‘interval of hesitation’ when we encounter another (a phrase and an idea which so impressed Peter Winch; see 1989: Chapter 9).

But such acknowledgement of reality will also show us what is right, and what is needed from us in that situation. The parable of the Samaritan is, for Weil, such an instance of attention. The Samaritan does not reflect on what is right; he simply attends and helps, because that’s what reality, once attended to, requires of him.

Attention (or its lack) generates the basis of all thought and action. As Weil puts it, ‘action is the pointer of the balance’, therefore ‘one must not touch the pointer, but the weights’ (GG 48). Attention is the right way of arranging the weights. It all starts with how we encounter the world: ‘People suppose that thinking does not pledge them, but it alone pledges us’ (N, quoted by Murdoch in KV 158). If there is one task in human life, that for Weil is attention. All value depends on it. But because it is not natural to us, in fact it goes against our nature, we should learn it and practice it as soon as we can:

The authentic and pure values—truth, beauty and goodness—in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.

Teaching should have no aim but to prepare, by training the attention, for the possibility of such an act.

(GG 120)

Such emphasis on the mostly invisible origin of all moral thought and action struck a chord in Murdoch, who found an ally in her struggle against contemporary English philosophy, as evident in her review of Weil’s Notebooks:

Spiritual progress is won through meditation: a view which is a contrast (and some may think a welcome corrective) to contemporary English ethics with its exclusive emphasis on act and choice, and its neglect of the ‘inner life’ … But Simone Weil emphasises ‘waiting’ and ‘attention’. ‘We should pay attention to such a point that we no longer have the choice’.

(KV 159)

Weil’s idea of attention influenced Murdoch deeply and extensively, giving her not only a renewed understanding of a familiar phenomenon, but also a new way to shape her longstanding defence of an ‘alternative’ idea of morality and moral philosophy. The game of morality begins to be played much earlier than her contemporaries thought—much earlier than conscious intention and action. It begins the moment we see, feel, think reality. And so much of what follows is shaped by that moment. So consciousness, perception, imagination come under new scrutiny. It is in this context that Murdoch, the moral philosopher, begins to work on her understanding of attention, which is also inevitably re-shaped in the process.

Murdoch’s debt to Weil is vast.⁶ The extent and limits of that debt, however, are never fully or explicitly made clear by Murdoch. One can be left with the impression that Weil is an inspiration for Murdoch, whose spirit pervades Murdoch’s thought, but is also left behind at times, moving in and out like a wind. In the same review of the Notebooks, Murdoch describes Weil as the reminder of a ‘standard’. So I think it is worth trying to make Weil’s presence in Murdoch’s work a little more precise, and to articulate it, here, through the concept of attention and its attendant concepts: unselfing, obedience, love.⁷ Below is a summary, while further connections and differences will emerge throughout the book.

Murdoch’s first clear acknowledgement of her debt to Weil can be found in ‘The Idea of Perfection’, where she tells us that she has ‘borrowed’ the word ‘attention’ from Simone Weil (IP 327). In MGM Weil is a recurring character, especially when Murdoch is negotiating the extent to which the self disappears in attention, and when she approaches the spiritual dimension. But even before Sovereignty, in ‘Against Dryness’, Murdoch begins to see how Weil’s attention is central to her project of making ‘ways of seeing’ central to morality: ‘Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of attention, not of will. We need a new vocabulary of attention’ (AD 293). In IP she writes:

I have used the word ‘attention’, which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.

(IP 327)

Attention both characterises the active moral agent and it is the proper and desirable feature of such agent. Attention is descriptive and normative. In cruder terms: good people are attentive; and those aspiring to goodness should aim for greater attention.

But attention also has a meta-ethical role. It is introduced in that essay, with the story of the mother-in-law ‘M’ overcoming prejudice and obtaining a renewed and more truthful vision of her daughter-in-law ‘D’. The story aims to show what the moral work is like for the individual, in the context of an essay that raises doubts about the contemporary model of the moral agent in Anglophone philosophy, in which all that seems to matter is action and choice. Thinking about the moral relevance of attention, Murdoch is here suggesting, helps not only the private individual but the philosopher in her task of understanding where the knots of morality lie. For Murdoch, they lie first and foremost in how we see the world and what we see. Such a vision depends to a significant extent on the presence of absence, and on the objects, of attention. These thoughts return in MGM, through extended discussions of how a moral ‘world’ is shaped.

In ‘On God and Good’ attention takes centre stage as the proper attitude to the good, developed based on the idea of God. Both are not just occasional ‘objects of attention’, but they are defined through that role. Here, as Murdoch writes, her debt to Simone Weil is evident. Acts of attention reveal an aspiration to something ‘higher’, and in turn what is absolute shows its existence in human life through attention.⁸ Attention here is seen as crucial for morality because it reveals that there is something beyond ourselves (the whole world) which is always and necessarily beyond us (Murdoch’s idea of the ‘transcendent’) because our capacity to grasp reality is constantly perfectible. The realisation of this fact through att...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 What is ethical about attention?
• 2 Attention without self-concern
• 3 Attention without self
• 4 Self-knowledge
• 5 Moral perception
• 6 Motivation and action
• Coda
• Index