Insights on paying attention from Simone Weil for your career and Life

The philosopher?Simone Weil?said, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” We would do well to give attention to our homes, families, co-workers and acquaintances and show this generosity abundantly.

“Everyone knows what attention is,” William James famously declared in his?Principles of Psychology. For those who are not “everyone,” James goes on to explain that attention is the “taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness is of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”

Simone Weil agrees with James’s insistence that attention both engages the mind and entails a kind of withdrawal, Weil would have taken issue with the claim that attention requires the mind’s concentration—tensing, really—on a specific issue. For Weil, this kind of mental tautness is, in fact, inimical to true attention. In Weil’s role as a teacher, we catch glimpses of what she understood by attention. For example, Anne Reynaud, one of her students at Roanne in 1933, recalled that Weil would take the class outdoors and gather them under a tall cedar tree where they would together “seek problems in geometry.” The phrase is telling: rather than “finding the answer,” the students instead looked for problems. Reflecting upon a problem, rather than resolving it, was Weil’s goal. No less telling is Reynaud’s recollection that Weil never dictated to the students during her lectures, just as she always refused to give them grades. These habits were bred not from indifference, but instead from a radically different conception of attention.

Weil later write an essay titled “Réflexions sur le bon usage des études scolaires en vue de l’amour de Dieu” (“Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”). By “view,” Weil means attention—the one skill all schools should cultivate in their students. But we need to attend to her understanding of the term. Normally, when we pay attention to someone or something, we undertake what Weil calls a “muscular effort”: our eyes lock on another’s eyes, our expressions reflect the proper response, and our bodies shift in relation to the object to which we are paying attention. This kind of attention flourishes in therapists’ offices, business schools, and funeral homes. It is a performative rather than reflective act, one that displays rather than truly pays attention. This sort of attention is usually accompanied by a kind of frowning application—the very same sort, as Weil notes, that leads us to a self-congratulatory “I have worked well!”

For Weil, attention is a “negative effort,” one that requires that we stand still rather than lean in. The object of this kind of attention could be mathematical or textual, a matter of grasping a puzzle posed by Euclid or one posed by Racine. Whether we do solve the problem, argues Weil, is secondary. The going is as important as the getting there, if not even more so. “It does not even matter much whether we succeed in finding the solution or understanding the proof, although it is important to try really hard to do so. Never in any case whatever is a genuine effort of the attention wasted.” Scorning practices like memorization and dictation that impose the “right answers” upon students, she acknowledges that the practices she wished to instill in students were alien to schools in her own day (and they remain alien to most schools in our own day). “Although people seem to be unaware of it today,” she declares, “the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies… All tasks that call upon the power of attention are interesting for the same reasons and to an almost equal degree.”

Is it really as simple, though, as saying that it is the going, and not the getting there, that counts? For Weil this could be deeply misleading. First, she gives this notion a particular twist: by embracing the going and not the getting there, we will ultimately get to somewhere more important than the original destination. Even should we fail to solve a geometry problem at the end of an hour, we will nevertheless have penetrated into what Weil calls “another more mysterious dimension.” This dimension is moral: it is the space where, by our act of attention, we grasp what has always been the real mystery—the lives of our fellow human beings.

Weil argues that this activity has little to do with the sort of effort most of us make when we think we are paying attention. Rather than the contracting of our muscles, attention involves the canceling of our desires; by turning toward another, we turn away from our blinding and bulimic self. 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.

Ps ( Compiled from online and sequenced for the sake of easy comprehension and usage )