You’ve probably read a lot of depressing things this week. The daily news is grim. There is no shortage of people telling us we’re going to hell in a handcart. So this column aims to bring a bit of constructive philosophising.
Credit goes to two academics in a University of Galway research project who were in touch with Unthinkable about Simone Weil’s philosophy of attention.
Weil was born in Paris in 1909 and devoted her life to fighting Nazism. She died aged 34 – her tireless campaigning contributed to the illness that claimed her life.
“At the heart of Weil’s ethics is the practice of attention, a selfless, patient form of seeing that allows one to perceive the needs of others without projection or appropriation. Attention is not simply focused observation; it is a moral stance, a form of openness that requires the suspension of the ego,” Michela Dianetti and Chiara Li Mandri write in a research paper exploring Weil’s contribution to moral thought.
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One of the great challenges today is content overload. There are so many things crying for our attention that it is easy to feel utterly powerless, paralysed by choice and – despite increased digital connectivity – alienated from the world.
Weil offers a solution but it’s not one you’ll find in a Silicon Valley self-help book. We should, says Weil, pay better attention – by which she means pay attention to the “needs” of others. Not because this is a guarantee of happiness. But rather because it’s the only way of having some moral integrity.
If you don’t respond to the needs surrounding you with attention then you are essentially a moral vacuum. And this lack of attention may help to explain why many of us feel self-loathing and disenchantment with life.
Weil’s concept of attention is similar to the Christian idea of witness. It’s active rather than passive, blending empathy with the courage to commit. But Dianetti and Li Mandri point out that Weil disagreed with Catholic theologians who “locate the sacred in the person”. Instead, “Weil locates the sacred in vulnerability”. And this allows Dianetti and Li Mandri to apply her thinking to the climate crisis.
“If we applied Weil’s ethics of attention to the natural world, what would happen?” they ask.
“Consider the Irish context. Ireland’s biodiversity is among the most threatened in Europe.
“By narrowly framing environmental protection through the lens of legal personhood, we risk cultivating a narrow and selective concern, where only certain beings – often the most charismatic animals or culturally significant species and landscapes – are granted recognition.
“Weil’s approach resists this hierarchy of visibility or affection. For her, it is not beauty, usefulness or symbolic weight that matters: vulnerability itself creates the claim.
“Witnessing the mutual vulnerability of the particular bog, bird and river engages us emotionally and motivates a call to action. It requires that we acknowledge the possibility of a destruction that is irreplaceable, that would impoverish our reality as a whole.”
Dianetti and Li Mandri are two parts of a quartet who founded the Galway-based study and action group Attentive Inquiry Reclaiming Environment (Aire) – University of Galway philosophy lecturers Lucy Elvis and Nora Ward complete the set.
Members of Aire are participating in a two-day conference organised by the Irish Philosophical Society at the university this weekend. But they are keen to promote their message beyond the walls of academia and, among other initiatives, have worked with primary school pupils in Galway on “intergenerational philosophical dialogue”.
Taking Weil seriously means reimagining our moral duties. Modern political debate tends to begin with a discussion of rights. But Weil starts with “awareness of the needs of another” and from this our moral obligations “emerge naturally”, as Dianetti and Li Mandri put it. This “bottom-up” rather than “top-down” approach “really feels from another world compared to our individualist age”, the pair say.
But there is so much vulnerability in the world. Where exactly should we invest our attention?
Dianetti and Li Mandri acknowledge “the risk of becoming overwhelmed by a sense of obligation” to so many causes. “Our argument is that the attention economy makes things worse by driving cultural inattention, which deepens ecological and social crises.”
In addition, “we see this feeling of being overwhelmed as both an individual experience and a reflection of the structural lack of collective spaces where people can actually confront and work through these ‘dark’ feelings. This is why we consider collective responses to be crucial”.
Gaining some control over your moral character may, therefore, begin with the device in your hand (or, if not in your hand, most likely nearby). What, after all, is the smartphone but a mechanism for drawing your attention away from the physical reality surrounding you?
Yes, you may find a virtual community online. But many of us use the smartphone as a means of distraction or as a way of averting our eyes from the needs of others, as we commute from screen to screen. By enabling us to pay attention to everything, the smartphone ensures we give our attention – in the Weilian sense – to nothing.
Look at your fellow beings. Look at nature. Cultivate “a form of openness that requires the suspension of the ego”. Our moral rehabilitation starts there.
