The Land In Its Dark Grey Slumber

“In her essays, “reflections on the right use of school studies” and “Human Personality,” Weil describes the kind of attention that she argues is fundamental to both ethical and intellectual life. “[T]he spirit of justice and the spirit of truth,” says Weil, “is nothing else but a certain kind of attention”. It is a kind of attention that forgoes mastery, concern for success, and hasty solutions in order to “contemplate attentively and slowly” the phenomena before us. Weil distinguishes such attention from the practice of “contracting [our] brows, holding [our] breath, stiffening [our] muscle” that schoolchildren often confuse with paying attention but that is more about posturing than genuinely engaging a problem. Genuine attention, she suggests, is more of a “negative effort” in which we “loosen up,” so as to allow our senses and mental energies to be absorbed and directed by the phenomena to which we are attending. While such attention relinquishes all expectations and takes “joy in the work,” it also must counter a deep-seated “evil” within us that resists earnest attention. We mitigate this evil, Weil says, each time that we concentrate fully on something, “not seeking anything, but ready to receive [the phenomenon before us] in its naked truth”. Weil does not deny the inevitable influence on our thinking of received beliefs, but she advocates for a kind of “interplay,” as code might describe it, between received beliefs and particular phenomena. As Weil explains, we hold our acquired knowledge “on a lower level,” as we focus with an open mind on the problem at hand, paying particular attention to errors in our own thinking. such attention not only tests received beliefs but yields “the virtue of humility,” which is “the right foundation” of all knowledge. The etymology of “attention” accords with Weil’s and Williams’s reflections. The Latin root of “attention,” tenir means to hold. Ad tenir means to hold oneself to. Thus “attention” signifies connecting with, attaching to. It is the opposite of detachment. No wonder that Williams identifies paying attention with “honoring the connection that exists between all beings” and Weil calls “[t]he name of this intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention … love”. Like love, the attention that Weil and Williams describe involves a “meshing” of boundaries;”