The dominant tradition in Western ethics says the will is central. You know the good; now you must choose it, against your inclinations, your laziness, your selfishness. Moral life is a battle between reason and desire, and the virtuous person is the one whose will is strong enough to win that battle consistently. This picture runs from Aristotle through Kant to most contemporary self-help culture: discipline yourself, overcome your weakness, force yourself to do what is right.
Simone Weil (1909–1943), philosopher, mystic, political activist, factory worker, and one of the strangest and most compelling minds of the twentieth century, believed this picture was not merely incomplete but actively harmful. The will, she argued, is an instrument of the ego, it acts on things, it forces, it controls. And the ego, with all its forcing and controlling, is precisely what stands between the human soul and genuine contact with reality, with other people, and with God.
Her alternative is attention, and her account of it is among the most original ideas in modern philosophy.
Attention, for Weil, is not concentration or effort. In fact, she is quite specific that it involves a suspension of effort: the deliberate emptying out of the self's projects, preferences, and mental chatter so that reality can appear as it actually is, rather than as filtered through the screen of what the ego wants to see. The analogy she uses is a student working on a difficult mathematics problem: the right approach is not to strain harder and harder, forcing a solution, but to hold the problem gently, let go of the anxious need to solve it immediately, and wait for the solution to present itself. The suspension of the will, the willingness to simply wait, is what allows genuine understanding to emerge.
Now extend this from mathematics to ethics and to other people. To truly attend to a suffering person, not to project onto them what you imagine their suffering to be, not to immediately reach for solutions that would relieve your discomfort at witnessing their pain, not to make their suffering about yourself, but to simply and completely turn toward them and receive their reality: this is extraordinarily difficult and extraordinarily rare. It requires the suspension of almost everything the ego typically does. And for Weil, this pure, ego-free attention to the other is love.
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
— Simone Weil, quoted in The Marginalian 'Simone Weil on Attention and Grace' (2015)
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace; quoted in The Marginalian (2015)
Weil's theory of attention is simultaneously an epistemology, an ethics, and a theology. As epistemology: genuine knowledge of anything, mathematics, art, other people, God, requires this quality of attention. The ego-driven mind always distorts what it sees, because it is always (subtly) looking for confirmation of what it already believes or wants. Only attention that has emptied itself of the self's agenda can receive the world truly. As ethics: the foundation of moral life is not rule-following or willpower but the cultivated capacity to see, to attend to the actual reality of other people and situations. As theology: Weil identifies the highest form of attention with prayer, not petitionary prayer (asking God for things) but the simple, receptive turning of the soul toward God, empty of demands, willing to wait.
Quick reflection
Weil says attention requires suspending the ego's agenda — and that this is what makes genuine understanding and genuine love possible. Think of a time you really listened to someone. Were you attending in Weil's sense — emptied of your own agenda — or were you partially elsewhere, preparing your response? What was the difference in the quality of understanding?