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From the Book corner: Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, and attention as a moral act

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Moral psychologyModern EuropeanIris Murdoch#attention#book-corner#love-of-neighbour#simone-weil
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Its coordinates: 3.1.4 Moral Motivation · 3.4 Moral Psychology

This week's book is Gravity and Grace, and it is an unusual one. Simone Weil never wrote it. After her death in 1943, her friend Gustave Thibon arranged passages from the notebooks she had left with him under headings such as "Void and Compensation", "Decreation" and "Attention and Will". It was published in 1947.

So it is a book of fragments, some a sentence long. It can be read in any order and argued with on every page.

The idea we would like to start with is attention. For Weil, attention is not concentration in the effortful sense. It is a waiting, an emptying of oneself so that something real, a problem, a text, another person, can be seen as it is. In an essay on school studies she says that the love of our neighbour consists largely in being able to ask someone, and mean it, "What are you going through?"

Iris Murdoch took this word from Weil and made it central to The Sovereignty of Good: moral life, she argued, happens mostly in how we look at people, before any choice is made.

An opening question: can attention be a moral act in itself, even if nothing is done afterwards? Or is it only the precondition for acting well?

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3 replies

  1. Elin Hedqvist

    Fellow

    On nights, attention is exactly what the schedule leaves no room for. The rota has a slot for medication, turning, checking. There is no slot for asking someone what they are going through and waiting for the answer, which can take twenty minutes and sometimes doesn't come at all.

    So I'd say yes, it is a moral act, and you can tell because it costs something. When I give it to one resident I am not giving it to another. That's not a precondition. That's already a choice about who matters tonight.

  2. Hugo Marchetti

    Fellow

    You have to remember where Weil got this. In 1934 and 1935 she took leave from teaching and worked on factory lines, at Alsthom and then at Renault, and wrote in her factory journal about how the pace of the work made thought impossible. The worker on the line cannot attend to anything; the machine has his attention.

    So for her attention is not only a private virtue. It is something work can steal. When I read her I think less about whether attention is a moral act and more about who gets the conditions to perform it.

  3. Hugo Marchetti

    Fellow

    You have to remember where Weil got this. In 1934 and 1935 she took leave from teaching and worked on factory lines, at Alsthom and then at Renault, and wrote in her factory journal about how the pace of the work made thought impossible. The worker on the line cannot attend to anything; the machine has his attention.

    So for her attention is not only a private virtue. It is something work can steal. When I read her I think less about whether attention is a moral act and more about who gets the conditions to perform it.