Attention
In Simone Weil, a disposition of mind that suspends its own thinking to make itself available to what is there: a problem, a text, a person.
Definition
For Weil, attention is not a muscular effort of concentration. It is a waiting, an active emptiness: the mind withdraws so that the object can appear. She saw in it the essence of all education, and the heart of our relation to others. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” she wrote in 1942.
The notion has taken on an unexpected urgency. As early as 1971, the economist Herbert Simon remarked that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Our systems know how to capture attention; whether they can give it back is another matter — as is what a life would become in which we never again needed to pay it.
See also
Related notions
In the essays