College campuses have a literacy problem. According to many humanities professors, the current crop of students demonstrates significantly less interest in reading books, and they are generally unprepared to meet the reading expectations that were once the norm. Educators typically lay the blame on a culture-wide attention deficit disorder driven by smartphone and social media use.
If that’s right, this failure to read is, ultimately, a failure of attention. Formed by Silicon Valley and productivity advice, most of us reflexively conflate attention and focus. But attention can refer to something richer and deeper than this—and, faced with the potential collapse of a robust reading public, we would do well to give more attention to what it means to pay attention.
English writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch, borrowing from the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, thought attention should not be reduced to mere focus. Attention is the central moral category—“the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent,” as she put it. Her emphasis on attention came in response to what she deemed a failure of modern moral philosophy. Moral philosophy, she claimed, was mired in discussions about will, action, and moral deliberation. But for Murdoch, morality is fundamentally, prior to any act, a matter of seeing. Moral agents are only able to will and act in the world that they “see”—the world, that is, we attend to. But that is not just looking at the world, either. Attention, for Murdoch, expresses “the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” In comparison, our contemporary concept of attention looks emaciated.
One of Murdoch’s lasting moral examples comes from The Sovereignty of the Good, where she imagines a mother-in-law (M) meeting a daughter-in-law (D) for the first time. M’s initial reaction to D is negative. She describes, for example, D as “juvenile.” But the critical moral shift comes when M agrees to “look again” and re-describe D’s behaviors in an altogether different light. M admits, in other words, she might be wrong. Instead of “juvenile,” D becomes “youthful.” Although well known to philosophers, the example is not well-known enough. It illustrates well how our initial descriptions set us on a trajectory, one that Murdoch thought was inevitably moral. But in the story, M’s actions toward D remain unchanged: Even in her early negative descriptions, she remains outwardly perfectly kind. For Murdoch the moral life is lived according to the “just and loving gaze” that shapes our perception of reality and the world we inhabit.
Attention does much moral heavy lifting for Murdoch, never more than in its capacity to orient us outward. To truly attend—even in the sense of merely focusing—is to turn to some other object. Unless we attend only to ourselves, attention demands we turn away from ourselves, if even momentarily. For Murdoch, a proper moral education begins in our earliest instructions: “Look! Don’t touch!” The moral significance of the instruction—surely lost on most of the adults who give it—is that it trains us to respect reality as other. When I walk outside on a beautiful spring day, I must constantly remind my two-year-old, “don’t touch that,” as he reaches out to pluck a blossoming tulip or disturb an ant hill. But it wasn’t until I read Murdoch that I recognized this as moral guidance. My son’s first task as a moral agent is to recognize there is a world out there, independent of him, worthy of his respect. Commenting on this way of attending, philosopher Silvia Caprioglio Panizza says attention is “the starting point of ethics: the recognition of the existence of something else, and someone else, which can be obstacles to our will.” We appreciate the beauty of a flower, but we should not haphazardly pluck it.
Proper attention thus requires what Murdoch calls an “unselfing”—the “self,” she says, is the real “place of illusion,” so what we need is to “attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness.” To illustrate what she has in mind, Murdoch recounts an experience she had on an afternoon stroll. After an event that hurt her pride, she is walking along a path, brooding, when she is struck by the sight of a hovering kestrel. At that moment, her attention to the bird pierces her pride and shakes her from self-absorption. She feels herself physically released of the aggression and frustration. But this experience is possible only because of attention. While attention can be aimed at a person or, as in the kestrel example, nature, Murdoch is especially keen to emphasize attending to art. The same moral training we begin as children—“Look! Don’t touch!”—is extended to the museum, where we must only observe, contemplate, and receive.
In her injunction to attend well to art, Murdoch shares much in common with the Christian Platonist philosopher and writer of fiction, C.S. Lewis. In his 1961 book An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis argues there are good and bad ways to read, especially when we read a novel or poem. Works of art such as these are “not merely logos (something said) but poiema (something made)…. They are complex and carefully made objects. Attention to the very objects they are is our first step.” To read a novel is, at least, to recognize in it something more than merely words we extract, make meaning of, and discard. If we approach any writing only from the morals we might “take away” or look only for what is “practical,” we rather miss the point. This, for Lewis, is “a flagrant instance of ‘using’ instead of ‘receiving.’”
Lewis distinguishes between the act of using and receiving. “When we ‘receive’ [a work of art],” he writes, “we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern invented by the artist. When we ‘use’ it we treat it as assistance for our own activities.” Murdoch would surely have agreed. The posture of attention is, necessarily, one of reception.
The notion that to use an object is not to attend to it is perhaps counterintuitive to us. When I turn off my alarm clock each morning, I do not approach it with a “just and loving gaze.” I can barely muster a gaze at all. It is simply a tool that I use. And that is, I think, morally permissible when it comes to something like an alarm clock. But when it comes to a person or a carefully crafted text, this kind of “use” is typically mistaken. Even if there are exceptions, the proper approach to a text is receptivity. Lewis, for example, expresses misgivings about writing notes in the margin of a text—a widely accepted practice that I normally encourage in my students. When phrases of praise (or censure) jump to our mind while reading, Lewis comments: “all this activity impedes reception.” So, for Lewis, “The necessary condition for all good reading is ‘to get ourselves out of the way.’”
Lewis and Murdoch advocate for what I call attentional humility. The move to “unself” (Murdoch) or “get ourselves out of the way” (Lewis) is a subspecies of humility because it is an orientation outward, toward another object in the world. Despite this overlap with the Christian virtue of humility, neither is strictly identical with it. A humble person may, of course, be more likely to engage in attentional humility. But we can also imagine a humble person failing on this front. Attentional humility is rather a habit of the mind, a habit of consciousness, that reflects in some ways the Christian virtue of humility. It describes, primarily, a posture toward another that is eager to receive rather than use.
Reading may initially seem like an odd candidate toward which to direct attentional humility. While it is surely proper to direct attentional humility on people, what about books? Isn’t it appropriate to “use” a book? To take the good insights and move along? In some cases, of course, it may be appropriate or morally permissible to do so. But as Lewis explains—and I think Murdoch agrees on this point—we miss something important in the text without attentional humility. I’ve noticed my own habit, even in works of fiction or poetry, to keep a pencil within arm’s length, ready to underline quotations that might make for a nice addition to an article or book. I find, too, my evaluations or descriptions of the text are shaped by the assessment of others. If a friend I trust assures me the book is “boring” and “not worth the work,” it is difficult for me to unshackle the text from that description. “Boring” sticks as a designation. But like Murdoch’s M, what we need is a “just and loving gaze” that is willing to re-evaluate or “look again.”
Lewis recognizes a possible weakness in the approach. If we give Dan Brown’s Inferno the same kind of attention we give to Dante’s, do we not show ourselves unworthy of the latter? While it’s true that some works of art are more worthy of our attention, we can learn this only through attention. Paradoxically, Lewis says “we must attend even to discover that something is not worth attention.” But that we might frequently bump into—and spend more time with—bad books is better than the alternative. In our haste to describe a book, “we give it too little chance to work on us,” he warns. Pointedly, “one of the chief operations of art is to remove our gaze from that mirrored face, to deliver us from that solitude.” It may seem a subtle difference, but I suspect this approach would require a complete reorientation to the text for most of us. “We should,” Lewis goes on, “be much less concerned with altering our own opinions—though this of course is sometimes their effect—than with entering fully into the opinions, and therefore also the attitudes, feelings and total experience, of other men.” Whether we end up agreeing with their opinions or not, attentional humility opens us to sympathetic reading—a willingness to receive from the text on the author’s own terms. This is strictly opposed to, and in contradiction with, our predilection to use texts for our own ends. To attend to the book properly, we “Look! Don’t touch!”
It is, I assume, uncontroversial to suggest that books play an important role in moral formation. How else to explain the intense conflicts over school curricula or books that should (or should not) be included in a school library? But if Lewis and Murdoch are right—and I think they are—then it’s not in the way we might expect. We do not read, first, to extract moral wisdom from texts that we then apply to become moral. Rather, reading itself—whatever we read—is moral instruction. No doubt, what we read can be morally formative, too. A week spent in Dostoevsky will shape us differently than a week spent in E.L. James. We should, then, think carefully about what we read. But I suspect, for most of us, the moral formation stops there. For Lewis and Murdoch, it is only the beginning.