“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” wrote the philosopher, political activist, and quasi-Catholic mystic Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace, one of her posthumously published works. For Weil, to pay full attention was to pray, and to pray was to pay full attention. Each presupposed the other. More than a pragmatic cognitive tool, attention, in her view, was nothing less than a gateway to the highest forms of human expression.
Why should we care about attention? To be awake and aware in this third decade of the twenty-first century is to have concerns about the decay of this human capacity. Abetted by algorithms designed to hijack our deep psychological craving for novel stimuli, our smartphones, those digital slot machines in our pockets, deliver us an unending stream of amusement. In doing so, they rescue us from boredom by flooding the mental space that could be used to cultivate attention.
But in a world where machines and algorithms can do the heavy lifting for us, where it’s easier than ever to immerse ourselves in imaginary worlds and entertainment, why not submit ourselves to the easy pleasures technology provides, while availing ourselves of the hard work from which it relieves us? In a world where distractions are always within reach and where thinking can be automated away, what does it matter that we’ve lost the ability to, say, get lost in a good book, or to think for hours on a single problem without input from other minds?
Weil lived a century too early to encounter our current attention economy. But the dozens of essays, letters, journals, and notebooks she left behind contain a reservoir of extraordinary depth and moral fortitude that also offers precious insight on how to think about our contemporary concerns about the “attention economy” and “information overload.”
In her 1942 essay, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” Weil insisted that to come into contact with God, to touch the divine, we must first cultivate our faculty of attention; prayer, she wrote, is “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God.”
But how do we achieve such a state? What does attention consist of? For Weil, paying attention required concentrating on an object (in this case, God) without distraction, without expecting anything from it, and without preparing to respond to or interact with it in any way. To pay attention, “our thought must be empty, waiting, not seeking anything.” We must be open to “suspending” it, “leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object.” Paying attention means transcending the inner chatter, releasing expectations, and opening ourselves to anything and everything the thing we’re attending to has to offer.
While Weil’s chief concern was the development of a relationship with God, we don’t need to be religious to find value in her insight. Replace God with nature or the universe or even the everyday world, and it becomes clear that whatever our religious convictions, engaging fully with life itself requires that we pay attention to it. We must carve out time to be present, to empty our thoughts and tune in, without expectation, to whatever our surroundings have to offer.
Paying attention is something we can get better at with practice. In fact, Weil argued that the primary aim of school studies should be cultivating this skill in students. The content of any particular lesson, be it mathematics, history, or what have you, mattered less in her eyes than the habits of mind the lesson itself required. Even if students make mistakes or get answers wrong, the effort itself strengthens those mental pathways that make paying attention easier in the future. In this way, attention is like a muscle: it gets stronger the more you engage it. Thus “every time that a human being succeeds in making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it, even if his effort produces no visible fruit.”
Learning to pay attention like this will not only boost students’ grades and make teachers’ jobs easier but also give students the tools to draw closer to God, or godliness, or spirit, or even something like capital-t Truth. Such knowledge will help them flourish in other areas of life, whether they be religious, spiritual, relational, emotional, or practical.
I compared attention to a muscle. But Weil herself thought that analogy was lacking. “Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort,” wrote Weil. We picture someone “contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles,” having a staring contest with the book or idea or complicated math problem before them. But Weil says that “contrary to the usual belief [will power] has practically no place in study…. there must be pleasure and joy in the work… The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.” If you’ve ever tried meditating, you’ll know that the harder you try to be present, the more difficult it will be. Instead, we must open ourselves to anything and everything the experience has to offer, with no expectation of manipulating the experience or receiving anything in return. Doing so produces a joyful, easy state, not a strained one.
This helps us understand why “[t]wenty minutes of concentrated, untried attention is infinitely better than three hours of the kind of frowning application which leads us to say with a sense of duty done: ‘I have worked well!’” Deep concentration on whatever’s in front of you almost always yields better results than harried context-switching, jumping back and forth between tabs or apps with furrowed brows. Willpower is often counterproductive; total, almost prayerful openness is the key.
Weil saw attention as a gateway to the divine. But she also saw it as a tool for engaging deeply with other people. To truly understand others and their suffering, we need to attend to them. Yet she wrote, “The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.” And elsewhere, she declared that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” It is “a recognition that the sufferer exists… exactly like we are.” Attention is nothing less than a gift.
This rings eerily true today, when we are all pulled in a million different directions. We talk about feeling alienated, overextended, and atomized, but how often do we carve out the time to attend fully and completely to the person in front of us?
Simone de Beauvoir once remarked that Simone Weil had “a heart that could beat right across the world.” By attending to others with unmixed, almost prayerful attention, Weil thought we could transcend our own limited perspectives and truly see others as they are. We could see the full humanity in each person we encounter. And we could touch the divine—or something like it.