David Egan Philosophy

Meditation is a kind of training of the attention. And as it happens, attention is the theme for this month’s mini-essay. A while back, I invited readers to propose topics for my monthly newsletter. Barbara asked me to write about Simone Weil’s thoughts on attention.

Simone Weil fits into a small group of philosophers whose life and character are as dynamic and bewitching as the thoughts they left for posterity. She was born in 1909 into an agnostic Jewish family in Paris. The family was not short on brains. Her older brother, André, became one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century. The two were close and Simone taught herself Ancient Greek at the age of twelve so that she and her brother could gossip without their parents understanding.

Her precocious intellect was more than matched by a precocious sense of solidarity with the downtrodden. At the age of five, she learned that soldiers fighting at the front in the First World War were not given sugar rations, and so she refused sugar herself, insisting that her share of sugar and chocolate should be sent to the front. At the age of ten, she joined a group of striking workers marching past her home, singing the Internationale along with them.

Weil attended a prestigious lycée, or high school, where she was known as “the Martian” or “the Red Virgin” because of her otherworldly eccentricity and steadfast commitment to labour politics. She was suspended for refusing to accept a rule that forbade women, but not men, from smoking.

Weil continued her studies at the École normale supérieure, where she was classmates with Simone de Beauvoir. When they sat the final exam in general philosophy and logic, Weil placed first and Beauvoir second, ahead of the twenty-eight other students, all men, who sat the exam.

Her university degree entitled her to teach in the French lycée system. Beyond those professional teaching duties, Weil immersed herself in labour activism, writing and lobbying as well as teaching philosophy to workers’ organizations.

But Weil had a strong aversion to the type of middle-class left-wing intellectual who theorized about the situation of workers without having any direct knowledge of their experience. In a conversation with Beauvoir during their student days, when Beauvoir argued that finding meaning in life mattered more than finding happiness, Weil replied, “It’s easy to see you’ve never gone hungry.”

And so, in 1934, Weil applied for a sabbatical from her lycée teaching and took a job in a car factory. This period of hard manual work not only sharpened her political convictions but also seeded a key insight of her mature philosophy. Weil would come to write about “affliction” (malheur for those of you who know French) and distinguish it from mere suffering, understood as the more familiar experience of physical or emotional pain.

Affliction for Weil is a kind of living death. Suffering is something a person might undergo but, with stoic endurance, emerge with their self and dignity intact. Affliction threatens to uproot the very personhood of the person. It’s not so much that I am vulnerable to affliction as that everything I might identify as “I” is vulnerable to affliction.

In a famous essay on the Iliad, Weil writes that the central subject of Homer’s epic poem is the force that turns a human being into a thing. She felt she’d come into direct contact with this force in her factory work. What made this work so degrading wasn’t simply that it was hard or poorly paid. Its relentless drudgery threatened to snuff out the very souls of the workers employed there.

Where previously she had written about oppression and humiliation, Weil started writing about affliction. This shift marked a spiritual turn in her thought. Not a turn away from politics but rather a turn toward a politics infused with spiritual conviction. Between 1935 and 1938, Weil had a series of mystical experiences that deepened this turn. Her spiritual orientation was primarily Christian but she never formally converted to Christianity and, as those of you who attended Nic Bommarito’s presentation last February know, she also drew inspiration from Indian and Tibetan sources.

Weil’s writings on attention stem from this period of deeper spiritual commitment. Weil doesn’t mean by attention anything substantially different from what we ordinarily mean with the word: it’s the business of directing the mind toward an object. But Weil maintains that doing this steadfastly can be transformative.

She is hardly alone in this regard. As far as I know, every spiritual or religious tradition has some form of intensive training of the attention. Nowadays people tend to associate meditation with Asian traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism. But the English word “meditation” derives from the Latin meditatio, which originally described contemplative practices in the Christian tradition. These practices are alive and well. I’ve had the pleasure of discussing philosophy with members of the World Community for Christian Meditation.

Meditative practices commonly take some object of attention like the breath or a mantra. The practitioner then tries to focus all of their attention on this one simple object. One thing you learn in trying this is how subtle and difficult the basic act of paying attention can be. The mind drifts easily and suddenly you realize you’ve been making a mental grocery list or relitigating the argument you had with a friend yesterday. Or maybe you tune out the obvious noise only to realize that there are layers upon layers of mental noise beneath that surface layer.

Weil doesn’t write about sitting cross-legged or counting the breath. Instead, in one of her central essays on the topic of attention, Weil writes about schoolwork as a way of training the attention. A geometry problem or a Latin exercise, according to Weil, enhances the student’s ability to direct their mind carefully and deliberately.

Weil emphasizes that the effort required isn’t the kind that involves gritting your teeth and straining. Instead, she says, attention requires a kind of negative effort, of letting go of whatever it is in you that resists settling the mind. It’s less a matter of doing and more a matter of patient waiting—a point that’s clearer in French, where the word for waiting, attendre, closely echoes the word for attention, which is, well, attention.

Some objects repel the attention, none more than affliction. One of the less edifying experiences of my return visit to Vancouver this summer was seeing people whose bodies and souls had been broken by fentanyl addiction. It’s literally hard to watch. Weil’s mature political philosophy calls not just for solidarity with the oppressed but loving attention given to the afflicted. It’s one thing to say you stand by the afflicted. It’s another to look them in the eyes and ask them what they are going through.

Weil’s model is hard to emulate. Some would say it’s not something we should want to emulate. She basically wants us to become saints. Weil herself died in 1943, at the age of 34, working for the Free French government in exile in London. She had contracted tuberculosis, continued to work and write around the clock, sleeping only a few hours each night, and refused to eat more than she imagined her compatriots in Nazi-occupied France were rationed. Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, summed up one common reaction to Weil. When she forwarded to him a plan to parachute a contingent white-clad nurses (herself included) to the front line to serve as a moral rebuke to the brutality of the Nazis, de Gaulle replied: “But she’s mad!”

Mad, perhaps, but far from irrelevant. Albert Camus, who did much to bring her posthumously to prominence, described her as “the only great spirit of our times.” Iris Murdoch drew directly on Weil in challenging the prevailing view of ethics as essentially a decision procedure. For Murdoch, Weil’s conception of attention was the key to unlocking what, if not making decisions, should lie at the heart of moral reflection.

My June newsletter offered some thoughts on existentialism in the age of the attention economy. Weil’s work on attention invites another visit to our present predicament of floating on a sea of AI slop and addictive algorithms. This arrangement might not be as materially dire as a 1930s assembly line or the Trojan War but I don’t think it’s such a stretch to see it as a form of affliction. The attention economy is engineered to turn people into things: to strip us of our autonomy and agency and turn us into pliable consumers. Most important, the attention economy constitutes a concerted attack on our capacity to pay attention. Whatever is required to settle the mind stably upon a single object of our choosing, internet-enabled devices are designed to do the reverse.

In this regard, Weil’s view of school studies as a technique for training the attention feels poignant. One of the things I and other teachers struggle with more than ever is how hard it is to get our students to give sustained attention to anything. In class, they struggle to tear their eyes from their phones. Outside of class, LLMs offer to summarize their readings and write their essays. It’s hard to sell them on the idea that learning to pay sustained is a virtue in its own right. It would be harder still to sell them on what Weil thinks this training of the attention is good for. For Weil, we must train the attention so that we can give our full attention to God. Directing all of one’s attention to God is Weil’s definition of prayer. 

1. About 80% of overseas Chinese (people of Chinese descent living outside China, Hong Kong, Macau, or Taiwan) live in Southeast Asia. This count includes the large Chinese populations in North America and elsewhere. (source)
2. Hard Rock International, which owns the Hard Rock Café and associated businesses, is owned by a Native American organization, the Seminole Tribe of Florida. (source)
3. In the folklore and mythology of cultures as geographically distinct as Europe, North America, South Asia, and Australia, the Pleiades star cluster has been interpreted as a group of seven siblings. (source)
4. In 1901, half the world’s petroleum came from Baku on the Caspian Sea, in what is now Azerbaijan. The Nobel family, famous for their prizes and for dynamite, set up shop there and built the world’s first oil pipeline and the world’s first ocean-going oil tanker. (source)
5. Two items concerning trust in Africa from a much longer list of findings. First, members of ethnic groups in Nigeria exposed to missionary activity in the 19th century express significantly less trust today. And despite inter-ethnic violence in election periods in Kenya, Kenyans show very little evidence of co-ethnic preference, which suggests the violence is probably driven by political organizations rather than individual prejudice. (source)
6. Ever wonder why digital photos seem unable to capture the magical colour of sunlight on leaves or the water of a clear blue sea? The system by which digital screens produce colours plots them within a matrix of reds, blues, and greens, which leaves out a significant band of greens and cyans that the eye can see but that screens can’t reproduce. That’s the first of five interesting facts from an article I skimmed a while ago but didn’t read carefully enough. (source)
7. Second, deer, like most mammals, can’t distinguish reds from greens and so an orange tiger appears to have the same colour as green foliage. Which makes tigers’ colouring a good camouflage from their principal prey. And orange is easier than green to synthesize.
8. Third, bird feathers seem to have a main shaft (called the rachis) from which a set of parallel hairs (called the barbs) extend. But there are actually two more layers of barbs (barbules and barbicels) that extend from the barbs in a fractal pattern. Barbicels are what allow barbs to hook together and maintain their shape. And both barbules and barbicels are so microscopically thin that the way they interact with light produces iridescence.
9. Fourth, peacocks get the iridescent effects of their plumage from feathers that have dark brown pigments. If you ground up peacock feathers, you’d be left with a brown powder.
10. Fifth, nearly every species of scorpion is intensely fluorescent under UV light. No one’s quite sure why, but one hypothesis is that it’s a way for the scorpion to see itself. Scorpions have photoreceptors in their tails so that their raised tails can “see” the rest of their bodies and any fluorescence they detect is a warning sign that the scorpion isn’t adequately hidden from the light, and hence from potential predators.
11. Afrobeat pioneer and political activist Fela Kuti visited the United States in 1969 and had an audition for Disneyland’s “Adventure Land,” a colonialist fantasy of Africa. He and his band failed the audition because Disney thought they didn’t sound “African” enough. (source)
12. By the 1860s, about a sixth of the revenue of British India came from the drug trade, mostly selling opium in China. (source)
13. Canada’s first significant assertion of diplomatic independence from Britain is connected to the founding of the modern Turkish republic. Canada refused to support the British in keeping Turkish nationalist forces from gaining control of the Dardanelles in 1922. (source)
14. Deer and cattle tend instinctively to align their bodies with the Earth’s magnetic field while grazing or resting, as do dogs while defecating. (source)