Ethical Attention: Accumulating Understandings

Ethical Attention: AccumulatingUnderstandings

Peta Bowden

My aim in this paper is to investigate a perceptive-epistemological dimension ofethics; a cognitive disposition that is connected with the possibilities and limits ofour ethical responsiveness to the world and the persons who people it. It is thiscognitive capacity that I want to call ethical attention.

Attention, of course, has not been ignored by modern philosophy. In empiri-cist thinking it signals a neutral capacity that may be turned indifferently onpreviously unperceived perceptions – perceptions that have their original stim-uli in the objective world. More idealist oriented formulations have attentionacting to bring the overarching structures of intelligibility supplied by conscious-ness to knowledge of themselves. While ordinary language philosophers haveattempted to analyse attention under a multitude of classifications: as an act, anoperation, a process, a mental state, an experience, a skill.

Despite their variety, however, there is a sense in which these expositions failto catch the subtleties, complexities, and anxieties of concrete persons in theirattending. In their determination to remain in the realm of ‘attention as such’ – inthe set of overtly specifiable phenomena – their reflections are cut off from themultiple ways of behaving and approaches to life that colour attention. Manyelusive forms of attention, such as, for example, getting the ‘feel’ of a situation, ofcautiously moving towards persons and events in thoughts, emotions and imag-inings, of myriad ‘peerings’ and situational readjustments, of waiting patiently insensitive ‘openness’ until gradually the light dawns, fail to show up within theseanalyses. In the shifting and responsive context of these involvements, the char-acter of attention is entwined in the imprecise and indeterminate realm of moralsensibilities and its investigation becomes an inquiry in ethics rather than a ques-tion of science. From this perspective attention can not be seen simply as a matterof activating impartial or trans-historical capacities, all be they derived from thespecificity of individual, situated (bodily)-consciousness; nor can it be merely aseries of manifestations of a singular, determinate state corresponding to a set ofclearly delineable and justifiable criteria. Rather attention becomes somethingmore akin to a continuously variable climate or ethos that is connected with thepossibilities and limitations of particular, culturally and historically conditionedlives.

It is this conception of ethical attention that I address in this paper. I shouldsay at the outset, however, that my reflections are not motivated by a search forlofty ethical ideals. They spring from a sense of the difficulties, intricacies and

European Journal of Philosophy 6:1 ISSN 0966–8373 pp. 59–77. Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998. 108 Cowley Road, OxfordOX4 1JF, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

vulnerabilities incurred in the everyday maintenance of that quality of attentive-ness that enables the successful sorting through of relationships with other people,and of the situatedness of our lives. Further, they are grounded in a not uncontro-versial view that moral concepts, like the people who use them, are complex, in-determinate and opaque. Accordingly clarification of these concepts becomes aprocess of accumulating understandings, adding layers to their density by lookingat the multiplicity and complexity of the examples of them in the world.

Thus my elaboration of ethical attention works by moving through someexamples of several different theorists’ thoughts concerning what they under-stand as the ethical dimensions of a special kind of focused perception. By draw-ing attention to their insights and their oversights the aim of this survey is toconvey something of the character of this important concept and how it may beunderstood. The paper looks, firstly, at the work of three philosophers who haveexplicitly discussed the ethical significance of a particular observational orienta-tion: Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum.1 Further importantdimensions of ethical attention are subsequently elucidated by drawing on thework of a number of other philosophers whose feminist concerns, while notspecifically directed towards the clarification of a perceptive disposition, show upadditional insights relating to its possibilities.

I

Some insights into French philosopher-theologian Simone Weil’s position may begained by looking at her own practice of attention. Weil’s writings, the results ofher attentions, display a revelatory certitude and restraint. She gives few argu-ments or discursive explanations for her remarks and it seems that ‘[h]er obser-vations often strike her as just too plain to require argument.’2 The dangers of anapproach that eschews justifications in a context that values rigorous analyses areclear, but this is precisely Weil’s point. Her practice denies absolutely the rele-vance of bringing external, human forms to bear on the objects of attention. Hersis a ‘method of understanding’ that does not ‘try to interpret [images, symbols,etc.] ... , but to look at them till the light suddenly dawns.’3 In this dawning lightthere is a clarity of self-disclosure that transcends the grasping exertions of amind determined to possess the truth. Answers come unencumbered by condi-tioning attachments directly to a mind that is profoundly open and receptive.4

Attention is not a matter of force or will, or reference to any human power, butmore like the unconditional yet obedient openness of mind that she calls ‘waitingon God’,5 allowing the world to reveal itself in its own truth. It is this clear-sightedness6 of mind that constitutes the virtue of attending and ultimately, forWeil, the realization of Goodness itself.

Despite the aura of self-effacement and detached submission that pervadesthis conception, Weil’s attention is a very active intellectual practice of looking.7

For it must overcome those passive preoccupations of the self that continuallydistract it. Accordingly attention is an energetic ‘gymnastics’8 aimed at erasing all

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those attachments to persons and objects that we form for our own sakes ratherthan from any sense of those persons’ and those objects’ own intrinsic worth.Even more importantly, attention must outmanoeuvre the deep and insidiousattachment we have for our own will: our fondness for this or that aspect ofourselves that drags at our every engagement with the world. Only that ‘looking’‘which is so full that the “I” disappears’9 can overcome this ever-present dis-traction.

Mediating between the almost contradictory qualities of detached patienceand vigilant self-scrutiny characteristic of Weil’s description of attention is thenotion of ‘consent’, a capacity embedded in the complex of practical attitudes andcommitments that allows activity to be intelligible.10 Consent gives attention itsethical quality, signifying a positive disposition in those who attend towards theirsubjects: a ‘wanting’, as Weil calls it – a desire for truth and goodness – distin-guishing it from a ‘willing’, the sort of desire she associates with selfish rewards.In ultimate terms, ‘[a]ttention ... is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faithand love.’11

The ground of ethical attention’s vigilant and responsive activity is laid out inWeil’s specific remarks concerning persons’ attention to other persons, in heressay, ‘Human Personality’. Here she claims that the object of virtuous attention,perception of what is most fundamental – ‘sacred’ – in another is ‘neither his [sicpassim] person, nor the human personality in him’12 but somewhat startlingly, theother’s ‘impersonality’. 13 Against a tradition that identifies persons with theirrational natures, she pits a sense of personhood constituted in the face of vulner-ability to affliction and holding the potential goodness of participating in therevelation of truth against ever harmful forces. In her words, the important coreof personhood is found in that ‘something that goes on indomitably expecting, inthe teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, thatgood and not evil will be done to him.’ 14

Insofar as it resides in everyone, this striving against affliction is ‘impersonal’.However, since it is expressed in every aspect of the contingent and concretespecificity of each person’s existence, sensitivity to its project requires attentive-ness to what it is for precisely each individual to have lived her or his particularlife, performed her or his particular actions with her or his particular character.15

Thus attention, when directed towards other human beings, is aimed at the wholeof them in their concrete uniqueness.

Given how different individual persons are from each other, separated as one‘point of view from which all things appear’ from another,16 such concernfulattention is no simple feat. If we are to attend to others we must ‘transportourselves to that centre of thought from which the other person reads values’,17

resisting at all costs the temptations to impose or force our own point of view on others, even when we believe that point of view may be in their own best interest.18

With this insight the full force of the virtue of attention embedded in the indi-vidual capacity for ‘consent’ and its ‘impersonality’ is brought home. It is the otherperson’s ‘impersonal’ personhood, her or his own unique capacity for ethical

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attentiveness, that is at stake, and the virtue of attention rests in enabling thatcapacity to be expressed. By travelling into the other’s world, my attentivenessreveals and nurtures the other’s attentiveness, as it were, and this is ‘what issacred’ in both of us, and in human life itself. We are both equal members in anatural order in which our ‘consent’, our wanting to attend to others, is vulner-able not only to our own internal and external attachments, but also to the impo-sitions of other persons. Ethical attention is, thus, both the virtue that reveals, anda form of our essential ‘impersonality’ that is revealed. While it makes the ‘I’ ofourselves disappear it also vanquishes the ‘I’ of others on whom it lights, reveal-ing and expressing the essential impersonal value of all of us.

Importantly then – though Weil does not work the insight through in depth –ethical attention has self-reflexive dimensions. In the revelation of the universalorder of equality through the movement of attention away from the self, attentionimplicitly reflects back on the self. Ethical attention’s recognition of the contin-gency and inappropriateness of ‘lookings’ that are formed through our personalattachments unveils our participation in the order of impersonality and truth.More specifically, movement towards another person in the proper way enablesme to recognize the reciprocal, truth-revealing potential of another’s movementtowards me. In this way I am able to see that my personal standpoint towardsmyself is simply the result of my circumstantial fate and not a revelation of theessential (impersonal) truth about me.19 Thus the open receptivity that woulderase self-interest is a means to fundamental awareness of self.

This reflexive dimension of attention has been worked out more fully by otherwriters and I shall return to it later. For Weil the dangers of self-absorption are ofgreater concern. She persistently reminds the reader of the distinction betweenthe concrete engrossment of ethical attention with the impersonality of others andthe passive attachments of a desiring self to particulars. 20 Although attention isactively and concernfully directed towards a substantial other it must strive to besomehow independent of, or impartial to, its own selective predispositions in thisopenness. In the tension between these modes of active engagement and passivereceptivity Weil locates the positive ethical quality of ‘patiently waiting’, avoid-ing the temptations of self-interested positions, and in that waiting, deepeningone’s understanding of the power that attention conveys.

One further aspect of her vision that is significant to the current discussion isits individualism. The point is made very directly in the essay on ‘HumanPersonality’:

Impersonality is ... impossible except in solitude; and not only physicaland mental solitude. This is never achieved by a man who thinks ofhimself as a member of a collectivity, as part of something which says‘We’.21

The essence of personhood, then, is marked by the purity of individuals’ detach-ment from each other. As an expression of ‘impersonality’, ethical attention toothers is an utterly solitary capacity. 22 Thinking of oneself ‘as part of something

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which says “We”’ is one of those passive attachments that prevents the self frommaintaining the pure receptivity that attentiveness to others requires. In otherwords, any form of human association is simply an extrinsic connection. Not onlyare physical closeness and mental exchanges excluded from the realm of essentialbeing, but so, too, are the deepest springs of communality and love:23 we can only‘think’ of ourselves as being intrinsically interconnected with others.

Along with this difficulty there is a lack of sensitivity to the manifold levels ofchange to which persons are exposed in the thronging relational context of every-day attentions. In this multiply constitutive process, while individual selves andthose who are the focus of their attentions change, their interactions also bringchanged perceptions of each other and changed understandings of thosechanges.24 Seen in this light attentiveness takes on additional depths of complex-ity, for not only do individuals struggle with the variability of their own desiresbut also with the inconstancies of other persons and the reciprocal effects of thesedynamics.

II

It is here, in the messiness of the continuous variability and endless complexity ofthe ordinary world, that one of Weil’s more famous readers, Iris Murdoch, hastaken up the notion of attention. Murdoch investigates ethical attention as a chal-lenge to predominant conceptual frameworks for morality, which ‘picture man[sic passim] as a brave naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empir-ical world.’25 For Murdoch:

[W]hat we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity ofthe moral life and the opacity of persons. We need more concepts interms of which to picture the substance of our being.26

Following Weil, she urges that the process of ethical renewal entails taking up theconcept of attention, not will.

Murdoch’s emphasis on the rich and complicated world in which this virtue iswoven highlights its intricate and endless labours in interaction with that world.Whereas for Weil the problem of attentiveness is pictured in terms of the internalpreoccupations of the self struggling with its temptations for access to an impar-tial world, for Murdoch this is only a part of the picture. While the ‘fat relentlessego’27 in constant pursuit of consolation is one of Murdoch’s principal targets, sheis also acutely sensitive to the vulnerability of attentiveness in face of the opacityand perplexity of the world of other persons outside it. Her language of attention,thus, converges on two intertwined themes First, a concern to emphasize the disci-pline involved in realizing the confusing otherness, of ‘the real existing messymodern world, full of real existing messy modern persons, with individual messymodern opinions of their own.’28 Second, a concern with the significance of thedeep and obscure terrain of our inner lives in this process of attention.



Where Weil takes insights from practices of prayer, Murdoch proclaims therole of literature in enabling us to ‘re-discover a sense of the density of our lives.’29

Stable imaginative forms can provide access to complex patterns of thought andaction that are veiled from us in actual experience because of the incessant activ-ity of our egos. Importantly for Murdoch literature also conveys the endless toilof attention. Where Weil portrays attention straining patiently, but inspira-tionally, against the untamed impulses of the ego, Murdoch pictures the continu-ous drudgery of the inexhaustible demand to attend ‘without rigidity’ at thesheer ‘contingency’ and infinite detail of the world, and its human personalities.Here the work of attention is an everyday, cumulative labour in uncertainty thatslowly and ‘imperceptibly’ builds up ‘structures of value round about us,’30 ratherthan the revelatory gymnastics described by, and familiar to Weil.

Literature, like other forms of art and some natural phenomena, may alsoassist the self in the unnatural task of making the ‘I’ disappear – or as Murdochcalls it, the ‘unselfing’ – required to direct attention outwards, away from its ownconsolation-seeking desires. Murdoch suggests that one of the most obvious occa-sions of ‘unselfing’ is that self-oblivious engrossment we experience whenconfronted with a natural or artistic object of great beauty.31 Such involvementindicates that the object of attention is something so appreciated, loved and caredabout, that persons can be prised away from their self-centred purposes anddesires to possess or exploit it. They are open to being moved by nature or greatart in, and through, this liberation from their fantasies.32 The ‘object’ elicits aperson’s ethical attention, and in so doing may make her or him explicitly awareof the possibilities of this capacity of self in other contexts.

Here again reflexive understanding of the movement of ethical attention awayfrom the self points to a return in enhanced self-understanding. For Weil, the selfcan gain access to itself from the perspective of the other; for Murdoch, ‘unself-ing’ energizes and allows the self to re-connect itself with its disposition to virtue.It is virtuous attention – ‘obedience’ to the claims of reality that lie outside the self– that serves, reflexively, to create this bond within the self. But once more I willdefer the exploration of these themes until later in this discussion where theyarise more directly.

Returning to Murdoch’s vision of morality, it is the everyday labours of ethi-cal attentiveness in situations of diverse intensities of interaction, graduallybuilding up ‘complex attitudes to life’,33 that compel moral practice. It is the ordi-nary work of attention, ‘continuously’ and ‘imperceptibly’ building up ‘struc-tures of values round about us’ that enables us to ‘choose’ to see – or to obey theclaims of – the reality of others, rather than slipping into the ‘inner indifference’of inattention.34

Murdoch illustrates her understanding of ethical attention with the case of ‘M’and ‘D’. A wonderfully ordinary example: M, a mother, feels hostility to herdaughter-in-law, D, for while D is ‘quite goodhearted’ she seems a little too‘familiar’, a little ‘unpolished’, has a slightly rough accent, is ‘tiresomely juvenile’.‘M feels that her son has married beneath him.’35 In her subsequent analysisMurdoch shows M self-reprovingly refusing to slip into a fixed picture of D and

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so looking again, with ‘careful and just attention’. In the course of this process Mgradually alters her vision of D. ‘D is discovered to be not unpolished but refresh-ingly simple, not familiar but spontaneous, not tiresomely juvenile but delight-fully youthful, and so on.’36 Throughout the discussion Murdoch emphasizes thepower of M’s continuous effort to maintain a ‘just and loving’ gaze in enablingher to apprehend the reality of D’s situation. As Murdoch systematicallydispenses with alternative descriptions of the change in M’s vision as, for exam-ple, a ‘hypothetical’ mind change or a ‘private decision’, she shows how M’sactivity – its ‘internal struggles’, its ‘endless labour’, its ‘forming part of a contin-uous fabric of being’ – converge in its moral qualities. Again and again, Murdochbrings back the recognition that M is engaged in looking with ethical attention.And further, in moving out attentively to look at D as D really is, M is seen to bebuilding on to her structure of values in a way that enables her to see a differentworld from that with which she began.

It is important to recognize in this example that although M’s attentivenessbrings about a change in vision that results in a positive perception of D,Murdoch’s point is not conditional on this specific outcome. We can readily imag-ine a case where the ‘endless labours’ and ‘internal struggles’ of ethical attentionmight allow M to see instead the reality of D’s manipulation of her son’s goodwilland her exploitation of his fortune. Attending ethically to D involves for M asustained and concernful engagement in seeing how it is with D and this in the‘continuous fabric of her being’ which, of course, includes her relationship withher son. No pre-specified code, such as an imperative to see others in a positivelight, or to affirm the judgments of one’s male offspring, determines M’s vision.Rather, Murdoch’s example aims to show the ethical power of attentiveness thatis directed towards the independent reality of another.

Weil’s groundwork is strong here, in Murdoch’s determination to dispel theinfluence of will from this moral perception. But the person of M is present andinvolved in terms of her structure of values: her moral ‘vision’. The Weiliannotions of ‘desire’ and ‘consent’ are fleshed out in the ‘just and loving’ quality ofthe arduously acquired set of ‘desires’ that constitutes M’s moral stance. It is,thus, this ‘wanting’ to see, not the will, that is at the heart of ethical attention.

But like Weil’s, Murdoch’s understanding of attention remains dependent onan appeal to a detached, intellectual sensibility. Although Murdoch is far morealert to the ambivalence and motivational complexities of the ego than is Weil –and she castigates those philosophers who fail to recognize the significance ofemotions in the structure of morality37 – her over-riding distrust of the ‘selfishempirical psyche’ leaves the impression that the emotional dimensions of atten-tion are purged of their worldly origins and engagements. Moral vision becomesa capacity of the mind that is charged with ridding itself of its own subjective andaffective predilections rather than capitalizing on emotional insights. And whileMurdoch emphasizes the significance of a just and loving vision, rather than theintermittant decisions of a rational will, she gives few leads as to how to identifythat perception in the world, apart from specifying its disconnection from theself-absorptions of the wilful ego. For Murdoch it seems that despite the opacity



of the world, and the temptations of the soul, just and loving attention simply willprogressively reach towards the perfection of a direct connection with the realityof the world.

Here her Platonic inspired understanding of the shadowy unity of truth andvirtue is manifest. Accordingly moral life is something like a slow but continuousascent out of darkness towards the light of some abstract ideal of perfection inknowledge, virtue and beauty.38 Thus M is able, through the cumulated laboursof her virtuous attention, to come to see the truth about D: differences in hervision appear to be due to looking the wrong way, or to variations in the densityof her cumulated fabric of vision. But Murdoch gives us little to go on withrespect to recognizing the rightness of looking or the appropriate density of theframework that will enable us to see reality. For all her attention to the immensecomplexity of human interactions, she seems to assume that the connectionbetween ethical attention and reality will be self-evident in its expression of thecoherence and unity of the persons in the world.

III

Here the work of Martha Nussbaum, a writer profoundly influenced by Aristotle– rather than by Plato – is of interest. Like Murdoch,39 Nussbaum affirms aconception of ‘moral attention and moral vision’ as the ‘painful vigilant effort’and ‘intense scrutiny of particulars’, directed towards wresting ourselves from‘obtuseness’ and the ‘refusal of vision’ in face of the ‘bewildering complexities’ ofour world.40 Nussbaum, however, understands ethical perception not in terms ofthe pursuit of an already sensed, if unknown, unity of perfection and truth, butrather in terms of the responsive participation of whole, thinking, feeling, sensingpersons in moral life.

It is a great impoverishment of experience, she claims, to understand ethicalattentiveness as a matter of pure intellect as distinct from emotional involvement.In order to make moral sense of their lives persons need to enter into an activelooking that centrally involves ‘emotions, feelings and sensory responses’ (FG15). While this passional apprehension involves a non-inferential dimension ofcognition: ‘the ability to recognize, acknowledge, respond to ... certain salientfeatures of a complex situation’ (FG 305), it is not some kind of patient acceptanceof the ‘impersonal’ quality of a situation, or progressive understanding of anunachieved perfection. On the contrary, ethical perception, is the ‘keen respon-siveness of intellect, imagination and feeling to the particulars of a situation’ (FG191) for it is characteristically the unique, personal import of their exchanges thatengages and informs persons’ attention (cf., for example, FG 309).

Nussbaum is acutely sensitive to the delicate balancing act of ‘desires’ that this‘fine-tuned perceiving’ requires. Her full-blooded endorsement of the vital,intrinsic significance of emotional responsivity in moral attention brings her faceto face with the intricacies of discrimination among attachments. Weil andMurdoch have also met this problem, but as we have seen, fear of the dangers of

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self-obsession leads them to favour a disposition that depends on a capacity tofocus on the transcendent potential in particular attachments. For Nussbaum,however, with her concern for the central presence of unique human persons, inall the irreducible specificity of their attachments, these Platonic-inspired selvesare severely constricted personages, exercising somewhat derivative possibilitieswith respect to the overarching unity of reality.

Attention characteristically involves elaboration of one’s emotional sensibili-ties and attachments: a movement of open responsivity towards the world that isat once an exercise in self-knowledge and self-expression. But at the same timethis expressive perceiving does not float free in a feast of self-indulgence.Nussbaum is well aware of the pitfalls of ‘jealous possessiveness’ and ‘vulgarheat’: the ‘blinding, blunt and coarse’ emotions that overwhelm and divert atten-tion from its virtuous path.41 In ethical attention, she claims, the moderating forcethat checks these dangerous desires is the ‘disparate plurality of attachments andcommitments’ which every person brings to the concrete situations in which sheor he is involved (FG 314). These ‘standing obligations’ are the combined inheri-tance of personal experience gained in minutiae of social life, and of the habitsand conventions, nourished by early moral training and cultivated in reflectivematurity.

Nussbaum’s discussions trace the intricate interweaving of ethical attentive-ness with these general obligations. Her aim is to dispel the idea that general prin-ciples are primary or sufficient to moral being, while at the same time avoidingarbitrary and self-obsessed expressions of desire by foregrounding the context ofaccumulated involvements and general commitments from within which anyspecific course of attention takes its value. There are strong resonances withMurdoch’s understanding of the cumulated fabric of moral lookings butNussbaum is anxious always to emphasize the priority of the specific, engagedresponsiveness of a particular, ‘entire personality’ in ‘figur[ing] out which rulesand standing commitments are operative’ in a particular context.42 However, ethi-cal attention is also always guided by the climate of ‘standing’ engagementswithin which it acts. Indeed, attention is virtually unintelligible without the guid-ing and sorting power of the general. ‘[W]e do not even love particular individu-als ... [in a morally attentive way] without loving centrally, repeatablecommitments and values which their lives exemplify’ (FG 306).

Nonetheless, this general vision called up by the particulars of an interaction isprimarily informed by those particulars, which throw light on its constituentvalues, and bring about revisions to its continually evolving assembly of commit-ments. The point is that there are always aspects of any concrete relationship thatcannot be captured in the antecedent ‘standing’ formulations, no matter how richor precise they may be. There is always something surprising and new in everysituation or else something irreducibly particular.

Thus we may be restrained by our responsibility to the evolving range ofantecedent commitments and attachments we carry with us in every particularsituation. At the same time there is always something inevitably unique in ourpersonalities in their specific emotional and evaluative involvements, that is



crucial to the moral quality of our attention. Further, not only are we cruciallypresent in all of our unique connectedness in ethical attention, our responsivenessdirectly contributes to our own awareness of these attachments: the nature oftheir significance and how they contribute to our sense of who we are and whatwe care about. For Nussbaum, moral attentiveness to others is also an explicit andnecessary labour in self-knowledge.

Once again a connection between attention to other persons and enriched self-knowledge is evident. Beginning, then, in the context of Nussbaum’s work, Iwant to take up my earlier promises to explore this dimension of attention inmore detail. For Nussbaum, the inextricable connection between self-knowledgeand responsive attention is latent in the characteristic interpenetration of theparticular and the general she associates with moral perception. In the first place,the features of one’s antecedent, general commitments are discovered in responseto the particular attachments engaged in any concrete situation; experience of theparticular confirms and deepens a person’s knowledge of her or his overall senseof values. But this is not all: the experience of the particular – of personal engagedlookings in a specific situation – may lead to a revising of these more generalconcerns. In light of a particular misunderstanding, for example, in the case of Mand D – to continue with Murdoch’s example – M may come to learn morevividly than before the importance of her love for her son and her sense of howcaring family connections contribute to what is valuable in life. In addition, shemay come to realize that her understanding of what counts in persons has beenconstricted and reduced by the specificity of her social status and class. Whileexploring the possibilites of responding to D with ethical attention, she maydiscover the social prejudices in her central value commitments, her intoleranceof different conventions of demeanour and speech, and her refusal to respect thedignity of persons who are dependent on a different set of social attachments andperhaps less privileged circumstances of development.43

It is a form of this connection between self-knowledge and attention that Weildetects when she claims that the movement of attention into the ‘centre ofthought from which the other person reads values’, reveals the contingency andcircumstantial nature of our own position. Murdoch’s reading of this reorienta-tion, too, as the refreshing and stimulating capacity to be moved by something –or someone – we appreciate, or care about, illuminates another side of this dimen-sion of perceptiveness. But it is apparent in my Nussbaumian account of M thatsomething quite different is also happening. M does not merely see herselfthrough D’s eyes, transporting herself, Weil-style, to the centre of D’s thought –though, of course, something of this occurs. And we could scarcely say that M isinspired by D, as by a great work of art, in Murdoch’s language – though again,perhaps something like inspiration occurs in her change of ‘vision’. Rather,Nussbaum’s analysis shows how M’s caring attention to a real and differentperson, can bring about a new awareness of the limitations, and thus a revising,of her own value commitments. In this context of social differences betweenpersons, attentiveness to the detail and particularity of those differences canenlarge and enrich moral possibilities.

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IV

Not surprisingly this aspect of attention resonates with the interests of thinkerswho are motivated by experiences of social marginalization, and who are oftenidentified in terms of their ‘differences’ from predominant norms of character anddesire. Feminist writers’ perceptiveness with respect to frequently overlookedimplications of socially structured differences between women and men – andamong individual women and men with diverse socio-cultural backgrounds –has enabled society-wide revising of many persons’ commitments and thusincreased ‘self-knowledge’.

In addition to this specific change in many persons’ ‘standing obligations’,however, responsive attentiveness to the power dynamics of relationships amongmales and females also brings new insights concerning the ‘general conception’of attention itself. In diverse formulations feminist thinkers often highlight theethical significance of the interconnections among participants in practices ofattention. There is a sense that the difficulties surrounding attention are not somuch a matter of weighing in the demands of the world against the self-centredego, or personal engagement against the normalized purity of the Real, forclearly, both ‘self’ and ‘world’ are vital to the process. Rather, the focus shifts tounderstanding ethical concepts in light of the interpenetration of the externalsocial and internal personal worlds and the possibilities of relatedness betweenindividual persons themselves.

There are many strands to these interwoven themes in feminist thought, butperhaps most important to the present discussion are those analyses that addressthe role of socio-political structures in persons’ understandings of who they are,their possibilities and values. Such discussions foreground the kind of ‘self-knowledge’ to which M may have access in her ethical attention to D, if the salientdetails of D’s social opportunities fall under her purview. But feminist analysesshow that this kind of reorientation and the revisioning of standing commitmentsit enables is often very hard won. For it may require an understanding of a personor a situation that involves overturning such profoundly entrenched and wide-spread commitments – for example, to hierarchical relations of class, race orgender – that the capacity for ethical attention of isolated individuals is over-whelmed.

Evidence of this point may be seen in many women’s experience of the processof developing a ‘feminist consciousness’: that is, a revaluation of their under-standing of gender relations. Sandra Bartky has explained how in becomingaware of the restrictions of the dominant pattern of relations between males andfemales, women often experience a ‘double ontological shock’.44 First they becomeaware that apparently benign social institutions – for example, the sexual divi-sion of labour – are limiting and disabling. But this perception is then radicalizedby their inability to work through the revaluation it entails. Frequently women’sparticular and personal perceptions are so profoundly affected by, and consti-tuted through, the general societal norms those institutions embody, that it isdifficult for them to understand how these social orders might be different. Even



more fundamentally confusing, they may be unable to understand their ownpersonal desires, motivations and beliefs. Women may not know whether theirdesire to centre their lives on nurturing and caring for their families is a disablingdesire, induced by their socialization in stereotypical ‘women’s roles’, andthereby a constraint on their possibilites for self-realization; or whether it is awholesome attachment to the ‘reality’ of the needs of human beings and theirrelationships with other persons.

In the face of this serious lack of clarity, the accounts of attention describedthus far are severely flawed by their own inattention to the socio-political impactson personal capacities for responsive attentiveness in particular situations andthe general perspectives persons bring into play to inform and illuminate thatattention. Even Nussbaum’s description of the subtle interpenetration of generalcommitments and situation-specific particulars misses the depth and breadth ofthe distortions that they may inflict on each other.

For example, many writers have pointed out how, under western social normsgoverning gender, women often define their self-interests and desires almostentirely in terms of the interests of their family members. As a result attention toothers is burdened not so much by the impositions of self-centred aims andimages but by those of self-denial. The vital point here is that this self-abnegationis not simply the ethically liberatory silencing of self-centred preoccupations andattachments, the ‘unselfing’ that marks the virtue of attention for Weil andMurdoch – and all those other philosophers who connect morality with impar-tiality. The deep and all-pervading impact of gender norms is such that the‘virtue’ of self-denial often attributed to and internalized by women depends ona quality of consciousness more aptly described as ‘no-selfed’ than ‘unselfed’.What is silenced is not a contingent desire or interest but a whole sense of self. 45

For the continuous nature of the self-sacrifice required of women, and required tobe met without frustration or resistence, indicates that no centred sense of self canbe present.46 Clearly, the capacity for ethical attention, as Weil, Murdoch, andNussbaum describe it, is extremely problematic under these conditions.

Insights such as these throw light on the radical doubt and confusion involvedin the ‘double ontological shock’. Sometimes, perhaps, an individual person maybe able to see a ‘flaw’ of personality like that of ‘no-selfing’ in terms of a passiveand ethically disabling attachment, but more frequently such transparency ofvision is unachievable. For in society-wide constructions of ‘reality’, as we haveseen in the example of gender relations of subordination and oppression, it isunlikely that a movement from within the self alone can provide the liberationnecessary for moral attention. Fear, insecurity, dependency, lack of training,resources and opportunity, etc., all work against the capacity for clear-sighted-ness.

But here again the analysis of ‘feminist consciousness raising’ signals somepossibilities for transformative attentiveness. Catherine MacKinnon, for example,has suggested that the success of ‘consciousness raising’ is due to its collectivenature. She argues that since the processes that determine women’s conscious-ness operate on each woman in terms of her collective social identity, rather than

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as a being with purely individual or subjectively-determined possibilities, theunmasking and transformation of those determinations is also dependent oncollective effort.47 For awareness of the imprint of social patterns on one’spersonal perceptions requires awareness of socially shared features of thoseperceptions. It can be seen, then, how a group of persons, each in the uniquenessof their own situation and personality, but who share (hitherto unrecognized)socially constructed identities, may be able, collectively, to bring their particularperceptions to bear on disabling structures, and thereby, together, loosen theirhold.

This analysis has important implications for the character of moral attention. Ithas already been shown how Weil’s explicit antagonism to the notion of intrinsicrelatedness or community between selves prevents her from seeing the ethicallyenriching possibilites of this dimension of human life. And now, in light of thisinsight of feminist practice, it can also be recognized that both Murdoch’s andNussbaum’s accounts of moral attention are also seriously limited – even if onlyby oversight. For although both writers stress the subtleties and difficulties ofattention between persons, and are sensitive to the contextuality and reflexivityof ethical perception, they fail to focus explicitly on the shared and communalaspects of attenders and the potential for collaboration and mutual support thatsuch connections hold.48 Nussbaum, to be sure, accords high ethical significanceto relational activities such as friendship and love, and she is also alwayscognizant of the essential intersubjective nature of persons’ situatedness. But thisdimension of being does not stay in the foreground – or perhaps it becomes sotaken for granted that it is too close to be seen. As a result her account of moralattention conveys a picture of relatively disparate moral agents drawing almostentirely on their separate inner resources for their capacity for attention. Incontrast the feminist position outlined above places the shared, inter-relateddimension of existence at the centre of moral life, thereby unsettling the grip ofmore individualist conceptions of attention. It enables understanding of the waysin which persons are constituted within collective structures, and thus allows themoral potential of attention that is guided and reinforced by collaborative epis-temic practices to come to light.

From another side, as well, feminist emphases on the social structuring ofdifferences between people and situations illuminate further dimensions of ethi-cal attention. Differences between persons are central in the preceding discus-sions of the nature of attention. We have seen how for Weil and Murdoch thedistance and opacity between persons – the very otherness of others – is itselfconstitutive of attention. For it is ‘obedience’ to the reality of this otherness that isthe mark of moral attention. For Nussbaum, too, ‘differences’ are crucial since herdescription of ethical perception depends decisively on finely-tuned scrutiny ofthe particularity of things: the irreducible uniqueness of their specificity. Forfeminist thinkers, differences are also central to attentiveness, since it is primarilyin and through understandings of gender differences that feminist perspectivesare constructed. But here, understanding of difference is radically altered throughapprehension of the socio-political structures that shape its dimensions.



By now a commonplace of feminist and post-colonial understanding – thoughstill an often overlooked point – is the recognition that many of the terms of‘difference’ through which the identities of persons are constructed are codedwith socio-political meanings. Accordingly differences do not always designatedistinctive attributes of individual persons, like the colour of their hair or theirsubjective desires, in socially benign, contrastive terms; frequently different traitsare distinguished in hierarchically related, either/or terms. Autonomy is opposedto dependency, rational to emotional, impersonal to personal, male to female,white to black – and perhaps, M to D – in ways that rank these differences ashigher to lower, dominant to subordinant, good to bad. Once these systemicbiases in the enormous range of possible relations between similarities anddissimilarities are recognized, the universalization of oppositional ethical ascrip-tions is revealed as the prejudiced assertion of the validity of a particular, ifcommonly agreed upon, practice of attention.

Unlike understandings of ethical attentiveness that emphasize the difficultiesof crossing the discontinuities between individual persons, attention to differ-ences that brings the hierarchical ethical loading of these attributions into view,also foregrounds the interconnections between persons. When differences amongpersons are seen as structured relations rather than independent and intrinsicessences that separate and set them in opposition to one another, the ground ofcommonalities and relatedness that allows discriminations to be made becomesmanifest. Accordingly ethical attention emerges as a practice that sustains virtu-ous relations among persons, rather than simply as the endless task of attendingto the multiplicity of perspectives.

Understanding of the reflexivity of attention may also be enhanced by thisrelational focus. For, in addition to contributing to awareness of the limitationsinherent in one’s perspective, attentiveness to the particularity of other personsthat is cognizant of the ground of relatedness between us points to interdepen-dence between our different understandings of the world as well. Access to thisinsight can allow us to see that not only does attentiveness directed to othersreflect back on oneself in enriched possibilities for self-knowledge, but that corre-spondingly, ethical attentiveness to oneself, one’s limits and prejudices, facilitatesrevised and augmented possibilities for attention to others.

In order to illuminate this side of reflexive attention, I want to close by consid-ering one further position that focuses on the interconnected dimensions ofdifferences, relatedness and reflexivity, more directly from the side of self-attentiveness. This last turn in my comparison of views, however, is not simply amatter of driving the preceding point home with an explicit example. It alsobrings into view yet another aspect of ethical attention: that is, the way percep-tion may be facilitated through the mobilization of the multiple different self-understandings that reside within each individual. In so doing, it also challengesthe universal validity of conceptions of persons as smoothly unified wholes,acting from a unitary centre of integrity.

In a brief and moving essay, ‘Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and LovingPerception’, Maria Lugones sets out an understanding of ethical attention – in her

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words, ‘loving perception’ – that weaves the themes of perspectival plurality andrelatedness among persons together with her experience of her own internalplurality.49 Taking another tack on the problems of ‘ontological shock’ arisingfrom being identified as different and subordinate, Lugones discusses the inter-nal differences and ambiguities that she lives with in this identity. As an hispanicwoman living partly in the mainstream ‘white/anglo’ culture in the UnitedStates, she acquires a flexibility in moving from her mainstream ‘outsider’ iden-tity to ‘other constructions of life where she is more or less “at home”’.50 Lugonesdescribes the everyday experience of inhabiting more than one ‘world’ at onetime: being ‘at the same time in a “world” that constructs one as stereotypicallylatin, for example, and in a “world” that constructs one as latin’,51 animating anambiguous self as stereotypically and/or genuinely ‘intense’, or travellingbetween her subordinated and ‘at home’ selves. The shift, she explains, may bewilful or completely unconscious but it is not a matter of acting or posing as adifferent person from one’s real self, for there is no experience of any ‘underlyingI’.52 In a later essay, Lugones gives another example of her plural personhood,when she talks about her simultaneous identification with her lesbian feministcommunity, and her deeply homophobic and sexist hispanic culture. Neitheridentity is primary; both live in ambiguous tension with each other.53

Lugones links this understanding with an exploration of the ethical dimen-sions of her experience of herself as both a practitioner and a victim of flawedattention. Identified as a daughter she describes the way in which she abused hermother by taking her for granted, appropriating her services and failing toacknowledge her mother’s separate identity, all the while seeing her as belongingto a quite different world. Lugones’ understanding of this abuse, silencing anddetachment is heightened by her own experience of it as a woman of colouramidst white/anglo women, feeling the loss of inter-relatedness, solidity and selfthat comes from being outside their field of vision.54 These failures of ethical atten-tion, she suggests, can be addressed by drawing on one’s flexibility in ‘travelling’between and connecting one’s different internal selves. This ingenious andresourceful, though often unreflective practice, can be developed in a rich capa-city for ‘loving perception’ – or attentiveness – that connects across externaldifferences between persons. Here attention to self facilitates attention to others:recognition and animation of our internal multiplicity provides the passport for‘travelling’ into the plurality of the ‘worlds’ of other persons. For both internaland external ‘travelling’ involves acknowledging that the self and the other arenot exhausted by a single identity, that each occupies multiple ‘worlds’ in someof which each is present as a lively subject who is irreducible to an object ofappropriation or exclusion. Ethical ‘travelling’ into her mother’s world thusenables Lugones to see the error of her initial perception of her mother’s identityas being exhausted by its mainstream Argentinian construction. By seeing howshe is connected with her mother Lugones is able to realize that there are ‘worlds’which her mother inhabits creatively, and equally importantly, how different she,Lugones, is from her mother in her mother’s ‘world’.55

Somewhat ironically, though with a felicitous sense of coherence, Lugones’



language of travelling, in its direct resonances with Weil’s talk of attention that‘transports’ us to the centre of another person’s thought, brings this survey backto its beginning. We can see that there are connections between these twoperspectives beyond the common words in which they are expressed. But in theirjuxtaposition among the other accounts of ethical attentiveness described heretheir differences, too, are manifest. Lugones’ travelling suggests possibilities forthe movement of attention that rely on an inner connection between persons: ashift within rich and multidimensional selves that is at once a part of the journeythat affirms their complex connections and differences. This determination toembrace ambiguity and difference without becoming fixed in any particularvision of reality and in so doing to perceive other persons with ethical attentionis a far cry from the struggle for unity that motivates Weil’s vision. And in point-ing to the interdependencies among persons in their similarities and their differ-ences Lugones’ understanding of attention throws into relief the limitations ofWeil’s view.

But as all the theorists of attention surveyed here so keenly perceive, the taskof ethical attentiveness is continuous, indeterminate and never complete. Howthen to go on? This question has never been far fom the surface of this investiga-tion. At each turn in the inquiry new possibilities have opened up and with themthe uncertain risks of a different set of impositions, distortions, reductions andoversights. But to see this, I think, is not to lapse into incoherence and the sort ofrelativism that is produced by inferring that since all of our attentions are limitedthere is nothing to choose between them. Rather it is to see that the answer tounderstanding ethical attention is in the continuation of the investigation itself: inthe setting out of further examples for comparison.56

Peta BowdenPhilosophy ProgrammeMurdoch UniversityMurdochWestern Australia, 6150

NOTES

1 Weil and Murdoch both use the word ‘attention’ to describe the ethical dispositionthey endorse; Nussbaum more commonly uses the words ‘perception’ and ‘discernment’.Obviously any conflation of terms is not without some difficulties. The following survey,however, aims to show that, in this case, the conceptual overlap in these different linguis-tic usages allows advances in conceptual understanding.

2 Teubner (1982), p. 221.3 Weil (1952), p. 109.4 This point is developed in more detail by Teubner.5 Weil (1952), p. 105. See also Weil (1950), esp. pp. 125–29.6 Weil also describes this capacity by means of aural metaphors, referring, for example,

to the ‘attentive silence’ in which truth can make itself heard. See Weil (1986), pp. 53 ff.

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7 Stewart-Robertson (1987), pp. 55–6. My understanding of Weil and Murdoch has beengreatly enhanced by this insightful and lively essay.

8 Weil (1952), p. 108.9 ibid., p. 105.10 Winch (1989), pp. 108–19.11 Weil (1952), p. 105.12 Weil (1986), pp. 50–1.13 ibid., p. 56.14 ibid., p. 51.15 ibid., pp. 50–1. See also Teubner (1982), p. 225.16 Quoted in Winch (1989), p. 118.17 ibid.18 Weil (1970), p. 329.19 Winch (1989), p. 182.20 See, for example, Weil (1986), p. 51.21 Weil (1986), p. 56.22 A rare gesture to the positive potential of society is given in Weil (1955), p. 7: ‘a collec-

tivity, of whatever kind – country, family, or any other – ... is food for a certain number ofhuman souls.’

23 I am using ‘love’ here in the sense of an intrinsic, mutually enhancing connection withparticular others. Weil, as we have seen, gives the highest place to love in her scheme ofvalues, but this is a love purged of its particularity and intrinsic mutuality.

24 This phrasing is indebted to Stewart-Robertson (1987), pp. 57–8.25 Murdoch (1983), p. 46.26 ibid., p. 49.27 Murdoch (1970), p. 52.28 Murdoch (1959–60), p. 260.29Murdoch (1983), p. 49.30 Murdoch (1970), p. 32.31 ibid:, p. 84ff.32 ibid., p. 58.33 Murdoch, (1956), pp. 40–1.34 Murdoch (1970), p. 37. See also Stewart-Robertson (1987), p. 64.35 Murdoch (1970), p. 17.36 ibid., pp. 17–18.37 See, for example, her comments about Kant, Murdoch (1970), pp. 79–82.38 The Platonic imagery of ascent and progress is explicitly evoked in Murdoch (1970),

p. 84ff.39 Curiously, Nussbaum herself refutes this similarity with Murdoch. Nussbaum (1986),

p. 16, takes Murdoch to task for the distinction she makes between literary and philo-sophical styles, claiming that Murdoch thereby denies the ethical possibilities of literature.Further references to Nussbaum (1986) will be given in parenthesis in the text using theabbreviation FG followed by the relevant page numbers.

40 Nussbaum (1985), p. 516.41 ibid., pp. 526–7.42 ibid., p. 525.43 Alternatively we could imagine her discovering her misapprehension of the values

and desires of her son, her naivety concerning predominant masculine motivations incontracting intimate relations legally, etc.



44 Bartky (1977), p. 29.45 See Strickling (1988) for an insightful discussion of this point.46 ibid., p. 191.47 MacKinnon (1982), p. 29.48 Murdoch (1970), p. 32, however, does gesture to the possibility of shared attention, in

connection with a notion of ‘shared concepts’: ‘M could be helped by someone who bothknew D and whose conceptual scheme M could understand or in that context begin tounderstand.’ But this possibility is minimal in the face of ‘the unavoidable contextualprivacy of language’ (p. 33).

49 Lugones (1987).50 ibid., p. 3.51 ibid., p. 11.52 ibid.53 Lugones (1990).54 Lugones (1987), pp. 4–9.55 ibid., p. 18.56 I am grateful to Lorraine Code, Sheila Mason, Sue Ashford and an anonymous referee

for the European Journal of Philosophy for their thoughtful comments on this work. I havealso benefited from the questions and comments of audiences at the AustralasianAssociation of Philosophy (N.Z.) Conference, Auckland, 1994, and at ConcordiaUniversity, York University and the University of Victoria in 1996.

REFERENCES

Bartky, S. (1977), ‘Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness’, in M. Vetterling-Braggin, et al. (eds.) Feminism and Philosophy. Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 22–34.

Lugones, M.C. (1987), ‘Playfulness, “World”-Travelling and Loving Perception’, Hypatia,Vol. 2, pp. 3–19.

Lugones, M.C. (1990), ‘Hispaneando y Lesbiando: On Sarah Hoagland’s “Lesbian Ethics”’,Hypatia, Vol. 5, pp. 138–44.

MacKinnon, C.A. (1982), ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda forTheory’, Signs, Vol. 7, pp. 1–30.

Murdoch, I. (1956), ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, Aristotelian Society: Dreams and Self-Knowledge, Supplementary Vol. 30, pp. 32–58.

Murdoch, I. (1959-60), ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisted’,Yale Review, Vol. 49, pp.247–71.

Murdoch, I. (1970), The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Murdoch, I. (1983), ‘Against Dryness: A Polemical Sketch’, in S. Hauerwas and A.

MacIntyre (eds.) Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy. Notre Dame:University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 43–50.

Nussbaum, M. (1985), ‘“Finely Aware and Richly Responsible”: Moral Attention and theMoral Task of Literature’, Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 82, pp. 516–29.

Nussbaum, M. (1986), The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy andPhilosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stewart-Robertson, C. (1987), ‘Philosophical reflections on the obligation to attend “notjust any way”’, Philosophy Today, Vol. 22, pp. 54–68.

Strickling, B.L. (1988), ‘Self-Abnegation’, in L. Code, S. Mullett and C. Overall (eds.)

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Feminist Perspectives: Philosophical Essays on Method and Morals. Toronto: University ofToronto Press, pp. 190–201.

Teubner, A. (1982), ‘Simone Weil: Equality as Compassion’, Philosophical and Pheno-menological Research, Vol. 43, pp. 221–38.

Weil, S. (1950), Waiting on God. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Weil, S. (1952), Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Weil, S. (1955), The Need for Roots, trans. A. Wills. Boston: Beacon Press.Weil, S. (1970), First and Last Notebooks, translated by Richard Rees. London: Oxford

University Press.Weil, S. (1986), ‘Human Personality’, in S. Miles (ed.) Simone Weil: An Anthology. New

York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pp. 49–84.Winch, P. (1989), Simone Weil: ‘The Just Balance’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press



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Ethical Attention: Accumulating Understandings