Marlene Jo (@marlenejo): "De-slopping a popular Simone Weil quote I see frequently do the rounds on Substack/X: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” I suspect people love to repost this because it fits very nicely into the banal zeitgeist of mindfulness good and phone/AI-bot-bad, go …"

De-slopping a popular Simone Weil quote I see frequently do the rounds on Substack/X: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” I suspect people love to repost this because it fits very nicely into the banal zeitgeist of mindfulness good and phone/AI-bot-bad, go touch grass instead rah-rah. But this quote actually captures a very specific ethical perspective, and it is a keyhole to Weil’s body of work and an idiosyncratic ‘way of knowing’ known as negative attention. Let’s start with completing the full quote: "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity, for it requires us to empty ourselves of our own desires so that we may truly see the reality of another." At the simplest level, Weil was interested in the alleviation of extreme suffering that she called affliction, whereby the basic needs and dignities of a human being are violated. She viewed any state of humanity that could look away from this condition of affliction to be fundamentally flawed and obstructed by the desires and confusions of ego. To Weil, attention is not a matter of getting off phone to do more useful things, but an orientation that is completely receptive to the true condition of others—suffering or not—such that the morally correct course of action not only became obvious, but collapsed all other options to act entirely. Attention is a means of emptying the self to attain moral clarity. One might also call this radical epistemic humility. To Weil, attention has both moral and metaphysical significance. It reflects her moral claim that we have natural obligations to attend to the needs of each other, particularly those with the most need, and attention is the frist instrument to acting on these obligations. Metaphysically, it reflects Weil’s belief that knowledge is gained through emptying—a sort of negative attention, such as that exercised in apophatic theology/via negativa—rather than active, pointed attention or exertion as will (as likely a lot of mindfulness slop is gesturing at), which follows from a higher level metaphysical claim that humanity is inherently divorced from ‘God’ (the whole/Absolute), and is thus incapable of higher knowledge without shedding particular knowledge (that of the ego). Intellectual honesty, morality, and beauty were all deeply interconnected domains in her philosophy, all of which were tied together through this negative attention; in fact she believed that it was through exercises in negative attention that their inherent interrelation could be made clear, and was the instrument that allowed her to write her highly declarative and vast body of philosophical writing. She is a very idiosyncratic philosopher/mystic who no doubt provokes a lot of resistance but I think is very worthwhile contemplating and reading in earnest in these times! There is a very good overview by Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil, and a wonderful podcast series on her by @Philosophize This! who I know is a big fan!

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• Sophia Cheng