Simone Weil attention is her name for a disciplined openness to reality, above all to other people, in which the self steps back so that something else can be seen as it is. Reference works treat it as the center of her ethics.
It is among the best-known ideas in simone weil philosophy, and it makes the most sense when read alongside the events of her life.
What Weil means by attention
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that Weil’s central ethical concept is “attention” (l’attention, in French). It adds that the idea was present in her early writings and reached its fullest theoretical form while she was in Marseille. The encyclopedia describes it as less a moral position or a specific practice than an orientation, one that nevertheless requires an arduous apprenticeship leading to a capacity of discernment on multiple levels.
In everyday English, attention usually means concentration on a task. Weil’s meaning is wider. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia, it includes discerning what someone is going through in suffering, the particular protest made by someone harmed, and the social conditions that create a climate for suffering. It also includes the recognition that one is, by chance, equally open to affliction at a different moment. The idea is therefore moral as well as mental: to attend is to take another person’s reality seriously.
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts the same point in terms of her aim, which was to face up to the real existence of other people. In its account, a refusal of this attention reads the world so that nothing and no one is sacred, not even oneself, and that reading produces the world of power and the sovereignty of force.
A negative effort: waiting rather than searching
Attention in Weil’s sense is not forced. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says it is directed not by will but by a particular kind of desire without an object. It is not a “muscular effort” but a “negative effort,” a phrase the encyclopedia takes from Waiting for God, and it involves a release of egoistic projects and desires and a growing receptivity of the mind.
The same source quotes her description of the state of mind involved. Thought should be, in her words, empty and waiting, “ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.” The encyclopedia points out that the French makes a connection plainer: attention and attente (waiting) are linked. On its reading, the problem with searching is that a searcher is eager to fill the empty space, and so settles too quickly on a counterfeit, a falsehood or an idol.
Waiting therefore carries a discipline of its own. Because imagination tends to fill any emptiness with something familiar, attention requires a suspension of projects, consolations and forms of prestige. The Stanford Encyclopedia ties this self-emptying to another of her terms, decreation, which receives its own explanation elsewhere on this site.
- Central ethical concept: attention
- Present in early writings, theoretical expression in Marseilles: Marseille
- Orientation requiring apprenticeship: orientation
- Attention includes discerning: discerning
- Equally subject of affliction: chance
Attention and the right use of school studies
Her best-known essay on the subject begins in the classroom. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy names it as “Reflections on the Right use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” collected in Waiting for God. The encyclopedia says that Weil takes prayer, defined as the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God, as her point of departure, and then describes attention as a kind of vigilance.
The essay places attention in a religious frame, and the encyclopedia presents that frame as hers: it writes of Weil as a Christian Platonist and says the desire behind attention is oriented toward a mysterious good. Readers can follow the argument about attention while treating the religious claims as Weil’s own, described here without endorsement.
Her wording of the idea in this essay is the most quoted. The encyclopedia cites her statement that attention consists of suspending thought and leaving it ready to be penetrated by its object, while the knowledge a person has already acquired stays within reach but on a lower level.
Attention to others and to affliction
The social side of the idea shows most clearly in what Weil says about people who suffer. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the exemplary story of attention for Weil is the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which compassion is exchanged when a person turns attention toward another who is anonymous and afflicted. On her reading, the actions that follow are the automatic effect of that moment of attention.
She also describes the self-emptying involved. In the encyclopedia’s quotation, the soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy adds that she described compassion of this kind as “the rarest and purest form of generosity,” and that it required being penetrated by suffering and not merely describing it from outside.
The experience that gave these claims their weight was her time among factory workers, when she met the suffering she called affliction. The page on simone weil affliction explains the term and how it shaped her view of what attention has to face.
Attention, force and knowledge
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says attention, in its consent to the autonomy of another, is an antidote to force. It also says that attention works against readings of the world that rest on imagination, unexamined perceptions or the prestige of a group, and shows itself as independent, detached thought.
For knowledge, the implication is that understanding reality is less a personal achievement and more an openness to what cannot be predicted. According to the encyclopedia, this means that attention resists the natural human tendency to seek control and dominance over others, and it connects the idea to her criticism of projects of self-expansion such as the colonialism she opposed in her time.
Seen together, these claims connect her ethics, her politics and her account of knowledge. In the encyclopedia’s presentation, attention informs her later social and political philosophy as well as her epistemology, which is why the idea recurs across so many parts of her work.
How scholars place the idea
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that attention is not motivated by duty and is not assessed by its consequences, and that it is arguably closer to virtue ethics than to other major approaches, although it differs from Aristotle’s virtue ethics in several respects. In its reading it is more a turning than a doing, more an orientation than an achievement.
The same source traces the idea’s later influence. It says the influence of attention can be seen in the writings of Maurice Blanchot, and that her Christian Platonism, including her concepts of the good, justice, void and attention, influenced Iris Murdoch’s emphasis on the good, metaphysics and morality. Attention also appears in the title of a scholarly study that the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists, Simone Weil: An Apprenticeship in Attention by Mario von der Ruhr.
Readers who want the setting for these ideas can follow the outline in the simone weil biography, which places the factory year and the religious experiences in sequence.
Frequently asked questions
Is Weil’s attention the same as concentration?
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Not quite. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy contrasts it with a “muscular effort” and calls it a “negative effort” that involves release and receptivity, so it is closer to patient waiting than to strained focus.
Why does she link attention to other people?
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According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the secondary direction of attention is toward other persons, especially those going through affliction, which she illustrated with the Good Samaritan.
Which text should a reader start with?
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The essay on school studies in Waiting for God is the one the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy uses to explain the idea, so it is a natural place to begin with her own wording.
Did attention influence later thinkers?
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Yes. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy names Maurice Blanchot and Iris Murdoch among those in whose writing the influence of attention can be seen.