One of the people at the Vienna conference was a philosopher called Silvia Panizza who has written a book about the ethics of attention focused on the work of Iris Murdoch inspired by Simone Weil. Right up my street. She was a beautiful and charming woman and her book is excellent, so well written and she explains difficult ideas very clearly.
Her case, following Murdoch and Weil, is that attention is key to living an ethical life. She sees attention as truth-seeking, in large part because when we attend closely to the other, we are emptied of the usual selfish concerns that engage the greedy ego. Our biases and preconceived notions are swept away and we she reality as it is - or, at least, as much as it is as a human is capable of doing given our species limitations and so on. She writes that through attending to something, we see clearly what the good thing to do is. Attention enables right action.
I am enjoying the book, especially, I suppose, because I already agree! But it does take me a lot deeper and substatiates a seemingly instinctive response.
One of the best things is that Silvia writes that she believes it's time to recognise that our moral duties are not limited to other humans. YES! So, there are a couple of chapters on animals. I guess she will write that were we to pay attention to what happens to animals in the food industry, we would see that this is not ethical and would act to abolish the meat, dairy and egg industries.
I've just read a section about "diffuse" attention. And this is rather what it's like when I sit in a wood or in the garden. I am waiting. Not impatiently, but openly, for the world to appear and fill my mind. This is what I meant when I said that "into my stillness the world comes". It is this open and waiting mode that allows what matters in the moment to appear, without my determining it.
Weil writes:
Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached,
empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in
our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not
in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we
are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all
particular and already formulated thoughts as a man on a mountain
who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually
looking at them, a great many forests and plains.
Weil is described as a mystic rather than as a philosopher. I haven't really established why or what that is intended to say about her. But it did make me think that maybe I'd more naturally tend toward that than philosophy. Maybe mystics are allowed to commune with birds and converse with trees rather than state syllogisms all the time!
Important stuff. I found the intro to the book and will read.
p.s. Yes, you make a good mystic 🌳 x