Attention is an Art Form
On cultivating silence for a specific kind of receptivity
I learned recently that Claude Monet often painted the same scenes multiple times so that he could render them in different seasons, during different times of day, and in different lights to demonstrate how the same fleeting subjects could be shown to the viewer in new ways.
I’m no Monet, but I have written the following essay multiple times now. Most recently it was the first about page for this newsletter; a few years ago it helped shape The Side View; it shows up in different places in my dissertation. It’s the same idea—attention is an art form—placed alongside other ideas, practices, and philosophers to show it in different lights.
In this case, I look at it alongside phenomenology (with special attention to Alva Noë) and contemplation (with special attention to Simone Weil and Hugh of St. Victor). The piece is an act of repeat writing, but it’s also about the importance of repetitious reading and what unfolds in perception as we return to the same texts again and again. Contemplation, as we’ll see, plays an important role in this process, as does the container, this very website.
It is, in the end, about sitting at the limit of what we can think and resting there.
The premise is this: Attention and perception are not brute facts of physiology.
They are skills you shape with your actions and practices. Both operate through your five senses, but also through your reasoning mind, your emotions, and your conscience. All learning to an important degree is perceptual learning, the process of shaping your skills of perception.
This understanding of perception as an active skill rather than passive reception has deep roots in phenomenology—the study of how consciousness structures our lived experience from the first-person point of view.
From Husserl forward, phenomenologists have investigated how our conscious experience is always intentional, always directed toward something. When we perceive, think, or feel, our consciousness reaches out toward objects, ideas, or emotions. This intentionality isn’t just about mental focus—it’s the fundamental way our consciousness connects with the world.
Central to phenomenology is the concept of “givenness”—how phenomena appear or present themselves to consciousness. The same object, with identical properties, can present itself differently to different perceivers.
This isn’t because the object changes, but because of how it is given to consciousness through our perceptual skills. If the world as it is given to us is related to our acts of intentionality—in other words, to our directed sense-making capacities—and if the same phenomena can show up in multiple ways to multiple people, then it follows that how we get something to “show up” for us in experience is related to the skills of perception that we bring to bear on it.
This becomes clear when we consider skilled perceivers like architects, meditators, and carpenters: Each of these people has learned to perceive the world in a certain manner; they get it to “show up” in a meaningful way that’s related not only to the basic mode of intentionality that’s connected to the bringing to presence of objects as such, but also to modes of skilled or advanced intentionality that let the practiced perceiver see the world in a unique way.
The philosopher Alva Noë helps us understand this dynamic more deeply.
For Noë, perception isn’t a linear progression from sensation to understanding, but rather an integrated process where understanding and sensation emerge together. When we perceive something, our understanding is already present in that perception. Here Noë speaks of “presence” rather than mere givenness. How are things made present to consciousness? Presence is achieved through the skills of our understanding—not skills executed in a detached, deliberative mode of judgment, but skills performed in integrated, fluid, and intelligent ways.
This perspective on skilled perception and presence gives us a new way to think about scholarship. We often view the scholar as a person dedicated to knowledge acquisition of some kind, or as an expert in this or that field of inquiry. This isn’t wrong, exactly, but this definition doesn’t get to the heart of the matter.
I am taken by Simone Weil’s idea that scholarship, like prayer or meditation, is a way of training attention. A scholar, in this sense, is something like a contemplative.
Contemplation means to “mark out a space for observation” or “to gaze attentively.” The suffix “templum” in the word is the same as in the word “temple,” which in a more literal and concrete way also “marks out a space for observation,” as one might find in a monastery, retreat center, or library. The word scholar contains a similar double meaning. The Greek skohlē notes a mode of “holding back, a keeping clear” but also a physical building for learning—the school or academy—much as the Latin schola marks a “meeting place for teachers and students.”
This dual meaning of space—both internal and external—has deep historical roots.
The ancient Greeks understood this intimately, designing their gymnasia and palaistrai as spaces that served both athletic and philosophical purposes. These weren’t merely practical arrangements, but reflected a deeper understanding that the cultivation of skilled perception requires both mental and physical spaces dedicated to practice. These training grounds often evolved into the great philosophical schools, revealing how the architecture of thought and the architecture of space mirror each other.
This “holding back” or “keeping clear” is thus practiced on two levels: in the quiet solitude of one’s inner life, and in the deliberate arrangement of environments that afford sustained, silent openness. This openness is the precondition for generating new modes of thought and perception.
Silence, in particular, creates a space for repose and receptivity—a crucial counterpoint to the more active aspects of philosophical training. It allows phenomena to be given to consciousness in new ways.
Contemplative practice isn’t just about maintaining focus; it’s about cultivating a specific kind of receptivity that allows things to show up differently. Just as the skilled carpenter sees the grain of wood in ways others cannot, the contemplative creates space for new modes of givenness, new ways for reality to present itself to awareness.
As Weil notes, this makes philosophy fundamentally “an affair of action and practice. That is why it is so difficult to write about it. Difficult in the same way as a treatise on tennis or running, only much more so.” Like any skilled practice, contemplation requires training our perception, our attention, and our receptivity.
To say that attention is an art form, then, is to recognize that like any art, it involves both technique and creativity, discipline and spontaneity.
Just as an artist learns to see color relationships or a musician develops an ear for harmony, the scholar-contemplative cultivates modes of attention that bring new dimensions of experience into presence. This isn’t simply about sustained focus—though that’s part of it—but about developing the sensitivity and skill to let phenomena show up in increasingly nuanced ways.
Like any art form, attention requires practice, patience, and a willingness to remain open to what might emerge. The art lies in finding the right balance between active engagement and receptive openness, between the intention to understand and the capacity to be surprised.
But there is something more radical at stake in this art of attention. Weil captures this perfectly when she writes:
The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting. By this standard, there are few philosophers. And one can hardly even say a few. There is no entry into the transcendent until the human faculties — intelligence, will, human love — have come up against a limit, and the human being waits at this threshold, which he can make no move to cross, without turning away and without knowing what he wants, in fixed, unwavering attention. It is a state of extreme humiliation. Genius is the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought. That is demonstrable.
This is attention of a particularly demanding kind.
It asks us not just to remain present at the threshold of what we cannot understand, but to find in that very limitation a kind of opening. The transcendence Weil speaks of isn’t about surpassing our limits through force of will or intellect—it emerges precisely when we fully acknowledge these limits, when we allow ourselves to be humbled by what exceeds our grasp.
This humility in thought isn’t weakness but a profound form of strength: the capacity to stay present with what we cannot master or contain.
This is where attention becomes not just an art but a transformation—when we learn to stay present with what we cannot grasp or resolve, allowing our very inability to understand becomes a new mode of being. The genius of thought, in this view, lies not in conquering intellectual territory but in cultivating the patience and humility to dwell at its borders. What Weil names as “extreme humiliation” is not self-abasement but rather the experience of being brought low before what exceeds us—a necessary descent that precedes any genuine insight. This humiliation becomes humility when we learn to dwell in it without resistance, when we allow our confrontation with what we cannot know to transform our very way of knowing.
For scholars, this work takes shape primarily through intellectual writing, which as Weil observed can create a circle for cultivating attention.
Writing is a kind of intentional act, and attention, at least some of the time, is a kind of writing, the writing of perception. The one shapes the other. Writing requires putting your thoughts and feelings on display, and when done with a certain attitude, it becomes an act of meditative attention.
In this regard, it can also be a means of examining and transforming our habitual modes of intentionality, revealing the knot of perceptual habits through which we encounter the world.
At root, then, writing is like other meditative exercises like self-examination, deep conversation, or therapy. You just are how your writing is, and there’s valuable information there, if you know how to look for it. In other words, we write to transform our perception of what we’re doing, and to give expression to the pull of the ambient thoughts and feelings around us.
This is an act of articulation that if done well can ornament and enrich our experience in the medium of words. Writing in this sense isn’t mere representation, but invocation, a means of bringing new things into presence.
Writing is creating as much as it is representing. Writing is revelatory in this way because it’s a craft that makes demands on you, if you take the training it offers seriously. What are the demands? Writing demands that you become different, that you train your attention onto your subject matter, on the one hand, and that you relax that same attention to gain insight, on the other.
Writing is relaxed focus. Reading is much the same.
Think honestly to yourself about the number of times you are able, really able, to conjure the resources needed to attend carefully to the text you are reading. The act is difficult because close reading is downstream of close attending, and close attending is a mode of skilled perceiving that needs training.
But what is happening here?
The intentional focus of consciousness lets the object of your attention unfold into greater detail. Reading is one example, but think also of viewing a painting, an oak tree, or a sunset. The scene unfolds inside the quality of your attention. The shape of your attention is there, with the scene, giving space for it to unfold.
In fact, the scene is your attention in concert with the phenomena present to your awareness. What does that mean? It means the timber of your own awareness participates in the revelation of detail, nuance, and understanding that you experience. Scholarship is this kind of attention, a deep listening aimed at unfolding texts, thoughts, and ideas.
Consider the practices of lectio divina in monastic traditions, where texts are not merely read but slowly imbibed through repeated encounter. The reader moves through distinct phases: reading, reflecting, responding, and resting with the text.
Each phase cultivates a different quality of attention.
In the initial reading, one attends to the bare words; in reflection, meanings begin to surface; in response, one’s own understanding enters into dialogue with the text; and in rest, one simply dwells with what has emerged. This isn’t just a method of reading—it’s a way of letting meaning unfold through attention.
This understanding of attention as a graduated development also appears in Hugh of St. Victor’s description of the five stages of spiritual development through study. “Of these five steps,” he writes, “the first, that is, study, belongs to beginners; the highest, that is, contemplation, to those who are perfect. As to the middle steps, the more of these one ascends, the more perfect he will be. For example: the first, study, gives understanding; the second, meditation, provides counsel; the third, prayer, makes petition; the fourth, performance, goes seeking; the fifth, contemplation, finds.”
What’s noteworthy here is how Hugh presents scholarly attention as a transformative journey—each stage develops a different quality of engagement, from initial understanding through active seeking, culminating in a form of attention that doesn’t just comprehend but finds or discovers.
These traditions suggest that deep scholarship isn’t just about accumulating knowledge—it’s about developing increasingly subtle modes of attention that allow phenomena to show themselves in new ways.
When a literary scholar returns to a familiar text and discovers new layers of meaning, or when a philosopher suddenly grasps a concept that had long remained opaque, what’s happening isn’t just the addition of new information. Rather, their capacity for attention has evolved, allowing the phenomena—whether text, concept, or experience—to unfold in ways that weren’t previously possible.
This is why scholarship requires both rigor and receptivity, both careful analysis and contemplative openness. The scholar’s attention must be precise enough to discern subtle distinctions yet spacious enough to allow unexpected connections to emerge.
In each act of careful reading, in each moment of sustained contemplation, we practice this dual movement of precision and openness, of careful discernment and receptive listening, ideally within a space suited to this unfolding.
But we don’t always have access to a retreat center, a monastery, or a library, what we do have is this place, a base camp, a landmark for thinking beyond thought.
The metaphor of the base camp is particularly apt for this kind of contemplative scholarship. Like the mountaineer’s base camp—a place of preparation and return, of gathering resources and processing experiences—this space serves as a waypoint for philosophical ascent and return, for a movement of theōria, in the traditional sense.
It is deliberately situated in the in-between (in the metaxu, to use the Greek term): half-way outside of town, half-way up the mountain, half-way into the woods. This liminal positioning mirrors the nature of contemplative attention itself, which always operates at the threshold between what we can grasp and what exceeds our grasp.
The Base Camp, then, is more than just a site for philosophical discussion—it is a practice ground for developing the skills of attention we’ve been exploring.
Here, through the shared work of close reading, careful attention, and contemplative writing, we create a space where scholarship can unfold in its fuller sense. Not just as the acquisition of knowledge, but as the cultivation of increasingly subtle ways of attending to texts, to ideas, and to one another.
In this way, The Base Camp becomes both a literal and metaphorical space for training our perception, a place where we can practice the art of attention that lies at the heart of genuine scholarship.