Practice in Still Life 2: Attention is an Art Form
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These posts are part of the ongoing serialization of my new book Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures. (Full publication details are available here.)
A study of saints, mystics, monastics, and philosophers, the book explores how philosophical and contemplative practices transform our perception and understanding of reality.
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— A.E. Robbert
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 intuitions, and your conscience. In this sense, 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 roots in phenomenology, the study, first, of how phenomena appear to us in experience, and second, of how consciousness structures this experience from the first-person point of view. Drawing from traditions of medieval philosophy, and more recently from Franz Brentano and then Edmund Husserl, phenomenologists have investigated how our conscious experience is always intentional (from the Latin intentio for “directed at” or “attending to”). In a phrase, consciousness in its regular operation is always directed toward something in the sense that when we perceive, think, or feel, our consciousness reaches out toward specific people, objects, ideas, or emotions. Intentionality in this sense is not the more limited observation about how our minds focus on this or that thing. It is, rather, an awareness of the basic way our consciousness connects with and structures the world and its events as such.
Central to phenomenology is the concept of “givenness” or how phenomena appear and present themselves to consciousness. Consider how the same object, with identical properties, can present itself differently to different perceivers. This is not only because the object changes over time, 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, designers, or woodworkers. 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 to this basic mode of intentionality involved in the bringing to presence of objects, but also, and more importantly for our purposes here, to modes of skilled or advanced intentionality that let the practiced perceiver see the world in a unique way.
I want to look in this essay not at these modes of skilled craftsmanship but at scholarship itself, and I want to do so in a way inflected with a contemplative dimension that I find essential to scholarly expression, including in our practices of reading and writing. This essay, in a phrase, is a contemplation on contemplation in the direction of scholarship. Specifically, I want to look at how attention, as an art form, manifests itself in the work of scholarship, and how this view can inform our practices of study from a meditative point of view. The philosopher Alva Noë can helps us understand this dynamic more deeply. For Noë, perception is not a linear progression from sensation to understanding, but rather an integrated process where understanding and sensation emerge together. In other words, when we perceive something, our understanding is already present in that perception. Here Noë speaks of “presence” rather than givenness, in the sense of how things are made present to consciousness. Presence, on Noë’s account, is achieved through the skills of our understanding, skills performed in integrated, fluid, and intelligent ways as arts of perception.1
It is this perspective on skilled perception and presence that gives us a different 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 is not wrong, exactly, but this definition does not get to the heart of the matter. Instead, 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.2 The word 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 were not merely practical arrangements but reflected the deeper understanding that the cultivation of skilled perception requires both mental and physical spaces dedicated to practice. Such 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 and contemplative openness. This openness, I would argue, is the precondition for generating new modes of thought and perception. Silence, in particular, creates a space for repose and receptivity—a counterpoint to the more active aspects of philosophical training. It allows phenomena to be given to consciousness in new ways.
We could describe this contemplative moment as a releasing of the intentio itself, a letting go of the project of directedness in favor of the quiet repose of intention-less dwelling and resting. In this moment, we may observe that the intentio is not only suspended but also inverted. Here it is the being of things given that flow into us, in receptivity, rather than us directing our intention outwardly through acts of attention or concentration—we move from beholding to being beheld, if you like. Contemplative practice in this sense is about cultivating a specific kind of receptivity that allows things to show up differently. To extend the analogy with craftsmanship, we can say that, while the skilled woodworker sees potentials in the grain of wood in ways others cannot, the contemplative creates space for new modes of givenness to appear, new ways for reality to present itself to awareness. As Weil notes, this makes philosophy “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.”3
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. Much like 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 involves not simply the sustained focus we might associate with contemplative practice—though that’s part of it—but developing the sensitivity and skill to let phenomena show up in increasingly nuanced ways by freeing ourselves from the effort of focused attention itself. And, like any art form, this kind of attention requires practice, patience, and a willingness to remain open to what might emerge before we know what it is we are attending to. 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 by what transcends our understanding.
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.4
This is attention of a particularly demanding kind. It asks us to remain present at the threshold of what we cannot understand, and then to find in that very limitation a kind of opening. The transcendence Weil speaks of is thus not 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 is not weakness but a renewed form of strength. It represents the capacity to stay present with what we cannot master or contain.
This is where attention becomes an art form but also a transformative event. When we learn to stay present with what we cannot grasp or resolve, we allow our very inability to understand to become 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 do not 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 virtuous 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 intuitions 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 intuitions 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 is not 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 upon what has emerged.
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.”5 What’s noteworthy here is how Hugh presents scholarly attention as a transformational event. Each stage develops a different quality of engagement, from initial understanding through active seeking, culminating in a form of attention that both comprehends and finds, discovers, and encounters. These traditions suggest that deep scholarship amounts to more than just accumulating knowledge. It also involves developing increasingly subtle modes of attention that allow phenomena to show themselves in new ways.
In this sense, we can say that when a scholar returns to a familiar text and discerns new dimensions of meaning, or when a philosopher comes to understand a concept that had long remained obscure, the event signals a shift in the quality of awareness. It is the attention itself that has been refined, allowing the object of study—whether a text, a concept, or an experience—to disclose facets of itself that were previously unavailable. Such moments remind us that scholarship is not solely a matter of analysis or knowledge acquisition, but a practice that requires both concentrated rigor and relaxed receptivity, both meticulous thought and contemplative openness. The scholar’s attention must be precise enough to discern subtle distinctions, but open enough to allow unexpected connections to emerge. This is a repetitious process. You must read. And then read again. Over time, this repetition becomes a form of askēsis—a disciplined refinement of perception that draws together contemplative presence and interpretive sensitivity into the ongoing practice of close study.
Yet this repetition is not a return to the same; there is an integrated moment of difference, as each encounter with the text is shaped by the gradual transformation of the one who reads it. The text, in this way, is continually renewed—showing different contours, aspects, or gradients in light of the deepened awareness brought to bear on it. What appears on a second or third reading is not only what was overlooked the first time, but also what could not yet appear; the text itself has grown different. In other words, these practices are productive of transformations in perception and understanding—gradually reshaping how things appear, how they are interpreted, and how they are known. Likewise, the one who returns to the text is not identical to the one who began the reading, in that this movement implies a metamorphosis that such an understanding enacts within the person. Metamorphosis in this context does not unfold all at once. Its staying power draws upon the work of memory (or memoria in the Latin sense of ars memoriae, a cultivated faculty trained through deliberate practice rather than passive retention alone). The transformation holds because the differences registered across repeated encounters are remembered; they are drawn into the continuity of the contemplative scholar who integrates these shifts in perception. In this way, memory becomes the medium through which repetition gives rise to insight, and insight, in turn, gives shape to who we are in the moment of contemplative awareness.
Such is the arc of contemplative scholarship: a sustained practice of returning, in which repetition and memory conspire to transform both perception and understanding, shaping the scholar who is continually formed by the very act of attending. This is, then, the phenomenological account of contemplative scholarship we set out to describe—one that takes seriously the subtle textures of study, the pacing of reading and reflection, and the subtle and granular shifts in awareness through which understanding unfolds. In each act of careful reading and in each moment of sustained contemplation, we practice this twofold movement of precision and openness, of careful discernment and receptive listening, ideally within spaces conducive to such unfolding—the aforementioned schools, monasteries, and libraries—each one serving as a kind of affordance space that amplifies and surfaces these moments of transformation and conversion in our attention.
But we do not always have access to these spaces. Fortunately, the schola and the templum can be fashioned wherever thinking happens, if not in physical form than in the interior stillness of one’s own mind or in the shared space of a community. We might think here of Socrates in the agora of Athens as our exemplar of this kind of philosophical place making, where his particular mode of conversational dialectic could take shape anywhere people gathered to pursue the truth. What we need, in this sense, is to create our own spaces for contemplation. Indeed, contemplation enacts this very same marking out of space, just as the schola creates a clearing for sustained attention. And, like the physical templum itself—this bounded space for observation and interpretation, for gathering wisdom and investigating experience—these spaces can serve as waypoints for philosophical ascent and return. They are deliberately situated in the in-between (in the metaxu, to use the Greek term), and this in-between positioning mirrors the nature of contemplative attention itself, which operates at the threshold between what we can grasp and what exceeds our grasp.
These contemplative spaces, whether physical or mental, serve as both sites for philosophical discussion and practice grounds for developing the skills of attention we’ve been exploring here. And they remind us that philosophy can happen anywhere—in the library, in the school, and in the monastery but also in the streets, at the tavern, and in the home. Through the shared work of close reading, careful attending, and contemplative writing, we can create environments where scholarship can unfold in this fuller sense, as the acquisition of knowledge, surely, but more importantly as the cultivation of increasingly subtle ways of attending to texts, to ideas, and to the world around us. In this way, each space we dedicate to careful thought becomes both a literal and metaphorical ground for training our perception, a place where we can practice the art of attention that lies at the heart of genuine scholarship.
This chapter is an excerpt from Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures, by A.E. Robbert, out now in Kindle, paperback, and ebook formats. Consider buying a copy today. All proceeds go towards supporting the research and writing you find here at The Base Camp.
Alva Noë, Varieties of Presence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” published in Waiting for God (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009).
Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, trans. Richard Rees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 362.
Weil, First and Last Notebooks, 335.
Hugh of St. Victor, The Didascalicon: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 132.
Hugh of St. Victor is one of those figures I've only ever skimmed through. Thanks for your engagement here, will need to give him a closer look.
These are the things Ive thought about my whole life. Thank you for your words.