Attention and Reformation
We become what we behold
“The soul must be swiveled around; it has to change the direction of its attention/desire. For the whole moral condition of the soul depends ultimately on what it attends to and loves.”
— Charles Taylor
What holds your attention?
Attention is directed at what concerns us, or what we care about, and what we care about is connected to our desires, purposes, and priorities. These in turn are downstream of the habits of living that create for us these orderings in our perception.
Askēsis (exercise, training) is a method of acting on these orderings. It is both an act of attention and an act of reforming attention, a reformation that occurs through the reconstitution of our focus by a change of our priorities in perception.
What holds us in attention is what we care about, and what we care about, at its highest pitch, is what we love. If, then, our knowledge is downstream of our attention, and our attention is downstream of our care, our love, then in an important sense our knowing is deeply tied to our loving, or our knowing-as-loving-attending as achieved through the transformative engagement of askēsis.
We can say with philosophical seriousness: attending, knowing, loving—the same.
But this picture isn’t quite full enough. I wrote recently about conversion, and this is exactly the type of movement that Charles Taylor writes of in the epigraph to this essay. A conversion experience is just this kind of turning of the soul—a “swiveling around,” as Taylor says—in the direction of what it “attends to and loves.”
Taylor is writing here about Plato while making his way over to St. Augustine.
For both men, we find that our transformation as persons is guided by and mirrors that which we come to love. In other words, we become like that which we love. To connect this notion back to our earlier formulation, we can say that we become like what we attend to, what we care about, or what we seek to know. These three acts—attending, caring, knowing—are different faces of the same movement, even as individuals we may emphasize one or the other of these faces at different times.
These differences in emphasis also manifest historically. In Taylor’s account, for example, the focus on attention is more Platonic (the weight is on knowing the right external order of things), and the emphasis on love is more Augustinian (the light of our knowing is accessed first by our inward love for God), but the continuity between the two is present in both cases. Either way, askēsis is about ordering the soul through love or attention (or both, ideally), in the context of our aim.
In this sense, in our “swiveling around” we are not only engaged in a change of direction, as though we are separate from what we turn towards. We are also transformed by the directionality of our looking.
We start to become what we’ve turned to behold.
In the Confessions, Augustine describes himself as a man split apart from himself. His will is struggling against his own vanities and his calling to God. “This debate in my heart,” he says, “was a struggle of myself against myself.” In other words, the younger Augustine doesn’t know which way to turn, what to aim for, or what to attend to, and this causes him enormous strife. Indeed, the story that runs through the Confessions is about Augustine’s own “turns”—from Manichaeism, to Platonism, to Christianity.
As I noted in that previous essay, we tend to emphasize the latter part of the word conversion in accounting for this type of event, that is, the “turning motion” (conversio, in Latin), emphasizing the action “to turn” (vertere). But this reading neglects the prefix “con-” (com), meaning “with” or “together” of con-vertare. In other words, the turning of conversion is always, “turning with, or together.”
To this formula we can now add that turning is not only a turning with or together but a turning towards guided by this directed loving-attending that we just diagnosed as essential to our acts of knowing and perceiving. And this is how our concerns and purposes line up with the order of our perception, or rather with how the order of our perceptions is entangled with the ordering of the objects of our perception, that is, with the world, and how both are transformed in our ways of looking.
This observation, that concerns and orders are connected, brings to light the very old idea that our perception of things and our moral standing within and against them share an intimate link. Our moral shaping is a kind of perceptual shaping, and our perceptual shaping, at least ideally, should be a kind of moral one.
There are two primary dimensions to this connection.
First, a practical one. Our judgements about right and wrong can gain in clarity in the same way that our perception gains greater ascertainment of certain sensory details relevant to the goals of our specific tasks. In this sense, the arts, sciences, and engineering disciplines, along with our moral concerns, interpersonal relationships, and ultimate values, are alike in being concerned with the art and practice of perception—with nuanced appraisals of what is the case in any given moment.
Second, an ethical one. The world as given to us is not arrayed by sensory data alone. It shows up to us as purveyed by values, and this is necessarily so. We rank one thing above another. We determine this action is more just than that one. We emerge in the middle of a field of discernments. We are immersed in perceptual judgments concerned with recognizing objects or events—this is that—but also value judgments, how we choose to navigate and prioritize our immediate field of action.
The attentional dimension here is thus at once moral and perceptual.
The further question, what orders the ordering of values? Is answered by this theme of to what the knowing, loving, and attending turns towards. For Plato, it is the Good. For Augustine, God. In every case, what you turn towards is what you turn to become, and in this we see an aesthetic dimension joining this sense of caring and knowing.
Shaping attention is a craft of its own. What you are shaping is you as a person.
This is what it means to interpret askēsis as an art of perception, an art whose medium is experience itself, enacted by you the person. This does not mean that experience can be shaped into any mould whatsoever; quite the opposite. Like all arts, it means that experience is a medium that allows for certain techniques, has specific constraints, and can offer certain kinds of opacity or illumination, all expressed in relation to the objects of our attention from the perspective of the type of creature we are, the concerns that we have, and the type of cosmos we inhabit.
In this context, what one turns towards becomes a vital, existential concern.
This choice is at the root of how Pierre Hadot understood philosophy as a way of life, with the different schools—Platonic, Stoic, Epicurean, etc.—opening out onto a view of humanity, the cosmos, and our ultimate purposes. As he says, “The philosophical school thus corresponds, above all, to the choice of a certain way of life and existential option which demands from the individual a total change of lifestyle, a conversion of one’s entire being, and ultimately a certain desire to be and to live in a certain way.”
Our voluntary choice in following a way of life is in this way both what sets the aim of our transformation and is the means by which this transformation can be accomplished. In other words, attention opens out onto reformation just as reformation realigns our attention.
To come full circle, this is why Taylor says, “The whole moral condition of the soul depends ultimately on what it attends to and loves.”
Choose wisely!