Attention is First Philosophy
The positive case, with illustrations from Aristotle, Descartes, and Merleau-Ponty, as well as five objections answered.
1. What is First?
The question of beginnings is a perennial problem in philosophy. Where do we begin, and what depends on that beginning?
The answers are many and valid, charting as they do the overlapping domains of metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology. Some begin with being, others with the good, others still with knowledge, experience, or history.
This essay explores a different kind of beginning.
I recently made the following claim:
Attention is first philosophy—
Philosophy is not only a system of thought but a mode of attentiveness, an exercised openness to what exceeds us yet calls us to deeper participation. Its systematic aspects are downstream of this attentiveness, and can certainly become a scaffolding by which others can train their own attention, but it is at its root a mode of cultivated attention.
As a poetic and sentimental stance on philosophy, this kind of description sounds good, but philosophy isn’t the pursuit of what sounds good.
Philosophy is the pursuit of what is good. And what is good in the context of a philosophical claim is the element of truth, as best we can figure it.
So, is it true that attention is first philosophy?
It’s a question I’ve circled for years.
And while I didn’t use the phrase “attention is first philosophy” in Practice in Still Life, nor in the sequences that composed its argument, the idea is unmistakably present in both. The phrase came to me later, as a retrospective condensation, something like the essence of what those pages were reaching toward and tried to unfold.
This piece is a first pass at exploring this perspective.
There are, of course, other ways of approaching philosophy. Mine is a non-competitive claim, but I think something important opens up within philosophy itself when we put attention at its center; namely, that it presents philosophy as yielding a cultivated disposition, as a mode of practiced receptivity aimed at transforming the person, rather than a discourse that exists in texts and arguments alone.
Philosophy, on this account, involves the shaping of perception and orientation as much as the articulation of ideas.
How, then, might one begin to justify such a claim?
2. Attention as a Philosophical Claim
One way is to return to the idea that philosophy is more than a system of doctrines but a way of life—a conversion, or way of turning the soul, as it were, toward what is existentially most important in one’s life.
This is the view articulated most clearly by Pierre Hadot.
Hadot reminds us that philosophy in its ancient forms was often practiced not as a theoretical pursuit alone, but as a mode of askēsis—an exercised and transformative discipline aimed at reshaping one’s perception of the world. He draws attention to the protreptic function of philosophical texts (recalling the Greek protreptikos, meaning a discourse meant to “turn” the reader toward philosophy). These texts are invitations to reorient one’s life and perception. Indeed, Aristotle’s early work the Protrepticus, was an invitation—an “exhortation,” literally—to its readers to enter into the life and work of philosophy through a turning of the soul toward wisdom in just this way.
Philosophy, in this light, depends first on an act of attention, and then on the practices that can secure, clarify, and transform this very mode of attending.
We might look here at a few examples to illustrate this point.
Aristotle’s own theōria, Descartes’s meditations, and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception each function in this spirit. They are arguments to be understood as well as paths of attention to be followed. To read them rightly is already to begin a training in thought and its navigation, scaffolded by a terrain of transformative expressions.
Let us look at what each philosopher took as their starting point, and how this starting point, in turn, reflects a certain quality and orientation of attention.
3. Three Orientations of Attention
Aristotle
Famously, Aristotle suggests that first philosophy (prôtē philosophia) is the study of being as being, constituting what we today call metaphysics. However, this inquiry is made available only through the activity of theōria: a mode of contemplative attention that does not aim at production or utility but at aligning the intellect with what is most universal and causally prior. As Andrea Nightingale has shown, theōria in Aristotle is a form of ethical and intellectual formation—an elevated kind of attentive beholding that trains the soul to see. It names both a philosophical exercise and a normative ideal, one that transforms the perceiving subject in relation to the intelligibility of being. On this view, theōria is not a method that follows from metaphysics; it is what makes prôtē philosophia possible. It grounds the act of philosophical seeing through which being as being first becomes visible. Theōria and prôtē philosophia in this way form a relation wherein the cultivated act of contemplative attention, and the virtue that perfects it, gives way to the systemic and expressive investigation we have today come to associate with metaphysics as such.
René Descartes
Descartes—responding to the fracturing of scholastic Aristotelianism, the rise of mechanistic science, and the erosion of trust in inherited authorities—turns his attention inward. As John Cottingham argues, the familiar portrayal of Descartes as a straightforward rationalist in today’s sense misrepresents the spiritual program that Descartes initiates. His act of doubt is not a logical maneuver that leaves the philosopher unchanged. It is a form of askēsis, deeply informed by Christian spiritual exercises, aimed at reshaping the mind through meditative reflection. This inner redirection is both methodological and existential, affording a kind of intellectual purification that prepares the soul to receive truth. The famous cogito, ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am”—is the result of a trained inward attention that withholds assent from everything until the most foundational of truths reveals itself: that thinking which points to the ineluctable existence of the thinker. This is a meditative and philosophical activity, and the text itself invites the reader into the same work.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Merleau-Ponty, working with and against the Cartesian framework, moves our attention to what he calls the tacit cogito, or the pre-reflective ground of perception that underwrites the possibility of reflection and knowledge in the first place. He argues that the certainty Descartes finds in thought presupposes a more basic relation of bodily being-in-the-world. The initial cogito of Descartes is a “second-hand cogito,” the cogito of language and speech, a late arrival. As Merleau-Ponty says:
“Beyond the spoken cogito, the one converted into utterances and into essential truth, there is clearly a tacit cogito, an experience [épreuve] of myself by myself. . . . The tacit cogito is only a cogito when it has expressed itself.”
Merleau-Ponty turns his attention to this background layer of being and perception. There is, in this background, an “I” that resides in silence, one prior to the “I think” that is different from this “I” that emerges in thought and language. In making this distinction, Merleau-Ponty redefines the starting point of philosophy as a “silent consciousness,” which only later is found in spoken and intellectual thinking. Rather than its negation, this silence from which the cogito emerges—and, presumably, to which it returns—is the condition that gives shape to the thinking subject.
Summary
My point in giving these very brief summaries is this:
Each of these thinkers, in their own context, initiates, first, a reorientation of attention in dialogue with the tradition they’ve entered into, and, second, they refocus this attention in a sustained and deliberate way over time, eventually yielding a new expression of philosophy. They do not simply argue over content or method or position. They turn, deliberately, toward what newly appears as most constitutive.
I see each figure as an example of how the question of first philosophy is always preceded by a shift in attention. This is to say that before any doctrine or domain or system is named as first, there is already at work this elemental act of turning toward what newly appears as primary—a shift in what draws us, compels us, and holds us in thought and attention as a new region of understanding discloses itself.
This is why we can say with some confidence: Attention is first philosophy.
4. Objections and Clarifications
This is the positive case I’ve tried to sketch, through illustration and figurative examples. However, to be sure, without added qualifications, this view—that attention is first philosophy—may invite several objections. I want to respond to five in particular that come to mind, to show why I think the claim still holds.
Five objections to the claim the attention is first philosophy:
That it risks collapsing philosophy into psychology. The attention I have in view is not a mental state or subjective mood. It is a structural—or even transcendental—condition for meaning and significance to appear at all. It precedes judgment. It is the field in which anything shows up as mattering at all and in this it should be thought of as distinct from personal psychological constitution.
That it cannot, on its own, determine the substantive content of a metaphysics, an epistemology, or a theory of perception. That’s true. Attention does not provide a metaphysics or a theory of ethics on its own. But it opens the ground in which such disciplines become possible. It names the condition, not the conclusion. We could say attention is necessary but not sufficient whilst still claiming that it is first in philosophy.
That it overlooks the fact that attention can be distorted or misdirected. That risk is real. Which is why attention must be trained. The fact that attention is first does not mean it is pure. It means it is consequential. Philosophy, I would argue, is the practice that forms this capacity in the direction of truth and significance—hence why we can call it an “exercised openness,” a “cultivated disposition,” and a “practiced receptivity.” The training of attention is key to warding off its misdirection or misallocation.
That it may not adequately explain how thinkers as different as Aristotle, Descartes, or Merleau-Ponty arrive at the domains they elevate as foundational. This concern mistakes the role of attention in my account. I am not claiming that attention alone explains the substantive content of their philosophies, nor that it causes their doctrines in a direct or deterministic way. What I am claiming is that attention plays a conditioning role: it sets the field of salience, it marks what appears as worthy of sustained thought, and it shapes the horizon within which questions can first be posed. In each case, a new domain becomes visible not just through abstract reasoning but because something has already drawn and held the philosopher’s attention. The difference between starting points reflects different acts of orientation. What makes something “first” for a thinker is not settled in advance, but is disclosed through a disciplined receptivity that gives form to what philosophy can see and say.
That it confuses phenomenological or methodical priority with ontological priority. This is, I think, the most serious and conceptually precise version of the critique. The claim that attention is first might be taken to suggest that attention is ontologically prior to being. However, this is not the claim I am making. My argument concerns the beginning of philosophy, not the beginning of reality. To say that attention is first philosophy is to assert a phenomenological and methodological priority—what comes first for us in the order of philosophical engagement. Being is indeed ontologically prior. But even the inquiry into being, I would argue, depends on a prior act of attentional orientation that makes such a question appear salient in the first place. This is not a metaphysical assertion about the structure of reality; it is an existential claim about the condition of orientation that makes metaphysical inquiry possible. In this way, attention names the beginning of philosophy, not the foundation of being.
5. Returning to the Beginning
The claim that attention is first philosophy is not intended to replace the intricacies and developed insights of philosophers like Aristotle, Descartes, or Merleau-Ponty. It is, rather, a way of naming what enables their projects to begin with.
Each of these figures, in their own context, enacts a reorientation of attention. They turn toward being, to the cogito, to silent consciousness—not arbitrarily, but because something has drawn their attention to these regions and sustained it.
That act of attention—deliberate, practiced, formative—is the beginning of philosophy. And if philosophy is to matter at all, it must begin again and again in that same movement: a cultivated openness formed through attentive askēsis, turned toward what calls for thought in each new epoch of history.
Attention is first philosophy.
Sherrington in his landmark study The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (1906) describes a kind of natural philosophy of perception (lecture IX). This was the first and remains the most coherent discussion of the three receptor fields exteroception, proprioception and interoception. These are in heavy use today in the fields of neuroscience, cognitive science, somatic psychology, and consciousness studies. The modern formulation has a heavy exteroceptive bias and misrepresents the importance of proprioception by dismissing it as positional awareness. Proprioception means self-awareness and Sherrington is the first to try to explain this deepest and innermost sensory motor system, the one that is the most self-referential. The distance receptors of sight, hearing and smell located in the leading segment of the animal body, of the head, are in a very real way the first locus of attention. But this is only from the perspective of functional survival behaviors. Philosophy like neuroscience tries to shed light on what is happening within and not just what is happening without. In a philosophical sense we can say that the self-referential core of being located not on the surface of the vertebrate organism but deepest within, is in a very real sense the primary perceptual system. The nucleus of a cell possesses its own nucleoskeleton, which is thoroughly embedded in the larger cytoskeleton of the cell and is affected by all of the movements of the organism, an information theoretic process called mechanotransduction, and which is what triggers the chemical or molecular expression of dna. Similarly the postural core of the vertebrate body includes the spine and its mechanical functioning is the basis of the richer but perhaps philosophically secondary expression by the visible and dynamic elements of the surface of the organism, exteroception. Proprioception or self-awareness as a deep internal process is philosophically primary because it forms the basis of the integrative action of the nervous system and by consequence of the more superficial actions that we engage in. What is important about this deepest inner system is that it is intrinsically homeostatic and integrative and this is the quality that gives it its primacy as a sort of innate ethical engine.
Everyone sleeps on Lonergan because, well, transcendental Thomism. but his 1957 Insight claims that the first step of any critical philosophy is ‘Pay attention!’ and every thing follows from how this works in his system.