The Sounding Line
Below are the video and written notes from my recent talk "Attention Is First Philosophy" at The Alembic in Berkeley, CA, June 25, 2025.
Good evening, and thank you all for being here.
I’m here to introduce my new book—it’s called Practice in Still Life—but before we get into that, I want to take a step back and focus on the title of this talk, because it names in a more general way the idea that really underpins the whole project.
The phrase I’ve put forward—“attention is first philosophy”—is something I want to explore with you tonight in a particular way.
I want to treat the phrase as an experiment in sounding. Do you know this term?
It’s a nautical technique that sailors would use.
To “sound” meant to lower a weighted line into the water to find out how deep it was when you can’t see the depth with your own eyes.
You couldn’t see the bottom directly, so you had to feel for it with this notched line that would tell you how deep the water was.
Today, we use sonar or radar for the same purpose. We send out a signal and listen for the return—for the delay, the echo, even the silence. It all tells us something about what lies beneath the surface.
So, that’s the spirit I want to bring to this idea. I want to test it. I want to sound it.
I want to see how far down attention goes. What does it disclose?
My hope is to make a case that attention really does play a foundational role in philosophy—that before any philosophy begins, attention is already at work and is indeed the primary starting point of philosophy.
Why Attention?
I also want to note why I think this perspective is important today. I can think of a few reasons.
The first is about the state of our attention in general today.
We live in what many are calling the “attention economy,” where our capacity for sustained focus is systematically fragmented and manipulated.
Our moment-to-moment awareness is captured, organized, and influenced by what are often carefully designed distraction machines and algorithmically-curated content.
And so many of us find our ability to concentrate under threat, and our stream of consciousness feels splintered, hurried, and easily interrupted.
Erik Davis, who invited me to give this talk, recently argued that attention is itself not just trainable—for concentration, for presence, and so on—but trainable more specifically, in his words, as something like a martial art—this is attention viewed as underpinned by a set of practices like meditation that can increase our agency in the world today in something like the way martial arts increase our agency for self-defense or offense.
So, we can say with Erik that attention is a martial art, and I think this is right, but I think underneath this specific claim is the more general idea that attention isn't something simply given but something we can shape and craft like an artwork—the art of perception—and what I'm going to talk about today is how philosophy relates to this view of attention and perception in a way that can help us grapple in a meaningful way with this so-called economy of attention.
The second reason is more historical and institutional.
Our intellectual culture today has largely separated contemplative practice from rigorous thinking, relegating the contemplative traditions that once nourished philosophical thought to forms of private spirituality while academic philosophy has become mostly analytical, divorced from body and soul.
What I'm suggesting is that philosophy, understood as cultivated attention and transformative practice, recovers something essential we've lost.
It offers us not only better arguments or theoretical systems but better ways of inhabiting the present and responding to it with lucidity and intention.
And in this sense, a philosophy of attention and practice invites us to rejoin what our culture has split apart, and what remains disparate and fragmented.
When we think of attention as first philosophy in this context, what we are afforded is the view that philosophy itself is a way of training what comes to presence in our perception.
Philosophy, in this sense, is cultivating the very capacity through which reality discloses itself to us.
This view suggests that the philosopher's work participates in a deep and transformative activity: the patient, practiced shaping of perception itself through the art of attention as first philosophy.
Now, I didn’t use that exact phrase in the book, but in hindsight, I think it names what the book was aiming toward.
And the book itself is less about laying out a philosophical system and more about bringing awareness to this practice of attention—as a form of askēsis (or spiritual exercise) that helps shape how and what we perceive.
So that’s where we’ll start: with this idea of attention as a beginning, and with the question of what it might mean to place that beginning at the center of philosophy itself.
As we go, we’ll also be tracing three major themes that run through the book:
These are attention, practice, and orientation.
I wouldn’t say these are separate topics, exactly—rather, they’re different aspects of a single movement. And I’ll return to each of them as we build the argument.
I should also note that the book itself is structured in three parts—fragments, essays, and lectures—of sixteen chapters. The fragments are short meditations on single words or concepts—like attention, conversion, and writing and memory practices—the essays are longer meditations on similar themes, and the lectures are adapted from talks I’ve given over the past few years, including one here at The Alembic. (There’s also a chapter in there on Evagrius and his demonology, for folks who remember that discussion from the last event.)
The book draws from an array of traditions: ancient philosophy, Christian mysticism, phenomenology, and theology, drawing from mystics (Dionysius the Areopagite, author of The Cloud of Unknowing), saints (Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Thomas Aquinas), philosophers (Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger), modern scholars (William Desmond, Charles Taylor, Pierre Hadot, Simone Kotva), contemplatives (Hugh of St. Victor, Evagrius Ponticus, Simone Weil, Nishitani Keiji), and historians (Mary Carruthers)
These are a lot we can talk about in there, but these primary themes or movements offer us a way into the book, and along the way, I’ll share with you some excerpts from the book that I think give us a deeper sense for what I mean by each of these terms, and why I think they’re so important for philosophy.
But we start with attention, and why I think it is first in philosophy.
What is First?
The question of beginnings is a perennial problem in philosophy. Where do we begin in our seeking, 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—why is there something rather than nothing?—others with the good—how should we live a good life—and others still begin with knowledge or doubt or 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?
And how might one begin to justify such a claim?
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—a way of life 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.
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 for us as persons.
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.
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.
In that sense, attention isn’t just a condition among others. It’s the act that allows philosophy to begin. Not once, but every time.
This is just a short sense, then, for what I mean by “attention is first philosophy.”
With that in mind, I’m going to move into a reading from the book—it’s a bit of a compilation of the introduction and the last essay—and then we can move into some discussion.
Practice in Still Life Excerpt
Note: This excerpt includes an adapted selection from the introduction and the final essay of the book. They have been lightly edited and combined here to give the audience a greater sense for the book’s opening and closing sequences.
Claude Monet often painted the same scenes multiple times to capture them in different seasons, at different hours, and in different lights.
This let him demonstrate how the same fleeting subjects could be shown to the viewer in varied ways, disclosing in this process the ephemeral nature of perception and light.
Rather than trying to capture a single definitive view of his subjects, Monet understood that reality was constantly shifting based on environmental conditions, externally, and perceptual conditions, internally, in the viewer.
Through these paintings, Monet demonstrated how a seemingly simple subject could become endlessly complex and worthy of sustained artistic investigation, a consequence of these repeated studies and the detail that unfolds within them.
In a different register, I think Monet's method illuminates something important about philosophical practice. Where he returned again and again to his water lilies, sunrises, and cathedrals, rendering new qualities and aspects in his subjects in each attempt, the philosopher returns to questions, texts, and practices, discovering through renewed attention what was not apparent in earlier readings.
What follows in this work is a series of such philosophical repetitions—expressed in essay form rather than paint, concept instead of color—each one exploring the importance of meditative reading and writing and what unfolds in perception as we return to the same texts over the course of weeks, years, and decades.
In a phrase, this work is about the relation between practice and perception, on the one hand, and how these practices both mediate and join us together with the reality we bring to presence, on the other.
Most centrally, the Greek term askēsis—which originally meant "training," "practice," or "exercise"—offers us the foundation for the writing to come, not as a static starting point, but as an active force making us capable of transformation, even allowing a kind of conversion experience (metanoia) to unfold.
Throughout this work, I use practice and askēsis to denote those deliberate activities by which we cultivate our capacities for perception, attention, and understanding. These practices include exercises like fasting, prayer, investigation, meditation, contemplation, memorization, self-examination, and dialectic.
While there are many kinds of transformative exercise, philosophical askēsis differs from these other forms of practice—in the arts and athletics, for example—in that it aims at transforming how we apprehend reality itself, including in its theoretical, moral, and aesthetic dimensions, rather than at grasping a specific domain within it.
However, where this theme is often taken up in philosophy in terms of a relation between thought and reality, I will take up the issue in a slightly different way, by focusing instead on the relation between practice and reality. Practice in this broadest sense is about the deliberate shaping of the person in such a way that reality comes to appear differently to the practitioner.
Philosophy in the sense I'm interested in is about shaping this person in a direction where a different kind of attending and perceiving can emerge—the kind that underwrites the ability to think logically and discursively to begin with.
Furthermore, the ancient, classical, and medieval traditions recognized that these are exercises organized not only by the mind's relation to itself but by the mind's relation to the world, to Being, to the whole of what is real, in the sense of a co-respondence with the ecology of Being and beings.
We can even say that this cultivated attention participates in the very creativity of Being itself. The space where this relation occurs—what Plato called the metaxu or the "in-between" of appearance and reality—is where philosophical practice takes place. Practice works within this intermediate realm, refining our receptivity to what shows itself while acknowledging that something always remains hidden or excessive to our grasp.
This art of perception is not set side aside as a unique fact apart from the larger passing of nature, but is a particular instance in its unfolding, where attention, as an art form, repeats in its own way the larger panoply of the artistic diorama that is nature’s varied, cosmic, and intimate expressions.
In other words, the metamorphosis that thought undergoes in its coming to consciousness through acts of attentiveness is in sympathy with the surging metamorphosis found in nature at large.
Conversion experiences are often encountered in just these moments where the internal metamorphosis of the philosopher and the external metamorphosis of reality are felt deeply as instances of the same singular process.
The human being can in this sense be thought of as the dyad wherein the becoming of Being finds its expression through the deep particularity of an individual’s psychological life as it advances within the whole of Being through the artistry of its own personal expression.
This movement between what is given to perception and what exceeds it affords the space where transformation becomes possible.
This book is about that relation.
In no uncertain terms, this book is about looking and how we look and, most centrally, how practicing our capacity for looking changes substantially both the looking of the person and what's looked at over time.
We could say, then, that the modes of askēsis this book describes are concerned not only with our awareness of these movements in philosophical consciousness but also with our capacity to sustain, shape, and nourish them.
These are practices for deepening attention and for moving towards that which guides them and draws them forward to begin with.
Conclusion
So, let me return to where we began. To that image of sounding, of lowering a weighted line into the dark water to discover what lies beneath the surface.
When we sound the depths of attention, what do we find?
We discover that attention isn’t just a tool we use to think more clearly or perceive more accurately. It guides nothing less than an ontological transformation, a reshaping of the very being who attends.
The practice of philosophical attention changes who we are in the act of seeing.
And this is what our sounding shows us. That in the depths of attention, everyday boundaries begin to dissolve. The one who attends and that which is attended to discover themselves to be participants in a single, unfolding reality. The art of perception becomes a way of participating in the very creativity of Being itself.
And so when I say that attention is first philosophy, I mean this: before we construct systems or arguments, before we analyze or categorize, we are already participants in this deeper process. Philosophy, at its most fundamental level, is the practice of becoming present to this participation, of learning to attend in such a way that both we and the world are transformed in the encounter.
This is the invitation that Practice in Still Life extends:
To discover what depths emerge when we lower that weighted line of attention into the mystery of our own being-in-the-world.
This sounding never ends, because the depths of attention, like the depths of Being itself, seem to have no bottom. And perhaps that's exactly as it should be.
Thank you.