What Is The Base Camp?

An introduction to this newsletter

The premise starts like this—

Attention and perception are not brute facts of physiology. They are skills you shape with your actions. 

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.

Scholarship is one of way of shaping those skills.

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.” 

In other words, the contemplative and the scholar are in the business of creating spaces for openness and receptivity, spaces that give way to the creative work of insight and inspiration.

For scholars, insight and inspiration come primarily in the form of intellectual writing, which as Weil observed can create a circle for cultivating attention. Writing is a kind of attention, 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 undoing what one is already doing, or might do in the future, as it reveals the knot of habits we call perception. 

At root, then, writing is similar to 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 view. Writing is creating is 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 skillful perceiving that needs training.

But what is happening here?

The 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, and while 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 Base Camp is a way point for this kind of ascent and return, for going out and coming and back. Half-way outside of town, half-way up the mountain, half-way into the woods, it affords a place for contemplative philosophy—rooted in close reading, close attending, and close writing. 

My hope for The Base Camp is that we can create a place for scholarship and writing in this contemplative sense—both through the sharing of writing about philosophy but also through the noticing of and attending to meditative scholarship and contemplative exercise.

The Base Camp is a reference marker for this kind of scholarship and contemplation, a place for training our skills of attention and understanding.

You can find me on Twitter (@AE_Robbert) or via email (ae.robbert@gmail) for more information.

— Adam Robbert