“To be known well, things must be known in detail, but as detail is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect.” — La Rochefoucauld (Leonard Tancock, trans.) Maxims (Penguin Books, 1959)
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour” — William Blake, from Auguries of Innocence, under “Songs and Ballads” in David V. Erdman, ed., The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Doubleday & Co., with revisions, 1979)
“Diderot’s distinctive strength, a paradoxical strength as it depended on a disposition often criticized as detrimental to any kind of success, may have consisted in an openness to the world so radical that it constantly implied the risk of getting lost in details that fascinated him, together with a truly unusual intensity in his reactions to all kinds of experiences and perceptions (‘enthusiasm’ was the word for such intensity in the language of the eighteenth century).” It seems Diderot had an uncommon and perhaps endearing ability “to concentrate on the presence of persons, objects, perceptions, and feelings in their concreteness and singularity, without much direction or purpose.” — Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Prose of the World: Denis Diderot and the Periphery of the Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2012).
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While avarice, greed (or cupidity), and lust are associated with the inordinate if not insatiable desire for power, wealth or material things and sex, I wonder if we might imagine them with regard to our experiences generally in the sense that quantity (past some tipping point) may trump or crowd out the quality of our experiences, that is, our capacity or ability to have attentive and possibly “rich” experiences. (Of course one might have comparatively few experiences, as it were, which are qualitatively poor or dull or zombie-like.) I am not claiming there need be conflict between the quantity and quality of our experiences, only that an unquenchable “thirst” for novel experiences at some point becomes pointless, in which case it is better to have fewer but qualitatively richer experiences which fully engage our attention, a concept that, philosophically speaking, “is of fundamental importance in the philosophy of mind, in epistemology, in action, and in ethics [I would add moral psychology, a subject that overlaps with philosophy of mind and ethics.].” In other words, is it true that fewer and presumably richer experiences are more conducive to a person cultivating the requisite forms of attention (found, for example, in religious and philosophical ‘therapies of desire’) than can be attained among those exhibiting a greedy or “lustful” hankering after many and apparently varied experiences? I suspect that it is the case, although I’m not sure this is an argument that is philosophically dispositive or amenable to resolution by the sciences.
Attention can be directed both outward and inward, the former concerning the world of our experience, our perceptions, thoughts and feelings of and about the material world, the latter, when disciplined and well-directed, entailing self-knowledge, self-examination, or introspection, perhaps even forms of mind-training and meditation found in worldviews from Stoicism to Buddhism and the spiritual exercises cultivated in monastic and mystical traditions. Jonardon Ganeri speaks to the inward dimension (which is intimately and indissolubly tied to the outward dimension):
“Attention … has an explanatory role in understanding the nature of mental action in general and of specific mental actions such as intending, remembering, introspecting, and empathizing. It has a central role in explaining the structure of the phenomenal and of cognitive access, the concept of the intentionality or directedness of the mental, the unity of consciousness, and the epistemology of perception. And attention is also key to an account of the nature of persons and their identity, to the distinction between oneself and others, and to the moral psychology that rests upon it.”
The Stoic concept of prosochē —the attitude and practice of attention—well captures the inextricable connection between the outward and inward dimensions (and psychoanalysis could be said to widen and deepen the inward dimension). It is “a state of continuous, vigilant, and unrelenting attentiveness to oneself—the present impressions, present desires, and present actions which shape one’s moral character (prohairesis).” The late philosopher and writer Iris Murdoch had an abiding appreciation of this sense of attention as an aptitude, attitude and practice as it relates to the ethical and spiritual life, for she believed that our states of consciousness and action presuppose cognitive and affective discrimination, and that any such discrimination is subject to moral appraisal, as evidenced this exquisite passage from her book, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992):
“The moral life is not intermittent or specialised, it is not a peculiar separate area of our existence. [….] Life is made up of details. We compartmentalise it for reasons of convenience, dividing the aesthetic from the moral, the public from the private, work from pleasure. [….] Yet we are all always deploying and directing our energy, refining or blunting it, purifying or corrupting it, and it is always easier to do a thing a second time. ‘Sensibility’ is a word which may be in place here. [….] Happenings in the consciousness so vague as to be almost non-existent can have moral ‘colour.’ All sorts of momentary sensibilities to other people, too shadowy to come under the heading of manners of communication, are still parts of moral activity. [….] [M]uch of our self-awareness is other-awareness, and in this area we exercise ourselves as moral beings in our use of many various skills as we direct our modes of attention.”
One encounters the attitude and practice of “attention” once again in a moral-psychological and perhaps pedagogical sense in the Republic of Letters and the modes of sociability and conversational manners and etiquette that governed the salons of the (French) Enlightenment. Suzanne Necker (b. Suzanne Curchod, 1737 – 6 May 1794) was one of the remarkable salonnières of the Enlightenment’s Republic of Letters who deliberately practiced this art of attention. According to Dena Goodman, Madame Necker’s
“seriousness, and that of the salon whose discourse she shaped is revealed most clearly in the concern she displayed in all things for paying attention. The word attention dominates the five-volumes of her journals published after her death by her husband. One must pay attention, she reminded herself repeatedly, not get distracted. Her purpose in life was not to distract men from their serious business but rather to discipline herself and her guests so that that business might be carried out. Her concern was to concentrate her own attention and to focus that of the philosophes (her guests); her intent was to be a serious contributor to the social and intellectual project of Enlightenment through the shaping of its discourse in her salon.”
Goodman selects a handful of examples “drawn from the many instances in which attention occurs in Necker’s journals: (i) Attention allows one to find new ideas in the most common things: one cannot read aloud well without fixing one’s attention; in a word, distraction kills, negates all the intellectual faculties. (ii) One gets used to inattention in letting one’s mind wander when one is alone. (iii) As soon as the attention of men gathered together is distracted for a single moment, one cannot fix it again. (iv) The great secret of conversation is continual attention. (v) Virtue, health, talent, happiness, are the fruits of patience and attention.” All of these propositions about attention deserve further discussion and analysis which we will not here provide.
As Goodman points out, the notion of “attention” was not foreign to Enlightenment thought, being central to Condillac’s epistemology (which, apart from his conception of the mind, was radically empiricist and based on a ‘sensationalist’ psychology) and, as intimated in the passage from Prose of the Word, it served, at the very least, as an epistemic virtue for Diderot. The economist and philosophe, André Morellet, “identified attention as the first principle of conversation.” For Necker, “attention” was the centerpiece of what we might christen a secular spiritual praxis or askesis that decisively shaped the “art of living” in general and her governance of the salon in particular. In this instance, a secular spiritual praxis needs to be viewed in the light of an upbringing by her father, a Calvinist minister, for Necker was simultaneously devoted both to Catholic France and Enlightenment Paris.
According to Goodman, the “ideal woman” of this time and place “was characterized by a lack of [narcissistic?] ego which enabled her to direct her attention to coordinating the egos of the men around her.” The fact that these men required this kind of vigorous group coordination and conversational governance, in other words, enforcement of the rules of polite conversation, speaks volumes about their egos (and the aristocracy) and the corresponding lack of requisite self-discipline needed to properly engage in the type of sophisticated intellectual conversation that salons brought to prominence in the Republic of Letters during the French Enlightenment. It also speaks, at least indirectly, to the “agonistic” character of French pedagogical theory and practice. In the words of Goodman (drawing on the work of Walter Ong): “Since the days of Peter Abelard in the twelfth century, French schools had been steeped in the language of battle.” And this was not peculiar to France: “The primary form the agon took in education of boys and young men from the Middle Ages on was disputation, a form of ceremonial combat.” The salons, in effect, and under the gentle yet firm guidance of Necker and other salonnières, had to counter the deleterious effects of French education on male elites with their steadfast yet subtle enforcement of the informal social norms, manners, and etiquette of polite conversation.
Our capacity for attentiveness to our daily experiences, our ability to pay attention to not only “what matters,” but also little, everyday things that, at least on the surface, “don’t matter” (or don’t matter as much), is of course threatened by far more than a lust for novel experiences. More fundamentally, and perhaps relatedly (by way of causation, exacerbation or intensification), we are, by degree and on occasion or habitually, disposed to experiencing mental conflict, that is, “a mind divided against itself”* a psychological fact well appreciated by some classical Greek philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, and those associated with Hellenistic Stoicism, for example. These philosophers viewed us as more or less subject to three symptoms of such internal conflict which, after A.W. Price, we will term (i) oscillation, (ii) vacillation, and (iii), and lack of self-control (including akrasia). In Western philosophy and literature, we have filled out this portrait of the divided mind in a manner that speaks to our uncanny ability for mental compartmentalization while lending some support to the thesis, or at least something like it, of mental modularity. Thus the French moralists, novelists and playwrights, psychoanalytic psychology, cognitive psychology, and recent philosophical explorations of the emotions have enabled us to see, for example, how self-love or what La Rochefoucauld called amour-propre (which, as Jon Elster has explained, includes a desire for both esteem and self-esteem), cognitive biases (systematic deviation from norms of rationality and/or rational judgment and deliberative decision-making), denial, self-deception, wishful and magical thinking, phantasies, illusions, and delusions represent dispositional tendencies that at one time or another afflict all of us. This belies whatever facile optimism or flattering pictures of the reasoning mind and rationality we’ve inherited from the European Enlightenment and soon became ensconced within Liberal political philosophy. What is perhaps worse, this model of our psychological conflicts and mental complexity gravely interferes with our conceptions and pursuit of happiness and well-being. The result may be, as Daniel M. Haybron has argued, that not only are many of us on a “hedonic treadmill” (‘we adapt to many changes in our lives, so that we tend eventually to wind up no more or less happy than we were to begin with’), we may be, as foreshadowed above, “substantially on an attentional treadmill” as well. The latter, in this instance, largely in reference to discernment of our own affects or emotions (our capacity for emotional introspection), thus “insofar as one is relatively inattentive about one’s affective state, or an undiscerning observer of what one does attend to, one is liable to be comparatively ignorant about the quality of one’s affect.” Hebron has well-explained the nature of “affective ignorance” and several of its most pressing implications for our pursuit of happiness and we cannot here summarize this analysis but can share part of its conclusion: “the possibility of widespread affective ignorance [Haybron abbreviates this as ‘AI,’ but as that abbreviation is now commonly used for ‘artificial intelligence,’ I am avoiding it here] should be regarded as a live [and lively!] hypothesis. We cannot assume that people are reliable judges of their own affective states,” something we earlier learned from the theory and clinical praxis of Freudian psychoanalysis. Thus, while self-development or self-direction, self-realization, self-fulfillment, and human flourishing or eudaimonia or happiness are all worthy ends, recalcitrant mental conflict and myriad cognitive and psychological mechanisms and processes (from the unconscious to conscious kind) interfere with our ability—and speaking within a normative model of moral psychology—to move in the right direction, let alone to realize or attain these ends.
* “In mental conflict,” writes Price, “a mind is divided against itself, and becomes a battleground of opposing beliefs or desires. The conflicted mind is characterized by relations not just of difference and divergence, but of contention and confrontation. It feels itself not so much attracted from outside by incompatible alternatives between which it has to make a choice, as torn within itself by hostile forces between which it cannot make peace. It is aware not just of contrasting considerations that need to be brought together in an exercise of judgment, but of colliding tendencies that refuse to co-exist within a single perspective [cf. cognitive dissonance]. One may perceive an external figure ambivalently as a friend and as an enemy, with something like a gestalt switch between the two aspects a one’s attitude alternates between love and hate. Even if both responses are perceptive and not projective, one may fail to form or maintain a unified grasp of a complex reality, vacillating instead between simple views that resist reconciliation with a conspectus. What hinders the achievement of single viewpoint is not the complexity of the object but the ambivalence of the subject [Jain metaphysics and epistemology address the ‘complexity of the object’ with its notion of anekāntavāda and correlative doctrines of nayavāda (the ‘doctrine of perspectives’) and syādvāda (the ‘doctrine of predication,’ also aptly termed the ‘maybe’ or ‘perhaps’ doctrine)]: his attitudes are mutually antithetical, and hold out against one another instead of cooperating in a durable synthesis. At heart his enmity is self-directed, so that he feels partly alien to himself. The external object may be the occasions of his internal conflict, but he himself is its cause. [….]
It is inevitable that we should speak of mental conflict in social language. There is no easy demarcation between the metaphor and the reality: the mind constitutes itself according to a model in our language that is also its own, so that our ways of speaking are its ways of being. Its modes of differentiating itself from the world become modes of differentiation within itself. Interpersonal relations are reflected internally by intrapersonal ones, so that the mind becomes the scene of a quasi-social drama. It is no accident that already in antiquity the classic source for what I have been describing should have been a dramatic monologue [Euripides’ Medea] in which a single character engages in an argument with herself as strenuous as any that she conducts with others.”
References and Further Reading
- Brakel, Linda A.W. Unconscious Knowing and Other Essays in Psycho-Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2010).
- Craveri, Benedetta (trans. Teresa Waugh) The Age of Conversation (The New York Review of Books, 2005).
- Goldgar, Anne. Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 (Yale University Press, 1995).
- Elster, Jon. Sour Grapes: Studies in the subversion of rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
- Elster, Jon. Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
- Elster, Jon. Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
- Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Cornell University Press, 1994).
- Gordon, Daniel. Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociality in French Thought, 1670-1789 (Princeton University Press, 1994).
- Dilman, Ilham. Freud, Insight and Change (Basil Blackwell, 1988).
- Fiordalis, David V., ed. Buddhist Spiritual Practices: Thinking with Pierre Hadot on Buddhism, Philosophy, and the Path (Mangalam Press, 2018).
- Ganeri, Jonardon. Attention, Not Self (Oxford University Press, 2017).
- Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Blackwell, 1995).
- Hadot, Pierre. What is Ancient Philosophy? (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002).
- Haybron, Daniel M. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008).
- Mulhall, Stephen. “Misplacing freedom, displacing the imagination: Cavell and Murdoch on the fact/value distinction,” in Anthony O’Hear, ed., Philosophy: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
- Murdoch, Iris. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Chatto and Windus, 1992).
- Olberding, Amy. The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2019).
- Price, A.W. Mental Conflict (Routledge, 1995).
- Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Beacon Press, 1988).
- Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Books, 2016).
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