The talk stands alone, but you might get more out of it after you’ve read the short but very dense 3-5 pages.

Attention and Will PDF: https://rohandrape.net/ut/rttcc-text/Weil1952d.pdf

Episode links:

• Youtube:

• On wherever you listen to your podcast as “thinking out loud” (Spotify, Apple, Pocket Cast)

Find me elsewhere:

• everything: https://linktr.ee/vincent_li

• writing: https://substack.com/@vincentli

• personal site: https://vincentli.space/

• photos: https://www.are.na/vincent-li/vincent-s-photographs

• twitter: https://x.com/vincent_yc_li

Timestamps

00:00 - intro and context
[Chapter 1] What pure attention yields
0:54 - painting non-Rorschachable paintings
2:35 - the white wall is not white, and the shadow not black
3:44 - seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees
4:26 - Weil’s mystical experience
[Chapter 2] The wrong way of paying attention
5:10 - the attention that grasps defeats itself
6:23 - attention is directed by desire, not will
6:52 - all desire aims at the Good until the horror of the void hijacks it
7:19 - an idol is a stable answer bought at the price of truth deformed
[Chapter 3] Attention as waiting
8:21 - desire as awaiting for what the stars will bring
8:39 - negative effort yields the attention of prayer
9:06 - the supreme effort of negative effort
9:38 - flow as the peak exertion with minimal self
[Chapter 4] Creation, gravity & grace, self-emptying
11:03 - God’s maximal withdrawal allows for our maximal individuation
11:51 - wretchedness of being a creature
12:40 - we empty ourselves to allow God back in
14:20 - attending is forgetting the name of the one who sees
[Chapter 5] Weil’s ideas applied to our lives
14:28 - you don’t become a genius, you have a genius
15:49 - you quit smoking not through willpower but through attention
[Chapter 6] Weil on why we ought to pay attention
17:32 - truly attending to a sufferer is almost a miracle
18:43 - to see reality clearly
19:10 - joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality
19:47 - closing

Transcript

Hi. The following talk on Simone Weil came from an event I co-hosted on her essay, Attention and Will. This talk, it stands alone, but you might get more out of it after you’ve read the short but very dense three to five pages, the PDF of which I’ve put a link to in the description. Many thanks to , Haroon, and Yusuf, who I co-hosted this with.

And so with that, this essay is actually a compiled collection of lines and passages taken from her notebook after her death, which partly accounts for why it’s so dense. In conversations like this, I’ve often wished that, when there’s this near-technical terminology and concepts at play, we had a shared language and frame to build off of, to remix, and of course to argue against. And so please take the following as a starting point rather than something that’s authoritative.

I want to actually start with a book about an artist called Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. It’s by Robert Irwin, who started his career in the 1950s. And he had this theme throughout his career, this dichotomy between physicality and imagery. And for him, he wanted to make paintings that weren’t Rorschachable, where you couldn’t look at one and go, “Oh, you know, that reminds me of a rabbit. That reminds me of when I was a kid and my parents,” and so on and so on.

And this was because he thought of imagery as the second-order re-presentation of reality. And he wanted his paintings instead to be encountered with this first-order, unmediated presence, where you’re not able to evade what’s happening in front of you through an abstraction in your mind. And so one of the first things he landed on was lines, because he thought that a line was the least Rorschachable gesture while still having the greatest power. And so he spent about two years painting just 10 paintings, where each painting contained just these two parallel lines.

And I hope you’re able to see that in this untitled painting here. The lines are very, very light. You might be forgiven to think that he didn’t spend a lot of time in a studio, you know, 10 paintings over two years is not a lot of output. But in fact, the opposite was true. He would spend about 12 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week in there. He would paint two lines, sit back, stare at them, and then remove one and move it up an eighth of an inch, sit back and then stare some more. Raising that line by just an eighth of an inch changed the entire perceptual field. What does it mean to cultivate such steady, intense attention on a single faculty, a single skill, a single subject matter over a long period of time? One of the things that may happen is that the truth of the world begins to reveal itself to you in a way that it didn’t before.

And we can get a glimpse of this, a small glimpse of this now. You know, if you look around whatever room or environment you’re in and try to find a white wall, this wall may seem white to you. And indeed, in a way, it totally is. But if you look more closely, like if I’m looking at this wall in front of me, I see these hues of yellows and greens. And in the shadows, the shadow is not just black. It is made up of something of a bluish-purplish color. This color, when we actually really pay attention to it, pay attention to what our raw sensory data gives us, and then kind of forget the label that we immediately put on it, label it as just white or the shadows as just black, we actually start to perceive the depth that it has.

And so why this title, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees? When we are in the full presence of something, the full physicality of something, we forget its name, its imagery, its representation, the conceptual handle or label that we give it that acts as a filter.

You know, I have a cup here, right? This cup, we could say that it is a cup, but we could also say that I could put it on my head, and then now it becomes a hat. Or if I swing it at somebody really hard, it then becomes a weapon. Or perhaps, if it’s really small, we could have it be a table for hamsters.

A clear expression of this in Weil was near the end of her life, during the period where she wrote the pieces that would become this essay that you’ve just read. One day, while reading through the Our Father prayer in Greek, the beauty of the Greek suddenly seized her. And she had something of the experience that you’re seeing in this comic here. She says of it, “Since that time I have made a practice of saying it through once each morning with absolute attention. If during the recitation my attention wanders or goes to sleep in the minutest degree, I begin again until I have once succeeded in going through it with absolutely pure attention.”

And this mode of attention is not the same one that we might take when we were in middle school and our teacher tells us to “pay attention,” where our backs straighten up, our jaws tense, and our eyebrows furrow. This is instead “muscular effort,” which is what drives will. It results in an attention that has a quality of fixation, of grasping, of clenching after a definitive understanding or solution, a definitive representation or label. She calls this muscular attention “the wrong way of seeking.” This is “attention fixed on a problem,” made from “the heat of the chase,” of an effort, of a desire that’s attached to seizing a temporal object. It produces the kind of egocentric, clenched, instrumental strivings that “defeat their own object,” which is seen in “the soured disposition of certain pious females, false asceticism,” and so on. In our own lives, it might have been chasing after grades, validation, a mystical state—all of which by themselves are great to receive, but distort us when we set our sights on them to try and fulfill something deeper.

And here I want to talk about desire, desire being a linchpin driving force in Weil’s thinking. To relate desire to attention, in SEP’s entry on her, it talks about how “attention is directed not by will, but by a particular kind of desire without an object.” Desire drives attention, or attention is what desire looks like once oriented towards something. “For Weil, the desire motivating attention is oriented toward the mysterious Good that ‘draws God down.’” She believes that all desire is oriented towards the Good, but becomes hijacked due to the “horror of the void.” The void, by definition, is empty—vide—“of idols, futural self-projections, consolations that compensate un-thinking, and attachments of collective and personal prestige.” The avoidance of the unknown, of reality in its fullness and contradiction, results in a desire that is quick to chase down a stable answer—a counterfeit, an idol—that we “accept at the price of a deformation of truth.”

When desire for the infinite Good becomes fixated on a finite object, we believe that we can utilize our will to obtain the object and satiate our desire for that infinite Good. At the most mundane level, we may say that this is a cup, and only a cup. When we do that, it is to perform the same shearing of reality and truth in favour of a comfortable finitude. It is, of course, right and good to say that this is a cup, but if we think of it and constrict it to only a cup, we forget the fullness that this object is. And this, for Weil, is to grasp onto false idols in replacement of God.

There is this wonderful etymology of desire. The original sense of desire here is “to await what the stars will bring.”

And so the way to free the energy of desire so that it can move to its natural orientation towards the Good is through the lever of attention, an attention of “negative effort.” This yields the attention of prayer, which has a quality of opening, of waiting. It’s like looking or listening, rather than an attachment. When you truly want to listen to a piece of music, you immerse yourself in it, expanding, relaxing, soaking into the music like a warm bath. You don’t grip onto its neck to try and squeeze the notes out of it.

Now, notice that this is negative effort rather than no effort. Seemingly paradoxically, this negative effort and mode of attention still draws a kind of “supreme effort,” where writing is like giving birth. She is not advocating for a passivity of action. You might accuse Weil of many things, but once you look at her life, her self-driven time on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, her months in the factory and so on, it is anything but passive. It’s not exact, but you can think about it in part like flow, perhaps most obviously in a physical activity like sports, where there is a supreme effort and exertion, but there is also an absolute effortlessness and fluidity of attention, of responsiveness, and also where our sense of self fades away.

And on that last point, we don’t beat the self out of existence, forcibly removing it or killing it, but rather through the fullness of our attention, paired with the absence of fixation, the space within us naturally widens.

This also makes it clear that we don’t want to do away with will, with muscular effort. It is necessary and important for action, but Weil’s point is that an error occurs when it overreaches into the domain of the soul, to that of the Good, the true, and the beautiful.

The words in the original French make clearer the connection, the wordplay she draws on between attention—l’attention—and waiting—attente. She talks of how attention should leave our thoughts “empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.” This open quality of attention that orients towards the Good requires a consenting to the void, the void which is always present.

Now, why is there even this void? For her, God, who is purely good, infinite, and eternal, drew back so that anything other than God could exist, that which is less than fully good, that which is finite and temporal. This act of creation, then, is one of abdication, a withdrawal. The maximal distance of God grants the maximal individuation of the other. This withdrawal, for Weil, is the expression of God’s love so that we can exist and that we can freely give ourselves back.

What fills the gap is the universe. It operates by what she calls necessity, matter, time, space, the blind web of material causes and effects, and also of social forces. “Wretchedness,” or misère, is the permanent condition of being a creature: finite, contingent, subject to necessity and to what she calls gravity. This is a truth about our condition as humans. It is the natural effect of creation, rather than a flaw added on top of it, and sin, for her, is the not-seeing of this nature.

This not-seeing manifests as imagining that we are “something,” this somethingness being a substantial, autonomous self that holds both the rich and powerful man, as well as the poor. To be sinless is not to be without wretchedness, but to have it in full conscious illumination, which, for her, is what Christ embodied.

And what that illumination requires is “decreation,” an act of self-emptying that mirrors the act of God in creation, a withdrawal of the self through that objectless, full, prayer attention, so that in that waiting, in that unflinching orientation towards the void—necessity, reality—we become a transparent channel so that God can see through us. This transparency happens not through our own will and effort, but through grace, the one exception to gravity. And this is because it’s not something we can do, we can’t pull God through us, we can’t grab onto the Good, because God, for Weil, is non-existent, in the sense that God does not exist in space and time.

In Attention and Will, she outlines how you liberate the energy of desire that’s attached to objects, which results in that bounded fixation, to instead become oriented towards the objectless, no-thingness Good, where there is nothing to clench, so that same energy, that objectless desire, can only take the form of a waiting attention in the void, “an attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears.” It’s important to emphasize that decreation is not destruction. Decreation makes something created pass into the uncreated, the uncreated being God. Destruction leads it into annihilation—a counterfeit. The uncreated has more reality and comes from attention and consent, whereas destruction is an act of will and force.

If seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees, for Weil, attending is forgetting the name of the one who sees.

Now, all of this may sound very abstract, but I think there is something that she’s pointing to, which is still borne out in our everyday living. She talks about how extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man. And you tie this extreme attention to the resultant self-emptying, you get to something that has been known to artists and creatives across human history.

Creativity is something that you set up the conditions for. You can be, as it is often very good to, be disciplined and have a creative habit. However, there’s a reason why the theme of artists and creatives believing their creative powers to come from something outside of them has been so common and so persistent. In fact, this is where the word “genius” came from. “The ancient Romans believed that every human baby is born with what they called his or her ‘genius,’ a guardian spirit assigned at birth. Roman birthday parties were held not so much to honour an individual as to honour that person’s genius. The Romans knew that it was not the man’s ego that was the source of his music, his art, his statecraft, or his courageous deeds.” And so you would not be a genius, but rather have a genius that was the source of your creativity.

Now, you might not think of yourself as a creative person, you don’t participate in creative activities, fine. Perhaps something more relevant then is craving and addiction, for the chocolate cake in your fridge or for your phone. Judson Brewer is a neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and a meditator who studies addiction and he’s by now put out numerous studies on helping people quit smoking at five times the quit rate of the current gold standard treatment. The central exercise that the participants did was to simply pay attention as they smoke. The focus is full attention on the direct, moment-to-moment experience of the feeling and the taste of smoking itself. And from this they can see directly that the cigarettes actually taste awful, that the experience itself is not really rewarding at all. Over a mere 10 to 15 instances of paying attention, that sense of how rewarding it is drops dramatically. In a parallel study on eating disorders, 40% of participants dropped craving-related eating, with how rewarding people found that kind of eating dropping below zero, meaning that it felt good to not eat in that way, within just 10 to 12 reps. Brewer himself emphasizes that it’s attention, not willpower, that leads to these changes.

Weil says that “we should be indifferent to good and evil but, when we are indifferent, that is to say, when we project the light of our attention equally on both, the good gains the day. This phenomenon comes about automatically. There lies the essential grace.” What is good naturally unveils itself when we rest our attention on it.

And for Weil, the consequences of this kind of attention are morally and existentially weighted. The first is that we develop the capacity to truly see another person. “The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.”

What is required is put well by Zaretsky: “We do not fully understand a hammer, Martin Heidegger observed, simply by staring at it. Instead, understanding comes when we pick it up and use it. Weil gives this observation an unusual wrinkle: we do not fully understand a fellow human being by staring, thinking, or even commiserating with her. Instead, understanding comes only when we let go of our self and allow the other to grab our full attention. In order for the reality of the other’s self to fully invest us, we must first divest ourselves of our own selves.”

The second is that in the self-emptying, waiting, open contact with the void, we perceive the real. “Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.”

“Only desire without an object is empty of imagination. There is the real presence of God in everything which imagination does not veil.”

And finally, contact with what’s real, where we have a full receptivity and acceptance of what is, of necessity, of amor fati, that contact is joy.

“Joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality.” “Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying ‘I’.”

“The only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.” Thank you all very much for your attention. I hope this was helpful, and I’m very much looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts in the comments or in messages later. Take care.

Everything referenced is listed at the end.

Heartfelt thanks to Carmen for your feedback!

Corrections:

In the Shklovsky section, the first part of the quote is actually from Danielle Dutton. Shklovsky did write the second part: “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life, it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.”

Episode links:

• Youtube:

• On wherever you listen to your podcast as “thinking out loud” (Spotify, Apple, Pocket Cast)

Find me elsewhere:

• everything: https://linktr.ee/vincent_li

• writing: https://substack.com/@vincentli

• personal site: https://vincentli.space/

• photos: https://www.are.na/vincent-li/vincent-s-photographs

• twitter: https://x.com/vincent_yc_li

Outline

Intro

• process over product + finding our deepest beliefs through felt contact

The life-long values that drive you

• final ends

  • final ends are our irreducible beliefs

  • ecosystem of final ends

  • what runs us is what we cannot see

• the belief diagram

  • vitality of beliefs: alive vs. dead

  • a belief can die through habit alone

  • source of beliefs: internal vs. external

  • adaptive preferences: what we desire changes based on what we can get

  • the diagram are diagnostic lenses

Seeing the invisible beliefs that run us

• the invisible beliefs we inherit

  • the sacred & the profane

  • we treat other’s self as a little god, and act accordingly

  • friction-chasing: where the suppressed self points

• the invisible beliefs we inhabit

  • the holy cows within us: unquestioned ways we perceive

  • meditation: dehabituating reactivity

  • emotional friction is where the gold lies

  • resources for untangling emotional knots

  • art as tool for self-investigation

  • befriending the unoriginal, the psychotic, and the obscene

Greatness through curiosity, not self-coercion

• curiosity & boredom as compass

  • okay, but how do you actually find your final ends?

  • when you simply don’t know what you want

  • curiosity as drive, boredom as clarification

  • research is what happens when curiosity meets the unknown

• why willpower is not enough and what works instead

  • winning the nobel prize through piddling around with the wobbling plate

  • greatness does not come solely from pushing yourself into it

  • willpower of the head, willpower of the heart

  • attention as mechanical, scarce resource vs attention as blooming, growing process

  • the cure to addiction is a life worth not escaping

  • orthodox priest on lust: don’t fight sensuality with anti-sensuality

  • why did most Vietnam war soldiers give up heroin spontaneously

  • paying careful attention to what enlivens you

  • unfolding over imposing

Disciplined play to change your life

• yin & yang

  • constraints are not the enemy of creativity

  • discipline is not a lack of freedom, but a harmonious relationship with time

• playful rigorous experimentation

  • morning pages as a laboratory

  • social anxiety experiment: leave 5 conversations

  • why morning pages over other journalling practices?

  • realizing writing wasn’t actually my medium

  • changing your life through intentional playful experimentation

  • constraints are both subtractive and additive

  • heat sinks: solving procrastination

  • building instinct and self-trust to successfully pursue your true desires

Recap & outro

Timestamps

00:00 - [Intro]
00:18 - process over product + finding our deepest beliefs through felt contact
00:42 - [Chapter 1] The life-long values that drive you
00:53 - final ends are our irreducible beliefs
01:09 - ecosystem of final ends
01:25 - what runs us is what we cannot see
01:54 - the belief diagram
01:59 - vitality of beliefs: alive vs. dead
02:17 - a belief can die through habit alone
04:00 - source of beliefs: internal vs. external
05:09 - adaptive preferences: what we desire changes based on what we can get
06:11 - the diagram are diagnostic lenses
06:26 - [Chapter 2] Seeing the invisible beliefs that run us
06:33 - the sacred & the profane
06:58 - we treat other’s self as a little god, and act accordingly
08:42 - friction-chasing: where the suppressed self points
10:13 - the holy cows within us: unquestioned ways we perceive
10:37 - meditation: dehabituating reactivity
12:48 - emotional friction is where the gold lies
13:28 - resources for untangling emotional knots
14:01 - art as tool for self-investigation
15:18 - befriending the unoriginal, the psychotic, and the obscene
15:47 - [Chapter 3] Greatness through curiosity, not self-coercion
16:07 - okay, but how do you actually find your final ends?
16:46 - when you simply don’t know what you want
17:06 - curiosity as drive, boredom as clarification
19:12 - research is what happens when curiosity meets the unknown
19:44 - winning the Nobel Prize through piddling around with the wobbling plate
20:31 - greatness does not come solely from pushing yourself into it
21:08 - willpower of the head, willpower of the heart
21:19 - attention as mechanical, scarce resource vs attention as blooming, growing process
21:54 - the cure to addiction is a life worth not escaping
22:18 - orthodox priest on lust: don’t fight sensuality with anti-sensuality
23:12 - why did most Vietnam war soldiers give up heroin spontaneously
24:59 - paying careful attention to what enlivens you
25:14 - unfolding over imposing
25:58 - [Chapter 4] Disciplined play to change your life
26:16 - constraints are not the enemy of creativity
26:21 - discipline is not a lack of freedom, but a harmonious relationship with time
27:18 - playful rigorous experimentation
27:50 - morning pages as a laboratory
28:43 - social anxiety experiment: leave 5 conversations
30:25 - why morning pages over other journalling practices?
30:50 - realizing writing wasn’t actually my medium
31:54 - changing your life through intentional playful experimentation
32:24 - constraints are both subtractive and additive
32:59 - heat sinks: solving procrastination
34:37 - building instinct and self-trust to successfully pursue your true desires
35:22 - [Recap & outro]

Transcript

Intro

Hi, welcome back to Thinking Out Loud. I started this year with a goal of trying to make more creative work, which has led me down this exploration of play and experimentation, and also in this digging deeper, trying to uncover what really drives me underneath all of this. I want to give you a theoretical and practical field report on two ideas, the first being creating the right process can matter more than obsessing over the right output, and the second of how long-standing values can come not from being imposed, top-down, and followed, but rather found and felt for right fit, bottom-up, through being tested against the world.

The life-long values that drive you

Final ends

We’ll begin with that last question. How do you figure out what matters to you, those most distilled and foundational reasons that drive all that you do? Aristotle talks about these as the telos, the final ends, them being final because you can’t reduce your reasons further beyond this. These become the things that are pursued purely for their own sake, rather than for some even deeper reason.

Whereas Aristotle believed that we have one ultimate final end, eudaimonia, Elijah Millgram believes that we instead are constructed from a multiplicity of final ends that evolve, change, and even compete with each other over time.

On top of this, when we begin to try and find what our final ends are, we run into one big problem, which is that so many of our beliefs are so ingrained in us that we have a hard time seeing what they are. It’s a bit of a fish-in-the-water sort of situation, despite them having a tremendous influence over us, over our actions, over how we perceive the world, what we care about and what we put our time and attention towards.

The belief diagram

And so to help with this, I came up with this chart to categorize some of our beliefs. The axis of the vitality of beliefs is about how those beliefs influence us.

Beliefs that are alive are embodied living truths. They are beliefs that actively shape how we are in the world, our actions, our thoughts, what we care about. Beliefs that are dead have become rote and habitual. And I mean dead in a trickier sense than just the fact that we no longer believe in them, but rather these are beliefs that we may still say that we hold, but that because they have become so habitual, they no longer have any influence over our actions.

Because of this, they no longer truly animate us. They have become things that we go through the motions of. An example of this may be somebody who starts volunteering at a food bank because they really care about alleviating suffering, this alleviation of suffering being a final end for them. And so they show up on Saturdays to start packing boxes of food.

In the beginning, they see the faces of those who they’re serving and feel spurred by this, feel the moral weight of their actions and are energized. However, you can imagine after a couple of years, they still show up at the shifts. They still pack the boxes, but there is something that has changed. Their internal relationship to this has hardened.

They will still tell you that they really believe in the alleviation of suffering, that this is why they still show up, but that sense of conviction, that embodied feeling of why this matters to them has been lost. Their belief is no longer truly present in their experience. The habituation has led to this work feeling mechanical, and although they still hold this belief, the final end no longer sustains them. The belief has become dead.

Before we begin discerning the vitality of any particular belief, we first have to be able to see them as a whole. The external and internal axis, this source of belief, helps us see where they come from. External beliefs are inherited through culture, and so this could include something like your parents as well as any kind of community that you’re a part of, whether that’s your university, a religion that you’re a part of, or even that friend group that you’ve been a part of for a really, really long time. For instance, Christianity has a whole set of beliefs that it has its believers take on, and these beliefs that I’m talking about, again, aren’t just ideas in our head.

These are things that move us, that we really embody. Internal beliefs are beliefs that have personal resonance, and is typically something that is discovered by us, rather than just taken on from a culture that we’re a part of. For instance, these are beliefs that could come from reading a book, or through a really good conversation, through experience, or specific, very inspirational individuals. This distinction is not clean, it blends.

For instance, the external will influence the internal. Jon Elster, the social philosopher, talks about this in terms of adaptive preferences. This can really be described through the fable of the fox and the grapes. There is a fox who comes to a grape tree, and wants to get this grape that is very high on a branch.

He tries a couple of times, jumping to try and get it, and failing, and eventually he gives up. As he’s walking away, he mutters to himself that the grapes were sour anyway. What we desire, what we value, changes based off of what we can realistically get. For instance, if, systematically, women are blocked out of the workforce, their desires will begin to shift to prefer domesticity.

More personally, and I’m sure you’ve seen some example of this, if somebody cannot get somebody else romantically, eventually, over time, they may see them more and more as unattractive, as somebody who weren’t suitable for them anyway. I want to emphasize here that this isn’t about external beliefs being bad and internal beliefs being good, but rather just as a way to diagnose and to see more clearly where our beliefs are coming from, what beliefs we hold.

Seeing the invisible beliefs that run us

The invisible beliefs we inherit

More practically, a way to begin to spot those external beliefs is through ritual. Émile Durkheim, the father of sociology, talks about religion as being born out of the experience of the sacred and the profane realms and the movement between them. The sacred is that which is powerful, external, set apart, prohibited, charged. And the profane is that which is the mundane, the everyday, the diffuse. Erving Goffman, a sociologist that came after Durkheim, built on his idea and began to see how in modern society we treat the individual self as a little god.

And this can be understood through two kinds of rituals that we do, avoidance rituals and presentational rituals. Avoidance rituals are about not profaning the sacred. This includes not intruding on somebody’s personal life uninvited, not touching them without permission, not bringing up topics that would embarrass them, not staring at them. You treat the other person’s individual self as something that could be contaminated without a proper protocol of approach.

Presentational rituals are the positive side of that. This is the active honoring of that little god. This shows up in things as small as greeting someone when we see them. This is an acknowledgment that their existence matters.

This also includes asking them how they are, laughing at their jokes, paying attention to them when they speak, complimenting them. All of these things are small offerings at the altar of their selfhood. Even when somebody does have authority, notice how they begin to couch their terms in a much more deferential way. For example, a boss, rather than issuing a direct command, might say, hey, when you get the chance, could you please maybe take a look at this?

There is an honoring of the subordinate itself, even while exercising direct power over them. I bring these examples up so that you can begin to use them as a kind of structural analogy to places in your own life. A way that I like to begin investigating this line of thought is through this idea of friction chasing, which is to investigate the places where you run into internal friction or resistance, where things don’t feel quite right. They feel inhibited.

You flinch away from them. You cringe at them. For example, if you imagine how you are in one friend group versus another, which parts of you become highlighted, which parts of you feel easily expressed, and which parts of you don’t, which parts of you stays hidden, stays a little strange if you were to bring it up in that environment. The parts that you suppress, that is a point of friction.

And by beginning to investigate that, you begin to see the differences in culture and you begin to spot what are those rituals that you’re always operating under? What are those invisible constraints that shape your behavior and shape what you value? This can come through things like, is there a group of friends that you feel comfortable complaining as default, but feel quite uncomfortable when you do have good news to share? As you begin to see the differences in how you show up, those places where you stay consistent that draws a through line through all of the different selves that shows up in different environments, those pieces can also begin to point to the final ends that you hold.

The invisible beliefs we inhabit

And so that question of what we’re treating as sacred in a culture can also be turned internally. We can broaden this by thinking about it in terms of habitual perception. What are the beliefs and ways of seeing the world that we don’t question, that we don’t touch? Or perhaps at a more fundamental level, are unable to question because we’re not even able to see them.

We can think about one part of meditation as working directly with this capacity to be able to see our habitual responses, to create a gap between an event and our reaction to that event so that we have more choice. David Chapman puts it in this sequence.

1. Something happens. So for example, a car cuts into your lane while you’re driving.

2. You perceive the event. And so you see the car and you slam on the brakes.

3. You immediately interpret it. That guy is a selfish, reckless asshole that almost caused me an accident. He just disrespected me. He shouldn’t be on the road.

4. An emotion arises based on the meaning that you gave the event. Anger. Your hands grip the wheel tighter. You feel a flush in your chest.

5. The energy of the emotion demands action. There’s an urgency there. There’s a sensation that you have to respond in some way. And finally

6. You do something that feels mandatory based off of your emotional interpretation. And so you honk, you tailgate them, you drive quicker than them to cut them off. You rant about it to your passenger for the next 10 minutes. You swear and mutter under your breath.

Steps three to six are all unnecessarily limited. There may be other ways to interpret the event. There might not even be a need to interpret the event at all.

And similarly, there might be other ways to react to the emotion. And it might be the most appropriate to not even react at all. One way that this shows up is that idea of imagining that that guy is speeding off because his wife is about to give birth to a child or there is some other kind of emergency. The reinterpretation of that same event changes our emotions to it and changes our reaction to it.

And so what meditation can do is to cultivate a kind of spaciousness, a spacious freedom through which you can break our habitual patterning and to perceive freshly and act differently. One way to spot more of these moments is to return to that idea of friction chasing. When in your life do things feel like it breaks down a little bit? For instance, why did that comment at that party bother you so much?

Why does this change in routine feel so destabilizing? What are the times that you felt disoriented and confused? All of this emotional charge is a signal towards some load-bearing belief. I’ll give you a personal example at the end of this essay where I realized that part of the reason why going to parties was so difficult for me was because I didn’t know how to exit them.

But this principle goes very very deep and in fact some of our best emotional and therapeutic modalities work exactly with this idea of investigating where your emotional resistances come up. If you would like to learn more about this I would recommend Joe Hudson’s podcast and work, Art of Accomplishment, as well as the books Power of Focusing, No Bad Parts, Already Free, and if you want something a little bit more theoretical, Unlocking the Emotional Brain. I hope that these will be good trailheads for you. Another way to begin to free ourselves from our habitual ways of perceiving is through art.

My previous video essay was on the topic of art and attention, and of how one way to understand art is that of different ways to provoke in the viewer an examination of their own psyche. As Irwin puts it, perception itself is the art act. And so art then becomes this tool for self-investigation, for thinking about and feeling into why did this thing make me feel so repulsed, and in fact what even is my relationship to repulsion? The Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky has this really wonderful idea of art as dehabituation.

He says that the job of art is to make the world strange so that we might see it again rather than simply recognizing it out of habit. Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life. It exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. Good art is embodied and participatory.

And a final example I’ll give here is improv. One of the books that has impacted me the most deeply has been Impro, written by Keith Johnstone. One of my favorite ideas in there is how he talks about the most creative ideas are the ones that are unoriginal, psychotic, and obscene. Each of these are a different kind of visceral fear that we have, and one of the greatest lessons of improv is that in befriending these fears, there lies our creativity.

Greatness through curiosity, not self-coercion

Curiosity & boredom as compass

And here we come to an important question. I’ve just spent the last while talking about the ways that we can dehabituate our perception, noticing the forces that are operating on you and those obstacles that are preventing you from seeing clearly, so that you can respond with a sharp mind and from those desires that are close to your heart. However, once you’ve gotten here, how do you actually find those final ends that are yours to live? Sometimes the process of clarifying and clearing away by itself reveals them, but oftentimes we’re left without direction in the space of possibility.

One answer might be to just pick one and commit to it. Now there are two ways that this can fail. The first is that that final end may go dead on you. You can still hold on to it, articulate it, but it no longer has that driving, animating force.

We talked about this earlier with that example of the person who volunteers at the food bank. The second is that there will inevitably be times in our lives where we just simply won’t know what our final ends are, whether that’s in relationship to what we’re going to choose in college or work or our romantic relationships and so on. In these moments, we actually just don’t know what we’re looking for. To return to improv, improv requires this kind of open stance, this open curiosity towards our own internal experience, this willingness to freefall into the unknown, guided only by that explorative spirit.

If you might recall Millgram, the one who said that we are constituted from a plurality of final ends, he interestingly said that this is the answer, that curiosity and fascinatingly boredom are the ways that we stare ourselves towards the discovery of our final ends. He refers to when we’re exploring uncharted intellectual territory. In those moments, there isn’t actually a clear why behind the things that we’re doing. It could just be guided purely off of instinct, and there, the decision between why you might choose one book to read versus another is ungrounded in a final end.

In those cases, that is your curiosity at work, and if curiosity is what moves you towards something and sustains that interest, boredom is the signal of pause. It points to when something may be at your limits, when there is something unresolved. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you should just stop doing it, but that there is some kind of emotional block, some sort of signal towards a deeper motivation that is pointing to how you are right now out of alignment. Curiosity and boredom serves as these two counterbalancing forces.

One is the energy of yes, of creating possibility, and the other is that of no, one of clarification and clearing out. Both, and in particular boredom, are important to sit with, to not be swayed into some impulse to scroll your phone, because in the sitting of them is where that inner intuition lies.

Adapted from Kanjun’s diagram

Kanjun too has this beautiful piece called Research as Understanding, where research comes not just from this process of straining hard in order to try and discover something new through the scientific process. Rather, if learning is something that happens when you’re trying to understand something that somebody else already understands, research is what happens as a byproduct of your curiosity when you chase to try and understand the things that nobody else understands yet.

Why willpower fails and what works instead

Feynman has this great anecdote in his book where he talks about how after being burnt out of doing physics, he just started to do things for the fun of it. And from that place of curiosity and play, and for no other reason than that, that eventually led to his work, which won him his Nobel Prize. He says of this process, it was effortless. It was easy to play with these things.

It was like uncorking a bottle. Everything flowed out effortlessly. Almost try to resist it. There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was.

The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that of piddling around with the wobbling plate. And I really want to emphasize the importance of play. I think so many of us, myself included for sure, seems to have this belief that great things can only come out of this self-flagellatory process where we push ourselves with our willpower towards greatness. Now, I’ll need a whole other video to talk more in depth about this supposed binary between discipline constraints and spontaneous creativity of how Yang structure can work well with Yin flow. But for now, I’ll start with the latter.

Joe Hudson, who I mentioned before, talks about how willpower is needed if it’s a desire that comes from the head, and it is not needed if it’s a desire that comes from the heart. And I think this is intuitive. We have sort of two ways that we typically think about attention.

One is attention as this mechanical process where it is a scarce resource that we have to allot carefully throughout a day. And the other is attention as this blooming, growing process where when we are in flow, it seems to naturally catch on itself. It seems to actually, in fact, grow and expand over time the deeper that we get in it. I think something that is relevant here is addiction.

QC talks about it like this. Willpower is really not the main weapon you have against the addiction nexus. The cure to addiction is to make your life feel good enough that you don’t want to escape it. That’s it.

It’s not easy, but it’s simple. Eat nutritious food, get restful sleep, feel, breathe, act. And this has resonance across a bunch of places. I remember this orthodox priest talking about lust, where he talks about lust as this distortion of the heart’s God-given power to orient externally to service, self-sacrifice, and care for others.

And it becomes distorted when we turn that inward. And so the solve is not to fight sensuality with anti-sensuality. It isn’t actually through repression, but rather giving the heart tasks that it wants to do. And so in this case, he recommends service without self-gain.

And so, for instance, going to volunteer at a food bank, or helping the old lady cross the street with her groceries. These things begin to train the heart to open up towards these more wholesome desires that is actually much more aligned with what it actually wants. Another angle into this is Mark Lewis’s work, where he has a different frame of addiction than we normally think of it. Typically, we believe that addiction is a biophysical phenomenon, where people get dependent on some kind of chemical, and the absence of that chemical creates that craving towards it.

If we don’t get chemical, we suffer in the same way as though we are lacking food. Lewis says that unfortunately this model isn’t complete. For instance, a lot of people spontaneously give up their addictions in their 30s. And a bigger historical example of this is through the Vietnam War, where in Vietnam, soldiers get addicted to opioids and heroin, but when they return to the US, the vast majority of them actually just give it up spontaneously.

And so if there isn’t that chemical in the body, why is there not that compulsion? The answer is actually quite similar to what we were just talking about. What kinds of rituals that we’re operating under, the cultural environments that we’re in, the people that we spend our time around, have a real influence over who we are. And Lewis talks about it in a similar way.

He talks about it as this sort of agent to arena relationship, where a soldier in Vietnam is a very, very different self and environment coupling than a civilian in a peaceful country. Beyond this, how you create a good environment, both externally and internally, then clearly has a huge influence over your ability to see yourself clearly and to pursue the things that enliven you. More than that, if you pay careful attention to what enlivens you, to what captures your curiosity and attention, and build your life such that you can follow them over time, you will begin to build a life that is powerfully and uniquely yours. Henrik Karlsson talks beautifully about this process.

In his essay, Everything That Turned Out Well In My Life, followed the same design process. In it, he talks about how you can get to what you want, or perhaps better put, what works for you in particular, not through imposing a top-down fantasy, but rather working in this attuned design and action process that unfolds you into being in the career, the relationships, the experiences that you want. This is very much in resonance with everything that we’ve been talking about so far. In that essay, he gives many great suggestions and questions in order to help you enter into this process of unfolding yourself.

Disciplined play to change your life

Yin & yang

Building on top of that, I want to give some suggestions for how to balance this bottom-up creativity with top-down discipline, this yin and yang, through disciplined play as rigorous experimentation. It’s done not through hindering the creative process, but rather setting up the environment, the constraints within which creativity can flourish. Rick Rubin noted the same thing in his book, The Creative Act. In it, he says that consider establishing a consistent framework around your creative process.

It is often the case that the more set in your personal regime, the more freedom you have within that structure to express yourself. Discipline and freedom seem like opposites. In reality, they are partners. Discipline is not a lack of freedom, it is a harmonious relationship with time.

Managing your schedule and daily habits well is a necessary component to free up the practical and creative capacity to make great art. It could even be said that a focused efficiency in life is more important than one in work. Approaching the practical aspects of your day with military precision allows the artistic windows to be opened in childlike freedom. Like how I talked about those presentational and avoidance rituals, I want to take these suggestions that I’m about to give you, these examples, as that.

As these frameworks within which you can build off of, play with, break and riff on. They are very much provocations for you to see how you might adapt it into your own life, into your own creative process. To help inspire a seeking of the forms of discipline and structure that work well for you.

Playful rigorous experimentation

This has taken form in the shape of morning pages, which was created by Julia Cameron. I didn’t understand experimentation until I had this space where every single morning I was forced to write at least 750 words. This is an alteration on the original format of writing by hand for three pages long, but I knew myself enough to know that if I were to do it in the original format, it would not stick. It would be way too laborious.

And so I adapted it to this digital form and instead kept track of it by word count. Now what this did was to give me the space to recount not just what happened in the day, but because I had to keep on writing to begin to analyze it in detail. It led me to begin to dissect, reflect and chart forward new paths. For example, this process has been really helpful in making me understand my social anxiety better.

How it happened for me was I would go to a party the previous night and then the next morning I would begin to reflect on it. What went well, what didn’t, and in fact, what even is an interaction? And in there I broke it down into three stages. The entry, the conversation itself, and then the exit.

With this framework, I could see that I was doing okay with the conversation. I struggled some with the entry, but where I really got stuck was the exit. I didn’t know how to exit conversations in a way that felt good, in a way that didn’t make me feel awkward or feel like I was disrespecting somebody. This helped me see really clearly that one of the reasons why I had that social anxiety was because I did not trust myself to exit well.

I didn’t trust myself to actually leave when I felt uncomfortable, when I felt bored, when I felt like I just wanted to be somewhere else. During the next morning pages, when I had an upcoming gathering that night, I came up with an experiment where I deliberately worked on exiting interactions whenever I got bored or tired, and I set myself the goal of exiting five conversations. This actually was fantastic. It gave me this embodied sense of evidence that I could actually take care of my own needs, that I was actually capable of moving myself to where I want to be.

Needing to hit a word count was absolutely crucial for me. I’ve tried other journaling practices over the years, and none of them have stuck. But there’s something about being pushed to the edges where it just didn’t feel like I had anything else to say, but needing to still write. That sitting with that space of boredom began opening up this deeper form of investigation.

The next example is not something that I realized through the morning pages, but is very much the kind of thing that I’m investigating in there. I’ve been trying to write for some years now, and it’s been this stop-start process where again, nothing has really stuck. It was only recently that I thought to question if writing was actually even the right medium for me. And in that questioning, I got to thinking, what was it that I wanted to get out of writing?

And were there other forms, other mediums that could better serve that process, that was actually better fitted for me? And through that, I realized that actually, speeches and presentations were my preferred format for much of my life. And so this is how I landed on these video essays, which has so far been exactly what I needed. It required me to not be so tunnel vision on writing, to begin to question why I was so attached to this idea of writing.

And through that process, be able to consider what did I actually want out of it? And are there other ways to achieve those same underlying desires? And so this ability to be able to take a step back, and more importantly, to be able to track this over time, to have a place where I am actively building on top of what I learned and what I recognized and saw the days before. These are all the ingredients that have made Morning Pages such an effective laboratory for me.

A place where I can take apart my life analytically, and then be able to play with them in a very intentional way. Some other experiments that I’ve been running with the Morning Pages have involved shaping what options are available to me. You see, a constraint is both something that removes optionality, for example, limiting the use of social media on my phone to five minutes a day, but it can also be done through adding something. This Morning Pages practice itself is a great example of that.

If the very first thing that I do in the morning is to open up my laptop and begin typing, then during that time, I can’t look at my phone. I can’t be on Twitter and scrolling. Another way that I’ve been approaching this question of shaping my options is through trying to solve procrastination for myself. I realized that there was a sense that this in-between state, where I get caught by something, is the same when I’m procrastinating on doing some work, as it is when, for some reason, hours of my day just disappear, and I’m left at the end kind of dazed and completely unsure as to what I spent my time on.

And I realized that this came from me trying to avoid some uncomfortable or difficult emotion, or where the excitement of doing something that I actually want to do has a lot more friction than simply going on my phone. I like to think about this dynamic in terms of heat sinks. Heat sinks are these places in thermal systems where if you have excess heat, you have to dump it somewhere. You have to move that excess energy.

In the same way, when I have this excess energy in my emotional system that I can’t handle right now, it has to be dumped somewhere. And so, in this analogy, phones are one heat sink. But there are heat sinks which leave you feeling more energized afterwards than more drained. Instead of leaving an emotionally compromised Vincent to figure that out, to figure out which heat sinks he wants to do that will leave him feeling more rejuvenated afterwards, this is something that I can begin planning out ahead of time in my morning pages, and then during the day actually test out and see if they work as I want them to.

Much of this is not only about finding what works for you, but also about building an instinct around your true desires, as well as a self-trust that you are able to pursue and fulfill what you actually want. The more that you’re able to successfully do what feels good to you, the more you become self-aligned, and in that, you’ll loop back around. to be able to notice more and more sharply the things that you actually want to do. It tightens that feedback loop between you doing something in the world and getting feedback that your instinct around it was correct or not. And then over time, as you begin to track and begin to change and evolve and iterate, you’re able to hone that instinct better and better.

Recap & outro

And so we just covered a lot. Let me do a recap. The first was to investigate what prevented us from seeing and feeling clearly what we already value. I gave the model of the belief diagram, with one axis being the source of belief, the internal or external source, and the other being the vitality of beliefs, from dead to alive.

These were presented as one way to help make visible the invisible structures that are constantly influencing us. After giving some tools for dehabituating our perception, we then talked about some ways to find those final ends, not through rigidly following some imposed or constructed top-down structure, but rather through this bottom-up process of being guided by curiosity and boredom, to stare us through the times when those final ends are uncertain. After that, we covered some more practical details around that bottom-up process, of the importance of play, of tuning into those things that make you feel alive, balanced with a more rigorous structure that turns those freeform explorations into experiments that can build on itself over time, through being in very conscious contact with the feedback loop between yourself and the environment that you’re in.

As I’m still in the middle of all of this myself, I would love to hear about how this stands for you, and to hear about any of the experiments that you’ve been already running in your own life. And so, until next time, take care.

References

People & works referenced

• Aristotle on telos

• Elijah Millgram. One of the main inspirations for this video essay came from his essay “On being bored out of your mind” - he doesn’t talk about the multiplicity of telos there, but does talk about curiosity and boredom

• Jon Elster on adaptive preferences

• Émile Durkheim on rituals and the sacred & the profane

• Erving Goffman on the individual self as little god via avoidance rituals and presentational rituals

• David Chapman on meditation and spacious freedom: https://vividness.live/spacious-freedom

• My previous video essay on art and perception:

• Viktor Shklovsky, from Danielle Dutton’s “A Picture Held Us Captive”. H/T Sundus for surfacing it, see fuller quote here:

• Keith Johnstone, Impro. “unoriginal, psychotic, obscene”

• Kanjun Qiu, Research as Understanding:

• Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! (I haven’t actually read this book, but the excerpt comes from there. Highly recommend seeking out the full excerpt)

• Joe Hudson on willpower:

• QC on addiction:

• Bishop Irenei on lust:

• Marc Lewis on addiction as not just chemical (learnt from John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series)

• Henrik Karlsson, Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process:

Escaping Flatland

Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process

Giacometti’s studio…

Read more

2 years ago · 4293 likes · 99 comments · Henrik Karlsson

• Rick Rubin, The Creative Act (have only read bits and pieces)

• Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way (have only worked with the morning pages practice)

Understanding internal resistance

• Joe Hudson’s Art of Accomplishment - his Twitter is great, as is his Youtube channel and podcast

• Power of Focusing (better introduction than the canonical “Focusing”)

• No Bad Parts (great on IFS, just ignore his understanding of the “self” in meditation)

• Already Free (western therapy in dialogue with meditation)

• Unlocking the Emotional Brain (underlying mechanism to all effective therapy)

Description

Most people don’t “get” modern art, believing it’s too abstract. I think it’s actually because modern art is, in some ways, *too* direct, touches too intimately on our direct perceptual and emotional experience. This is one of the great outcomes of the developments in the art world during the 20th century, and in this video essay I trace how it came to be so, and provide a way to encounter modern art that’ll hopefully help you have a richer experience.

Links

Youtube:

Timestamps

• 00:00 - good art provokes us into the here-now, in an embodied way, to consider the things that matter

• 01:06 - art history is a study in how our attention has changed over time

• 01:39 - art as inhabiting the world of the artist from their perspective

• 02:26 - flattening of the value hierarchy: from Jesus the King to just the color red

• 03:05 - Medieval art: spiritual hierarchy

• 03:33 - the Renaissance: the dignity of the human

• 04:20 - the Baroque: the Catholic Church engineers attention

• 05:06 - the Dutch Golden Age: where modernity, domesticity, and the stock market were born

• 06:24 - Romanticism: meaning after God

• 06:42 - Realism: the unadorned truth of ordinary life

• 07:05 - Impressionism: painting how perception feels

• 07:53 - the Cambrian explosion of modern art

• 08:21 - Rothko paints landscapes of meaning

• 08:47 - Cubism: embodied seeing

• 10:33 - Hockney’s collages: seeing as fragmented snapshots

• 10:44 - Light and Space: the environment is never neutral

• 12:01 - John Cage’s 4’33”: the coughing is the music

• 12:53 - perception itself is the art act

• 13:32 - Marina Abramović: presence as medium

• 14:10 - games as crafted modes of being, transforming through play

• 15:28 - metaphor versus presence

• 16:05 - being here now is uncomfortable, and that’s what makes you alive

• 17:00 - a little more aware of how beautiful the world is

References

• Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees - Lawrence Weschler

• Ways of Seeing - John Berger

• True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney - Lawrence Weschler

• Games: Agency As Art - C Thi. Nguyen

• Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation - Bruce Tift

Transcript

Good Art, Attention, and Ways of Seeing

Welcome to Thinking Out Loud. I want to talk about art and perception, mainly this idea that good art provokes us into being in the here and now to consider the things that matter.

I want to give you my idiosyncratic view of a particular slice of art history and through that, hopefully equip you with a new and interesting way to encounter art and even better yet, the mundane world around you so that you can see the pavement, the clouds, the particular interactions of your loved ones in a new light.

A lot of this was spurred by this book, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. I adore this book. It’s been such a rich source of inspiration, and if you want to dig in a little bit more of some of the things we’re gonna talk about, this is a great one to start with. And I’ll be coming back to the subject of this book, Robert Irwin, later on.

And so the progression of art could be thought of as a progression of how our attention has changed over time from upward and outward to downwards and inwards. It shows us what mattered to people and increasingly over time, what mattered to the particular artists themselves.

One way to experience art is to understand it as a glimpse into the mind of the artist, to feel the things that they’ve felt and to notice the things that they’ve seen.

I’m gonna grab another book here by John Berger. It’s called Ways of Seeing. I’ve just begun this one, but I think the title really speaks to a way of approaching this same idea. There are multiple ways of seeing, and art can be thought of as encapsulated experiences of one of those ways.

Through doing so, through engaging with art like this, I think that with the best of it, we can expand beyond ourselves through contrast and deepen those parts that are most intimate to us through resonance.

The Flattening of the Value Hierarchy

And so what are some of these ways of seeing? One way to frame this arc of art history can be through both what I mentioned before, the shift in attention, or through the way that Irwin puts it as the flattening of the value hierarchy.

First, we started with only depicting religious subjects of Jesus the King, and then eventually it became this particular king, then a wealthy merchant, then a handmaiden, then the handmaiden’s red shawl, and then just the color red. And in fact, even beyond that, then the perception of the color red.

And so how did we get there?

The Historical Arc of Attention

We can start back at the top with medieval art. If you see art from that period, one of the first things that you notice is that it is not naturalistic, meaning that what’s depicted in there does not look like how we, in quote unquote, real life see it. Things are depicted instead based off of spiritual hierarchy. The figures that are depicted bigger are spiritually more important.

When it came around to the Renaissance, the predominant philosophy was humanism. Humanism in the sense of the humanities, because I believe around that time there was a rediscovery of the Greek and Roman canon. As a result of studying the humanities, there became a more intimate focus on human potential, on the dignity of the human figure and psyche. This was one factor among many that led to the naturalistic depiction that you see in paintings in a Mona Lisa or in the Sistine Chapel. It’s no coincidence also that it was around this time that perspective began to become developed.

One of the next major periods that happened was the Baroque era. The art during this period was made to engineer the viewer’s attention through light and drama and emotion. It started to shift away from the perfectly balanced art of the High Renaissance into something that was deliberately trying to draw the viewer in. And the reason behind this was quite funny actually. The Catholic Church was trying to win people back after the split through the Protestant Reformation. They used these paintings to draw people back in via felt experience. Social media and advertising are not novel in its attempts to manipulate our attention and create visual propaganda.

Around the same time that the Baroque era was happening, there was also the Dutch Golden Age. It was during then that we started to get still lives and landscapes and depictions of that wealthy merchant class. This era in general was fascinating for a lot of reasons. For instance, a lot of our modern notions of family, of domesticity came from this period, that of the single family home where you have just the parents with their kids because there are no longer servants, where the notion of the woman being in the kitchen and the kitchen being her domain, of the woman raising the child on her own because you no longer used maidens, of women being married regardless of her social position or wealth. All of these things came from this period, and not only that, the stock market too was first created or popularized during then.

Now, while this set precedents for giving serious attention to ordinary life, it wasn’t a direct representation as all of the paintings were still laden with virtue and vice and morality.

Eventually, we get Romanticism, which is where the artist’s inner state becomes central. One way to understand what this period was about was a search for meaning within oneself, given that the external divine was upended through the Enlightenment.

At around the 1840s, we then get Realism, which in contrast to the Dutch Golden Age, gave our first really direct and unadorned representation of the working class, of ordinary life. This was a period where social truth was what was put at the highest, and anti-idealization.

Next came Impressionism, which was already beginning to be a response to the introduction of the camera. Impressionism was the depiction of how perception subjectively felt. A lot of it was the painting of how light moves, of how color change and forms shift in and out of focus. You started getting plein airs as a serious output, which is where people go live to the site of what they’re gonna paint and paint it on the spot. This becomes the main production rather than as a preliminary step for the, quote-unquote, “serious studio paintings.”

Modern Art and the Shift Toward Perception

With the introduction of the camera as well as World War I, we get the Cambrian explosion that is modern art. And so you can see in reaction to these, the reckoning with the horror of the Great World War and the resulting fragmentation of meaning, as well as the wrestling with the purpose and the future of painting, given that it has lost its advantage of pictorial or realistic depiction.

One of the answers was Expressionism. I think you can see this in one of its later iterations, Abstract Expressionism, particularly Rothko, which I love Rothko, one of my absolute favorite artists. And I think it’s because he paints landscapes of meaning that is meant to evoke in you, the viewer, in as direct way as possible, the emotions of grief and sorrow and profound joy.

Another answer was Cubism. And one way to understand Cubism was that if much of the history was this reckoning of what subject could be depicted, whether it is only religious subjects, as we mentioned before, or a handmaiden, or like in Realism, peasants, here it began to take an even bigger step back. It started to question the value hierarchy of the figure and the ground itself. Or another way of putting it is the content of the painting, the thing that’s depicted, and the background within which it lies.

It also responded to the challenge of photography by depicting what it cannot, namely time, multiple vantage points, and as David Hockney puts it, “The sense of the lived and living experience.”

To stay with Hockney a little bit more, he said that, “Cubism, I realized during those days, is about our own bodily presence in the world. It’s about the world, yes, but ultimately about where we are in it, how we are in it. It’s about the kind of perception a human being can have in the midst of living.”

And if you think about it, when you see something, when you look at something, let’s say meeting a person for the first time, it isn’t like a camera. We don’t just take all of them in at once in a single moment. We might first look at their eyes, and then their shirt, and then their nose, and then back to the eyes. It is in these fragmented snapshots that then gets collated together into an impression.

Hockney’s own photo collages, which were made in the 1980s, are a direct extension of that Cubist answer.

If Cubism was a dealing with the question of the figure-ground relationship within a painting, the Light and Space artists started at this point and then did one step back and started to consider the figure and ground relationship between the painting, the artwork, and the entire space around it.

The environment, the physical environment that surrounds a painting always has an effect on it. For instance, this white wall here, or you can look at any white wall around you, is not actually white. It is yellow or tinted with purple in the shadows and maybe a subtle sense of green. There is an immense amount of richness there, and all of that richness has subtle effects on how we perceive a painting. The environment is never neutral. It is always deeply intertwined with what’s in it.

I think a great way to grok this is through the shadow checker illusion, where the A and B tiles at first appear to be completely different shades, but they’re actually exactly the same. What this is really pointing to is how context-dependent human perception is.

We can see this idea of the environment having an immense influence on the art itself through John Cage’s 4’33”. In this piece of art, a pianist walks to a piano, opens up the lid, and then sits there without playing a note for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. This artwork is about many things, but one of which is this sense that the environment, the sounds, the coughing, the shuffling, the sneezes, all of that is music itself, is part of the music.

And so I think this is a great example of how as history has progressed, we as the participants, we as the viewers, our own perception, our own bodily functions have become more and more embedded into not just the experience of the art, but also the art itself. At a certain point, as Owen puts it, perception itself is the art act.

Art is no longer some object outside of us, but it is us. And I think this is why I like really good abstract art. It forces me into a relationship with myself to investigate my own experience and in that self-investigation, also self-connection.

Performance, Presence, and Games

In the questioning of the medium, fine arts started to broaden up beyond, say, painting and sculpture into much more experimental forms like performance art. In the change of the medium came different ways to investigate human experience.

I think a really good example is Marina Abramovic’s entire body of work, but in particular, I want to talk about her piece, The Artist is Present. In this piece, for almost three months, Abramovic sat in MoMA every single day for the length of the entire day on a wooden chair, silent and motionless. And she simply invited the participants to come sit in front of her and meet her gaze. As Abramovic says herself, this piece is about presence, about engaging with the here now together.

If we consider, as C Thi. Nguyen argues in his book, Games Agency as Art, that what makes games special is not its ability to give delight, to tell stories, to convey a message, but rather it’s through the crafting of agencies, of modes of being for players to inhabit, then we might begin to get a sense of why gamification has been so popular and also the potential, the power of games to change and transform us through having us inhabit ways of being that we wouldn’t have been able to otherwise through play.

Games here include both video games and also things like rock climbing, where the designer uses goals, environments, and abilities as the tools by which they practice their art. And I think the best art does that for us. It moves us into being with what we would typically flinch away from, both profound grief and profound joy, and in that process, changes us.

Metaphor Versus Presence

To return to Irwin, one theme that is a through line through much of his work is this tension between what he calls imagery versus physicality, or in other words, metaphor versus presence.

Especially in his earlier work, he was trying to make things that weren’t Rorschachable, that you couldn’t look at it and say, this is a painting about a lion, or this is something that reminds me of a duck or a rabbit. Because in doing so, it becomes a representation, a re-presentation of something. And in the engaging of the art, you then engage with it through a secondary layer, and you’re no longer with it in its presence, in its energetic field.

And it got me thinking about why that might even be good. In my own meditation practice, being here now is often quite uncomfortable, and yet people speak of it as this self-evident good thing.

I’m reminded here of Bruce Tift’s book, Already Free, which is a dialogue between Western therapy and Buddhism. In it, he talks about how any intense emotion is actually an expression of aliveness, and any attempt to ignore it or push it away or to try and change it is removing ourselves from that raw presence.

To connect most fully with an experience, to be as alive as we can, then, is to be with it just as it is here and now.

Closing

When Irwin was asked what his ambition was a bit later in life, he replied that it’s really just to make you a little bit more aware than you were the day before of how beautiful the world is.

I hope you get to visit a good museum in the near future. Thank you for being here with me. I’ll see you all soon.