This is a talk on Simone Weil’s ideas on attention, desire, God’s withdrawal, and self-emptying. I tie it to art, creativity, and addiction. It came from an event I co-hosted on her essay “Attention and Will”, which served as the starting point and a continual anchor of reference throughout.
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)
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everything: https://linktr.ee/vincent_li
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personal site: https://vincentli.space/
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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 maja, 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.
