Attention, Availability, and the Reading of Books

In “Reflections on the Good Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” Simone Weil defines attention at what is its locus classicus as: “L’attention consiste à suspendre sa pensée, á la laisser disponible, vide, et pénétrable à l’objet…”. Emma Craufurd’s translation, in use since 1951, has it as “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object….” That is accurate, indeed literal, in its entirety save one word. She translates “disponible” as “detached.” That is possible, and, although Weil uses “detached” as part of the lexicon for attention, “disponible” can and ought to carry a somewhat different sense here. The word is common in both French and Spanish. It can mean “open” or “free.” as a bank window might be to the next person in line. But that also means “available,” or “ready for use, ” or “usable.”  Levy and Barabas get this right in their translation, using “available.”

Why is “available” the right translation? What nuance does it add?

Often attention is treated as a matter of empathy, or even noticing, or focusing. As such, it requires something of “unselfing,” as Iris Murdoch aptly put it. But to make one’s thought available, to make oneself available, goes much further. It is to let one’s thought and being be occupied by what one is paying attention to. It is to make room for whatever you are paying attention to.

In ethics, this means more than noticing or empathy. In paying attention to the afflicted, it means to give room in human life to one who no longer has any space to call her own in human life. It is to give her space in my life to occupy and to move in. In this sense, attention is dangerous, but can also be creative, as I argued several years ago. (Springsted 1994) One can also see how this would work with respect to prayer, which Weil thinks is the goal of attention. Attention makes one available to God.

But within its original context, that of an essay on school studies, what would making oneself available to a subject matter, or a book mean? What does it mean for a student or a scholar, or a reader? What would it mean for a teacher?

Students, Scholars, Readers

Students should be taught to be critical readers. This is worthy enough. One’s education should move one beyond credulity, being impressionable, and naivete. One should learn to set various viewpoints against each other, and judge between them rationally. But if I think that is sufficient to being a good reader, I will never engage an author as another speaker who can address me directly, or move me. As a reader I will always remain a “buffered self” as Charles Taylor famously described the modern self.

Such a reader remains unengaged and distant, with identity, context, and the like between the text and the reader. One’s reading is “consumerist” reading as the philosopher Paul E. Griffiths described it. (Griffiths 1999, 44-45) Reading like this is a matter of consuming information, trying to find a “takeaway” that one can use to one’s advantage or one’s own work, and to discard what one has read when it is over and done with. It is to treat the text – and its author – as ephemeral and a product among other products. We read newspapers this way, but our reading in academic subjects is largely the same, even if it is more focused. Academic writing is done with consumerist reading in view: to get published in an acceptable journal, to garner citations, to be compared with similar articles, to be listed on a cv.

Griffiths compares consumerist reading with the way religious people read religious texts. With religious texts, adherents seek to establish relations between the reader and the text. The text becomes a treasure house, full of meaning, and it requires reverence, and patience. In his place, the reader is then seen as someone who has the capacity for mystery, wisdom, and moral being. (Griffiths 1999: 42ff.)

Griffiths’ chief interest is in how practitioners approach religious texts. Not all texts are religious, of course. But Weil herself certainly sees an analogy between such literal religious reading, and the sort of attention she thinks students should give to any text, since she sees a connection between the attention of reading a text and prayer.

What attention as availability requires can be expanded in another direction as well.  An attentive reading of a text, one that makes the reader’s mind available to what is being read, can also be described as resulting in a generous reading of the text. To give a text a generous reading means not dismissing the author out of hand, because, of course, “we know what he is all about,” or because the text serves “no practical purpose.”  Rather, it is to let oneself be led by the text wherever it might take one. It is to be open to surprise, and to wait upon the text in such a way that one is open to being revealed to, which may well mean being changed; hence, the further requirements of attention: being empty and ready to be penetrated. Reading generously means, at least for awhile, to think along with the author and to take him or her seriously, to give the author the benefit of the doubt. It means not shrinking the horizons of the picture the author is offering. There is a truly reprehensible habit of many readers, including scholars, of impatiently and imperiously demanding the relevance of texts, of trimming them and enframing them to answer current questions, which usually means sizing them up (or, usually, down) to answers the reader has already set his or her heart on. This often happens with all sorts of texts, but it especially happens to ancient texts, which are often as foreign to us as texts coming from different cultures, because, of course, they are foreign. But both should be treated with respect, and read generously.

Beverly Gaventa

An example of what reading generously in this way means is found in the 2017 Presidential Address to the Society of Biblical Literature by the noted New Testament scholar, Beverly Gaventa. Gaventa in her address is interested in dealing with the passage in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 13, where he advises his readers to “respect the authorities.” It is not a text that has had an easy time among contemporary scholars, and has often been dismissed. Gaventa begins her examination, not with Paul, but with Simone Weil’s essay on the Iliad, which she describes as a “generous reading.” Gaventa notes how Homer scholars might find Weil’s reading deficient. Weil ignores the “right” topics: ancient Greek honor and shame, the gods’ dealings with humanity, the glorification of warfare, and Homeric authorship. Instead, Weil’s generous reading “probes the Iliad  on the assumption that there is a unified angle of vision, that the text has integrity, even that she has something to learn from it…. [It] begins with a patient attempt to hear the other person, or, in this cases, the other text.” (Gaventa 2017, 21)

What does Gaventa think that Weil can teach us from her reading? The range of the empire of force, the likeness of the enemy to us, our hubris in thinking we are exempt from force. Following Weil’s lead, Gaventa then thinks it is possible to see Paul as worrying about the nature of force and Sin, especially as things that can turn the community’s dealings with outside authorities into an “us” and “them”. She goes on to say to the scholarly community, the community that habitually divides itself into “us” and “them.” that if the scholarly community continually avoids reading generously, “if the only words our students hear from us about our texts are words of distrust and suspicion, it is hard to see a long-term future for our enterprise.” (Ibid.)

Teachers

What attention, especially attention as availability, means for a teacher, for one who assigns and teaches texts, follows quite easily and can be treated in shorter order.

If the development of attention is what is most important for a student, then it is clear that the teacher’s most important task is to make that possible. No one can teach attention, just as one cannot teach insight. It has to come from within the student. But one can give students texts that are worthy of attention, that can be revelatory to them. A teacher personally needs to treat texts generously, and never as a foil for some treasured personal point of view. A teacher should not mock authors or opposing critics.  A teacher needs to be attentive to both the text, and to the students. A teacher does not need to answer every question, and needs to show that a lot of questions just need pondering and waiting on. That is what Weil herself said philosophy is:  “The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly year after year, with any hope, patiently waiting.” (Weil 1970, 335)

That is the way to read a book.

Bio Statement

Eric O. Springsted is the past president of the American Weil Society (1981-2014) and the author, most recently, of Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021). He is also on the Attention‘s advisory board.

Sources

Gaventa 2017              Gaventa, Beverly “Reading Romans 13 with Simone Weil: Toward a More Generous Hermeneutics” in Journal of Biblical Literature. Vol. 136. 1. 7-22

Griffiths 1999             Griffiths, Paul. Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Springsted 1994          Springsted, Eric “On Persons, Tennis, and Politics” in Diogenes Allen and Eric O. Springsted, Spirit, Nature and Community: Issues in the Thought of Simone Weil. Albany: The State University of New York Press. 157-270.

Weil 1970                   Weil, Simone. First and Last Notebooks. Trans. Richard Rees. Oxford: 

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