[This blog post describes the research I presented at the 2022 APA Pacific meeting in Vancouver, in a presentation called “How to Have an Insight.” This research explores how Simon Weil’s concept of attention can help us better understand Iris Murdoch’s views on the topic, and how to think about people in a way that is truthful, loving, and just. I also have an in-progress manuscript on these same issues.]
Sometimes when we’re trying to answer a question, it’s clear how we should go about addressing the question. Right at the outset, we can think of a sequence of steps that will get us the answer we need, and at each step, we’ll know we’re steadily making progress towards getting the final answer. An example of this sort of question is “How many times does the letter ‘e’ show up in this blog post?”. For me, the first method that comes to mind is reading all the words left to right, keeping a running tally on a piece of paper as I go. Each step of the way, I’d know how close I was getting to the end of the blog post and having the final tally at hand.
But other questions—all of which are much more interesting than that first question—are less straightforward to address. Sometimes when we are trying to answer a question and have access to all the information that we should need and all the time to think that we should need, we nonetheless end up feeling like our thinking just runs up against a wall. Sometimes an answer eventually comes to us, but it doesn’t feel at all like it comes to us in a neat, step-by-step manner.
What psychologists call “insight problems” are one example of the more interesting kind of question. You might have heard of one insight problem in particular—the Nine Dot Problem. In this problem, you have nine dots on a piece of paper, arranged in a three-by-three square configuration. What you need to do is connect all the dots with four straight lines without taking your pencil off the paper. When confronted by this question, people often run up against that wall in their thinking before eventually coming up with the right answer.
The questions that lead to these blocks in our thinking include more than “insight problems.” For instance, the feeling of running up against a wall in conscious thought comes up all the time in my own experiences of doing philosophy. Sometimes I understand everything I think I should need to about a philosophical question and have all the time to deliberate I should need to, but neither an answer nor a method comes to me. And then, eventually, something changes (at least sometimes) and I arrive at an answer.
Some of my current research concerns how Simone Weil’s (1909–1943) advice about how to tackle these especially challenging questions can advance our understanding of Murdoch’s contributions to the study of attention. Weil thinks that the key to answering problems like insight problems is employing a particular variety of attention, and I think the psychological study of problem solving provides support for that view.
Thinking through Weil’s advice concerning these questions also helps us understand the work of Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) a bit better, because in The Sovereignty of Good Murdoch tells us that (at least in part of her book) she “borrows” Weil’s concept of attention. Understanding Murdoch’s work is particularly valuable, because the part of her work that I focus on is about how we can manage to attentively think about the people around us in a way that is more truthful, loving, and just. As it turns out, the variety of attention that Weil advises us to use to tackle problems like insight problems is in many respects the same variety of attention that Murdoch thinks we should use to attentively think about the people around us in a way that is more truthful, loving, and just. (I say “in many respects” because there are some small differences between their accounts—I get into this issue more in one of my in-progress manuscripts.)
Weil on Attention
Psychologists distinguish between “focal” and “diffuse” attention, and this is a distinction that can help us understand how Weil thinks we should answer especially challenging questions. Focal attention is like a bright spotlight which we can direct at one or a few objects. Diffuse attention is like a dimmer lamp which we can direct at a larger range of objects. Psychologists study both these varieties at the level of attentive perceiving as well as the level of attentive thinking. For instance, in conscious perception we can switch from diffusely attending to a whole landscape to focally attending to just one tree in the landscape. Similarly, in conscious thought we can switch from diffusely attending to a broad topic, like “what Murdoch talks about in The Sovereignty of Good,” to focally attending to a narrow topic, like “Murdoch’s example of what it feels like to quell anxious thinking through suddenly attending to a kestrel.”
Weil’s view is that when trying to answer especially challenging questions we should strive to focally attend to nothing at all, and to simultaneously diffusely attend to a question and information that’s relevant to answering that question. As we do this, answers will occur to us sporadically, and when they do, we can check if they work. If they don’t, she thinks we should return to the carefully structured posture in thought that she describes. (In fact, Weil thinks that it’s useful to employ this method even if we’re faced with a relatively easy question, just so that we’ll get practice for thinking this way when it truly matters.)
In the essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies With a View to the Love of God,” Weil uses a comparison to a man on a mountain, gazing straight forward, to help us get a grip on what it would be like to address a question in the way she describes (You can find this comparison on page 35 of Waiting for God, which contains the essay). Weil says that the man’s awareness is structured into two parts: he gazes forward at nothing in particular, and he is also aware, but in a more peripheral way, of the forests and plains below his gaze. Weil’s thought is that when we follow her advice about how to answer an especially challenging question, our awareness should similarly be structured into two very different parts. Our effort to keep focal attention empty corresponds to the man on the mountain’s forward gaze. Both are empty. Our effort to keep in mind a question and information relevant to answering the question corresponds to what the man on the mountain is aware of more peripherally.
I’ll note that this might be a controversial reading of Weil. I discussed more of the textual evidence in favor of it in the APA presentation that inspired this blog post. In that same presentation, I argued that looking at the psychological literature on insight problems provides support for Weil’s views. It often seems like stepping back and adopting a state of mind that is partly composed of diffuse attention is what allows participants to see their problems in a new light and to come up with a method of answering the question that will work. (See this paper for an overview of insight problems.) For instance—and sorry for the spoiler—solving the Nine Dot Problem requires giving up the assumption that you can’t draw a line that is “outside” of the three-by-three grid of dots. There is actually nothing in the framing of the question that tells participants to work with that assumption. But it’s an assumption participants tend to make, and one they need to free themselves from via diffuse attention, before they can manage to answer the question.
I should note that what I describe above is just one part of Weil’s system of views on attention, and not the part of her system that many readers of Weil focus on. Readers of Weil often focus on her idea that a particular variety of attention might reduce our awareness of our selves, or somehow reduce our selves in a more literal away. They also often focus on Weil’s idea that the variety of attention I’ve described above is one that is best used during prayer, or one that is particularly useful in moral deliberation. All these aspects of Weil’s thought do fit together, and all of them need to be mentioned to describe her views in an exhaustive way. In this blog post, one reason I’m emphasizing the more purely epistemic aspect of her thought is that I think that it may be helpful for anyone who has struggled with that experience of running up against a wall while answering a difficult question. And I’m also emphasizing this aspect of her thought because it helps us better understand the work of Murdoch.
Murdoch on Attention
So now we can turn to Murdoch. Murdoch, in The Sovereignty of Good, famously tells this story about a mother and a daughter-in-law, and describes how the mother uses her attention to improve her view of her daughter-in-law.
“A mother, whom I shall call M, feels hostility to her daughter-in-law, whom I shall call D. M finds D quite a good-hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile. … Thus much for M’s first thoughts about D. Time passes, and it could be that M settles down with a hardened sense of grievance and a fixed picture of D, imprisoned (if I may use a question begging word) by the cliché: my poor son has married a silly vulgar girl. However, the M of the example is an intelligent and well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving careful and just attention to an object which confronts her. M tells herself: ‘I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again.’ Here I assume that M observes D or at least reflects deliberately about D, until gradually her vision of D alters.” (pp. 17–18)
So this is a story where “careful and just” attention on M’s part enables her to change her view of D. But just what kind of attention is at work here? We need to know some more details before we can try to follow Murdoch’s advice ourselves.
You might expect M to be using purely focal attention. This is the variety of attention that first comes to mind for many people when you mention “attention.” On this way of thinking, M’s especially careful focal attention to D, whether in perception or in thought or both, is what has allowed M to get an accurate, and improved, view of what D is like as a person. (I think that this is a way some recent readers of Murdoch understand the variety of attention at work in the M & D case; I discussed this more in my APA presentation about this research, but won’t get into those details here.)
I am worried about this reading of Murdoch. Murdoch tells us that she “borrows” Weil’s account of attention, and although Weil talked about multiple varieties of attention in her work, I suspect Murdoch must have had in mind the variety of attention I discussed above. It was, after all, what Weil thought of as the most important kind of attention we could learn to deploy. But if the variety of attention that Weil thinks we should use to answer challenging questions is the variety of attention at work in the story of M & D, M cannot be paying purely focal attention to D. Instead, if M were really following Weil’s advice, M would be occupying a state of mind structured into two parts. M would be striving to focally attend to nothing, and to diffusely attend to the question of what kind of a person D truly is, and information that is relevant to answering that question.
Moreover, it seems like this latter strategy is one that is just more likely to work. I suspect that for most of us, if we already think poorly of someone, simply focally attending to that person, in an especially effortful and sustained way, might just deepen our annoyance with that person. But following Weil’s advice in this context involves doing more than just focally attending to the person you think poorly of. It involves focally attending to nothing, and diffusely attending to a question about that person. It’s an open-ended way of thinking that could allow you to see that person in an entirely new light. (If, indeed, you really should. But Murdoch has stipulated that in the case of M & D, M’s seeing D in a new light is also M’s seeing D more accurately.)
So, Murdoch says that she borrows Weil’s concept of attention, and it independently seems like purely focal attention would not help M improve her view of D’s character. Therefore, it seems like the variety of attention at work in the case of M & D is a variety of attention that is partly (but not wholly) composed of diffuse attention. This is an important realization for those of us who want to follow Murdoch’s advice about how to do better justice, in our attentive thought, to the people around us. (My conclusion raises some further questions about Murdoch’s work, like whether this variety of attention is the one that she is always talking about when she talks about attention. I think the answer to that question is “no.”)
To sum up, getting clear on Weil’s account of the epistemic role of a particular variety of attention is something that can advance our understanding of Murdoch’s contributions to the study of attention. And getting clear on what both of them have to say about the study of attention is interesting in its own right, because their work offers up practical suggestions about how to address any of the hard questions we might encounter in day-to-day life or philosophical theorizing, as well as how to do better justice, in our attentive thinking, to the people around us.
