Attention is First Philosophy
Illich and Cayley each has just as much attention as they need in the moment. The joy of their conversation, the resonance of their encounter, to borrow another formulation, may tacitly derive from the sense that there is nothing else to which they ought to be giving their attention in that moment because their attention is ordered toward the good ... See more
L. M. Sacasas • Your Attention Is Not a Resource
By paying a certain kind of attention, you can humanise or dehumanise, cherish or strip of all value. By a kind of alienating, fragmenting and focal attention, you can reduce humanity – or art, sex, humour, or religion – to nothing. You can so alienate yourself from a poem that you stop seeing the poem at all, and instead come to see in its place j
... See moreIain McGilchrist • The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World
A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind.