(Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory) Silvia Caprioglio Panizza - The Ethics of Attention - Engaging The Real With Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil-Routledge (2022)

The Ethics of Attention
This book draws on Iris Murdoch’s philosophy to explore questions

related to the importance of attention in ethics. In doing so, it also engages
with Murdoch’s ideas about the existence of a moral reality, the impor-
tance of love, and the necessity but also the difficulty, for most of us, of
fighting against our natural self-centred tendencies.
Why is attention important to morality? This book argues that many
moral failures and moral achievements can be explained by attention.
Not only our actions and choices, but the possibilities we choose among,
and even the meaning of what we perceive, are to a large extent deter-
mined by whether we pay attention, and what we attend do. In this way,
the book argues that attention is fundamental, though often overlooked,
in morality. While the book’s discussion of attention revolves primarily
around Murdoch’s thought, it also engages significantly with Simone
Weil, who introduced the concept of attention in a spiritual context. The
book also engages with contemporary debates concerning moral percep-
tion and motivation, empirical psychology, animal ethics, and Buddhist
philosophy.
The Ethics of Attention will be of interest to researchers and advanced
students working on Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, ethics and moral psy-
chology, and the philosophy of attention.
Silvia Caprioglio Panizza is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Centre

for Ethics, University of Pardubice, and Teaching Fellow at the Centre for
Ethics in Public Life, School of Philosophy, University College Dublin,
where she is a member of PEriTiA (Horizon 2020). She is co-editor of
The Murdochian Mind (Routledge 2022) and has co-edited and co-trans-
lated Simone Weil’s Venice Saved (Bloomsbury 2019).
Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory
Virtues, Democracy, and Online Media

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Edited by Nancy E. Snow and Maria Silvia Vaccarezza
Evil Matters
A Philosophical Inquiry
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Desert Collapses
Why No One Deserves Anything
Stephen Kershnar
Neglected Virtues
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Analysis, Axiomatics and Applications
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Value Incommensurability
Ethics, Risk, and Decision-Making
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A Philosophical Defense of Misanthropy

Toby Svoboda

Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil
Silvia Caprioglio Panizza
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routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Ethics-and-Moral-Theory/book-
series/SE0423
Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch
and Simone Weil
Silvia Caprioglio Panizza

First published 2022
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© 2022 Silvia Caprioglio Panizza
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ISBN: 978-0-367-75693-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-75956-8 (pbk)
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003164852
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Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
(T. S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets)
The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on
something real. It is the same with the act of love. To know
that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as
much as I do—that is enough, the rest follows of itself.
(Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 119)
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
1 What is ethical about attention? 14
2 Attention without self-concern 63
3 Attention without self 87
4 Self-knowledge 110
5 Moral perception 129
6 Motivation and action 150
Coda 173
Index 177
Acknowledgements
This is in many ways a personal book, so the individuals whom I want to

thank exceed those who directly contributed to the academic content of
these pages. They are those human and non-human animals who are and
have been my teachers in attention, and sources of motivation and energy.
My parents, of course, Iolanda Caprioglio and Giulio Panizza, for their sup-
port even when I did not see it. Jean, for her marvellous presence and quiet
teaching. My friends Chiara Bargero, Chiara Devido, and Pamela Provera,
for sharing laughter and sunshine during the strange summer of 2021.
This is also a book which started many years ago, with the project
which inspired the present volume. Instrumental to that were the people
at the University of East Anglia who offered insight, advice, and support,
especially: Tom Greaves, Rupert Read, Davide Rizza, Catherine Rowett,
and Philip Wilson; and Gareth Jones, who was beyond generous with his
time and who helped me immensely to develop and sharpen the original
material.
I am grateful to colleagues in the Murdoch world and in attention
studies for helpful conversations. For the former: Sophie Grace Chappell,
Niklas Forsberg, Mark Hopwood, Miles Leeson, and the participants at
the Murdoch Reading Group. For the latter: Antony Fredriksson, Tom
McClelland, Isabel Kaeslin, Maude Ouellette-Dubé, and the participants
at The Politics of Attention workshop in Fribourg.
My colleagues at UCD have offered a wonderful and supportive think-
ing environment. I thank them for this and for their feedback. In particu-
lar: Christopher Cowley, Alena Dvořáková, Katherine O’Donnell, Brian
O’Connor, Danielle Petherbridge, Karim Sadek, and Rowland Stout; and
Maria Baghramian, also for being such a patient and generous mentor
during the past two years.
Many of these colleagues, needless to say, should also be thanked as
friends.
I also would like to thank Dae Gak and Vanessa Blanchette for our
conversations, and Fabrizio Furlan for empathetic and immediate IT sup-
port during moments of computer crisis.
x Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to my editors at Routledge, Alexandra Simmons and
Andrew Weckenmann, for their encouragement and help during the prep-
aration of the manuscript. I would also like to thank the anonymous
reviewers for helpful suggestions.
There is an unfortunate irony about this book, which is that it stole the
attention from those who deserve it during the final months of writing it.
I can only apologise to them, and hope that the reflections in these pages
will allow me to return the stolen attention more plentifully than I would
have been able to do without.
This work has received funding from the

European Union’s Horizon 2020 research
and innovation programme under grant
agreement No 870883. The information and
opinions contained herein are those of the
authors and do not necessarily reflect those
of the European Commission.
Abbreviations
Works by Iris Murdoch
AD Against Dryness
AIN Art is the Imitation of Nature
DPR The Darkness of Practical Reason
F&S The Fire and The Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists
IP The Idea of Perfection
KV Knowing the Void
MGM Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
NP Nostalgia for the Particular
OGG On ‘God’ and ‘Good’
SBR The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited
S&G The Sublime and the Good
SGC The Sovereignty of Good over other Concepts
T&L Thinking and Language
TSE T. S. Eliot as a Moralist
VCM Vision and Choice in Morality
Works by Simone Weil
APP On the Abolition of All Political Parties

GG Gravity and Grace
HP Human Personality
IPF The Iliad or the Poem of Force
LN The Love of Our Neighbour
LP Lectures on Philosophy
OL Oppression and Liberty
LOW Love of the Order of the World
RSS Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to
the Love of God
SA Spiritual Autobiography
SN On Science, Necessity and the Love of God
WG Waiting for God
Introduction
When 28-year-old Daisy, who had been sleeping rough for 18 months in
London, met journalist Victoria Derbyshire, she told her something that
one may find surprising. The worst thing about rough sleeping, in her
view, was not the cold nights, or the discomfort of a makeshift bed.
Rather, ‘the worst thing about rough sleeping is not being seen’
(BBC 2020). A sentiment echoed by many. Mark Horvath, founder of the
‘Invisible People’ project, was inspired in his work by a homeless man
living in Los Angeles. He said:
For years, the man assumed he was invisible because no one would
look at him. That is until a boy handed him a pamphlet one day and
the man responded, ‘What! You can see me? How can you see me?
I’m invisible!’.
(Mentock n.d.)1
There can be harm in not seeing. This is, I think, a difficult thought to hold.
We can have an impact on others simply by directing, or failing to direct,
our gaze. The people who are harmed by not being seen are, of course, part
of our visual field for at least a short period of time. Then two sets of pos-
sibilities become available to us: to look away immediately or to look at
them as we would somebody else; and to look at them in an unresponsive
and unengaged way, as objects—or to pay attention to them.2
Being attended to can be transformative, as the man in Los Angeles testi-
fies. Attention is a way, perhaps the first way, of acknowledging another’s
existence. Everything follows from that. And yet, it is something we can fail
to do so much of the time. In fact, attention is not easy at all.
In the case of homeless people, there are many reasons for avoiding
attention. We may feel guilt: at living in a society that enables that pre-
dicament; at our comfortable lives; at the fact that we are not helping. We
may feel uncomfortable, for their lives look very different from ours.
We may be afraid of such difference. And so on. These emotions arise
when those individuals enter our landscape. Then, looking away can be
an active rejection of acknowledgment.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003164852-1
2 Introduction
At times not attending can be less like a refusal, and more like a habit
developed, perhaps to avoid those forms of discomfort in the first place.
When one consumes a meal containing animals and their products, for
instance, very seldom is attention directed at the animals themselves.
They are, as Carol Adams (1990) memorably put it, the great ‘absent
referent’. Lack of attention to the animals does not have the consequence
of making animals feel unreal, as in the case above, because the animals
are no longer there. (But we could still worry about lack of acknowledg-
ment, which can also apply to the dead.) What is clearer is that lack of
attention, here, makes it easier to perform certain actions, buying and
consuming products which, if we attended to the animals and the produc-
tion process, we may feel a moral resistance towards.3
Yet we know what happens to animals. We know the meat on the table,
the jacket in the shop, came from once living, breathing animals. But atten-
tion is not just knowledge. It is participating in what we are seeing or think-
ing about, even if we are not actors on the scene. Knowledge can be abstract,
attention is concrete. Iris Murdoch contrasts attention with ‘looking’
(IP 329). Both knowing and looking may be detached, attention is engaged.
Knowing and looking may be superficial, attention is imaginative. Looking
(but not knowing) may be distorting, attention is truth-directed. Attention is
directed at reality and, specifically, at an individual reality: not ‘people’, not
‘animals’, not ‘nature’, but this person, this animal, this blade of grass.4
We begin to see that attention is far from inconsequential. It can effect
significant changes in others, in our actions, as well as in ourselves. But
attention does not only matter in terms of its consequences. It also mat-
ters in itself. In attention, we join reality, we become more truthful, more
present—and that has far reaching, although sometimes imperceptible,
effects on our consciousness, our character, our priorities … as well as
our present and future actions.
To summarise, the exercise of attention (or its failure) has two main,
interconnected, manifestations: one is that there are things that we may
wish to ignore, but that in order to be morally responsible we ought not
to ignore; the other is that, while some things are within our field of
vision, we may not fully engage with them, we may ‘look’ without ‘see-
ing’, and ignore certain aspects, block our sympathy, avoid exercising the
imagination, and so on. Attention involves not just ‘knowledge’, but also,
with Stanley Cavell (1979), ‘acknowledgment’.
This book
In this book I propose an ‘ethics of attention’: a meta ethical and norma-
tive view that takes attention to be central. My claim in this book is that
attention is fundamental to morality. It returns the experience of a reality
from which distraction, defenses, or projection separate us. That, in itself,
makes us better, more open and less self-concerned. Every time, often
imperceptibly, attention shapes us and our world. It constitutes the
Introduction 3
background upon which deliberation, choice, and action occur. At its
most successful, attention renders deliberation and choice unnecessary,
because the experience of the reality that attention reveals already con-
tains within itself both motivation and direction. Attention can do all of
this, yet it is often overlooked when moral questions are discussed, or
moral situations confronted. The idea, unfortunately, is not mine. It
comes from Irish Murdoch, on whom I will be mainly drawing, who in
turn took it from Simone Weil, who will also figure prominently in these
pages, but as a ‘secondary character’.
Here is a brief summary of the book as a whole. Chapter 1 sets out the
reasons for considering attention morally at all, and then discusses the
two ‘axes’ upon which attention operates morally: the presence or
absence of attention, and the objects of attention. Chapters 2 and 3
engage with the role of the self in attention. If attention is truth-seeking,
it needs to remove our own projections and distortions. That is ‘unself-
ing’. In these chapters, I consider respectively a ‘tame’ or moderate ‘unself-
ing’, that is, the removal of self-concern, and a ‘radical’ unselfing, that is,
the removal of any idea of substantial and fixed self. Either way, the idea
that attending needs to be directed to reality and away from the self cre-
ates difficulties for self-knowledge, which I try to resolve in Chapter 4.
The last two chapters, Chapters 5 and 6, concern the consequences of
attention for moral perception, motivation, and action. There, I claim
that attention is necessary for moral perception, and can be sufficient for
motivation and action based on such perception.
Weil, Murdoch, and me

Although they did not choose it, this book puts together the thoughts of
Weil and Murdoch with some of my own reflections. In order of promi-
nence: Murdoch, Weil, and my attempt to tease out and justify ideas that
I find important. This interaction is perhaps an obvious fact of any book
that aims both at exegesis and at defending an idea. But it raises the ques-
tions: where does Weil end and Murdoch begin? And: Where do Weil and
Murdoch, and especially Murdoch, end, and I begin?
The aim of the book is to develop Murdoch’s ideas about attention.
That means, on the one hand, that Simone Weil’s philosophy, which
inspired Murdoch’s idea of attention in fundamental ways, accompanies
many of the reflections offered here. In some cases, Weil works as support
or development of ideas about attention that are derived from Murdoch.
In other cases, Murdoch departs from Weil; when that happens, it is,
I hope, clearly flagged.
On the other hand, developing Murdoch’s (and Weil’s) ideas about
attention means taking paths that they did not take. My hope is that,
when that happens, the ideas offered are nonetheless compatible with,
primarily, Murdoch’s views on attention. Some of the new paths are dic-
tated by historical context: when it is helpful, I make connections with
4 Introduction
contemporary discussions of attention in philosophy and psychology. All
in all, Murdoch offers attention as a way forward in morality, a funda-
mental yet neglected moral phenomenon, but she has so much more to
say, that some of the potential of this suggestion remains untapped.
Expanding it through connections with their origin in Weil, and through
further ethical exploration, is the goal of this book.
Attention and Murdoch’s philosophy

Attention is central to Murdoch’s thought not only because of the funda-
mental role which, I argue, it plays in morality, but also because of the
way it operates within Murdoch’s philosophy as a whole, holding together
her most distinctive ideas. Two of Murdoch’s ideas which differentiate
her from her contemporaries are the emphasis on the inner life, and a
particular type of moral realism, which affirms the reality of the good
while also allowing for the individual’s contribution in perception and
understanding. Attention is central to both.
Attention and the importance of the inner life go hand in hand.
Attention, for Murdoch, both shapes and is determined by the individu-
al’s consciousness. Twentieth-century moral philosophy, in Murdoch’s
view, is fixated on will and action, and that overlooks the way in which
much of what is morally relevant occurs on a level that is more inward,
more elusive, and longer lasting (see Cordner 2016: 198). This kind of
argument is developed, for instance, in ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’
and in ‘The Idea of Perfection’, where Murdoch insists on the ethical
value of the inner life—developed, in various ways, through the quality
and objects of attention—aiming to show the inadequacies of a moral
philosophy that only understands morality as based on what is publicly
observable. The much-discussed M&D example, which revolves around
an act of attention, is at the same time primarily aimed at showing the
importance of the inner life in morality, and how inner events can have
moral relevance without any action occurring at all. By ignoring what
happens besides and before action, the kind of ethics Murdoch attacks
fails to understand not only the moral qualities of individuals, but also of
the actions themselves, as long as they appear detached from the ‘inner
work’ that shapes them. This is true, for Murdoch, not only of what is
explicitly moral, but of all actions, and of concepts too.
Taking attention seriously in morality also supports the possibility of
moral realism, and in turn moral realism allows us to draw a picture of
morality where attention is of fundamental importance. Murdoch claims
that ‘goodness is connected with knowledge’ (IP 330). There are two
ideas which come together in this thought. On the one hand, the object of
knowledge is, for Murdoch, a moral reality, which divides between the
ideal Good and the value which is part of the world. At the same time, for
Murdoch, moral reality is not known impersonally and passively, but
Introduction 5
through the active exercise of the individual’s faculties which are guided
by value. She writes:
It is perfectly obvious that goodness is connected with knowledge:

not with impersonal quasi-scientific knowledge of the ordinary
world, but with a refined and honest perception of what is really the
case, a patient and just discernment and exploration of what con-
fronts one, which is the result not simply of opening one’s eyes but of
a certainly perfectly familiar kind of moral discipline.
(IP 330)
Value is, Murdoch claims, both a real constituent of the world and a
ubiquitous constituent of consciousness. Both claims justify, indeed
require, the need for attention: attention is what discovers value in reality,
and it is itself a moral faculty. The apparent tension between value being
part of reality and of the structure of the mind has led to a lively discus-
sion about Murdoch’s brand of moral realism, and interpretations vary:
from Antonaccio’s (2000) ‘reflexive realism’, to the Platonic ‘earthy real-
ism’ supported by Robjant (2011), through Bagnoli’s (2012) constructiv-
ist reading. While I find the more robust form of realism more plausibly
attributed to Murdoch, which is the reading I will support in the book,
attention remains central on all of these readings. Whether value is there
independently of the activity of evaluation, or whether it is something
that is determined by such activity, attention enables the proper relation-
ship to the world where value, in various ways, is encountered. It not only
does so instrumentally (we need to know what is true to make good
choices), but also constitutively, removing obscuring influences (mostly,
arising out of self-concern) from the world we apprehend.
The difficulty of attention

I have opened with cases where attention stands out, partly due to the
clear moral relevance of the situations, but also because they are cases of
lack or failures of attention. That is because the moral importance of
attention is easier to see when attention fails. Indeed, this whole book
could have been written from the perspective of the failures of attention:
what does it mean not to attend, how do we do it, and why? Failures of
attention are ubiquitous, take numerous forms, and are hidden and dis-
guised in so many ways. The reason for embarking on a study of atten-
tion in ethics is not only because it is so important, but precisely because
we fail so much and so often, with consequences that can be disastrous.
The world’s literature is full of compelling and even heart-warming
(because we’re not alone) descriptions of how humans fail to attend, and
as far as description and re-creation of what happens go, I cannot hope
to do better or even as well here. In this book I try, instead, to argue for
6 Introduction
the positive side of attention: to offer reasons for trying to attend more
and better, to explore all that attention can do, and to bring out some
ways in which we can be more attentive.
When we attend, even if nothing follows, we are breaking through
solipsistic tendencies. This is the inherent value of attention. Part of its
value, however, comes from its rarity: attention is difficult. The two cases
I introduced above give us no trouble explaining why we find it hard to
attend. Attention to suffering is hard, opening up to the possibility that
we are doing something wrong is hard, accepting that our world includes
some fundamental harm is hard. But there is something else about atten-
tion that is more difficult to grasp: reality is difficult for us to contem-
plate. Not just suffering, not just this or that reality: reality itself.
I have opened this book with T. S. Eliot telling us that we cannot bear
too much reality. I think Iris Murdoch’s philosophical work is, in a sig-
nificant way, a moral response to this statement. ‘We are not used to
looking at the real world at all’, she writes, so anything that encourages
or indeed forces us to do so (in her example, great art) startles us—but
can also delight us (OGG 35 2). Try it: look at something ordinary with
attention. After some time, the object will transform—it will become less
familiar, more interesting, even awe-inspiring, just because it exists.
This is part of what Cora Diamond (2008) has called ‘the difficulty of
reality’. The difficulty is ‘the mind’s not being able to encompass some-
thing which it encounters’ (44). Diamond’s main examples are not insig-
nificant: the fact of death, animal suffering, beauty. But anything can
present such difficulty. Habit pushes things into the realm of the unprob-
lematic. That’s sometimes necessary. But it does not come without a cost.
According to Murdoch, the tendency to run away from reality is constitu-
tive of the human mind. On the one hand, we find it easier to see things
as we would like them to be. On the other, to ‘really see’ reality is an
‘endless task’ (IP 317), because there is always more to see and under-
stand, the distance between us and reality can be bridged but imperfectly.
Murdoch’s inspiration, time and again, is Plato. The myth of the cave: it
takes work and effort to see things as they are, and the vision may not be
comfortable. That is why attention is crucial: to counteract or prevent
illusion. So what else can we do, but to at least try to attend more, if we
don’t want to miss our own lives, and miss the world?
The sense of attention to reality as a demand and the resistance we expe-
rience go hand in hand. Explaining it is difficult. There are psychological
reasons that can be more superficial or deeper. We know that we feel resis-
tance because reality is not as we want it to be. This is part of Murdoch’s
thought, and her emphasis on removing the ego in attention. But this resis-
tance is not a simple instance of selfishness, or a childish refusal to accept
the facts. Attending means giving yourself over to the unknown; what you
just cannot control; what marks your limits; it means accepting—taking
Introduction 7
in—a reality that lacks order, that is mutable, and finite, including you (the
great lesson of Buddhism).
The thoughts about the distance of reality, and their Platonic influ-
ence, come to Murdoch from Simone Weil. Indeed, why reality itself is
hard to contemplate, and why it is good to try, are fundamental ques-
tions that may be more suitably addressed by a mystic. Simone Weil was
one. For her, the difficulty of attending comes from an ontological
premise, which comes with a normative requirement: remove your will
to let reality emerge. Iris Murdoch was not (in any ordinary sense) a
mystic. Yet, her moral reflections rest on foundations that are meta-
physical and require not so much argument, but a shift in vision. What
Murdoch takes to be fundamental is that we are guided by a sense of
something absolute—the idea of perfection, or the Platonic Idea of the
Good—which we cannot justify precisely because it governs all of our
conscious activities. And with that, she takes it as fundamental that
‘consciousness is a form of moral activity: what we attend do, how we
attend, whether we attend’ (MGM 167). Good, following Plato, is
closely connected with Truth. So reality, for Murdoch, is a normative
concept: something that we infinitely strive towards, and never fully
reach. There is no love without realism. No flourishing through
blindness.
Vision and touch, body and metaphor

In most of this book I use, following Murdoch, the language of vision
to talk about attention. Vision is a common metaphor which, as
Murdoch explains, comes naturally to us when we talk about immedi-
ate understanding and moral perception: ‘The activity and imagery of
vision is at the centre of human existence, wherein we are conscious of
ourselves as both inward and outward, distanced and surrounded.’
But, as a metaphor, it also comes with connotations to which one may
object. Murdoch is aware: ‘The visual is an image of distance and non-
possession’ (MGM 461–2). The non-possessive element of attention is
important and beneficial. Distance may simply mean refraining from
distortion. But if it means contemplative detachment, then it is rarely
appropriate. Often attention is involved, close, it is engaged. That is
one reason why we may want to use other metaphors, beyond vision,
to talk about what attention yields. But more importantly, we need to
remember that, in actual experience, we do not only attend with our
eyes. We attend mentally, yes. But we also attend with our ears, with
our fingers, with our nose. Attention is a form of perception. It is,
therefore, embodied. This aspect, not sufficiently stressed by Murdoch,
is important to another philosopher of attention, Merleau-Ponty. In a
recent book, Richard Kearney (2021) has challenged the primacy of
8 Introduction
sight, and recommends touch as central to our encounter with reality.
Vision can make us spectators. Touching, we are participants, more
open to reciprocity and experience. Hence, as Kearney argues, we
should not underestimate the role of touch in attention:
Touch provides our most basic apprehension of things. Why? Because

tactility is the ability to modulate the passion of existence—Greek
pathos understood as suffering, receiving, enduring others who come
to us as this or that. Passion, passivity, and patience share a common
root. This is what the poet Christian Wiman calls the ‘passion of pure
attention, nerves, readiness.’ To touch and be touched simultaneously
is to be connected with others in a way that prizes us open … Which
is no bad thing. Without exposure of skin (ex-peausition) there is no
real experience.
(41)
Touch is waiting (attendre), and it is vulnerability. It is attentive passion.

This thought is, in fact, very Weilian, very Murdochian. Attention is eros.
It is the desire to join the world. But it is non-possessive desire. While
Murdoch emphasises apprehension over reciprocity, and distance over
closeness, she does so for specific reasons: to stress that in attention we
need to put our self-interest to a side, and avoid possessiveness. Vision is
suited for the Platonic intellectual insight that pushes us beyond appear-
ance to the ideal. But the ideal (the Good) is manifested in the physical
world, a world which is not to be transcended but known better and
more intimately. None of this, then, prevents us from considering atten-
tion bodily, and to use vision but also touch, smell, and so on, both liter-
ally and metaphorically. As Kearney writes, ‘flesh is not opposed to
mind—it is deep mind, intimate mind, felt mind’ (47).5
A non-anthropocentric ethics
This book takes a non-anthropocentric perspective, as much as I am capa-
ble of it given my humanity and socio-historical context. When I talk about
ethics, I do not assume that human beings are the primary objects of moral
thinking and feeling. Instead, unless specifically stated, I will be talking
generally about morality, taking for granted that it takes a number of dif-
ferent objects depending on different factors. Non-human animals figure
significantly in this book, and there are specific considerations that are
raised in relation to the ethics of relating to them, but that does not make
this into a book in applied ethics, insofar as applied ethics is concerned
with one specific field or group or problem only, separating it from moral-
ity generally. There are specificities about ethics in the case of non-human
animals, such as the fact that they are the group made to suffer and die by
humans more than any other; or that there are specific difficulties in think-
ing about, and attending to, other animals, which are partly different from
Introduction 9
the difficulties in relating to other humans. But only partly. Much of what
I will say about the ethics of attention is manifested in relation to other
people as well as other animals (and sometimes other living organisms).
I think it is time to at least ditch the assumption that moral thinking is
properly or primarily about humans. An assumption which, I believe, both
Murdoch and Weil made throughout most of their work. Yet, I use their
philosophy to develop a moral account along non-anthropocentric lines.
This is because I think the tools they offer are among the best for moral
thinking generally. One could go further, and claim—as Mick Smith (2011)
does—that Murdochian philosophy can offer tools for re-thinking human
dominance over nature: her notion of unselfing, the idea of giving up pos-
session and control, and the capacity to value what is other are all themes
that fit very well within an ecological ethic and, indeed, worldview. These
suggestions, at the same time, are, according to Smith, unintentional, inso-
far as Murdoch herself was not primarily or especially concerned with
either environmental or animal issues. I think that is true.6
Nonetheless, for its broad and adaptable nature, as well as for its abil-
ity to offer an alternative to mainstream theories that are felt by some as
increasingly unsatisfying, Murdoch’s ethics has been adopted not only by
environmental thinkers like Smith, but also by animal ethicists, who find
promise in the idea of attention to and love for other animals. In terms of
philosophical approach, Aaltola (2018: 194) stresses that Murdoch’s
emphasis on love, vision, and particularity is a better starting point than
many theories specific to animal ethics which are rationalistic and
abstract. By returning us to the individual, reality, and felt experience,
Murdoch’s ethics makes it easier both to approach animals, and to think
of ourselves as animals.
Attention, now
Our confused conscious being is both here and elsewhere, living at

different levels and in different modes of cognition. We are ‘dis-
tracted’ creatures, extended, layered, pulled apart.
(MGM 296)
The conversations about attention that I have in this book with

Murdoch and Weil aim to have a broad and general validity. At the
same time attention, like everything else, moves and changes through
historical periods, political influences, and cultural geographies. In the
twenty-first century, particularly in the West, it is said that attention is
scarcer than ever, and more politicised, and at the mercy of market
interests. The scarcity refers, mainly, to the divided attention that is the
result of an increasing number of objects that compete for our atten-
tion. Information is plentiful and, in some cases, overabundant. To
cope with the multiplication of stimuli, sustained attention becomes
10 Introduction
rarer and more difficult to achieve, because our more frequent switch-
ing of attention among different objects, and the shorter ‘attention
span’ encouraged by current technology, which trains our minds
towards distraction. Attention, as Tim Wu (2016) has emphatically
shown, has also increasingly become a commodity: advertisement, par-
ticularly on the internet, depends on capturing attention. The ‘the
attention economy’ has become a field of study in its own right. The
market use of attention shows an awareness of some of the features of
attention that will be relevant for us in this book: that attention struc-
tures our consciousness (Watzl 2017); that it is closely related to work-
ing memory (Oberauer 2019); and that attending is a way of valuing.
For some, the situation of attention scarcity feels distressing. Not only
because we have too many possible objects of attention, experienced as a
strain on our resources, but also because it becomes more difficult to pay
attention at all. As I will present it in this book, it is not enough for atten-
tion that consciousness is captured by or ‘filled’ with an object. Attention
contains an (often implicit) element of truth-seeking. When attention is
strained, and when the objects encourage fantasy or self-indulgence
rather than truthfulness, we become less likely to pay attention at all.
Attention can reveal something which is there, but it often takes time,
patience, and a sort of ‘mental presence’. What Weil calls ‘waiting’.
The connection with patience and presence can make the exploration of
attention particularly timely from a political point of view. Zygmunt Bauman
and Leonidas Donskis (2014) have argued that the main reason why twenty-
first century society is, as they believe, moving towards ‘moral blindness’ is
the loss of the ability to be present and appreciate the particularity of indi-
viduals, partly caused by the increasing use of certain kinds of technology.
(Three decades ago, Murdoch had similar complaints in relation to televi-
sion, claiming that it ‘impairs our power to perceive’ (MGM 377)).7
As we shall see, attending involves both striving towards truthful vision
and refraining from projections, which can mean patiently waiting for
our faculties to become attuned to the object and for its multiple aspects
to reveal themselves. To attend patiently and receptively to all reality like
we attend to a painting: art—one of Murdoch’s favourite images but also
instances of goodness—can give us a useful image of the kind of attention
that the various critics mentioned above may wish to restore. Art profes-
sor Jennifer Roberts (2013) calls for the recovery of precisely this sort of
patient attention, which she recommends to students as essential to be
able to see what is in a painting (but also in reality more generally):
these are the kind of practices that now most need to be actively
engineered by faculty, because they simply are no longer available …
It is commonly assumed that vision is immediate … But what stu-
dents learn in a visceral way is that in any work of art there are
details and orders and relationships that take time to perceive.
(Roberts 2013: n.p.)
Introduction 11
There is a ‘depth’ to things, which is there, but also often not immediately
available. A central idea of Murdoch’s and Weil’s, and Plato’s too.
The need for recovering attention, again, is probably not specific to our
time, but it may be getting more acute. Perhaps it is for these reasons the
we are seeing in the West an increased interest in Buddhist practices,
which through meditation teach precisely to train the attention—and aim
for freedom from suffering which results from inattention and illusion.
The importance of attention is indeed central to Buddhist philosophy:
the Buddha gave prime importance to the ability to frame the issue of
suffering in the proper way. He called this ability yoniso manasi-
kara—appropriate attention—and taught that no other inner quality
was more helpful for untangling suffering and gaining release.
(Thanissaro Bhikkhu 2006: n.p.)
It is not surprising, then, that Murdoch flirted with Buddhism, and that
her friend and later biographer Peter Conradi is a Buddhist. She read
Sekida’s Zen Training, and engaged with it in MGM. Simone Weil too
was drawn to Eastern philosophy, but eventually found greater affinity
with Hinduism rather than Buddhism. Some of these influences will
return in this book.
After I briefly described Iris Murdoch’s thought to my friend Dae Gak,
a Zen master, he exclaimed: ‘She’s a Buddhist!’8 And he told me a Zen
story:
A student said to Master Ichu, ‘Please write for me something of

great wisdom’.
Master Ichu picked up his brush and wrote one word: ‘Attention’.
The student said, ‘Is that all?’
The master wrote, ‘Attention. Attention’.
The student became irritable. ‘That doesn’t seem profound or
subtle to me’.
In response, Master Ichu wrote simply, ‘Attention. Attention.
Attention’.
In frustration, the student demanded, ‘What does this word
attention mean?’
Master Ichu replied, ‘Attention means attention’.
(Joko Beck 1993: 168)
I feel that frustration too, as Dae Gak knows to his chagrin. Simone Weil
would say I am impatient, lacking precisely that attention which can stay
with mysteries and paradoxes, without trying to get out of them by my own
means. This whole book, as well, may show my misunderstanding of the
Buddhist message, by trying to say in six chapters, a coda, and one introduc-
tion, what Master Ichu says in three words. But perhaps, the master would
concede, these are meanderings of thought we need to go through, a
12 Introduction
necessary part of the path that may lead to knowing attention without ask-
ing questions. Paraphrasing Murdoch at the start of IP, there are instinctively
wise people and those that need to question and analyse, and as Zen recog-
nises, seeing things as they are may require a long pilgrimage in which we
lose familiarity with them. The wonder and loss of familiarity we experience
when we do philosophy may be understood in this context.9
Notes
1 For more accounts of this sort of experience, in the context of a sociological
reflection of the importance of the gaze in relation to homeless people, see
Kramer and Hsieh (2019).
2 On seeing someone as a something (or ‘reification’) and its opposite (‘recogni-
tion’) see Axel Honneth’s fundamental work (2007).
3 More recently, on her website, Adams writes about vegan-feminism as arising
precisely from attention: ‘Vegan-feminism … comes with an insistence “Pay
attention!” Pay attention, now. The process of objectification/fragmentation/
consumption can be interrupted by the process of attention/nowness/compas-
sion’ (Adams 2018: n.p.).
4 Typically: there are also other modes of attention, as we shall see in the final
sections of Chapter 1.
5 On attention as bodily, and on this aspect not being explicitly embraced by
Murdoch, see also the conclusion of Cordner’s essay (2016).
6 My discussion on Murdoch’s anthropocentrism, it should be noted, is based
on her philosophy and not her novels, like the rest of this book. Some have
suggested that Murdoch’s novels are useful sources of environmental ethical
thinking (see e.g. Oulton 2020). But what I am interested in here is what we
can learn from her philosophy.
7 See also MGM 110, 372 and 377.
8 But then came to the conclusion that she is not quite.
9 As Murdoch writes, ‘A study of philosophy may be likened to a catharsis, like
that of the Zen Buddhist who begins with rivers and mountains, doubts rivers
and mountains, then returns to rivers and mountains’ (MGM 189).
Bibliography
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Introduction 13
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———, On ‘God’ and ‘Good’ [OGG], pp. 337–365.
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1 What is ethical about attention?
You may find it intuitively true that attention is important for morality. If
you have been immersed in Simone Weil’s world, or in Iris Murdoch’s, my
task of explaining why it is so will start from some common ground, and
the difficulties will lie in the specific reasons. But you may also find that
your understanding of what attention is, your experience of paying atten-
tion, has little to do with morality—with goodness or responsibility or
moral error.
We can say: we attend to a ladybird who has landed on our hand; we
attend with satisfaction to the embarrassing faux pas of someone who
had offended us; we attend to how our lower back feels as we lift a table
while helping a friend move; we attend to the betrayals and reconcilia-
tions of the characters in the soap opera on TV. These are all ordinary
uses of the verb ‘to attend’, some of them signalling a vicious activity,
others a morally neutral one. We can attend in so many ways, to so many
things. So what’s attention got to do with morality?
This is the kind of response I received as I attempted to explain the
topic of my book to friends and family. It represents an important
reminder that ordinarily we do not often think about attention as mor-
ally significant, and that the word ‘attention’, in noun, verb, or adverbial
form, is not generally used in ordinary language to convey something that
we find morally relevant.1
For this reason, some of the (few) contemporary philosophical defences
of the moral importance of attention have chosen to qualify attention.
Dorothea Debus (2015), for instance, finds value in what she calls ‘full
attention’, rather than attention tout court.2 This may appear to be a
strategy that the main philosophical proponent of the moral value of
attention, Iris Murdoch, also employs. So does Murdoch’s source for the
moral idea of attention, Simone Weil, who takes attention to have not
only a moral but primarily a metaphysical and religious value.
There are indeed passages in both Murdoch and Weil where the idea of
morally good attention is presented as attention which is qualified in
some way. For instance, in ‘The Idea of Perfection’ Murdoch writes that
DOI: 10.4324/9781003164852-2
What is ethical about attention? 15
‘Virtue is au fond the same in the artist as in the good man in that it is a
selfless attention to nature’ (IP 332), and elsewhere she talks about ‘just
attention’ and ‘respectful and loving attention’ (MGM 377). Weil, on her
part, offers a beautiful string of adjectives when describing ‘the sort of
attention which can attend to truth and to affliction’: it is an attention
that is ‘intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous’ and that is iden-
tified with love (HP 91–2); while in ‘Reflections on the Right Use of
School Studies’ she writes about ‘the highest part of the attention’ being
that which ‘makes contact with God’ (RSS 105).
So the first question arises: is there a specific form of attention—‘moral
attention’—which is morally relevant? Or, instead, are we ordinarily
blind to some important aspects of attention and their ramifications into
what we consider moral?
I think the latter is closer to the truth. There is a moral relevance—
sometimes obvious, more often subtle, even invisible—that is present
when we engage in what we ordinarily understand to be attention. One
fundamental aspect of attention which makes it morally relevant, indeed
morally good, is truth-seeking. While this element is not always consid-
ered to be present in all instances of what we call attention, it can be
revealed to be there. We attend because we want to find out. There is
something we don’t know. Our attention is captured by something that is
salient, that needs to be known. As Jonardon Ganeri (2017) puts it, dis-
cussing the work of Brian O’Shaughnessy (2002), attention is what makes
consciousness into a ‘reality-detector’ (Ganeri 2017: 10). Attentive
engagement with reality, whatever its other aims or mood or contexts,
seeks to discover something. Attention interrogates reality, it is stretched
in the direction of—a ‘tension towards’—reality. That is why Murdoch,
out of the various contrasts to attention one can draw (and, as we shall
see, there are several), mostly contrasts attention with fantasy: a form of
consciousness that projects, absorbs, or is uninterested in what is really
the case. Of course, paying attention may not be sufficient for discovering
what is true, and we may get things wrong despite our efforts. But atten-
tion’s aim is reality.3
It also matters what we attend to, in so many ways. Ignoring some-
thing or someone can harm. Attending to something or someone will
focus our care and actions on them, to the exclusion of other objects. Our
habitual objects of attention frame our world and interests around them.
And so on. The presence of attention (as truth-seeking) and its objects
will be the two ‘axes’ around which, in this chapter, I propose to analyse
the moral importance of attention. A ‘vertical’ axis and a ‘horizontal’ axis
respectively.
In what follows I aim to bring out the moral relevance of attention
compatibly, to a large extent, with how we ordinarily talk about it, but
also with psychological and other philosophical formulations beyond
ethics—although I draw implications that go beyond such uses. The con-
cept of attention under scrutiny mainly comes from Murdoch, and sec-
ondly from Weil. So do the ways I suggest the concept is expanded and
refined. Perhaps radically, I propose that attention thus understood is not
only morally relevant, but that it is morally good, and even that it is
fundamental to morality.
Introducing attention in Weil and Murdoch

The idea that attention is fundamental to morality is a central and strik-
ing idea that can be found primarily in the thought of two philosophers:
first in Simone Weil, and then in Iris Murdoch. Murdoch was impressed
by Weil, and proceeded to make some of her concepts, including atten-
tion, her own. What follows is a brief introductory sketch of their ideas
about attention.
For Weil, the value of attention comes from its capacity to join us to the
world and simultaneously ‘undo’ our self (décréation), which is the obsta-
cle to such joining. Attention is both union and withdrawal. Weil’s basis for
this idea comes from her religious metaphysics, specifically from her view
of creation. Since God is fullness of being, only self-withdrawal enables
anything else to exist. So creation is withdrawal and the supreme act of
love. Attention is an imitation of God’s act of creation: our selves are, for
Weil, the obstacle to embracing reality, while attention is the way.4
Hence, attention is both a religious and a moral task for Weil. Through
attention we come closer to God, but we also do what is right: that is,
acknowledging—loving—the world, nature, and ‘our neighbour’.5 This
acknowledgement is the starting point of ethics: the recognition of the
existence of something else, and someone else, which can be obstacles to
our will, a recognition which is expressed in the ‘interval of hesitation’
when we encounter another (a phrase and an idea which so impressed
Peter Winch; see 1989: Chapter 9).
But such acknowledgement of reality will also show us what is right,
and what is needed from us in that situation. The parable of the Samaritan
is, for Weil, such an instance of attention. The Samaritan does not reflect
on what is right; he simply attends and helps, because that’s what reality,
once attended to, requires of him.
Attention (or its lack) generates the basis of all thought and action. As
Weil puts it, ‘action is the pointer of the balance’, therefore ‘one must not
touch the pointer, but the weights’ (GG 48). Attention is the right way of
arranging the weights. It all starts with how we encounter the world:
‘People suppose that thinking does not pledge them, but it alone pledges
us’ (N, quoted by Murdoch in KV 158). If there is one task in human life,
that for Weil is attention. All value depends on it. But because it is not
natural to us, in fact it goes against our nature, we should learn it and
practice it as soon as we can:
The authentic and pure values—truth, beauty and goodness—in the
activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a
certain application of the full attention to the object.
Teaching should have no aim but to prepare, by training the atten-
tion, for the possibility of such an act.
(GG 120)
Such emphasis on the mostly invisible origin of all moral thought and
action struck a chord in Murdoch, who found an ally in her struggle
against contemporary English philosophy, as evident in her review of
Weil’s Notebooks:
Spiritual progress is won through meditation: a view which is a con-

trast (and some may think a welcome corrective) to contemporary
English ethics with its exclusive emphasis on act and choice, and its
neglect of the ‘inner life’ … But Simone Weil emphasises ‘waiting’ and
‘attention’. ‘We should pay attention to such a point that we no lon-
ger have the choice’.
(KV 159)
Weil’s idea of attention influenced Murdoch deeply and extensively, giving

her not only a renewed understanding of a familiar phenomenon, but also
a new way to shape her longstanding defence of an ‘alternative’ idea of
morality and moral philosophy. The game of morality begins to be played
much earlier than her contemporaries thought—much earlier than con-
scious intention and action. It begins the moment we see, feel, think reality.
And so much of what follows is shaped by that moment. So consciousness,
perception, imagination come under new scrutiny. It is in this context that
Murdoch, the moral philosopher, begins to work on her understanding of
attention, which is also inevitably re-shaped in the process.
Murdoch’s debt to Weil is vast.6 The extent and limits of that debt,
however, are never fully or explicitly made clear by Murdoch. One can be
left with the impression that Weil is an inspiration for Murdoch, whose
spirit pervades Murdoch’s thought, but is also left behind at times, mov-
ing in and out like a wind. In the same review of the Notebooks, Murdoch
describes Weil as the reminder of a ‘standard’. So I think it is worth trying
to make Weil’s presence in Murdoch’s work a little more precise, and to
articulate it, here, through the concept of attention and its attendant con-
cepts: unselfing, obedience, love.7 Below is a summary, while further con-
nections and differences will emerge throughout the book.
Murdoch’s first clear acknowledgement of her debt to Weil can be
found in ‘The Idea of Perfection’, where she tells us that she has ‘bor-
rowed’ the word ‘attention’ from Simone Weil (IP 327). In MGM Weil is
a recurring character, especially when Murdoch is negotiating the extent
to which the self disappears in attention, and when she approaches the
spiritual dimension. But even before Sovereignty, in ‘Against Dryness’,
Murdoch begins to see how Weil’s attention is central to her project of
making ‘ways of seeing’ central to morality: ‘Simone Weil said that moral-
ity was a matter of attention, not of will. We need a new vocabulary of
attention’ (AD 293). In IP she writes:
I have used the word ‘attention’, which I borrow from Simone Weil,
to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an indi-
vidual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark
of the active moral agent.
(IP 327)
Attention both characterises the active moral agent and it is the proper
and desirable feature of such agent. Attention is descriptive and norma-
tive. In cruder terms: good people are attentive; and those aspiring to
goodness should aim for greater attention.
But attention also has a meta-ethical role. It is introduced in that essay,
with the story of the mother-in-law ‘M’ overcoming prejudice and obtain-
ing a renewed and more truthful vision of her daughter-in-law ‘D’. The
story aims to show what the moral work is like for the individual, in the
context of an essay that raises doubts about the contemporary model of the
moral agent in Anglophone philosophy, in which all that seems to matter is
action and choice. Thinking about the moral relevance of attention,
Murdoch is here suggesting, helps not only the private individual but the
philosopher in her task of understanding where the knots of morality lie.
For Murdoch, they lie first and foremost in how we see the world and what
we see. Such a vision depends to a significant extent on the presence of
absence, and on the objects, of attention. These thoughts return in MGM,
through extended discussions of how a moral ‘world’ is shaped.
In ‘On God and Good’ attention takes centre stage as the proper atti-
tude to the good, developed based on the idea of God. Both are not just
occasional ‘objects of attention’, but they are defined through that role.
Here, as Murdoch writes, her debt to Simone Weil is evident. Acts of
attention reveal an aspiration to something ‘higher’, and in turn what is
absolute shows its existence in human life through attention.8 Attention
here is seen as crucial for morality because it reveals that there is some-
thing beyond ourselves (the whole world) which is always and necessarily
beyond us (Murdoch’s idea of the ‘transcendent’) because our capacity to
grasp reality is constantly perfectible. The realisation of this fact through
attention causes elation and provides a sense of direction, for we learn
that we can see better, more, more clearly, ad infinitum. Hence, attention
to God/Good is morally important because of the way it shapes, guides,
and inspires us (particularly at a time—which is also ours—where,
Murdoch felt, the empiricist idea that ‘this is all there is’ has been unduly
extended to discourage any search for what is invisible or not-yet-visible).
Attention in this sense is called a ‘technique’ which Murdoch, again fol-
lowing Weil, equates to prayer. Its effects are ‘the purification and reori-
entation of an energy which is naturally selfish’ (OGG 344). So attention
to God or to the good, for Murdoch, is not attention to a ‘thing’, but the
revelation of a distant (never clearly known) idea which both guides us in
all our encounters with the world, and changes us the more we are guided
by it. It is the Platonic Idea of the Good. (I will return to this in the section
‘The horizontal axis’ below.)
Murdoch’s Platonism, too, was influenced by Weil. For both, the idea
of the good as guiding light always ‘somewhere beyond’ (SGC 376) is a
moral but also a mystical one, although in a special sense for Murdoch.
There is something we intuit but cannot fully grasp, yet it transforms us
completely. An experience of the good is a periagoge, a turning around.
Weil reads Plato as a mystic (SA 70), and one of Murdoch’s central efforts
is to reintroduce mysticism into morality along the lines just sketched:
‘The background to morals is properly some sort of mysticism, if by this
is meant a non-dogmatic essentially unformulated faith in the reality of
the good, occasionally connected with experience’ (OGG 360).9 As this
quote suggests, Murdoch’s mysticism is not that of religious believers,
and it is also not quite Weil’s. Murdoch proposes a secular morality,
rejecting the idea of a personal God, and rejecting religion. Weil’s thought,
on the other hand, is grounded on a religious metaphysics. This has con-
sequences for the idea of attention. The first is that attention to reality is,
for Weil, attention to a world that was created by God. Practically, this
comes with an acceptance, indeed a love of the whole of reality, which is
easier to understand if everything bears the mark of divinity. Murdoch,
who did not believe in such a God-created world, had to move along dif-
ferent, sometimes metaphorical, paths. Second, without Weil’s metaphysi-
cal view of the world as created by God through self-withdrawal, where
human will is interference and its renunciation an imitation of God,
Murdoch’s idea of unselfing also becomes different from Weil’s idea of
decreation—despite being both concomitants of attention. When I attend,
the object fills my consciousness, and I am not there. This can ring true
for both. But the extent and exact meaning of such self-withdrawal differ
in Murdoch and Weil, with implications for how we think about atten-
tion. (I explore this difference in Chapters 2 and 3.)
The upshot is that, although Weil’s religious attention has an ethical
dimension, and although Murdoch’s secular attention has religious inspi-
rations, the large overlapping between their concepts of attention also
contains differences. Unfortunately for my project, it is on the back-
ground of Weil’s philosophy that the normativity of attention can be
explained more straightforwardly. If God created the world, then it
deserves our attention; then everything deserves our attention, indeed our
love; then we will act in accordance to the order of the world; and finally,
then our attention will imply a self-renunciation as an imitation of God
and an act of love, conforming our will to God’s.
Based on Murdoch’s secular philosophy, the necessity of attention is
more difficult to ground. Human life, Murdoch writes, ‘has no external
point or τελoς’ (SGC 364). This goes together with her stress on the chanc-
iness and messiness of life, and attention is no exception. There are revela-
tions, but there is mostly an ordinary, piecemeal effort. All this makes it
harder to explain why, as I argue, we ought to try to pay attention, and why
as philosophers we should re-consider the moral grounding of thoughts,
acts, and situations, and explore how they arise from attention, or the lack
thereof. But it is also what makes it worthwhile to attempt to clarify and
justify the great importance of attention for those who, like Murdoch, live
in a world without a personal, omnipotent, creator God.
The varieties of attention

This overview of the concept of attention in Weil and Murdoch might
give some the impression that their use is a technical one, and that we
should rather talk of attention on the one hand, and moral attention on
the other. I think we would lose much of the force of attention if we
reached that conclusion, besides misunderstanding both philosophers.
Although their use of ‘attention’ is, as we have seen, sometimes qualified,
more often they simply talk about ‘attention’, and many of the adjectives
we have seen employed are not necessarily modifiers of attention, but can
be considered as already inherent in attention.10 The idea, then, is not
that we need a new concept—moral attention—but that we need to bring
out the hidden moral potential of attention as we know it. If the ordinary
concept is refined and expanded in the process, that does not mean it is
altered so much as to become a different one.11
Something similar can be said of the concept of attention as employed in
psychology, where it is being studied intensively, becoming one of the cen-
tral topics in the past four decades. The psychology of attention, in fact,
makes it easier to work with a flexible and expanded concept of attention,
for the simple reason that there is no unanimous agreement among psy-
chologists about what attention is. Both Harold Pashler and Elizabeth
Styles, in the introductions to their respective books on the psychology of
attention, remark that contrary to William James’s famous statement that
‘every one knows what attention is’ (1890: 403), in the field of psychology
it may be more accurate to say that ‘no one knows what attention is, and
that there may even not be an “it” there to be known about (although of
course there might be)’ (Pashler 1998: 1). Styles, strikingly, also writes that
‘it would be closer to the truth to say that “Nobody knows what attention
is”’, and continues ‘or at least not all psychologists agree. The problem is
that ‘“attention” is not a single concept, but an umbrella term for a variety
of psychological phenomena’ (Styles 2006: 1).
To complicate things further, it is common to divide attention into dif-
ferent types, according to the categorisation proposed by MacKay Moore
Sohlberg and Catherine Mateer (1989: 130–131). Based on their model,
attention can be divided into: focused attention (the basic capacity to
attend to stimuli); sustained attention (including vigilance and mental
control or working memory; this is the capacity to maintain attention to
an object over time); selective attention (the capacity to shut out irrele-
vant stimuli); alternating attention (the mental flexibility required to
switch attention from one task or stimulus to another); and divided
attention (the ability to attend to more than one task or object at the
same time). Each of these aspects or forms of attention can be relevant to
the ethical aspect of attention, and will be relevant to our discussion, in
different ways and for different purposes.
The questions about attention most commonly explored in non-ethical
research (psychology and philosophy of mind) have to do with selectivity,
consciousness, and the processes involved in attention. In what follows
I introduce these questions, and briefly note their relevance to the ethical
dimension.
Selectivity
One of the key questions asked in psychology refers to the ways in which
attention relates to information processing. Since there is a necessary
selectivity in what information we are conscious of, attention is used to
explain such selectivity. The mechanisms responsible for the selectivity of
attention have been central to the debate. For a long time, Donald
Broadbent’s (1958) model was the most influential one, according to
which attention depends on capacity limitations of the brain, which form
a ‘bottleneck’ through which selection occurs. Developments of this the-
ory include the suggestion that there is not a single bottleneck, but that
selectivity depends on various limitations occurring in different channels.
This model has been influentially criticised by Alan Allport (1993), who
argues that attention is not concerned with the limitation of processing
capacities, but rather it is a state of the whole organism which addresses
the necessity to integrate information, given our capacity to represent
more information than is needed. Allport’s positive suggestion (1987),
also put forth by Odmar Neumann (1987), is that attention is what
enables us to act coherently in a goal-directed way. This is the ‘selection
for action’ theory, developed in philosophy by Wayne Wu (2011), who
goes further and identifies attention and selection for action. Regardless
of the specific theory of attention, it is clear that selectivity is a central, if
not the central, feature of attention as researched in psychology, as well
as in some philosophical studies. The selectivity of attention is ethically
relevant, as we shall see, concerning the objects of attention (the horizon-
tal axis).
The faculties of attention
In the psychological literature, attention is often studied as visual or audi-
tory attention, and more generally as a perceptual phenomenon. But, as
Sebastian Watzl (2017) writes, we can also talk about varieties of atten-
tion depending on more than perception. Wu, as we have seen, broadens
attention beyond perception to agency. While according to Watzl, atten-
tion is a way of organising the mind, so that
depending on what kind of state is currently at the center of our

mind, there is perceptual attention, intellectual attention, emotional
attention, desire-like attention, and attentive basketball playing.
Attention thus crosscuts the usual divisions of the mind: between the
cognitive and the conative, the perceptual and the intellectual, the
active and the passive, the epistemic and the practical. Attention can
be any of these things.
(2017: 2)
An ethical account of attention works best with such broadened

understanding of what parts of us are engaged in attention. Many
instances of attention as obviously morally important engage more
than just perception. More radically, Weil and Murdoch operate with
a broader notion of attention as involving the whole individual. Weil
insists that attention engages the intellect as well as ‘the imaginative
part of our soul’ (RSS 115). Murdoch thinks of the human being as a
unified entity, and of consciousness, following James, as a ‘stream’
that cannot be clearly divided into parts. According to Murdoch’s
moral epistemology, perception partly depends on will, will is shaped
by perception, and imagination, which depends on our character and
our desires, is part of all cognition as well as perception. Therefore,
any change in consciousness is also a change in moral quality, engag-
ing the whole person, intellect, will, desires: ‘What moves us—motives,
desires, reasoning—emerges from a constantly changing complex.
Moral change is the change of that complex’ (MGM 300). Often
Murdoch describes moral progress using Plato’s parable of the cave:
progress is occasioned by attention through a turning around (peria-
goge) of the whole individual moved by desire for the good, a desire
which gets progressively refined as one learns to see more clearly, by
desiring better and better objects, and advancing towards what is
more real and better, an ideal end goal which each object, seen in rela-
tion to the previous one, points to. Similarly Weil, drawing on the
same Platonic source, writes that ‘the soul cannot turn its eyes in a
new direction without turning entirely in that direction’ (SN 106).
Such complete turning is the work of attention.
Consciousness
We can see how a concept used in one field is expanded by a philosophi-
cal and moral vision, without being contradicted by it. There is another
question related to attention that is central to psychological studies, but
even more to the philosophy of mind and phenomenology. That is the
relationship between attention and consciousness.
There is an ongoing dispute about whether attention is sufficient or
necessary for consciousness, or both, or neither. On one end of the spec-
trum, there are those who support the view that attention is necessary for
consciousness. If we do not attend to an object, then that object will not
figure in our consciousness (see Cohen et al. 2012; Prinz 2012). This view
seems to be supported by the phenomenon of ‘inattentional blindness’,
when we fail to notice and hence to be aware of an object that is well
within our visual field, simply because our attention is engaged elsewhere
(Mack and Rock 1998). According to Jesse Prinz (2011), attention is
both necessary and sufficient for consciousness, because attention is what
is responsible for making representations accessible to working memory.
John Campbell (2002) also focuses on the explanatory role of attention,
and argues that attention explains the knowledge of the reference of a
demonstrative, therefore attention must be conscious.
On the other hand, there are suggestions that it is possible to attend to
something of which we are not conscious (see Yi Jiang et al. 2006). This
claim, in the case of visual attention, is demonstrated by measuring eye
movement, or by noting the effects of attentional shifts (for instance, in
the psychological experiments, reaction time). Hence psychologist Robert
Kentridge (2011) has argued that attention can be unconscious. In phi-
losophy, Wayne Wu (2011) supports this conclusion, on the basis that
attention can select objects as targets for action even when the objects are
not consciously perceived.
I will not here try to enter these intricate debates. What matters for our
purposes is that attention makes a difference to consciousness—whether
it enables it, or changes its quality, or makes objects available even in the
absence of concomitant conscious awareness. If attention shapes con-
sciousness, then it matters when and to what we pay attention. Whether
unattended items remain outside our consciousness, or they are simply
not salient, it means that what we do not attend to will play a different
role in our minds, and also in our actions.
The morality of attention

From ordinary language, to psychology, philosophy of mind, and phe-
nomenology, we can see how the concept of attention meanders through
contexts of use without entirely losing its identity, even if a unitary
definition is hard to obtain. For the moral philosopher, that is not a prob-
lem. In fact, we can take the richness of the concept to illuminate some
aspects where morality is lodged, but often unseen.
For these purposes, I propose a non-exhaustive working definition
of attention, which is largely compatible with the concept in ordinary
language, psychology, and some philosophical theories, and which is
principally inspired by the moral reflections on attention offered by
Weil and Murdoch. This definition has a rather modest aim of bring-
ing out aspects of attention that are morally relevant, rather than
delimiting or fixing the concept. This means also that I do not attempt
to adjudicate which of the philosophical theories of attention is best.
Different theories highlight something about attention that can be
shown to be morally relevant, and my task is to make that aspect of
attention salient. Hence, I consider the ethical contribution to be, if
anything, an expansion of the concept of attention. Drawing on
Murdoch and Weil, I propose we understand attention very broadly as
a truth-seeking engagement of the individual with reality. Truth-
seeking need not be a conscious aim, yet attention is finding out some-
thing about its object; it is opposed to both fantasy (fabrication) and
obliviousness. The attentive subject is understood as a whole: some-
times attention is more clearly intellectual, at other times affective, but
any aspect of the individual can be called into the act of attention and
can be affected by it.12 Engagement means being occupied, involved,
there; its opposite is distraction or absent-mindedness. Reality is a
complex concept which, as we shall see, takes up normative dimen-
sions in both Weil and Murdoch. Its moral relevance is both that of
being a standard to aim at (ever progressing knowledge and under-
standing), and that of being something outside ourselves, which does
not bend to our wishes and hopes, the opposite of self-absorption or
fantasy. Selectivity is strikingly absent from this definition, not because
the selectivity of attention is irrelevant to morality—quite the con-
trary—but because according to Murdoch’s and Weil’s understanding,
selectivity is not always a relevant part of attention, as we shall see.
The features offered in this definition are not part of all ordinary
understandings of attention, nor are they an explicit feature of the scien-
tific concept. At the same time, this definition can fit with important
aspects of what we ordinarily and scientifically understand to be atten-
tion. Psychological studies, and many philosophical ones, do not deny the
moral relevance of attention; they are simply indifferent to it, since
morality is not their object. Ordinary language sometimes acknowledges
the moral relevance of attention, and sometimes is blind to it. For
Murdoch, the reason that we often do not see the moral relevance of
attention is the same reason we often do not see the moral relevance of
consciousness, perception, and the whole inner life: an assumption that
morality is played out in deliberation and action, and a (quite
understandable) difficulty of identifying the moral importance of small
inner movements, momentary thoughts, particular images, and flickers or
withdrawals of attention.
To unpack this definition, as mentioned, I propose to analyse the moral
importance of attention along two axes, which also show the relevance of
the diverse notions of attention just presented. The vertical axis corre-
sponds to the presence and absence of attention. The key moral concept
here is truth. Attention on this axis is both truth-seeking and an occasion
for a kind of ‘joining’ of the subject with the world. Truth-seeking, in the
Platonic world that informs Murdoch’s and Weil’s thinking, is eros. Such
truth-seeking erotic joining removes, at the same time, the self-concerned
distortions between us and reality. The vertical axis includes the role that
attention plays in making objects available to consciousness, although it
does not rely on an identification of consciousness with attention. The
relevant types of attention are focused and sustained, although even a
moment’s attention can be morally significant in this way.
The horizontal axis corresponds to the allocation of attention. The
selectivity of attention, so important in psychology and other areas of
philosophy, becomes more relevant for morality in this axis. What we
attend to matters morally in various ways. Our objects of attention enter
our consciousness and, hence, if Murdoch is right, define our ‘moral qual-
ity’. That, in turn, will shape what else we pay attention to, what is salient
for us, and how we understand and frame what enters our consciousness.
That, further, will have consequences for what motivates us to act, and
what kinds of actions we will perform. Here selective, alternating, and
divided attention are more important.
The latter axis, of course, implies the former. But it will be helpful to
divide them because we learn different lessons from the presence of atten-
tion as such, its inherent value, and from the different objects to which
attention is bestowed, an allocation which has more visible consequences
in the moral quality of the attentive subject, her perceptions, and her
actions.
The moral importance of attention, I am going to suggest, is both
normative—regarding what we should do, presenting attention as some-
thing to be encouraged—and meta-ethical—suggesting a different picture
of what morality is about, pointing at hidden places where moral learn-
ing, motivation, change, or failure take place.
But before we enter into a more specific explanation of the various
ways in which attention is fundamental to morality, which will be duly
followed by an acknowledgement of the limits of attention in morality,
we need to prepare the ground for the discussion to properly take root.
Showing that attention can be a moral concept in the first place requires
defending two aspects of attention that are not unanimously agreed upon
in the psychological and philosophical studies of attention. These are the
idea that attention is not present in all conscious activity, and that it is
connected with agency. Without the possibility of being somehow respon-
sible for attention, we can still be improved by it, but we cannot claim it
to be a mark, let alone ‘the’ mark, of the ‘moral agent’. And if attention is
something that is omnipresent whenever we are awake, then either we are
always morally good, or attention is not morally beneficial. Nor would
this view allow us to think of attention as we ordinarily do, when we
rebuke ourselves or others for being inattentive, and tell each other to pay
attention.
Attention and agency

Attention cannot be a central concept in morality if there is not some
agency involved. And yet, it may seem that the objects of our attention
just make an impression on us, which is not up to us. The direction of
attention, too, is sometimes willed, but it often seems to be determined by
something that we do not choose. What, then, does attention have to do
with a moral agent? Much more than we might think, according not only
to Murdoch and Weil, but to many modern and contemporary accounts
of attention. In psychology, where definitions are scarce, Richard Shiffrin
offers a definition of attention that has agency as a central element:
‘Attention has been used to refer to all those aspects of human cognition
that the subject can control’ (1988: 739). The idea that attention is a
form of agency is forcefully articulated also by James, who writes that
‘my experience is what I agree to attend to’ (1890, v.1: 402). Not only is
volition present in attention, which shapes experience and draws limits to
the objects of perception, but for James volition is strikingly identified
with some forms of attention. He writes: ‘to attend … is the volitional
act, the only inward volitional act’ (v.2: 567). And: ‘attention with effort
is all that any case of volition implies’ (v.2: 561).
The difficulty of recognising the agency of attention, according to
James, comes precisely from the idea that ‘experience is supposed to be of
something simply given’ (v.1: 402). But the phenomenon of attention dis-
rupts this assumption. Many philosophers of mind and phenomenolo-
gists agree. Watzl (2017) sees attention as structuring the field of
experience. Wu (2011) claims that attention is a function of agency. Mole
takes attention to be engaging in a task, even if the task is simply a per-
ceptual one (like ‘getting acquainted with a chair’) (2011: 73).
In a first and rather obvious sense, the agency of attention depends on
the fact that attention can be willed. We have the capacity to choose
whether to pay attention, and what to pay attention to. You may be mak-
ing the choice to keep reading right now, even if you are tempted to put
down the book, or something more enticing competes for your attention.
While Murdoch’s ethics is emphatically not based on the will, she does
not deny that the will plays a role, also in attention. Attention can be
something we try to exercise, choose to redirect, and so on.
In ‘The Darkness of Practical Reason’, for instance, Murdoch writes:
Beliefs about people often proceed … imaginatively and under direct

pressure of will: we have to attend to people, we may have to have
faith in them, and here justice and realism demand the inhibition of
certain pictures, the promotion of others’
(DPR 199)
In Sovereignty, the mother-in-law M ‘reflects deliberately about D’

(IP 313). Discussing the switch of attention from which we gain moral
improvement, Murdoch says that it is ‘something which we may also do
deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish
care’ (SGC 369). And towards the end of MGM she tells us that, among
moral disciplines,
The inhibition of unworthy fantasies is perhaps the most accessible

discipline … There may be a place here for the idea of an effort of
will … We have (gravity, necessity) a natural impulse to derealise the
world and surround ourselves with fantasy. Simply stopping this,
refraining from filling voids with lies and falsity, is progress.
(MGM 503)
Still, Murdoch’s project is centred around a re-configuration of morality

that not only broadens its domain beyond the will, but to a large extent
refocuses the domain of the moral on less apparent, less conscious inner
movements. Her worries about the centrality of the will remain even
when the will directs not outward action but mental action. Immediately
after making room for the will in attention in MGM, she writes: ‘The
concept of will should be kept under restraint; if it becomes too powerful
and abstract and simple it tends to swallow and segregate our ideas of
morality, obliterate their omnipresent detail, and facilitate a treatment of
“morality” as a small special subject’ (348).
Will, Murdoch is suggesting, is not the only nor the main agent of
moral change and of the progress that we make through attention. You
keep reading, you keep your attention focused on the page: is this really
mainly a result of an act of will, or is it something else, your habit of
focusing perhaps, or your capacity for letting your mind be led by what
is on the page, for letting it flow forward with the narrative?
The place for effort of will, Murdoch suggests, is usually that of nega-
tive constraint (‘I really want to stop reading this book!’ you tell yourself,
and then the will responds: ‘No, keep going, it’s poor discipline to leave
things unfinished’). Will holds up the ‘notice’ ‘DON’T DO IT. (Socrates’s
daemon told him only what not to do)’ (MGM 302).13 So sometimes the
will operates in attention. This is a capacity not to be dismissed. But often
it does not operate so. And when it does, it is mostly in directing or
initiating attention. During attention, we are doing something different.
What we are doing, first and foremost, for Murdoch, is to let ourselves be
struck by an object, or led by it, and influenced not only in our perception
but also in our ‘energy’.14 That may be, on the Murdochian model, what
‘sustained attention’ requires. If you have not yet put down this book, it
may be because (humour me please) some of the content is drawing you
forward. The agency of attention, more often and perhaps more properly,
is then a sort of receptivity or allowing.
In fact, attention requires a delicate balance of activity and passivity. If
you try too hard, strive to find, you will lose the object. This is the caution
sounded again and again by Simone Weil, who emphasises even more
than Murdoch the passive side of attention. If I am paying attention to
you—with the aim of wanting to know how you are, say whether you’re
happy in the new city you’ve moved to—I need to avoid scrutinising your
face, looking for signs of tiredness or of flourishing, and so on. I need to
take a step back. This is, however, still an effort, only an effort of a differ-
ent kind. It would be much easier to rush the process, and look for what
I want to see or expect.
The wrong way of seeking. The attention fixed on a problem. Another

phenomenon due to horror of the void. We do not want to have lost
our labour. The heat of the chase. We must not want to find: as in the
case of an excessive devotion, we become dependent on the object of
our efforts. We need an outward reward which chance sometimes
provides and which we are ready to accept at the price of a deforma-
tion of the truth.
It is only effort without desire (not attached to an object) which infal-
libly contains a reward.
To draw back before the object we are pursuing. Only an indirect
method is effective. We do nothing if we have not first drawn back.
(GG 117)
Such waiting is not passive in any ordinary way. It is a restraint of the

ego, and of the will insofar as it is driven by our hastiness to know. That,
in itself, is difficult, and requires agency. But attention, in this sense, is
active also because it is stretched wholly towards the object, albeit with-
out placing anything upon it. Weil warns that attention should not be
‘muscular effort’ and yet she observes that it is, at the same time, the
greatest of all efforts (RSS 70–1). Murdoch likens the artist’s creative
power to such ‘active passivity’, or waiting: ‘Here we can experience the
force and movement of imagination in conscious waiting and periods of
attention’ (MGM 323).
What attention suggests, then, is rather that the dichotomy between
activity and passivity in mental life—identified respectively with action
and perception, will and consciousness—may not be helpful. As James
remarks, the assumption that perception is just ‘given’ obscures the real
work of attention, and provides a false picture of a divided self, with
active and passive faculties. Murdoch’s critique of contemporary moral
philosophy has this target. Her objection to Hampshire: ‘The argument
depends on the purity of the two dualisms: active and passive, and (within
the former) reason and will’ (DPR 196). On the one hand, perception is
not passive, and on the other, will is constrained by how we see the world,
what we see, what we ignore, our habits … which are a result of
attention.15
The idea that attention can bridge the divide is present both in Murdoch
and in contemporary philosophers of attention not influenced by her.
Ganeri, for instance, drawing on both Buddhist and Western sources,
argues that attention allows us to understand such more nuanced role of
agency. In contrast to what he calls the ‘agent-causal self’ view (whereby
the agent is like a ‘driver’, the ‘origin of willed directives’), attention can
be active without being ‘the outcome of rationalising intentions’ (2017:
16). In this way Ganeri, much like Murdoch, rejects the either-or of activ-
ity and passivity, arguing that ‘There is an alternative both to imagining
that all human action must have its origin in such an agent [the “driver”]
and its intentions and depicting human beings as entirely passive, deter-
ministically propelled by efficient causation, and that is to understand
that mindedness is already an activity’ (20). Attention, for Ganeri, is what
explains the nature of mental action.
Kestrel-moments, too, when our attention is caught by something
external and yet we claim moral improvement for them, become more
easily understandable on this basis.16 We can be active in our engagement
with the world without exercising a reality-independent, subject-exclu-
sive will. Attending to the kestrel is still something we do, even if not
voluntarily. Further, the conditions that enable the kestrel to make an
impression on us, the kind of perception that we have of the kestrel, the
impression she makes on us, whether we keep looking, and so on, are all
specific to us, and partly created by how we have shaped our ‘background
of consciousness’ through countless small moments of attention or
inattention.17
Attention not all the time

The other, only apparently obvious, requirement to consider attention as
morally important is that attention is not something that we exercise all
the time in our waking life. This is where the moral account of attention
needs to take some distance from those theories in psychology and phi-
losophy of mind that consider attention as necessary for consciousness.
These views can certainly be compatible with the morality of the alloca-
tion of attention, but not with the idea that attention itself can have moral
relevance. Ordinary language is more helpful here, or any view that
allows for the possibility of inattention. Attention has various opposites:
distraction, fantasy, reverie. It does not matter to us, at this point, which
opposite of attention we choose; in fact, I do not think attention has only
one opposite. William James, for instance, contrasts attention with the
‘dazed, scatter-brained state which in French is called distraction, and
Zerstreutheit in German’ (1890, v.1: 404). Murdoch contrasts it mostly
with fantasy, sometimes like James with distraction (the ‘anxious calcu-
lating distracted passing of time’ in MGM 264), at other times like Weil
with reverie (MGM 218). If these states exist, and if Murdoch is right
that they are not attentive states, we need to make room for conscious
states where attention is not operating.
This difficulty in squaring a more intuitive understanding of attention
with some scientific and philosophical views is also felt within philo-
sophical psychology. Christopher Mole, in tracing a history of attention,
discusses early studies which tried to extend the concept so much ‘as to
include even what we ordinarily call inattention’ (Ward 1918: 49, quoted
in Mole 2011: 7). This, as Mole responds, means losing much of what
delimits attention as a specific phenomenon and concept (in Mole’s case,
selectivity and directedness):
If we use the word ‘attention’ in such a way that all conscious states
involve attention to some degree, even those idle, tuned-out states
that we naturally describe as instances of inattention, then we lose
our grip on the selectivity and directedness that our preliminary char-
acterization of attention took to be of its essence.
(2011: 7)
Broadening attention to a constantly ongoing phenomenon may lead to a

difficulty in understanding attention, since there is nothing to contrast it
with. Yet some readers of Murdoch too have taken her to conceive of
attention as omnipresent in consciousness. This is, in part, due to some
passages in which Murdoch may seem to claim just that. Such as this:
if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously

it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value
round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of
choice most of the business of choosing is already over.
(IP 329)
Niklas Forsberg quotes this passage writing that ‘The “work of atten-
tion” is something that goes one continuously and it is not something
that can be, as it were, “switched off”’ (2013: 145) and then continues:
‘The “in between” [between moments of overt choice] is out of our con-
trol’ (146). This seems to suggest that attention is constant, and we have
no control over it. Both thoughts are problematic. In the section above,
we saw the problem with the latter.18 As for the omnipresence of atten-
tion, we would misunderstand Murdoch if we took her to mean that
attention is constantly at work. Its work is constant only if we read it as
‘task’ (as Murdoch elsewhere refers to attention): if every act of cognition
matters, then at every moment attention is at stake. But attention itself is
not constant, and it is in fact ‘off’ a lot of the time. Indeed, the ‘natural’
human state, for Murdoch, is one of inattention (fantasy), so switching
on the lights is the rare gift we should aspire to.
What does go on all the time—and can be mistaken for attention—is
the evaluative activity of consciousness. It is conceivable that readings of
Murdochian attention as constantly occurring result from taking the
attentive aspect of consciousness for the whole. It is central to Murdoch’s
moral psychology that our encounter with the world is always evaluative.
Whether or not we attend is part of such evaluative encounter: ‘one can-
not “philosophise” adequately upon the subject unless one takes it as
fundamental that consciousness is a form of moral activity: what we
attend to, how we attend, whether we attend’ (MGM 167, emphasis
added) and ‘We are all the time building up our value world and exercis-
ing, or failing to exercise, our sense of truth in the daily hourly minutely
business of apprehending, or failing to apprehend, what is real and distin-
guishing it from illusion’ (MGM 304). What cannot be ‘switched off’, as
Murdoch writes, is not attention, but ‘the moral life’ (IP 329).
If we are always in some sense morally active, succeeding or failing in
grasping what is real, then this form of omnipresence is exactly what
gives attention its importance. And that is also why we need to be able to
differentiate between lazy, biased, self-involved, inattentive states—and
attention:
I would like on the whole to use the word ‘attention’ as a good word
and use some more general term like ‘looking’ as the neutral word. …
Attention is the effort to counteract such states of illusion.
(IP 329)
The vertical axis: the presence and absence of attention

The moral importance of attention can be understood, as I have sug-
gested, along two axes. The first regards the presence or the absence of
attention. In this axis, as we have seen, lack of attention can manifest as
distraction, as reverie, or as fantasy: in all of these cases, there is some-
thing we are missing, which we are not missing in attention. That is
because attention is a direction of consciousness that has as one of its
functions that of disclosing, or bringing out, something about the object.
This does not mean that attention is always successful. But, I will argue,
attention is necessary for discovering truths about its object—based on
the Murdochian understanding of truth.
Truth is relevant to the effects and the function of attention. Although
attention does not guarantee success (i.e. it is not sufficient for knowledge
or correct perception), attention is necessary for clear and just perception
or knowledge of its object. Attended-to objects enter our field of con-
sciousness, and they do so in specific ways: not only with greater truthful-
ness, but also with greater salience and determinacy (see Prinzmetal et al.
1998; Yeshurun and Carrasco 1998; Nanay 2010).
In terms of the function of attention, I have been talking about truth-
seeking as one of its constitutive elements. This claim could be mislead-
ing: the truth-seeking of attention does not need to be a conscious
decision. We can attend with full awareness of what we are doing, and try
wilfully to pay attention; but we can also attend through habit, either
because we are generally attentive, or because we have a habit of attend-
ing to particular objects, or because we care about some objects which
are then salient for us; and we also can attend thanks to some external
stimulus that catches our attention. The truth-seeking element is present
even when attention is not caused by a conscious desire to know what is
true. The ‘seeking’ aspect of attention, then, has, in a sense, a life of its
own. It is not just we that are seeking. Attention is. When we pay atten-
tion to a car suddenly coming towards us as we cross the street, the role
of attention is to alert us of the presence of the car, and of further useful
facts such as its speed and direction. That is not something we are, in that
moment, actively seeking. But there is something we do not know, and
something we need to know. It is the role or function of attention to make
such information available. In the Stanford Encyclopaedia entry, Mole
summarises attention as being ‘involved in the selective directedness of
our mental lives’ (2021: n.p.). Attention is directed to something. And
even when it is partial or initiated with wicked intentions, or is made use
of wrongly afterwards, one of its important functions remains to discover
something about that reality.19
This pull towards truth in attention is called by Murdoch, following
Plato, by the name of eros. Eros is part of attention, what animates it,
whether we know it or not. Towards the end of MGM, Murdoch writes
that ‘A large part of what I have been concerned with comes under the
heading of Eros’ (MGM 494), defined thus: ‘“Eros” is the continuous
operation of spiritual energy, desire, intellect, love, as it moves among
and responds to particular objects of attention, the force of magnetism
and attraction which joins us to the world’ (MGM 496, emphasis added).
Eros governs all life, which is, again after Plato, ‘a spiritual pilgrimage
inspired by the disturbing magnetism of truth’ (MGM 14).
If attention has this truth-seeking function, then we have a first instru-
mental reason to think of attention as morally valuable: it helps us to get
the facts right, based on which we have to decide and act. In this case,
attention is an element of any moral view and any moral theory. Principle-
application depends on knowing facts. Doing our duty requires that we
identify the facts correctly. Maximising utility depends on that too. This
is a correct and important way of thinking about the truth-seeking value
of attention in morality. But, just like that, it is also rather uninteresting.
What this formulation misses is that attention reveals something that
would be invisible without it, and that such ‘truths’ are not available to
impersonal, detached observation—what Murdoch calls just ‘looking’.
Both Murdoch and Weil have a far richer story about the work of atten-
tion and the truth which attention can reveal. And if the story is right,
then the facts revealed by attention will be shown to do much of the work
that, on the picture above, is done by principles and choices.
Further, the instrumental account is insufficient because attention is
also inherently valuable. The truth-seeking element of attention is valu-
able in itself, and it is valuable because truth is valuable. There is value in
the object (truth) and value in the seeking. But it is not the same kind of
value. The value of truth is fundamental, and has a metaphysical aspect.
The value of truth-seeking is explained not only by the value of truth, but
also by the process which truth-seeking requires, which is a moral pro-
cess: we are improved by closeness to truth, as well as by what such
movement requires from us.
The value of truth

These thoughts are not easy. Let’s try to go slowly here. Murdoch’s argu-
ments for the reality of good, and its relation to truth, start from our expe-
rience of truth and goodness: ‘Truth is very close to good’, she writes
(MGM 325). In the idea and the method, Murdoch follows Plato. As
Socrates in the Republic takes it to be clear that truth is better than false-
hood (e.g. 595c3–4), so Murdoch assumes the intrinsic value of knowing
the truth (‘it was assumed that it is better to know the truth than to remain
in a state of illusion’, OGG 352). Truth is good, and knowing truth is good.
It is hard to disagree. But does this mean that everything is good, insofar as
it is true? In the truth-seeking of attention, there is an element of desire,
indeed of love—of eros—for the object. Yet it is implausible that the objects
of attention are only good ones. So, should we love evil?
That is one of Murdoch’s worries reading Weil: ‘She seems at times
almost too ready to embrace evil and to love God as its author’ (KV 160).
Weil has a metaphysical story to tell to explain why we can love every-
thing: God created the world. But I think that Murdoch’s worry is not
only due to a metaphysical difference; it can also be a misunderstanding
of Weil’s position, which Murdoch could and sometimes does embrace.
The point of contact, which is also the reason for valuing truth as such,
lies in Murdoch’s argument for the omnipresence of the good. In a nut-
shell, the argument is that in every act of consciousness we are guided by
an idea of perfection, which is also at the same time truth-seeking. This is
the ‘degrees of reality’ or ‘degrees of perfection’ argument, which
Murdoch finds in both Plato and St. Anselm (see MGM Ch. 13). The
perception of relative goodness in things, where some appear better than
others, suggests, according to Murdoch, that there is something that uni-
fies all these cases, and also and by the same token, that what unifies them
does so in such a way that particular cases relate to the good as to a
model which they tend to but do not reach (for it is after all an ideal). The
‘degrees of reality’ argument is meant to indicate not only the unity, but
also the perfection of the good. ‘We come to perceive scales, distances,
standards’ (OGG 350), and this perception suggests that there is an end-
point to those scales.
What is important for our purposes here is that the idea of the good is
not an object among others, nor even an idea among others. It is found in
all of our experiences, therefore in our experience of reality as such. As
Murdoch puts it, the Proof is ‘from all the world’, and only the totality of
experience can testify to something which is supposed to surpass it and
hold it together. The desire to know anything at all is itself a manifesta-
tion of our capacity to pursue the good.
So the value of truth, which attention can reveal, is not the value of this
or that particular truth. It is the value of truth itself. From this, a sense of
awe at the existence of individual realities, even a sense of the value of
individual realities, can be distinguished from the claim that these reali-
ties are morally good. Weil’s idea, I believe, is that there is a value in
reality that is more fundamental than morality. It is something that allows
us to love others regardless of their sins, and be loved regardless of ours.
And what allows us to love a blade of grass, or a beehive, or a rock.
Sophie Grace Chappell sees this idea as present in both Weil and
Murdoch, and quotes its expression in Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima’s
exhortation to ‘“love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of
sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love
the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the
divine mystery in things” (Dostoevsky 1952: 167)’ (Chappell 2015: 311).
A sense of the existence of the world as a whole: Wittgenstein’s definition
of the mystical, quoted in SGC 370 (Tractatus 6.44: ‘not how the world
is, but that it is, is the mystical’).
Attention as joining (eros)

The difficulty in singling out the value of truth lies in the fact that, as we
saw, Murdoch’s main focus is the value of truth-seeking. Again, Murdoch
sticks close to Plato here:
It remains Plato’s (surely correct) view that the bad (or mediocre)
man is in a state of illusion … The instructed and morally purified
mind sees reality clearly and indeed (in an important sense) provides
us with the concept. The original role of the Forms was not to lead us
to some attenuated elsewhere but to show us the real world. It is the
dreamer in the cave who is astray and elsewhere.
(F&S 426–427)
There are at least two reasons why the truth-seeking of attention, and its
(degrees of) success, are good. One is that it brings us closer to reality.
The other is that such closeness is possible by removing the impediments
that, according to Murdoch, come from self-concern. These are, I suggest,
the two faces of attention: eros (joining) and unselfing (letting be). These
two aspects are interdependent: when we seek truth, our self recedes;
when our self recedes, attention can disclose truth. Reality and unselfing,
united in attention, are the instruments of moral change: ‘Moral change
comes from an attention to the world whose natural result is a decrease
in egoism through an increased sense of the reality of, primarily of course
other people, but also other things’ (MGM 52).20 Let’s look at each ‘face’
of attention in turn.
Attention helps us ‘join’ the world, which we already inhabit in the first
place, but which we escape all the time by distraction, denial, fantasy. An
inattentive mind, in this sense, is lonely. An attentive mind, which seeks
the real, is not always happy, but is, in a deep sense, joyful.21 Attention
removes a sense of separation of self and world, either by removing a
sense of self (Chapter 3), or more simply by removing illusions (Chapter
2). Attention, Murdoch tells us, is a way of knowing the world which is
engaged and imaginative, where imagination is not ‘making things up’,
but rather not stopping at the surface of things:
We use our imagination not to escape the world but to join it, and
this exhilarates us because of the distance between our ordinary
dulled consciousness and an apprehension of the real. … The author-
ity of morals is the authority of truth, that is of reality.
(SGC 374)
In attention we experience closeness, because to attend is to be filled in

one’s consciousness with the object of attention. Once again, any object
can occasion this increased closeness. As Murdoch writes, ‘In a sense,
everything about us asks for our attention … The world of nature and of
ordinary artefacts is full of potential points of light, of worlds within the
world’ (MGM 339) and goes on to quote Wittgenstein contemplating a
stove. Yes, even a stove can occasion this magic:
If I have been contemplating the stove, and then am told: but now all
you know is the stove, my result does indeed seem trivial. For this
represents the matter as if I had studied the stove as one among the
many things in the world. But if I was contemplating the stove it was
my world, and everything else colourless by contrast with it …
(Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, 7, 8, 9 October 1916).
(MGM 26–7)
Debus also notes this reason for finding value in attention: ‘someone who
gives something her full attention gains … a heightened sense of reality,
and an increased openness to the object she attends to, and by extension
an increased openness to the world’. This is valuable because, Debus
writes, it is ‘very fulfilling’ (Debus 2013: 1179). But that is not where its
central value lies. Such openness does not always need to give rise to posi-
tive emotions. The breaking down of the self’s barrier, pleasurable or not,
is the main point here.
Finally, when attention is shared with another (‘joint attention’), the
potential of attention to let our consciousness come closer to reality also
has intersubjective implications. These are drawn particularly by Merleau-
Ponty, who claims that perception shows us a world that is shared: it is
attending to the same reality that shows us that there is, indeed, a reality
which is there for both of us. Antony Fredriksson develops this thought,
stressing the way in which ‘embodied orientations’ enable us to share
attention with other embodied beings, human or non-human. This shared
world revealed by attention, in turn, provides us with an immediate expe-
rience that runs against the claims of solipsism and relativism (Fredriksson
forthcoming: Chapter 4).
Attention as allowing to be (unselfing)

The truth-seeking of attention enables a greater closeness with reality.
That is made possible by overcoming what separates us from reality in
the first place—the reason for our ‘ordinary, dulled consciousness’ (SGC
374). That reason is, in Murdoch’s view, the self of the ego. The quote
above continues:
It remains Plato’s (surely correct) view that the bad (or mediocre)
man is in a state of illusion, of which egoism is the most general
name, though particular cases would of course suggest more detailed
descriptions. Obsession, prejudice, envy, anxiety, ignorance, greed,
neurosis, and so on and so on veil reality.
(F&S 426)
Attention enables a more truthful perception and understanding of real-

ity because the ‘screen’ of the self is withdrawn, or rather minimised.
I devote the next two chapters to the exploration of what such ‘unselfing’
means. Here, the question is why truthfulness requires goodness, a good-
ness which I articulate, following Murdoch, primarily as love (eros) and
unselfing—the components of attention. Surely we don’t need to be good
to excel at maths, or to learn a language?
According to Murdoch and Weil, we do. At least at the time we are
learning, perceiving, or knowing. For these to be successful, some virtue
is required:
all just vision … is a moral matter … the same virtue (love) [is]
required throughout and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a
blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person.
(OGG 357)
Eros, as we have seen, is the positive side. As in the Symposium, eros is

desire for the good which is at the same time desire for truth. But because
truth and goodness are Ideas, eros is not desire for anything in particular.
If it was, it would have no role in attention, for it would try to determine
the object of our vision, to ‘possess’ it by distorting it to suit our wishes.
As we saw in the section on agency above, Weil ardently cautions against
this form of desire. In attention ‘we must not want to find … it is only
effort without desire (not attached to an object) which infallibly contains
a reward’ (GG 117). This is the lesson of the Bhagavad Gītā, which Weil
admires: not to be attached to the fruit of action—or vision.
This kind of partial detachment in attention is also the reason both
Weil and Murdoch take the appreciation of beauty to be a proper exer-
cise of goodness, but also the easiest way in:
Beauty attracts the attention and yet does nothing to sustain it.
Beauty always promises, but never gives anything. There is nothing
to be desired, because the one thing we want is that it should not
change … if one does not seek means to evade the exquisite anguish
it inflicts, then desire is gradually transformed into love and one
begins to acquire the faculty of pure and disinterested attention.
(HP 28–9)
Echoed by Murdoch, here, for instance:
Beauty gives us an immediate image of good desire, the desire for

goodness and the desire for truth. We are attracted to the real in the
guise of the beautiful and the response to this attraction brings joy.
To overcome egoism in its protean forms of fantasy and illusion (per
tanti rami cercando) is automatically to become more moral; to see
the real is to see its independence and ergo its claims.
(F&S 425)
Beauty may be sui generis. The sensibility of the artist does not, for most
of us, represent a good model of knowledge or truthfulness. But even in
learning mathematics something similar needs to occur: we must recog-
nise a reality that is independent of our desires, keep our attention fixed
on it, and desire to see it for what it is.22
That is unselfing: the recognition of a reality that is not ours to distort,
even if only in imagination. That is why eros and unselfing go together in
attention. A non-attached desire for truth comes with a giving up of our
claims on it:
the realism (ability to perceive reality) required for goodness is a kind

of intellectual ability to perceive what is true, which is automatically
at the same time a suppression of self.
(OGG 353)
There is a sense, in attention, of respect for a reality that is separate and

independent from me. But wasn’t attention a way of joining reality? Well,
there are two ways of joining: by removing obstacles, or by swallowing.
The mind, Murdoch holds, tends to do the latter. Attention the former.
But by revealing reality, it reveals both its closeness and its distance. The
latter is nothing but the fact that our distortions are illusory. It says noth-
ing about a metaphysical separation.
Attention is love, but it is not blind

Attention, as Murdoch and Weil argue, is required for correct perception,
for learning, even for mathematics. These objects of attention can mislead
us into thinking that attention is just an efficient way of getting more
facts. But the very concept of ‘fact’, and the relative way of knowing
them, is at stake for Murdoch. The impression just mentioned changes if
we think about other kinds of truth, such as those we seek when we ask:
Is she really manipulative? Is this plant suffering? Was that look intimate
or sarcastic? Does Lucy the cat need to spend more time in the garden? Is
this friendship or a romantic relationship?
These cases give us a more obvious way into Murdoch’s idea of truth
as revealed by attention: not a series of facts discovered by an impersonal
mind (she thinks there’s no such thing), but facts that reveal themselves to
the imaginative, seeking, loving, unselfing mind of the individual. Some of
these facts could also be characterised as ‘moral facts’, based on the appli-
cation of our ordinary moral vocabulary.23 But we must bear in mind
that, for Murdoch, there is no separate realm of moral facts, contrasted
with non-moral facts. All truths, including scientific ones, are like this,
infinitely discoverable by a moral faculty.
‘Truth’ is not just a collection of facts. Truthfulness, the search for

truth, for a closer connection between thought and reality, demands
and effects an exercise of virtues and a purification of desires. The
ability, for instance, to think justly about what is evil, or to love
another person unselfishly, involves a discipline of intellect and
emotion.
(MGM 399)
When it comes to attending to individuals, the need for attention under-

stood as unselfed and loving becomes clearer. In the M&D story, Murdoch
makes it clear that M’s act of attention does not only help her to see D
more positively, but it reveals something true about D: ‘When M is just
and loving she sees D as she really is’ (IP 329). Such new ‘vision’ is not, as
Christopher Cordner (2016) argues, simply a broadened vision, enabled
by knowing ‘more details’; it is not an accumulation of more imperson-
ally discoverable items. Cordner criticises some readers of Murdoch for
holding just this view of attention. Instead, Cordner argues, the truth
about D can be known by attention which includes engagement, meaning
‘being present’ and vulnerable to the object of attention, and receptive-
ness, or ‘waiting on’.24
I think Cordner is right about the elements of attention he highlights.
M does not need ‘more facts’ about D. Rather, she changes the way she
sees the same attitudes and behaviours. How? The love that drives a new,
attentive vision has many different ‘entry points’: sometimes it is a re-
description we hear from someone else; sometimes it is our capacity to
connect to a particular detail; and sometimes, in fact, we do need new
information in order to see someone differently, and with greater justice.
But it matters what we do with that new information. No amount of new
facts can force a changed perception on us. To try to bring this home, let’s
look at one of the cases in which the strength of a new vision comes out
most clearly, the case of forgiveness. And nowhere is forgiveness more
astonishing than in the case of people who forgave others who caused
them and their loved ones unspeakable suffering.
Wilhelm Hamelmann witnessed his whole family being murdered one
night in 1945. Twenty years later, he visited some of the killers in prison
and forgave them. He even took one of them to work with him
(Heinemann 2020). More recently, Candice Mama forgave the killer of
her father, murdered for being an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa
(Wallis 2020). Barbara Mangi, in the US, forgave the man who killed her
daughter after hearing him in trial, and started a correspondence with
him (Schoenberg 2017). It is easy, I think, to balk at these stories.
Hamelmann was even harassed by anonymous individuals who thought
it was wrong of him to forgive the ‘monsters’. But, clearly, Hamelmann
did not see them as such. How did that happen?
In a letter to her daughter’s killer, Barbara Mangi wrote:
Early on … I sadly thought of you as just Dana’s murderer. But when

I heard your words to us that day at the plea agreement hearing and
then, with each additional choice I made to let myself be open to the
words in (your) letters … I came to believe that you are much more
than your crime. Once I had a much deeper and (more) personal
understanding of your life’s journey, I was able to see you as a multi-
faceted, complicated, spiritual, caring young man.
(Schoenberg 2017: n.p.)
The man was no longer just a ‘murderer’ but a ‘complicated’ and even
‘caring’ young man. It matters that this change came after an apology.
One could say that the apology changed the facts, and that the person
who was forgiven was no longer, in a relevant sense, the same who per-
petrated the crime. But for Mangi it very much was. What she came to
consider was that the man was more than a killer, not something else. It
may also matter that Hamelmann was a Christian. Yet, in the letters he
received he was told that ‘Your intention has nothing to do with
Christianity’. Perhaps it matters that some of these people, like Candice
Mama, were moved by the desire to feel better. But that does not change
that she could see something else in her father’s killer: real liberation does
not come from sham forgiveness. What these (I think extraordinary)
people were able to do was to see the killers, in a compassionate but non-
sentimental way, as the individuals they were. Candice Mama describes
learning about the story of her father’s killer thus:
It almost forces you to step into their shoes for a little bit and say,
‘You know what, if I had been dealt this pair of cards, if I had been
raised by a militant father in a militant family, went to police acad-
emy, lived in an environment that told me that this was the enemy
and this is what’s right, and then I went on to be celebrated by my
friends, by my peer groups for being the best at what I do … I mean,
would I have turned out any different?’
(Wallis 2020: n.p.)
To see the killers as individuals requires a broadening of the understand-

ing of their lives, which includes their difficult past, their own trauma,
and so on. But that is not a mere accumulation of facts. It is using those
facts to shed light on the people who went through such lives, to under-
stand their influences, and in the end to come out with a different and
more complete knowledge of those people. The facts that enable empathy
with those people also become more salient, and when salience changes
the whole picture changes.
One could worry that this re-framing can amount to making excuses.
That would be true if the crimes were forgotten, or minimised, which is
something the forgivers of these stories, I think, did not, or could not, do.
Rather, the attentive vision amounts to seeing those individuals not in a
fragmented way, crystallised by their deed, but as wholes, and to use
imagination and empathy to wonder what it may have felt like to be
them. Love, I wrote, needs an entry point: sometimes the entry point for
love is another’s suffering; but it can also be ordinary: somebody’s obses-
sion with hazelnut ice cream, somebody else’s fumbling with their shirt
buttons, and so on. The change of vision cannot be brought about as an
impartial spectator, as a judge. Love, in the sense discussed, is required,
however impossible it seems.
Attention as gift
These cases also show, perhaps too starkly, that attention also has value
for those who receive it. One is transformed by attending, but one is also
transformed by being the receiver of attention. The examples above,
however, can mislead into thinking that being attended to is good only
because it can lead to resolution, to forgiveness, to a new relationship.
What I want to say is more minimal and fundamental: attention is valu-
able for those who receive it because it amounts to acknowledging their
reality. That, as we have seen, requires a withdrawal of self-interest. In
that sense, attention is a gift. We confer value simply by attending. But
that requires that we see the value as already there. Weil’s description of
attention to the afflicted makes this point particularly clear. (I discuss it
further in Chapter 5.) In a letter to the poet Joë Bousquet, Weil writes that
attention is ‘the rarest and purest form of generosity. It is given to very
few minds to notice that things and beings exist’.25 Acknowledging
another’s reality is not natural, and requires attention (love and unself-
ing). A thought apparently absurd but utterly important, echoed by
Murdoch: ‘love is the extremely difficult realization that something other
than oneself is real’ (SBL 215).
Attention does not land on something we have no interest in. If our
sense of ourselves depends on others, receiving attention is necessary. But
more subtly, attention can have the value of acknowledgement even if the
object does not know about it. This is shown in practices such as holding
moments of silence for victims of oppressive regimes, or in the practice of
‘bearing witness’ to animals being killed, outside slaughterhouses.
Attention says: this is real, this deserves to be seen or known—and even
‘I am here’ to those who cannot hear it.
Motivation and action

If the presence of attention enables us to acknowledge its object, then
what changes is not only our inner life, our ‘vision’, but everything else
too. Attention determines not only how we see, but what we see. It is
attending to the lonely person sitting on the pavement that may motivate
me to talk to her. If I did not see her, the possibility of talking to her
would of course not even be present. And if I did not attend to her, the
need of company or comfort would not become visible to me. Attention
is good in itself, but it is also the beginning and foundation of action.26
What we do depends on what we see. And what we see is partly up to
us. This, in a nutshell, is Murdoch’s lesson on attention and action. We
harm those we see as enemies, not those we see as friends. We eat what
we see as food, not those we see as fellow living creatures. We vote for
policies rejecting asylum to those we see as scroungers or threats, not
those we see as people needing help. It may be unfashionable to say this,
but it is Murdoch’s and Weil’s view that one of these visions is more
truthful than the other, and I think they are right. (These are important
points, so I discuss them further in Chapters 5 and 6.)
The horizontal axis: the objects of attention

The moral relevance of attention is not exhausted by the fact of attention,
or the presence of it. Even if we agree that attending has moral benefits
over not attending, the question of what we attend to is not morally neu-
tral. This seems intuitively true: we become frustrated with the acquain-
tance whose attention is riveted on their phone while sharing a meal with
us (we might say it’s ‘rude’ or ‘inconsiderate’); we think that the person
who constantly focuses on the vicissitudes of their favourite TV character
and hardly spares a thought for the latest forest fire or border conflict has
lost sight of something important. We may assume neither of these people
would claim that they believe our company or climate change are irrele-
vant. What we think is wrong is the allocation of their attention.
There are several reasons why what we attend to matters. Some of
these build on considerations pertaining to the vertical axis. One reason
is that, as we saw, attending entails a (sometimes minimal) recognition of
value in the object, as worthy of attention. That recognition is beneficial
to the object of attention, most clearly when the object can be aware of
it. That’s why we are disappointed by the phone-attender.
The allocation of attention matters beyond such value-recognition.
Once we attend to an object, and do not attend to others, much more
follows. To begin with, our actions depend on what we attend to, our
failures to act partly depend on what we do not attend to. When atten-
tion picks out some objects and others are excluded, our field of choice is
thus delimited. As Murdoch writes, ‘I can only choose within the world I
can see, in the moral sense of “see” …’ (IP 329).
Not only the range of choices for our actions, but the quality and moti-
vations of our actions also depend both on the presence, and on the
objects, of attention. That is because whether we attend, and what we
attend to, has an important role in shaping us—our ‘quality of conscious-
ness’. And consciousness matters, as Murdoch repeats: ‘consciousness is
a form of moral activity: what we attend to, how we attend, whether we
attend’ (MGM 167). Our objects of attention reveal something about
who we are, and influence who are going to be.27 And out of that atten-
tion-shaped consciousness our inclinations, knowledge, concepts, and
actions arise.
This shaping of consciousness is connected not only with the presence
or absence, but also with the selectivity of attention. In other words, what
we attend to shapes our consciousness. This is Watzl’s (2017) theory of
attention.28 In Watzl’s words, ‘attention consists in regulating priority
structures’ (70).29 On this view, attention is what makes some things
salient, while others fall into the background, resulting in a kind of hier-
archical and structured content of experience. Watzl compares this phe-
nomenon to a newspaper front page, divided between headlines, articles,
fine print, and so on; or, yet more relevant for us: when one organises
one’s life around a project, such as writing a book or swimming across a
strait, other things will become less important to them, and less salient.30
The selectivity of attention in shaping consciousness is an important part
of Murdoch’s broader idea that attention shapes consciousness, both in
how we see and in what we see. It is ‘a sort of seeping of colour, or the
setting up of a magnetic field’ (DPR 200).31
If it matters what is salient for us, and what is not, and if attention has a
key role in determining that, then it matters what we attend to. When
attention is selective and focused, it picks out some objects and leaves out
others. This is part of Murdoch’s view of the morality of attention: that we
can focus on an ‘individual reality’ (IP 327). So the question is: which one?
The question can be divided between whether some objects are legiti-
mate objects of attention and others are not, and whether among legiti-
mate objects of attention some take precedence over others. If the task of
attention is to reveal reality, including moral reality, it would be contra-
dictory to claim that we should, as a rule, ignore certain objects, or not
attend to them. It is not just that attention is valuable in its own right
because it improves us. It’s that whatever is part of reality has, in princi-
ple, a claim to attention. Often, as Chappell (2015) has noted, the impres-
sion that something is a bad object of attention comes from the fact that
we don’t think it really is an object of attention, such as ‘hard-core por-
nography, or Nazi memorabilia, or excrement, or celebrity magazines’. In
those cases, it may indeed be more likely that we are not attending, but
engaging through ‘some disreputable private obsession’ or ‘getting lost in
pointless, anxious, fantasy-warped trivia’ (305). But if we are truly
attending, contemplating with a clear eye and without fantasy, why
should they in principle be excluded? We may learn something.32
So the real question is the latter: is there a way—a rule or a practice or
a virtue—to allocate attention well, showing us which objects we should
attend to over others? Can we have criteria to determine the moral
salience of particular objects of attention?
In response to this question, Murdoch seems to suggest various candi-
dates in different passages. In this section, I will follow Chappell’s
identification of Murdoch’s candidates for attention as well as Chappell’s
strategy of looking at each in turn, but with the addition of two more of
Murdoch’s suggestions, and one possibility that she does not herself offer.
Chappell writes:
‘Joining the world as it really is’ necessarily involves recognizing that,

even if everything is interesting, still it is part of the way the world
‘really is’ that some things are more important, and so more worthy
of contemplation, than others. Under this heading Murdoch notes
three things, or kinds of thing, in particular. The first is other people;
the second is beauty; the third is what she calls ‘the Good’.
(2015: 309)
Substituting God for the Good, these possibilities are also present in Weil.
To this list, I add ‘good things’ and ‘what is present’, suggested by
Murdoch, and things for which we are directly responsible, a plausible
candidate but not suggested by Murdoch or Weil.
The good
Let us start with the good. The good as an object of attention is sug-
gested, after all, frequently by Murdoch, and throughout the whole essay
‘On God and Good’;33 Weil, too, tells us we should attend to something
perfect and transcendent, but for her that is God. But: God, for Weil, is
absent34; and for Murdoch, the good is not an object in the world, it is
only dimly perceptible in mostly mediated ways, it is indefinable, and we
may be completely wrong about its nature even when, perhaps especially
when, we think we’ve got it. That is our object of attention. One may feel
like replying: Thanks for nothing.
Except that attending to the good, or to God, is not like attending to
some object which, however, we cannot perceive. Nor is it attending
solely to something beyond, ignoring this world and what it contains,
which attention to the good as some kind of object would entail. This
possibility forms the basis for the objection famously raised by Gregory
Vlastos (1973) to Plato, and by others such as Martha Nussbaum (1996)
to Murdoch, or Peta Bowden (1998) to Murdoch and Weil: that attention
to the good bypasses the individual or uses them or it in order to get to
what really matters—the ideal.35 But that is not what attention to the
good, or God, is for either Weil or Murdoch. In fact, Murdoch writes, ‘the
direction of attention is … towards the great surprising variety of the
world, and the ability so to direct attention is love’ (SG 66). And, perhaps
more surprisingly, here is Weil:
expressions such as to love our neighbor in God, or for God, are

misleading and equivocal. A man has all he can do, even if he
concentrates all the attention of which he is capable, to look at this
small inert thing of flesh, lying stripped of clothing by the roadside.
It is not the time to turn his thoughts toward God … there are times
when, as we look at creatures, we do not have to think explicitly of
God … There are times when thinking of God separates us from him.
(LN 151)
We can attend to the good (or God), but such attention is different from
attention to any particular object, and it is not in competition with it:
instead, attention to the good is attention to reality, for that is the only
place in which the good manifests itself, it is where we learn about it.36 To
‘really see’ something or someone, or to see them lovingly (where love is
eros: desire for the good) amounts to this: seeing them through the good.
We might equally say that for Murdoch we are using the good in order to
get to the real. But that, too, would miss the closeness of the two. Look,
for instance, at someone with attention. After a little while, what you see
will be transformed, you may feel the joy and excitement that comes with
discovery, that you are making progress in understanding or vision, that
there is something familiar yet awe inspiring in that hand gesture or even
the pin in their hair. This is attention to reality and to the good together.
As the good is not an object, there is no other way to attend to it.
So Mark Hopwood is quite right when he writes that ‘on Murdoch’s
view, eros has two objects: the particular individual and the good … We
love particular individuals in the light of the good, and we love the good
through particular individuals’ (2017: 486).37 This is the idea of the good
as ‘incarnate’, in an ordinary way. In a beautiful piece, Janet Soskice
(1992) has shown how theologians can apply this idea, and find God not
only in monasteries and retreats, but changing diapers and cooking soup
for screaming children (MGM 460: ‘St Paul said we find God everywhere
in the world’). This world is not a passing place on the path to a more
fulfilling one, it is where spiritual insight can be found. Love, inspiring
attention, ‘joins us to Good and joins us to the world through the Good’
(SGC 384, emphasis added).
Objects within the world

If the good inspires attention, what we are left with is, well, all the world
as a possible object. Can’t we be a bit more specific? Let’s try to get some
clarity by taking a walk.
It is a beautiful autumn day and the leaves on the trees are various
shades of red and brown. I am walking down the avenue from university
to home, wearing cheap leather trainers. A squirrel has just crossed the
road in front of me. Earlier, I had a conversation with my friend Philip,
one of the best people I know, and the effects of the care I received during
that chat are still in me as a vague sensation of wellbeing. At the same
time, my grandmother, many miles away, is unwell. But as I walk, I am
primarily absorbed by a philosophical problem which has been exercis-
ing me for the past few weeks, to the exclusion of almost everything else.
Let us assume that I am genuinely attending to the problem, with a desire
to see its aspects justly and trying to exclude self-directed influences, such
as my eagerness to find a solution quickly or my fear of not being able to
do so. Does my selection of the object of attention present a problem?
Should I be attending, for example, to the colourful trees around me,
because they are beautiful, because they are a manifestation of nature?
Should I attend to Philip, to fill my consciousness with goodness by
example? Should I attend to the squirrel, a living being who is there with
me, now? Or should I worry, if I have not yet done so, about the shoes I
am wearing, because they are the result of suffering and exploitation,
something that by buying them I participate in? Or should I think about
my grandmother, because I care about her, and because thinking about
her may prompt me to call her, which would make her happy?
Good things
The good which inspires our attention is, according to Murdoch, discov-
ered thanks to the experience of its presence in the world. There are good
things that inspire us, and show us intimation of something better. Would
those be a more proper object of attention? Insofar as they help us, show
us the way, embody a model, yes: Murdoch writes that it is a ‘psychologi-
cal fact … that we receive moral help by focusing on valuable things’ and
quotes St. Paul: ‘whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure,
whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if
there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things’
(OGG 345). The quote recurs in MGM, where Murdoch comments:
‘These “things” which are just and good assist our attention when we try
to make just and compassionate judgments of others or to judge and cor-
rect ourselves’ (MGM 301). Attending to Philip may fill my mind with
goodness, and perhaps remind me of how to be better when I need it.
This may be true, as Murdoch writes, if we consider our habitual
objects of attention (OGG 345): objects shape our consciousness more
deeply, the more we attend to them. But even so, what is good cannot
have privileged claim to attention. Attention needs to encompass more
than goodness, because clear perception of reality includes things that are
not good. In fact, difficulties and suffering and all sorts of things that
have little goodness in them are in many cases what merits attention most
urgently.38 It is true that one needs to have learnt, and continue to learn,
to distinguish what is good from what is not and in what degree, through
a constant and renewed sense of what the good involves. But what the
good does is to help to apprehend clearly a multifarious, often flawed,
reality.
Beauty
Something similar can be said of beauty. In nature (the autumn trees) or
in art, beauty is for Murdoch both an image of goodness and a proper
way in. In this too she follows Weil, and her idea that beauty is special,
because it arouses desire without possessiveness—a necessary element of
attention. Murdoch writes:
The beautiful in nature (and we would wish to add in art) demands

and rewards attention to something grasped as entirely external and
indifferent to the greedy ego. We cannot acquire and assimilate the
beautiful.
(F&S 417)
Similarly, for Weil
Beauty attracts the attention and yet does nothing to sustain it.
Beauty always promises, but never gives anything. There is nothing
to be desired, because the one thing we want is that it should not
change … if one does not seek means to evade the exquisite anguish
it inflicts, then desire is gradually transformed into love and one
begins to acquire the faculty of pure and disinterested attention.
(HP 28–9)
And yet like good things, beautiful things cannot override other possible
objects of attention, because attention is not only directed to what is
valuable, but to what is salient—to what needs our attention. And that,
sometimes, is not so good: climate change, animal (human or non-human)
suffering, and so on. Murdoch acknowledges this:
Art, though it demands moral effort and teaches quiet attention (as
any serious study can do) is a kind of treat … we have to make moral
choices, we do not have to enjoy great art and doubtless many good
people never do.
(FS 453–4)
Other people
What about ‘other people’, the first candidate for being an especially apt
object of contemplation mentioned by Chappell (2015) above? It is a fact
that Murdoch often returns to the importance of other people, and places
the moral importance of people above art (FS 417). So it is tempting to
think that, in my walk, I am being selfish if I am focused on my problem,
or on the leaves, or on the squirrel, and not on my grandmother. But what
makes the suggestion plausible, I think, is not her humanity. It is, on the
one hand, the fact that she is unwell, and needs support. And on the other,
the fact that we have a relationship, that she may rely on me, or that I
may have a special role in cheering her up. It is not, therefore, the human-
ity that is primary here, for we do not need to take for granted that it is
only another human who can have such needs and expectations from me.
Murdoch often just assumes that, other things being equal, other people
are more morally important than other objects: ‘Moral change comes
from an attention to the world whose natural result is a decrease in ego-
ism through an increased sense of the reality of, primarily of course other
people, but also other things’ (MGM 52).39 ‘Of course’? Helpfully, here
Murdoch also shows an awareness that ‘other things’ too can be morally
salient.40
Responsibility
In the previous section, I have indicated a form of responsibility that can
also be connected with the priorities of attention: the idea that by attend-
ing to my grandmother I may be motivated to call her, and therefore
cause her to feel better for a few moments. The possibility, then, is that
attention should prioritise that which we are responsible for, such as, and
most obviously, that which we can causally influence for better or worse.
Something ‘needs’ our attention, something that ‘surrounds and concerns
us’ (MGM 218). In the story, this is also connected, less hypothetically,
with my leather shoes: am I responsible to attend to the animals whose
lives my choice of shoes has affected? That seems like a reasonable sug-
gestion. It seems true, in any case, that at some point soon (and before my
next purchase) I ought to attend to that. But is that what is most salient
now? Or are we always required to attend to what we can be responsible
for, to what we can help or hinder? A view of morality which requires one
primarily to attend to what one is causally linked to appears not only to
be overly demanding, but also to exclude much of what is experienced as
making life valuable and worthwhile: the contemplation of nature and
the red leaves on the pavement, but also of art, of what has nothing to do
with us, and of the little ‘pointless’ but interesting details of one’s
surroundings.
Presence
Finally, what about attention to the squirrel, not only because she is a
living being, or because she is beautiful, but mainly—the aspect I now
want to bring out—because she is here with me, now? The intuition that
what is present takes precedence on our attention over what is not pres-
ent is a common one. Think of the Samaritan: no one would say to him,
‘How biased you are, why did you help this man over here, and not
someone else, equally suffering, miles away?’ OK, somebody might,
there’s always someone. But the mere fact that the sufferer is here now
gives him a claim to the Samaritan’s attention, from which his actions
arise. Or let’s return to the person focused on the phone instead of us. We
think we have a claim to their attention because we are here with them.
Are we right? Murdoch seems to think so, and emphasises the impor-
tance of presence. Chapter 8 of MGM opens with a lyrical passage by
Walter Pater, exalting the joy and value of being fully present, suggesting
something that Murdoch believes philosophy has unduly neglected: the
importance of ‘presence and encounter’ (MGM 112): ‘living in the pres-
ent: I really see the face of my friend, the playing dog, Piero’s picture’
(MGM 301). Attention and presence are closely linked:
Should we not in any case endeavour to see (visual metaphor) and

attend to what surrounds and concerns us, because it is there and is
interesting, beautiful, strange, worth experiencing, and because it
demands (and needs) our attention, rather than living in a vague haze
of private anxiety and fantasy? … one must see what is happening,
what is there, in order to be able to see what ought to be done, one
should see the faces of strangers as well as of friends. Alert vivid
experience, living in the present, can be celebrated as the higher
hedonism, or as moral or spiritual ‘attention’.
(MGM 218)
Murdoch reminds us of the ways we avoid what is present in favour of a

hazy distraction, choosing our own contents of consciousness, instead of
being chosen: ‘So much of our lives is thus passed and wasted “else-
where”, as with the tourist who does not look at the famous monument,
but fiddles with his camera to get a good “view” which he can display
later to his neighbours’ (MGM 264).
But, as Murdoch recognises, we are also creatures who live in time, and
the things we do are shaped by the past and will have consequences in the
future, to which we also need to attend. Attention to what is present is
challenged by the importance and, in some cases, necessity to attend to
what is not only temporally, but also spatially not present: we’re back
with the grandmother miles away who can be cheered up by a phone call,
or the animals and labourers who are harmed by my purchasing habits.
‘We move about in time in all sorts of strange ways which are also entirely
familiar’, Murdoch writes. But where do these ‘journeys’ originate? Now:
‘our time-adventures return to and are based in presence and encounter’
(MGM 212).
But hold on, somewhere between these quotes we have switched from
physical to mental presence, and the switch is far from irrelevant. While
there are claims that what is physically here now can make on our
attention—which has, besides, the ability to draw us out of ourselves
more, as the squirrel does—Murdoch’s most important point is that inat-
tention is a sort of elsewhere, an inner absence; and that attention, con-
versely, allows us to be fully present, whether the object is this tree, or this
thought, or even this memory:
But we can in general see and appreciate the difference between anx-
ious calculating distracted passing of time when the present is never
really inhabited or filled, and present moments which are lived atten-
tively as truth and reality. In selfish obsessional calculation or resent-
ment we are ‘always elsewhere’.
(MGM 395–6)41
Diffuse attention
So, how do we know? If attention has, as I have been arguing, an impor-
tance that is both inherent and also related to our further thoughts and
actions, it seems far from irrelevant what we attend to, yet we have found
no way to choose between the objects that compete for our attention.
Most of the ‘objects’ considered have some claim to our attention—
variously due to their inherent value, our relationships to them, the con-
text they are in.
And it is precisely the contextual, particular, embodied nature of atten-
tion that makes it impossible to decide, once and for all, what we should
direct attention to. This is both because the possible objects of attention
depend on context, and because attention operates contextually.
Nonetheless, there is still something that attention itself can do to help
us here. Without resorting to universal principles, or before doing that,
attention can play a role in selecting its own objects. To understand how
that is possible, however, we need to return to the plurality of attention,
and make a new distinction: between focused and diffuse attention.
While Murdoch emphasises the individual as the proper object of
attention, her idea of attention to the good, as we have seen, opens the
way to a form of attention that is not only focused on the particular, but
also at the same time open and receptive to what is not yet individuated.
And while Weil also argues for the importance of attention to particulars,
in her view of attention we find more clearly the possibility that attention
takes an object that is not (yet) specified. In both philosophers, the idea
that attention can be open, empty, waiting, is linked to the ‘unselfing’
movement of attention, which here takes precedence over the directed, or
‘erotic’ movement. Taking a step back, we focus on nothing, and wait
until something happens. ‘Something is apprehended as there which is
not yet known. Then something comes; as we sometimes say from the
unconscious. It comes to us out of the dark of non-being, as a reward for
loving attention’ (MGM 505). This is not focusing, but it is attention.
This form of attention is known in psychology as diffuse or distributed
attention: defined by psychologist Alison Gopnik (2009) as ‘lantern’
attention, as opposed to the more traditional ‘spotlight’ metaphor, and
explained by Adrienne Prettyman (2014) as attending to the night sky as
a whole (rather than to any particular star or area). No particular object
or property is the object of our focus.
If we return to Weil’s well-known definition of attention in RSS, we
will see that this ‘diffuse attention’ is precisely the mode of attention that
she is describing:
Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached,

empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in
our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not
in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we
are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all
particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain
who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually
looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our
thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to
receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.
(RSS 111–112)
Is it possible, then, that the answer to our walking question is that, before
finding its object, attention needs to be open, or diffuse? I think it is. In
fact, it is necessary, morally speaking, that attention starts broader, ‘wait-
ing’ for salience to be revealed. And it is a point that Weil and Murdoch
emphasise. This is why selectivity, included in many definitions of atten-
tion, is absent from my working definition offered above.
Indeed, it seems that even with what we would describe as focused
attention, the possibility of narrowing down further is present, so we
need to be receptive to the various salience of, say, my upset friend’s
demeanour, or her eyes, or her words—and maybe not her shoes. The
capacity to be thus receptive is where, I believe, attention comes closer to
being a virtue, a sort of phronesis, a disposition to allocate attention
according to salience at a given moment. Then, particular items will
become salient as possible objects of attention (or as ‘attentional affor-
dances’—see McClelland 2021) and others will not. What differentiates
the initial open attention from an inattentive or fantasy-ridden state is
that what will become salient is, in the first case, less likely to be deter-
mined by my hopes and desires (more ‘unselfed’).
The distinction between these two types of attention is particularly
clear in the context of two of the main types of Buddhist meditation. One
is ‘Focused Attention (FA) [which] entails the voluntary focusing of atten-
tion on a chosen object. The other style, Open Monitoring (OM) medita-
tion, involves non-reactive monitoring of the content of experience from
moment to moment’ (Lutz et al. 2008: 1). In Open Monitoring attention
is, as Weil puts it, ‘suspended’. Experience as well as neuropsychological
studies have shown that this kind of meditation can train the mind to be
less reactive, and it has been associated with less subjective control,
reduced ‘top-down control and local competition [among alternative
thoughts] and, thus, [it] leads to a broader distribution of potential
resources’ (Colzato et al. 2012: 5) which is necessary to be receptive to all
the potentially salient objects that, as Murdoch puts it, ‘demand’ and
‘deserve’ our attention.42 Moreover, in the same study OM has been
found to increase detachment from autobiographical memory (a form of
unselfing, we may say) which helped develop a non-judgemental, non-
reactive attitude. Attention can be trained. It’s no wonder Murdoch rec-
ommended teaching meditation to children (MGM 337).
The ethics of attention: implications and limitations

There is probably still something not fully satisfying with the answer we
have arrived at. What if attention is not enough, and we still get it wrong,
both in terms of moral salience, and in terms of the actual properties of
the reality we perceive? And how do we know when it is right to attend
to what is not here, not clamouring for our attention? Australian forest
fires, animals in farms and labs, people crossing the sea … when ought we
to bring them into our attention? What if we attend as well as we can, but
still get it wrong? And what if we just cannot attend?
Attention cannot do everything. But it does quite a lot, in fact, an
astonishing—and often hidden—amount of moral work. I have tried to
summarise, in this chapter, what it can do. In the following chapters,
I will explore both the how and the further why of the moral importance
of attention (What does it mean to attend? How do I do it? And what
happens when I do?). For now, I will conclude this chapter with a quick
overview of where attention has taken us, and mention where it cannot
take us.
I have argued that attention is necessary to perceive or know truths,
and that morality needs truth. If facts do not just impress themselves on
us, regardless of the state we are in, we need to make ourselves available
to them and seek them out: that is attention. On the one hand, that means
that there is a good or virtuous state of the subject that enables her to
perceive and know better. On the other, this is premised on an idea of
truth, derived from Murdoch, where facts are not merely ‘the surface’ of
things, but are shaped and framed by us in countless ways, and where
moral faculties are needed as much as physical senses in revealing them.
On this view, the distinction between moral and non-moral facts, if at all
necessary, is a practical one, neither epistemological nor ontological.43
Morality needs truths, thus understood, as revealed by attention,
because knowing what is true is good in itself, but also because a false
understanding, a false ‘picture’ of something, besides being unjust to the
object, will determine the meaning of what we confront (a rightful pro-
test or a dangerous mob? a fellow creature or an enemy? etc.) and hence
our attitudes, and hence our actions. In this sense, attention shapes our
concepts, and it shapes the whole background of knowledge, affect, and
perception upon which morality is played out. Action and intention still
matter. But their meaning and origin come from attention. So the core of
morality is pushed back, starts earlier, with the way we encounter reality.
In this way morality, moreover, is extended, for it can play itself out all
the time, not only when we have to make an overtly ‘moral choice’.
These considerations are both meta-ethical, re-describing morality, and
normative, giving us reasons to be more mindful of our modes of percep-
tion, encouraging greater attention, both momentarily and habitually,
and reflecting on what our objects of attention are, again both at a given
moment and in our habits. We are given stronger reasons to ask and tell
ourselves: What am I missing? Am I prejudiced, afraid, hasty? Wait, stay
with this! etc.
On this picture, disagreement, evil, and freedom also begin to take a
distinctive shape. The focus of disagreement is shifted to perception,
understanding, construal, and their obstacles; it helps to have ‘mutual
objects of attention’ (IP 326) and look again, together and physically, not
at norms but at what we are disagreeing about. Evil is not ill will but,
with Socrates, a form of ignorance, as well as, with Aristotle, unskilful-
ness. Most of all, it is blindness, confusion, and an excessive focus on the
wrong objects to the exclusion and distortion of everything else (for
Murdoch and Weil, that is the self). Similarly, freedom is not—as Murdoch
stresses, especially in her earlier work—an exercise of the unbridled will,
but freedom from distortion or fantasy, and the positive freedom to desire
what we see is right—and which is right anyway, even if we don’t choose
it.
But, unfortunately, attention offers no guarantee. Even if the mere
effort to attend is never lost in us (as Weil argues in RSS), that does not
mean it will yield a truthful vision of what we are seeking, and we may
be mistaken both about our capacity to attend and about what we see.
All we can do is try, remove impediments, and sincerely desire truth and
good—even despite our own interests. That is why attention does not
exclude other paths to morality. While attention can do all the moral
work, it is a fact that it does not always do so, so other avenues are neces-
sary. Mainstream moral theories, such as deontology and consequential-
ism, are useful both to replace attention when it does not work, but also
in their interactions with attention. (Something of which Murdoch is
keenly aware: see e.g. MGM 53.) Attention can reveal exactly who or
what it is we have a duty towards, or determine which possibilities are
salient.44 Attention can be attention to consequences, and help to disclose
possibilities that on a consequentialist approach we need to know about.
Conversely, being mindful of consequences, or of certain prohibitions
and duties, can direct attention (for instance, to what is not present). And
an awareness of the importance of consequences, prohibitions and duties
can encourage us to question and check the success of our attention when
the insights clash significantly.
There are also more serious limitations to an ethics of attention—as I
call a moral life and ethical view that takes attention to be central. Some
have to do with attention as such. Others with the way I have presented it.
Central to the latter is the way in which I discuss attention mainly as an
individual endeavour, and while I include social, political, and historical
influences, they are not my main focus. In part, I confess that I feel better
equipped at the task I have undertaken as opposed to taking a more public
focus. Such studies exist, although not extensively in ethics.45 But more
importantly, while attention is inevitably and significantly shaped also by
what is not individual, it is ultimately a battle that is fought by the indi-
vidual, and that is where all threads converge. This is also Murdoch’s and
Weil’s focus—the latter, in fact, claiming that there is no real attention
except in solitude (HP 75). Another element missing from my presentation
is the mutuality of attention. This follows from the solitary aspect of atten-
tion in Murdoch and Weil, where we mostly find the importance of attend-
ing, occasionally the importance of being attended to, but not much about
mutual attention.46 I believe there is transformative and moral potential in
that, but my concern in this book, and the philosophers who are leading us,
simply shift our focus elsewhere for now.
Making attention, as I understand it, central to ethics also includes
inherent difficulties. One has been voiced by Sabina Lovibond, who wor-
ries about the unselfing that attention implies from the point of view of
female oppression. Surely, emancipation requires becoming ‘more of a
presence’ and not, as Weil and Murdoch suggest, an ‘ideal of absence or
detachment—whereby one becomes less of a presence in the world’?
(Lovibond 2011: 103). I am not interested here to know whether
Murdoch was, as David Robjant’s review of Lovibond titles, ‘an uncon-
scious misogynist’ (Robjant 2011). But if it’s true that prioritising atten-
tion in ethics leads to difficulties in asserting one’s rights, then we have
reasons to worry. These remain even if we were to read unselfing mod-
estly as nothing more than lack of selfishness. For it remains true that,
while attention may not actively require us to neglect our needs, it does
not give us many tools to take care of our own interests—something we
particularly need to do if we belong to one of those groups that are
socially oppressed. Attention as properly directed to the world, to the
other, makes it difficult to think about how to care for oneself, even assert
oneself over another if needed (the kind of question, granted, that arise
when something has already gone wrong). One way out would be to
attend to ourselves impartially, as one oppressed individual among oth-
ers, and defend ourselves based on that. Another way is to point out that
the unselfing both philosophers talk about aspires to be universal. Yet the
aspiration does not exclude hidden bias, and some difficulties persist.
One, as I said, is that attention is not particularly helpful for self-asser-
tion. The other is something that I as a woman, and some of you as
women, may need to take seriously: is attraction to an ethics of attention,
with relative unselfing, a way of (subconsciously) reinforcing a patriar-
chal order or betraying allegiance to it? Not having to assert one’s will
may feel like relief. Ironically, finding the answer to that would require
some unselfing, here thought of as un-identifying from a tradition of
female submissiveness.47
Finally, although this is not an inherent flaw of attention, we need to be
aware that the normativity of attention, too, is limited. There may be
times when attention is impossible for us (it may be just too hard, or it
may drive us mad to contemplate some situations).48 And even times
when attention does not benefit its object, and a loving gaze is perceived
as intrusive, unwelcome, unwanted (cf. MGM 334). But how do we know
when that is the case? We won’t know if we need to let someone be unless
we attend first. There is attention at close proximity, and attention at a
distance. Attention at a distance: that way of attending may feel safer too.
It’s easier to embrace everyone, the whole world, if they don’t even know
about it. Perhaps that is one reason Murdoch and Weil favoured it.
Perhaps that’s what makes it easier to write about it. And that, also, is a
reminder of the vulnerability that most of the time does comes with
attention, the willingness to be misunderstood, the willingness to be
rejected, and most of all the willingness to change.
Notes
1 With the exception of the adjective ‘attentive’ used to describe a person,
rather than specific actions.
2 Debus takes inspiration from Simone Weil in her defence of the value of
attention, and derives from Weil the claims that attention is both ‘sufficient’
and ‘necessary’ for an activity to have value. This reading is, as Debus admits,
questionable as an exegesis of Weil, but she comments that her argument does
not depend on its correctness (2015: 1174 and Endnote 3). The argument,
indeed, works despite of a reading of Weil which, in my view, departs from
Weil’s thought in two respects: first, Debus takes an adverbial view of atten-
tion—something that modifies an action—while Weil takes attention to be an
activity in its own right; hence, and second, attention cannot be something
that bestows value upon what we are doing, as Debus suggests, because for
Weil the act of attention is value discovering, and not something that can be
applied to any activity. The actualization of ‘the authentic and pure values’
(GG 120) are a consequence of the act of attention.
3 This characterisation of attention as truth seeking allows for voluntary or invol-
untary switchings of focused attention among different objects, compatibly with
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological understanding of attention as what creates a
‘field’ which allows for the movements of consciousness (2012: 31). Some
instances of what we ordinarily call ‘distraction’ are just movements of attention
to something else, rather than absence of attention, so they can retain the truth-
seeking value. What attention is not compatible with is intentional or knowing
distortion of reality.
4 My treatment of Weil’s idea of attention, especially its religious context, is
necessarily cursory. For further discussions, some particularly including the
religious dimension of attention, see Vetö (1994: Chapter 2), Cameron (2003),
von der Ruhr (2006: Chapter 2), Rozelle-Stone and Stone (2013: 102–112).
Here is a brief summary of the background to her idea: Weil sees the universe
as deterministic, dominated by the ‘necessity’ which was determined by God
in God’s withdrawal. This is the idea of Tzimtzum, which comes from Isaac
Luria’s Kabbalistic doctrine. The Hebrew word ‘Tzimtzum’ has the dual
meaning of ‘withdrawal’ and ‘concealment’, and refers to the idea that the
world exists as a result of the withdrawal of the only true reality, that is God.
Thus God is necessarily concealed from creation, which has the character of
negation. Human beings also partake of the necessity of God-created reality
except, Weil holds, for one spark of freedom: their autonomy to desire neces-
sity or not to desire it. Such desire of obedience is attention.
5 See ‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God’ in WG.
6 Other striking ideas that Murdoch inherits from Weil are: the idea that atten-
tion is prayer; the identification, in some places, of attention and love; the
attention to God and the good; the Platonic inspiration, also seen as mystical;
the idea that attention to beauty is the clearest and most accessible form of
defeated yet eros-like desire; the connection of attention with intellectual dis-
ciplines like mathematics or learning a language; the recommendation to
teach attention in schools.
7 Regarding Murdoch’s main Weilian heritage, Sissela Bok (2005) stresses obe-
dience, Sabina Lovibond (2011) attention and obedience, Kate Larson (2009)
love. These concepts are, as we shall see, closely tied together, so that these
differences are indeed a matter of emphasis.
8 An idea elaborated through St. Anselm’s Ontological Proof in MGM
Chapter 13.
9 See also this passage, where Murdoch connected mysticism with morality and
Plato’s cave: ‘Mystics of all kinds have usually known this and have attempted
by extremities of language to portray the nakedness and aloneness of Good, its
absolute for-nothingness. One might say that true morality is a sort of uneso-
teric mysticism, having its source in an austere and unconsoled love of the
Good. When Plato wants to explain Good he uses the image of the sun. The
moral pilgrim emerges from the cave and begins to see the real world in the
light of the sun, and last of all is able to look at the sun itself’ (SGC 375–6).
10 Above I quoted Weil’s idea that ‘the highest part of the attention only makes
contact with God’. Yet she also continues: ‘but the whole attention is turned
toward God’ (RSS 105, emphasis added).
11 The negotiation and re-negotiation of concepts is also, after all, part of ordi-
nary linguistic activities. ‘That’s not love!’ we can say to someone obsessively
scouring their spouse’s social media. My point is not to establish whether in this
case we would be right, but only that ordinary language is not a tyrant. And it
could not be: within it there are contradictions that a philosophical exploration
of attention would have to take seriously. Sebastian Watzl, making a stronger
claim, argues for our freedom to modify the ordinary concept of attention, if
exploration and reflection take us there, saying that ‘ordinary judgments about
attention … are not sacrosanct’ (2017: 9). He also comments: ‘ordinary under-
standing is both subtly influenced by popular science and often draws on intro-
spection of the first-person case’ (2017: 9). Murdoch herself gives us similar
reasons to take seriously but not entirely bow to ordinary language, observing
that politics and cultural climate influence the concepts we have.
12 This idea is in harmony with Watzl’s account of attention as subject-level
phenomenon, as opposed to a subpersonal state, property, or process (2017:
33–37). This understanding allows for a phenomenological account of atten-
tion. Moreover, unlike ‘personal level’, the subject-level allows for an account
of attention that includes other animals (34).
13 Cf. also OGG 354.
14 Even ‘deliberately falling out of love’, in Murdoch’s example, ‘is not a jump of
the will, it is the acquiring of new objects of attention and thus of new ener-
gies as a result of refocusing’ (OGG 345).
15 ‘Imagining is a doing’ (DPR 199).
16 See Murdoch’s famous ‘kestrel’ example in SGC 369.
17 Mole defends the agency involved in attention through a similar example:
one’s attention being ‘caught involuntarily by a sudden sound at the window’.
But he considers it a genuine case of attention only ‘If the way in which that
episode of looking to the window unfolds is guided by one’s understanding of
what it is that one is doing in looking to the window’ (2011: 53). What
Murdoch is suggesting with the kestrel story, instead, has no such restriction.
In fact, it is precisely when attention is not so consciously guided, for
Murdoch, that it bears its truth-revealing and unselfing fruits.
18 Indeed, Murdoch writes about fantasy, even more clearly: ‘the ego is indeed
unbridled. Continuous control is required’ (MGM 260).
19 See also Watzl, although relating to more overt forms of intentionality: ‘What
makes watching something different from looking at it is the aim or goal a
subject has while attending: you are watching something when you are visually
attending to it with the aim of knowing what that thing is doing’ (2017: 45).
20 As explained in the introduction, I question that ‘of course’, but that’s not the
main point here.
21 See RSS 110.
22 See RSS.
23 See Chapter 5.
24 On the vulnerability of attention, see also Laverty 2007: 100.
25 Letter, 13 April 1942, in Pétrement 1988: 462.
26 See e.g. OGG 353: ‘True vision occasions right conduct …’ and MGM 39:
‘reality emerges as the object of truthful vision, and virtuous action as the
product of such vision’.
27 See also this passage where Murdoch, reading Plato, is not shy of moralising the
objects of consciousness: ‘each subject has the object he deserves’ (MGM 167).
28 Watzl goes further than we need to go here, and defines attention in terms of
its role in structuring consciousness around specific objects. Murdoch’s and
Weil’s definition of attention, as we have seen and shall see, includes other
elements that are not fully concordant with this definition—that is why I left
‘selectivity’ out of my working definition earlier in this chapter. But this does
not imply that for them attention is never selective nor that selectivity is mor-
ally unimportant.
29 On attention as configuring consciousness in phenomenology, see also
Merleau-Ponty (2012: Chapters 3–4), and Aron Gurwitsch (1964).
30 It is our mental states, not the objects themselves, for Watzl, that thus organ-
ise attention: visually attending to a leaf means prioritising our seeing of the
leaf in our field of consciousness. The same goes with intellectual attention,
where attending to a particular thought structures consciousness around it.
This point could be at odds with Murdoch’s view, where attention is not
reflexive. But Watzl is not arguing that attention is directed at mental states,
only that mental states are what is made salient. This could still be a problem,
particularly for Weil. Nonetheless, regardless of this distinction, the point on
relative salience and structuring of consciousness holds.
31 See also James: ‘My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items
which I notice shape my mind’ (1890, v.1: 402).
32 Chappell here uses the word ‘contemplation’ but for the purposes of this
discussion it can be interchangeable with attention, which Chappell includes
as a more generic form of contemplation (2015: 300).
33 And it is part of the definition of both the good and God as a ‘a single, perfect,
transcendent, non-representable, necessarily real object of attention’ (OGG 344).
34 Albeit manifest precisely through such absence.
35 Bowden praises Martha Nussbaum for being able to do justice to the embodied
and particularistic kind of attention, the ‘central presence of unique human per-
sons’, that, according to him, is missing in both Murdoch and Weil, who instead
‘focus on the transcendent potential in particular attachments’ (1998: 67).
36 With due differences, which I do not have the space to spell out here. Primarily,
while Murdoch’s Good is real only as an idea, or Idea, Weil’s God has a more
substantial ontology, and her idea of attention is more frequently, though not
always, of something devoted only to God and away from the world.
37 Chappell defends both Murdoch and Plato on similar grounds (2015: 319).
38 See Chapters 5 and 6, for instance, on the importance of attending to suffer-
ing and affliction.
39 See also SBR 282, and AIN 257: ‘Other people are … the most interesting
features of our world …’.
40 See also: ‘the view which I suggest … connects morality with attention to
individuals, human individuals or individual realities of other kinds’ (IP 329).
41 See also, with reference to Weil: ‘Some or much of the time when we are
“aware” we do not have any vivid sense of presentness. Simone Weil expressed
her wish for a lively present by saying that she wanted to be able to perceive
without reverie. An inability to be fully present is something which we often
feel’ (MGM 212).
42 Interestingly, given Murdoch’s focus on art as a model and mode of goodness
and attention, Bence Nanay (2016: Chapter 2) has argued that diffuse or
distributed attention plays an important role in aesthetic experience.
43 See Chapter 5.
44 See Blum (1994: Chapter 3) on moral perception and judgement.
45 There are many studies on the political and sociological aspects of attention.
Choosing one, I recommend Yves Citton’s (2017) comprehensive book.
46 ‘It matters how we see other people. Such looking is not always dialogue,
indeed it is rarely mutual …’ (MGM 463).
47 Some of these worries have been raised in relation to the ethics of care—which
has embraced the ethical significance of attention—by Joan Tronto (1989).
48 See Panizza (2021) on cases where attending to evil may be the wrong thing
to do, or just ‘impossible’.
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2 Attention without self-concern
When we concentrate intensely our attention on something or someone,

on a situation or an individual, it seems as if ‘that’ is all there is: as if there
is only the object of our attention. What falls away, what is not seen or
simply, as we experience it, not there, is me—the one who attends.
I attend, and there is only my friend; only her eyes; only the tiny island in
the Pacific Ocean across the waves; only the owl on the birch tree; only
the crowded street; and so on. I think that, in a meaningful sense, that is
true. In attention, that is all there is. But of course I am there, I am the one
attending to all of that, in fact, if I were not there, this act of attention
would not occur at all. Is the experience an illusion, or am I an illusion?
What happens to the self in attention? In this chapter and the following
one, I will try to address this question. In Murdoch, that is the question
of ‘unselfing’. In Weil, it is ‘decreation’.
We need to know the answer, I think, for two reasons. One is meta-
physical, the other is practical, and the two are combined. Attention, and
one’s experience of it, naturally call up questions about the self: ‘what
happens to the self in attention?’ leads to a more fundamental ‘wait …
what is the self?’ Can we learn something about the self through atten-
tion, rather than the other way around? Jonardon Ganeri, in Attention,
No Self (2017), argues that it is precisely through attention that we can
understand the self. The confusion about the self that attention can pro-
voke is a fruitful starting point. But why is a metaphysical question about
the self needed to make moral progress, given the non-metaphysical rea-
sons to think about attention as morally desirable, as I hope to have
offered in Chapter 1? We need to look no further than the title of
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals to find an answer. As Murdoch shows
us, our background ideas about what is the case, what is real, the struc-
ture of reality and self, are not just idle abstractions—and when they are,
they are either postures, or not applicable to everyday life—but inform
everything we think and do, inseparably from moral sensibility, thought,
and action. If the human being ‘is a creature who makes pictures of [one-
self] and then comes to resemble the picture’ (M&E 75), then it matters
DOI: 10.4324/9781003164852-3
for morality, and for moral philosophy, what kind of picture we make; it
also matters whether we can find some truth or justification to that pic-
ture as such.1
Depending on what we think we are doing in attention, and how we
think of ourselves as agents of attention, our attention will change. Are we
separate and substantial entities taking in a world that is alien to us? Are
we fundamentally interrelated with the world we observe, shaping it and
being shaped, and essentially one? Are we, as Simone Weil thought, an
interference in the tissue of creation? Different conceptions can go hand in
hand with different responses: we can punish and repress the self; we can
think of the self as divided, and try to keep only a part; we can think of the
self as to be ignored, or to be removed. The motivation for attending, the
quality of attention, its results, all this cannot be separated from our under-
standing—explicit, or assumed and unquestioned—of what we are doing.
In this chapter and the next I will look at the metaphysical and practi-
cal questions of the self in attention together. I am not going to engage in
the colossal task of explaining what the self is, but rather, what kind of
self is implied or needed by the idea of attention that we are working
with, suggested by Murdoch and inspired by Weil. However, on this point
Murdoch and Weil seem to come apart. Therefore, I am going to discuss
the self in attention going down two different paths. Each explores a pos-
sible understanding of the self, its role in attention, and the practical
consequences and theoretical implications of holding that view. While
Murdoch fits more easily with the first solution, we will see that she is
also tempted by the second.
The first path takes the self to be something substantial and with some
degree of unity, identified with the moral subject, also the subject of atten-
tion; attention is then understood, on this view, as personal, its structure
and outcomes inescapably shaped by the individual. If there is something
to change and remove, it is only a portion of the self. The self as such is
necessary, and can be good. Because the self here is only changed or par-
tially reduced, and an intuitive or common-sense notion (again, in some
parts of the world, and in the current era) of the self as a substantial ‘I’ is
retained, I shall call this the ‘Tame View’ [TV]. The second path takes more
literally Murdoch’s idea of ‘unselfing’ as accompanying attention, and
takes a closer look at Simone Weil’s influence, including her idea of ‘décréa-
tion’, which is what Murdoch—perhaps not very accurately, as we shall
see—translates as ‘unselfing’. Here there is something about the self that is
fundamentally absent in attention. I will call this the ‘Radical View’ [RV] of
unselfing. This chapter defends the former. The next chapter will defend the
latter, and will end with an evaluation of the two possible views in relation
to the ethical role of attention, and in Murdoch’s thought.
The questions raised in this chapter are, as I said, important for under-
standing attention, its moral role, and something about us and about
morality through attention; but they are also important in the context of
Attention without self-concern 65
Murdochian exegesis, because some unclarity has been evidenced around
unselfing, even a ‘tension’ in Murdoch’s thought. The tension—which
roughly corresponds to the division between the TV and the RV—is
between a rich and substantial conception of the self, and passages that
seem to suggest that the self should be radically modified or even removed
in order to attend and, more generally, in order to be good. That is a ten-
sion that preoccupies, for instance, Maria Antonaccio’s early and influen-
tial book on Murdoch, Picturing the Human (2000). More generally,
Antonaccio observes this tension in Murdoch’s presentation of the indi-
vidual as in some way separate and substantial (qua individual), but also
as partly determined by, and significantly merged with, a transcendent
reality (Antonaccio 2000: 139–143); or, as Peter Conradi notes (but in
relation to Murdoch’s novels), ‘between a spiritual and a secular or
worldly view of the moral agent’ (1986: x quoted in Antonaccio 2000:
141).
The resolution of difficulties in Murdoch’s philosophical writings is, of
course, relevant in this book, and I hope to offer something in that direc-
tion in this chapter and the next one. But exegetical work is useful also
because it helps us understand attention and the moral task thereof. That
is our main concern here. So the question, ‘What did Murdoch think
about the self in attention?’ is raised in relation to the question ‘What can
and should we think about the self in attention?’ In this task, Simone
Weil’s thought will have the role, as we shall see, of pushing Murdochian
insights further, in a direction which Murdoch was wary to take, but
which offers a view that, I believe, we should not discount.
Murdochian conceptions of the self

The main reason for wanting a substantial conception of the self in moral
philosophy, Murdoch writes, is that it allows us to make sense of what it
means to be good, and to make moral progress. Surely not only the idea of
the good matters, but being good also matters? Not only good actions, but
good people? These are the concerns that drive her arguments to reinstate
‘the self’ in philosophy, from earlier essay like ‘Thinking and Language’,
‘Nostalgia for the Particular’, ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, up to the
long discussions of consciousness in MGM (esp. Chapters 6 and 8).
Murdoch says that we need to try to answer questions such as ‘What is
a good man like? How can we make ourselves morally better? Can we
make ourselves morally better?’ (OGG 342). Here is an indication of the
importance of the individual in morality, but also a hesitation about the
possibility of moral improvement, which leads her attack on the self, or
part of it, and its recalcitrance. Can we improve, and if so, how?
These questions are raised not on their own, but in the context of a
tradition that assigns too much importance to what is public and empiri-
cally established, to the detriment of everything else, first and foremost
the intimacy of moral experience. It is important to remember that,
although Murdoch was absolutely serious about the importance of a con-
cept of individual self, the emphasis she lays on it may be to a not insig-
nificant extent motivated by the need to oppose a picture of human beings
that makes no space for inner life or turns it into something irrelevant
and insubstantial: ‘“the man” of modern moral philosophy’ famously
attacked in the pages of Sovereignty (IP 302–306). So we may wonder (as
the next chapter shows) whether part of the emphasis, or the quality of
the emphasis, came from opposition.
Murdoch’s starting point for reinstating the self seems to be, character-
istically, an appeal to experience. We know we are individuals, with idio-
syncrasies, ways of seeing, a history, an ‘inner life’ that is sometimes
visible to others, sometimes not. We also know, in ways that are similar
and ways that are different, that others are such individuals too. And we
evaluate ourselves and others first and foremost based on that individual-
ity. The inner life is so rich and complex, wonderful and destructive, and
for better or worse it is our home. These are the reflections found vari-
ously throughout Murdoch’s work. But, also characteristically, Murdoch
does not offer a unitary definition of what the self is, or the inner life, or
consciousness. These concepts both merge and come apart, together with
others such as ‘ego’, ‘individual’, ‘psyche’, ‘self-being’.
So, what sort of thing could the self be? Murdoch gives us some
options:
a) The historical individual, including accumulated experience, knowl-

edge, and her personal development of concepts over time (IP 319–22)
b) One’s ‘personal vision’, which includes inclinations and character traits,
and which is also evaluative (so that in attention one will see the same
world, but differently from anyone else) (VCM 80: a ‘total vision of life’)
c) The background of consciousness (MGM 171), or a ‘place’ (SGC 376),
something partially unified and continuous, from which individual
acts of cognition emerge and by which they are shaped
d) A replacement for the concept of ‘soul’, with its (again, at least partial)
unity and continuity (but not necessarily an entity) (MGM 166)
This is merely an attempt to chart different notions of self. It is not to

claim that these ways of understanding the self are exclusive; in fact, they
overlap to a large extent. All of them seem to be part of the common-
sense idea of ‘person’ or individual, presented by Murdoch (an idea she
also sees in Plato):
These forms of argument in removing old Cartesian errors, may

indeed seem to render problematic the common-sense conception of
the individual self as a moral centre or substance … But surely the
‘person’ we wish to defend here, endorsed by common-sense, is not
so easily magicked away. Our present moment, our experiences, our
flow of consciousness, our indelible moral sense, are not all these
essentially linked together and do they not imply the individual?
(MGM 153, emphasis added)
The self can be conceived of as something unitary. At the same time,

Murdoch also reminds us that the aspiration to unify is dangerous,
because while it calms our fear of chaos it can distort a world that is
rarely unitary and never orderly; that goes together with a rejection of
‘metaphysical unity’ and the tendency to reify the self into an entity (SGC
94). Yet, that does not imply no unity whatsoever. Some unity can be
retained: ‘There is a false unity and multiplicity and a true unity and
multiplicity’; in the case of the self, ‘There is the selfish ego surrounded by
dark menacing chaos, and the more enlightened soul perceiving the diver-
sity of creation in the light of truth’ (MGM 165). Clearly, we need to seek
the enlightened soul. This suggests that the self can be kept, as something
substantial and somehow unitary, but some parts of the self should be
discarded, and some forms of unity rejected. What is the concept of self
we are left with, and what exactly needs to go?
Unselfing
If the self is to be preserved, as part of experience and as a unity of a
particular kind, then why is the self a problem for attention, so that we
need to ‘unself’ in order to attend, love, and be good (or, well, better)?
The general answer: the self stands in the way of reality. How?
The chief enemy of excellence in morality … is personal fantasy: the

tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which
prevents one from seeing what is there outside one.
(OGG 347–8)
A few pages earlier we encounter another ‘enemy’:
In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego. Moral philosophy
is properly, and in the past has sometimes been, the discussion of this
ego and of the techniques (if any) for its defeat.
(OGG 342)
This seems easy. It is not the self that is the problem, but ego and fantasy.
Fantasy is a ‘bad use of the imagination’ (DPR 202), ‘the proliferation of
blinding self-centred aims and images’ (OGG 354), and it is something
produced by the ego, which is only a part of the self, not the whole self.
Ego impedes attention, making us see what we want to see—or what we
fear, depending on how masochistically inclined we are.
But wait. While in the quotes above it is the ego that is seen as respon-
sible for fantasy and hence for lack of attention and moral failure, else-
where Murdoch talks about ‘self’ and ‘psyche’ as operating in the same
way (e.g. MGM 147). The self, then, is not so obviously off the hook: ‘the
self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion’ (SGC 376).
There’s something about our selves that distances us from reality, for
which we need attention and unselfing as part of it. The claims about the
self-protective and distorting nature of the mind are presented as empiri-
cal claims, partly meant to conform to ordinary observation, and partly
derived from Freud. Appealing to what she sees as ‘true and important’ in
Freud, Murdoch paints a picture of humanity as moved by ‘quasi-
mechanical’ forces, with the overall aim of protecting the self and with
the consequence of obscuring reality. Here Murdoch talks about the
‘psyche’ as that aspect of the self that causes problems:
[Freud] sees the psyche as an egocentric system of quasi-mechanical

energy, largely determined by its own individual history, whose natu-
ral attachments are sexual, ambiguous, and hard for the subject to
understand or control … Objectivity and unselfishness are not natu-
ral to human beings.
(OGG 341)2
The self as only a source of fantasy

Creating fantasy is, according to Murdoch, the main tendency of the self,
through the operations of the psyche and more specifically the ego. Most
of us, at least, need to work very hard indeed to see things as they are. The
idea of ‘mechanical’ forces separating us from what is real is also found
in Weil, who sees the universe as governed by necessity. Necessity in us is
‘gravity’, manifested in the illusions and acquisitive desires that derive
from taking our position in the universe as central and most important,
which de-realises everything else (for we are not, it may be unnecessary
to add, central and most important). But gravity has an opposite, which
is ‘grace’, made possible (but not secured) by attention and obedience.
For our purposes, it is enough to say that grace is what rewards our
efforts of attention with true vision.
In Murdoch, too, we see that fantasy, while pervasive, spontaneously
arising, and dominant, is not inescapable.3 That is shown by her contrast
of fantasy with ‘attention to reality’, which is instead ‘what counteracts
the system’ (OGG 354). Despite Murdoch’s and Weil’s radically pessimis-
tic views about the self (with important differences, as we shall see), it
must be possible for us to do some amount of justice to reality. Otherwise,
not only would attention be impossible, but there would be, as a conse-
quence, no possibility for the individual to improve morally through
increasingly clear understanding and by developing a better ‘quality of
consciousness’.4 There would only be paralysis. And no moral theory, nor
Murdoch or Weil, would advocate moral stasis.
The strong tendency to fantasise is directly related to the importance of
attention: the more pervasive distorted perception, the more pressing the
requirement to attend. To put the burden of morality on the possibility to
counter the ‘dear self’ is of course not original to Murdoch. In fact, almost
all moral theories warn against the natural tendency for self-concern.5
Murdoch’s main point, however, is that the self is not only something we
tend to unduly favour, but also that such privileging creates an epistemic
failure, distorting our perception and understanding of the world, and
that the self is naturally inclined in that direction—and there is where
moral problems begin.
The self as the only source of fantasy

If Murdoch is right that epistemic and moral error is constituted by fan-
tasy, and that the source of fantasy is the self, then eliminating the self
sounds like a good idea, solving the problem at its roots. But, as we have
seen, the self is not only a source of fantasy. And while it is the main one,
it may not be the only one.
The possibility of other sources of fantasy besides the self has been
observed among others by Lawrence Blum (2012: 314–6), who laments
Murdoch’s lack of appreciation of social or cultural sources of perceptual
and intellectual distortions. It is not that Murdoch ignores social influ-
ences: one of her concerns in relation to the difficulty to attend is the
influence of convention on perception, as Margaret Holland (2012) has
discussed.6 It is true, however, that in Murdoch the battle for clear per-
ception, even the one against the force of convention, seems to be fought
primarily at the individual level, and Murdoch says little about how to
foster forms of attention socially.
The strength of social and cultural distortions, such as stereotypes or
conventions, cannot be underestimated. Their existence can indeed show
that the self is not the source of all fantasy. However, it can still be true
that the self is the medium, a necessary element of fantasy. The power of
cultural stereotypes, for instance, partly depends on how deeply they are
internalised, and whether they serve us. In these cases, the self can work
ardently to maintain the beliefs acquired, to prevent discomfort or dis-
ruption of one’s worldview. This interrelation is clear, as Blum himself
notes, in the M&D story, where M’s perception of D as unrefined issues
from a position of privilege and a conventional understanding of class
division, and the consequent disregard for the individual case, shaping
expectations and offering a readily available and little-examined vocabu-
lary of thick concepts, such as ‘vulgar’ and ‘unpolished’.7 But these social
factors would not have the influence they have, and more specifically they
would not so strongly influence perception, if they had not been made
part of M’s own way of thinking, the abandoning of which requires some
sacrifice on the part of her ego (admitting her own mistakes, being open
to new interpretations, threatening her self-image, etc.).8
Fantasy, an epistemic-moral concept, refers to the distortions of reality
that we are responsible for it—but not necessarily, indeed not often, con-
scious of. That simply means that the self is implicated, although the ori-
gins may lie elsewhere. Other forms of error or illusion do not necessarily
oppose or hinder attention (and cannot be classed as instances of moral
failure): visual illusions, being lied to by someone else, are not instances of
fantasy or inattention. What psychology calls ‘illusions’, both cognitive and
perceptual, are cases where the stimulus or the context, rather than the self,
causes the alteration in perception or conception (see Colman 2009: 365).
When a stick appears bent in water, or when we see movement in a film
instead of a succession of shots, we are not in the grip of fantasy.
The fact that the self cannot be only a source of fantasy, and the fact
that there exist, although internalised, other sources of fantasy, are rea-
sons to doubt that what we need to do, to see justly with attention, is to
remove the self tout court. First, that seems impossible, as well as para-
doxical on someone’s path to moral improvement. And given Murdoch’s
emphasis on the importance on the inner life, it seems like she cannot
mean that either.
The Tame View

The self gets in the way, but the self is also the locus of morality. The self
precludes or distorts attention, but the self is also the agent or subject of
attention. This seems to be where we are, and despite some internal
inconsistencies, it is a position that Murdoch’s texts lend significant sup-
port to. Is this an inconsistent or paradoxical position? Some readers,
such as Antonaccio (2012) and Jordan (2008), think so. Antonaccio iden-
tifies two currents in Murdoch’s thought: one is personal, creative and
‘aesthetic’, where consciousness is engaged in a creative process in rela-
tion to reality, disclosing features and possibilities that are not available
from an impersonal perspective; the other, where unselfing is part of a
‘saintly’ ideal of ascetic self-negation, based on an impersonal kind of
objectivity where the individual qua individual has no role (2012: Chapter
6). Similarly, Jordan (2008) holds that one tendency in Murdoch’s
thought, which includes her view of the ideal or ‘highest person’, is one
where personal elements play no role. Going further than Antonaccio,
Jordan suggests that Murdoch ‘offers a model where the suppression of
the self (i.e., anything personal) is primary. In order to see the “real
world”, as a consequence, one needs to rid oneself of his or her distinctive
personality’ (2008: 235). Attention, on the second alternative, is consid-
ered, at least partly, an impersonal endeavour.
But, as we have seen, the tension can be resolved by noting that while the
self gets in the way of attention, that is not all that the self does. In other
words, there is nothing essentially immoral or distorting about the self. It is
only some aspects (tendencies and activities) of the self that preclude atten-
tion, or, using the Platonic metaphor that both Murdoch and Weil appreci-
ate, the lower ‘parts’ of the self that work against truthfulness and therefore
need to be suppressed. We are back with the view that it is really the ego
that is problematic, not the whole self. While some passages in Murdoch
are at odds with this position, and while she does claim that we need to
suppress the self, more often she calls for the suppression of selfishness.
Unselfing, then, is removal not of self, but of selfishness. Because it fits with
much of Murdoch’s overall interests, especially her recovery of a substan-
tial self as the centre or locus of moral progress, this solution has been
endorsed by many and diverse readers of Murdoch, such as Antonaccio
(mostly in her earlier book, 2000), Hämäläinen (2015) and Meszaros
(2016). Beyond scholarship, this view enables us to make sense of the idea
of making moral progress as improving ourselves through attention.
I am calling this the ‘Tame View’ because on this reading, the unselfing
that attention involves is not something that requires a denial of subjectiv-
ity, nor an uprooting of a familiar sense of who we are, nor indeed a
removal of the contribution that the individual makes to perception. There
is no ontological or metaphysical issue, but a question of psychology. Of
course, the task is still difficult, but it’s a familiar problem, played out on
familiar territory. What seemed initially like an intriguing paradox turns
out to be a fairly ordinary observation: the more selfish we are, the less
space we will leave to reality outside of us. To call it ordinary is not to say
that it is not important, or not insightful, but that it is available to common
sense, as well as ordinary experience. But of course, to justify and explain
the details of this view requires going beyond common sense and through
some analysis. In the rest of this chapter we will see in what ways, on this
picture, the self works in both promoting and hindering attention.
Cognitive penetration: good and bad

To maintain the substantial self in attention means that the self is not
only a subject or agent of attention—that from which acts of attention
arise, which could be very thin indeed—but also that the self contributes
in significant ways to determining and shaping what is perceived. When
it comes to perception, this contribution of the self—the individual’s
inner states, character traits, knowledge, and so on—is currently dis-
cussed in epistemology as ‘cognitive penetration’. Here cognitive penetra-
tion serves to expand and support the idea that perception can be
determined by the individual, in her given circumstances—and that some-
times that leads to distorted perception, but at other times it leads to
improved perception.
An early formulation of the thesis that perception is cognitively pene-
trable is Zenon Pylyshyn’s (1999), for whom cognitive penetration
requires that perception ‘alter the contents of perceptions in a way that is
logically connected to the contents of beliefs, expectations, values, and so
on’ (343).9 Recently, philosophers of mind and epistemologists have been
more interested in the cognitive penetrability of perceptual experience.
Susanna Siegel defines cognitive penetration thus10:
If visual experience is cognitively penetrable, then it is nomologically

possible for two subjects (or for one subject in different counterfac-
tual circumstances, or at different times) to have visual experiences
with different contents while seeing and attending to the same distal
stimuli under the same external conditions, as a result of differences
in other cognitive (including affective) states.
(2012: 205–6)11
Mental states or features that can penetrate or influence perceptual expe-

rience, Siegel writes, include ‘moods, beliefs, hypotheses, knowledge,
desires, and traits’ (201). Some of these are transitory (moods) and others
can be said to be constitutive of the self (traits), in either case what mat-
ters is that the influence comes from the particular individual who is
perceiving. In Siegel’s example, Jill has the belief that Jack is angry with
her; on subsequently meeting Jack, and seeing his face, she perceives it as
an angry face, whereas in other circumstances (without the prior belief
that Jack is angry) Jill would not see anger in Jack’s face. In this example,
Jill’s belief determines her perception and by doing so leads her to a false
or distorted perception.
The main philosophical controversy surrounding cognitive penetration
concerns the possibility of perceptual justification (see Lyons 2016). Can
we take what we see as a reason to believe things are that way, if we play
are role, if our mental states play a role, in what we see? Isn’t that the very
definition of subjective distortion? This is a reasonable worry, and it is the
worry that leads Murdoch to offer ‘unselfing’ as the pre-requisite for
clear vision, and as an accompaniment of attention. But the same worry,
as we have seen, can lead us to lose the self entirely: then, cognitive pen-
etration can be a way of articulating the workings of fantasy, where the
self gets in the way of reality. The ‘realism’ of attention would seem to
require, conversely, that the subject is transparent to what she is pre-
sented with: if Jill were to be attentive, she would have to give up any
element contributed by her particular self to her perception, and instead
approach Jack by being completely open to observe whatever she is pre-
sented with, trying as much as possible not to let her emotions and beliefs
play any role. But is this the right conclusion?
Murdoch gives us reasons to think otherwise. First, according to her,
there is no impersonal perception. Individuals’ consciousness always
influences perception (I return to this below). But that does not mean that
perception is always distorted because, and second, just as imagination
can become fantasy, and an apparent desire for goodness can be mistaken
and produce false values, so the contribution of the subject to perception
(cognitive penetration) can lead to clear and objective perception. The
amount of ‘penetration’ varies according to context, and there are cases
when the subject’s contribution needs to be substantial to improve and
refine perception and knowledge.
This is the case of virtues such as honesty and humility, or of knowl-
edge and skills. As Siegel writes,
In some cases, cognitive penetration can be epistemically beneficial …

If Iris Murdoch and John McDowell are correct in thinking that hav-
ing the right sort of character lets you see more moral facts than
someone lacking that character sees when faced with the same situa-
tion, then there too, your perceptual experience becomes epistemi-
cally better, thanks to its being penetrated by your character.
(2012: 201)
Jill could, for instance, remind herself that her insecurities often lead her
to expect others to be critical of her actions (self-knowledge); she may
wonder if Jack’s ongoing tension with his partner is making him look
particularly worn out these days (empathy); she may remember that there
are many other significant factors, besides herself, influencing Jack’s emo-
tions (humility). These are ways of using her own specific resources to
improve her understanding, yet removing the pernicious influences of the
self, which may lead to a different perception.
Combining the personal and the objective

Murdoch’s philosophy contains a conception of objectivity and percep-
tion which can explain the requirement of unselfing in attention without
appealing to impersonality. Murdoch believes that reality is not directly
‘mirrored’ by the human mind, but grasped through the exercise of the
imagination, which is inherently evaluative. Each individual has a par-
ticular orientation to the Good and resulting understanding of and com-
mitment to values, so that the imagination which presents reality to us is
inescapably personal and moral. Concepts, too, which are the tools with
which we grasp the world, are evaluative instruments: which concepts we
apply, and what we take those concepts to mean, reveal our evaluative
grasp of the given situation.
This does not, however, imply subjectivism, or mean that ‘reality’ sim-
ply equates with each individual’s grasp of it, or that each person has a
set of purely private concepts. The application of concepts to specific situ-
ations is subject to public rules, and the concepts themselves are not made
up by the individuals, but learnt publicly with other people, within public
contexts of use, in relation to specific objects or situations. ‘We learn
through attending to contexts, vocabulary develops through close atten-
tion to objects, and we can only understand others if we can to some
extent share their contexts’ (IP 325).
At the same time concepts, Murdoch argues, are also not rigid and
finite, but capable of development and ‘deepening’. The understanding of
some concepts, like ‘courage’, ‘joy’, ‘repentance’, or ‘human being’, is, on
the one hand, something that can be refined and deepened, potentially ad
infinitum (this is Murdoch’s idea of perfectionism of knowledge and the
‘transcendence’ of reality) in relation to a reality which, importantly, is
‘there’, regardless of us. On the other hand, such process takes place in
the context of the individual’s life and experience (IP 319–20), as well as
through the individual’s faculties, her imagination, her character traits,
her ability for empathy, her particular interests, and so on.
The idea of ‘objective reality’, for instance, undergoes important modi-

fications when it is to be understood, not in relation to ‘the world
described by science’, but in relation to the progressing life of a person.
(IP 320)12
This view of cognition and concepts, then, comes with a different view
of objectivity, where the world is not the ‘impersonal world of facts: the
hard objective world’ (IP 319), but a world understood and perceived
(but not constituted) by individuals through their imagination. On this
view, there is not one single possible way of understanding or perceiving
reality, but several compatible ways, depending on the individual’s
imaginative faculties. On the other hand, there are also ways of seeing
reality which are not correct. This model accounts for the necessary
limitation of individuals, occupying a particular position and having
limited faculties, and for the impossibility of occupying a perspective
from nowhere. At the same time, the proposed model does not reject the
notion of objectivity, but broadens it to include various compatible
individual perspectives, as well as the evaluative process through which
reality is apprehended.
What makes the suppression of any contribution of the self in atten-
tion appear plausible, then, is not the requirement of objectivity itself,
but a particular understanding of objectivity.13 The interpretation of
‘unselfing’ as elimination of any personal factor in perception assumes
precisely the ‘scientific’ view of objective knowledge that Murdoch criti-
cises. Only if objective knowledge and correct perception are conceived
as being completely independent of the perceiving individual is the elimi-
nation of the self both possible and desirable. But if Murdoch is correct
that the individual is ineliminable in perception and that objectivity and
truthfulness in fact involve a personal element, then the unselfing of
attention cannot require elimination of the self’s contribution to percep-
tion. Only part of the self needs to go. Which part exactly, and how?
Unselfing as reorientation of consciousness

On the Tame View I am now defending, we should not, and indeed can-
not, understand attention as non-cognitively penetrated thought and per-
ception. So one way to address the question above is to seek to remove
some forms of cognitive penetration—those that lead to fantasy. There
are, indeed, countless states of mind and subjective properties that
obscure reality: Alex’s sexist bias make her judge women as less capable
than men in a job interview; Omar’s depression makes everything look
dull or hopeless; Carla’s relentless optimism makes her believe that things
will turn out well when there is no reason to suppose they will. How are
these different from the states of mind and character traits that enable or
help attention?
The inner states that can penetrate perception listed above included
knowledge, beliefs, moods, attitudes, desires. To these, Murdoch adds a
crucial element: value. Murdoch understands value as an ‘orientation to
the Good’. This formulation is both mysterious and very important. The
image of value as orientation appears many times in Murdoch, and it is
conceived as something fundamental about human life. We can lack many
things, but without a sense of where goodness lies human life would simply
be inconceivable. She writes: ‘There is an orientation toward goodness in
the fundamental texture of human nature’ (MGM 474) and approvingly
quotes Charles Taylor’s claim that an ‘“orientation in relation to the good
is essential to being a functional human agent” (p. 42)’ (MGM 166). This
is a foundational element that needs to be present at the start of any reflec-
tion on life and that cannot be ‘inserted later’ (MGM 168).
The ‘orientation’ to the Good refers (as we have seen in Chapter 1) not
to a contemplation of an object, but to what each of us understands to be
valuable, the things we take to be more valuable than others, that towards
which we aspire. The orientation, then, is both cognitive and affective,
including a way of seeing—which makes what matters more salient, or
determines the meaning of situations—and the motivation and (to use
Murdoch’s word) energy to pursue certain goals, or avoid other outcomes.
The Good being elusive, as is the case with non-reified ideals, it is natural
that each of us will understand its manifestations and its general direction
in slightly or extremely different ways. This is what structures conscious-
ness, for Murdoch; this is the defining element of the self, and the most
important and ubiquitous marker of individuality. ‘To describe the self may
seem to involve describing the self as moral being, to discuss conscious-
nesses to involve discerning qualities of consciousness’ (MGM 166).14
If the fundamental structure of the self is given by the subject’s under-
standing of goodness, then, on the one hand, value is what penetrates all
acts of cognition and perception, and on the other, everything else is sub-
ordinate to value. This means that all the other cognition-penetrating
elements we have seen are themselves dependent upon each individual’s
orientation to the Good. When something goes wrong in that o rientation—
inour understanding of where goodness lies—then everything else goes
wrong.
Even if it is true, following Plato, that ‘Good is what every soul pur-
sues’ (Republic 505E in MGM 56), no one claims either that everyone
always acts according to what is good, nor that everyone always knows
what is good. There are many idols and false gods. The main and most
dazzling one, according to Murdoch, is the self. Taking ourselves to be
the most important item in the world, we turn our focus and our energies
towards ourselves, and arrange everything else accordingly. The source of
this mistake is natural. Murdoch appeals to Freud. Weil, starting from
God, offers a useful image:
Just as God, being outside the universe, is at the same time the center,
so each man imagines he is situated in the center of the world. The
illusion of perspective places him at the center of space; an illusion of
the same kind falsifies his idea of time; and yet another kindred illusion
arranges a whole hierarchy of values around him. This illusion is
extended even to our sense of existence, on account of the intimate
connection between our sense of value and our sense of being; being
seems to us less and less concentrated the farther it is removed from us.
(LOW 158–9)
Julia T. Meszaros, reading Murdoch, seems to defend this idea: that what
needs to be removed in unselfing is, primarily, ‘an illusion, a fantasy,
about oneself’ (2016: 141, emphasis added). This is the fantasy of cen-
trality. But in order to keep, as Meszaros wants to do, both a view of the
self as a ‘mechanism of attachments’ and as something substantial, the
illusion to be defeated has to be that of the ego, a part or specific perspec-
tive of the self, and not, as Meszaros suggests, the common-sense under-
standing of self (2016: 148, 166) which Murdoch, in fact, defends more
than once.15
Looking away from the self

The sense of being at the centre of space, being, and value is hard to
avoid. The work of attention, conversely, goes in the direction of realising
that this impression, so easy and natural, is false. If the self, as Weil puts
it, has a centripetal force, it makes sense that in order to attend and defeat
fantasy we should look away from the self. Murdoch agrees: ‘The direc-
tion of attention is, contrary to nature, outward, away from self’
(OGG 354). This is the unifying factor of the various cases in which the
contribution of the subject is conducive to clearer perception. For
instance, expertise (the sommelier who can taste grape where someone
else cannot), virtues such as patience (which allows for more details to
become visible) or a certain sensibility (the capacity to tell when a com-
ment is inappropriate). In all these cases the agent’s consciousness is
turned to something external.16
Therefore, if attention is aided by the self in directing consciousness
outward, then what opposes attention and is eliminated in unselfing is
not (a) the self as such, nor even (b) the self as a factor shaping percep-
tion, but (c) the self as object of one’s consciousness. As Samantha Vice
writes, it is not the self as agent, but the self as object, that we need to
worry about (2007: 61). This also explains what Murdoch means by
the frequent mention of ‘ego-centric’, ‘egotistical’, and ‘selfish’ concern,
in her descriptions of ‘bad’, non-attentive consciousness: all these terms
refer to a direction of consciousness, from self back to self, rather than
to an inevitable distorting feature of the self. Most of Murdoch’s own
examples of attention involve such re-direction away from the self and
to something external. The kestrel outside one’s window, a mountain
landscape, a work of art, are easier ways to improve or ‘purify’ con-
sciousness because they are catalysts of attention, unobtrusively direct-
ing consciousness away from the self and to something external. Even
romantic love, that awfully mixed and dangerous phenomenon, is con-
sidered as a possible stimulus for new and greater attention, thanks to
its ability to completely turn us ‘away’ from ourselves and focus us
entirely towards the other person (MGM 16–17).
Caring away from the self

Speaking of attention or fantasy as ‘directions of consciousness’ is suit-
ably broad, encompassing all of the subject’s faculties, including intellec-
tual observation, emotional participation, imaginative engagement. But
perhaps this definition is too broad. The self naturally directs conscious-
ness back to itself, and does so because it is the source of desires and
because of our natural interest in ourselves. Because of the interested and
desiring quality of the self, and because desire is the main factor in the
direction of consciousness, I suggest that the non-attentive direction of
consciousness towards the self is more properly understood as a ‘direc-
tion of concern’. Fantasy arises when consciousness is turned to the self,
but this does not refer to a purely intellectual contemplation of the self
(which may be acceptable—see Chapter 4), but rather to an engagement
and concern with it.17
As Simone Weil writes, giving up self-centredness has to be done ‘not
only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul’ (LOW 159).
The difference, in this more specific idea of unselfing, is one of engaged and
affective direction. Desire is, for Murdoch, what directs consciousness to
particular objects, so it is first of all desire that needs to be controlled and
directed properly. Eros the mediator directs our minds and bodies.
Contrary to Peta Bowden’s claim that ‘like Weil’s, Murdoch’s under-
standing of attention remains dependent on an appeal to a detached,
intellectual sensibility.’ (1998: 65), attention engages the whole individ-
ual, but primarily, in fact, desire and affect: ‘To attend is to care, to learn
to desire to learn’ (MGM 179). If there is detachment, it is detachment
from self-concern according to the TV, or, as we shall see, a passionate
detachment from everything according to the RV, which is made not of
intellect but of eros.18
Romantic love, again, gives us a clear illustration of the phenomenon
of re-direction of care in attention: when, heroically, we manage to see
the loved one as s/he is, that occurs by overcoming our own deeply
ingrained insecurities, our anxiety to be loved, our grandiose desire to be
with someone exceptional, our fear of failure, and so on. It is not just by
looking at the other that we grow, but by re-directing both gaze and care
away from ourselves. Despite its difficulties, love may be an obvious
example of the affective re-direction of vision. But concern for, rather
than just focus on, self is also present in more subtle forms whenever
fantasy arises: insecurity or arrogance make Joe unable to appreciate the
skills of her new boss; brooding over a disagreement makes Palak blind
to the blackbird on the lawn; fear of contested authority makes Fatma
angry with her friend for not immediately believing her. Self-concern, as
poet-philosopher Giacomo Leopardi writes, is ‘wafer thin, and slips into
every crack’ (1921: 109).19
Forms of self-concern
To realise that we are not the centre of value and being means giving up
illusions about ourselves and—if our understanding of value organises all
our perceptions—about the world. So fantasy takes the shape of a dual
distortion. On the one hand, there is a distortion about ourselves, about
the place that we occupy in the world: instead of conceiving of ourselves
as occupying a point like any other in the universe, we live and think as
if we were at the centre, inflating our own importance and taking our
point of view to have special relevance. This leaves little room for any-
thing else to truly matter. Second, distortion about the world follows
from this: if self is taken to be central, the external world will be unseen
in its reality, given that self fills most of the field of vision. This is why
both Murdoch and Weil claim that the self is the negation of the other
(N 213), and that the self’s ‘violent contraction’ can only ‘crush’ what it
encounters.20 That is also why Murdoch and Weil insist, in a way that
only makes sense in this context, on the importance to recognise the exis-
tence of what is other than me; Murdoch famously claiming, for instance,
that ‘love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than
oneself is real’ (S&G 215) and Weil, with characteristic intensity: ‘if mur-
derers knew their victims really existed, they would not be able to thrust
their knives into them. Not to see obstacles is the terrible secret of the
carnage of the victorious warrior, and of the misdeed of the criminal’
(N 109). Self-concern, therefore, can be either direct or indirect. While it
is probably easier to identify the former (‘am I fantasising about being
praised by my boss, again?’), the latter is more insidious, because it shows
that just trying to redirect our focus will not necessarily achieve libera-
tion from fantasy.
Direct self-concern
Direct self-concern, too, may appear at any point, even when we are (or
think we are) entirely engrossed in something external and beautiful.
Following Murdoch, let’s take art as an example, in this case literature. In
the short story Je ne parle pas francais, Katherine Mansfield describes the
experience of an egotistical artist in a café in Paris, who happens to read
a sentence which gives him an intense aesthetic experience. But immedi-
ately his mind turns back upon himself.
quite suddenly, at the bottom of the page, written in green ink, I fell
on to that stupid, stale little phrase: Je ne parle pas francais.
There! It had come—the moment—the geste! And although I was so
ready, it caught me, it tumbled me over; I was simply overwhelmed.
And the physical feeling was so curious, so particular … But, ah!
The agony of that moment! How can I describe it? I didn’t think of
anything. I didn’t even cry out to myself. Just for one moment I was
not. I was Agony, Agony, Agony.
Then it passed, and the very second after I was thinking: ‘Good God!
Am I capable of feeling as strongly as that? But I was absolutely
unconscious! I hadn’t a phrase to meet it with! I was overcome! I was
swept off my feet! I didn’t even try, in the dimmest way, to put it
down!’
And up I puffed and puffed, blowing off finally with: ‘After all I must
be first-rate. No second-rate mind could have experienced such an
intensity of feeling so … purely.’
(Mansfield 1953: 87–8)
The text is a delight, with the mention of self-extinction ironically remind-

ing us of how self-centred we can be precisely when/because we think we
are being the opposite (more on this below).21 Murdoch’s remarks that
the ‘self is such a dazzling object that if one looks there one may see noth-
ing else’ (SG 31) is well illustrated here. And if one looks elsewhere, it
won’t take long before one looks back at the self again.
Indirect self-concern
More often, the self distorts perception in indirect ways: the world is the
apparent object of one’s concern, but self-concern misrepresents it to suit
the self’s wants and needs. No one is immune to this form of fantasy, occur-
ring in various degrees so much of the time. That is why attention, as rec-
ommended by Murdoch, is a constant task (IP 334). One of the most
striking accounts of such distortions in Western literature can be found in
Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary [1856] (2012). The protagonist Emma
has become the epitome of the daydreamer, whose fantasies lead to destruc-
tive actions and a tragic end.22 By living in a dream-world driven by self-
gratification, Emma Bovary embodies an ongoing lack of attention and
corresponding distortion of reality, an almost constant failure to do justice
to things and people around her. Here, the self is not an object but a (bad)
filter: turning a stale metaphor into a real practise, it is said that Flaubert
drew inspiration in writing the novel by looking at landscapes through
pieces of coloured glass (Sodré 1999: 52).
Although apparently concerned with her surroundings and desperately
attached to her lover, Emma only wishes for things to be different from
what they are, in order to conform to the idealised life she has constructed
for herself out of reading sentimental novels.23 Differently from
Mansfield’s character, Emma is mostly not directly thinking about herself,
yet her perceptions are in the same way determined by her attempts to
gratify her self by picturing a reality which satisfies her romantic ideals.
Uninterested in ‘the great and surprising variety of the world’ (OGG 354)
discoverable through attention, Emma indulges in daydreams which are
dull and repetitive, lacking in imagination, because they are entirely
geared towards the same unfulfilled desires. Even the men she claims to
love are nothing but tools in satisfying her romantic longings, something
that is evident in her preference for daydreaming about her lover
Rodolphe rather than spending time with him.
We are all a bit ‘neurotic’

Murdoch, as we have seen, turns to Freud to describe the interference of
the self in perception. In psychoanalytic terminology, Murdochian fan-
tasy, that is, distorting or blocking reality out of self-concern, is known as
a ‘defence mechanism’.24 In a psychoanalytic reading of Madame Bovary,
Ignês Sodré explains how Emma’s daydreams are defence mechanisms
aiming ‘to cure empty and depressed states of mind’ and they thus repre-
sent an avoidance of reality (1999: 49). While it may be easy to recognise
these distorting operations of the self in Flaubert’s heroine, it may be less
straightforward to spot them in the smaller details of our lives.
One of the main obstacles to attention that Murdoch identifies is ‘neu-
rosis’, a concept she derives from Freud but which she also seems to
employ rather loosely to refer to anxious and egoistic states of mind.25
For Murdoch, in neurosis
we may fail to see the individual because we are completely enclosed

in a fantasy world of our own into which we try to draw things from
outside, not grasping their reality and independence, making them
into dream objects of our own.
(S&G 216)
In her discussion of Murdoch’s conception of neurosis, Margaret Holland

(2012) refers to David Shapiro (1965), who explains how, in some kinds
of obsessive-compulsive neurosis, the element of avoidance of reality is
motivated by a conservative anxiety to avoid novelty, surprise, or any-
thing that may not fit with the established worldview of the subject. Fear
of reality is the prime driver of fantasy. While fantasy is, as Murdoch
notes, repetitive. As Murdoch explores at length, through her caution
against ‘false unities’ and ‘comforting fictions’, so many of our activities
(philosophy included) are at least in part self-soothing. ‘The self’, she
writes, ‘reduces all to a false unity’ (OGG 354). Its aim is to avoid uncer-
tainty, unpredictability, and the chaos and messiness that characterise
reality; not to speak of the unavoidable finitude of life.
As the neurotic person rejects uncertainties and is ‘actively inattentive’
to new ideas, so the ordinary (mildly neurotic) person cannot really bear
reality, not all the time (Shapiro 1965: 30 quoted in Holland 2012: 262).
Yet this search for certainty and order is the exact opposite of the open
and receptive attitude of the attentive subject as described by both Weil
and Murdoch, where the ability to be unsettled and surprised is essential.
The ‘variety of the world’ is not only ‘great and surprising’ (OGG 354),
but often also shocking, terrifying, and senseless.
It is not surprising, then, to find out that in psychology and psycho-
analysis defence mechanisms are not always considered undesirable, and
indeed sometimes are necessary. Anna Freud analysed their various func-
tions (1992), while Sigmund Freud noted how some the operations of the
ego are needed to keep some psychological balance and manage emotions
(1990). This link between defence mechanisms and lack of attention, inci-
dentally, helps us to avoid moralism and prescribing attention as a duty,
equally valid all the time for everyone. Murdoch does not take it to be so,
nor have I been suggesting that it is, but it is tempting to think of lack of
attention as always a moral failure. Not even Weil, who thinks that atten-
tion is always good, claims that we should always be required to attend.
To help us further moderate moral fervour, even when lack of attention
takes the character of self-absorption, it is not always clear that it is either
condemnable or avoidable. Most of us, even when we are mildly unhappy
or worried, find it harder to attend, and feel pulled towards self-focus. In
the more serious cases of mood and personality disorders, the links with
self-absorption are well known; anxiety, for instance, increases egocen-
trism (Todd et al. 2015). Strikingly, the connection between such disor-
ders and increased self-concern is not one-directional, and Gaydukevych
and Kocovski (2012) have found that self-focus also leads to anxiety.
Lack of attention to the world seems to be not only a moral problem.26
These considerations show some of the limits of attention as evidenced in
Chapter 1, but they do not deny the overall desirability of attention. Attention
remains something to aspire to, even if sometimes it is too hard to attain.
Knowing what the obstacles are, and how natural they are, may indeed help,
in understanding both ourselves and others, mitigating judgement.
Attention beyond the self

Because understanding attention requires an understanding of the role
the self plays within it, the aim of this chapter was to offer one way,
derived from Murdoch, to make sense of the self in attention. That
involved understanding, together and at the same time, what happens to
the self in attention, and what we can find out about the self through
attention. But it also involved an attempt to reconcile what seemed like
two ideas that are in tension: Murdoch’s claim that we need a substantial
self as the subject of morality, and the idea that attention requires a
removal of self. The solution presented is that attention does not require
a removal of self tout court, but only of specific tendencies of the self
towards self-concern. The self remains, and even the self’s contribution to
perception remains. Following Murdoch’s idea of consciousness and per-
ception as always and necessarily in some way shaped or filtered by us,
we can conclude that a more substantial role of the self, as contributing
something personal to perception in attention, is not at odds with a clear
and just vision. This is the ‘Tame View’ of unselfing, rightly popular in
Murdoch studies. This view has much to recommend it. However, I am
not fully satisfied with it. Of course I have personal reasons (it does not
excite me), but also exegetical reasons (Murdoch is attracted to, although
ultimately does not settle onto, a different view), and philosophical rea-
sons (the alternative may be harder to accept but is coherent, it fits with
our experience of attention, and while facing other difficulties, it better
accounts for the—admittedly rarer—experiences of intense, rewarded
attention, or ‘grace’). This second view, more Weilian than Murdochian,
is worth exploring, and is the subject of the next chapter.
Notes
1 ‘We see how deep metaphysical imagery goes down into the human soul.
Farther than we can see?’ (MGM 85).
2 Two kinds of ‘automatic’ processes emerge as connected with attention, in
this chapter and in Chapter 6. On the one hand, the ‘automaticity’ of fantasy,
which means, for Murdoch, simply that fantasy is natural and spontaneous.
On the other, as we shall see, there is the automaticity of responses arising
from attentive correct perception. The first comes from obeying the self, or an
illusion of the self; the second from obeying the world. In both cases, the
process is in fact also, to some extent, under the subject’s control, but one
level up: through the redirection of attention (involving, as Murdoch puts it,
‘psychic energies’ which create the quality of consciousness from which these
processes emerge, and depending on the objects that attention takes).
3 See for instance Murdoch’s remarks about the psyche: ‘it is reluctant to face
unpleasant realities’; ‘Its consciousness is not normally a transparent glass’
(SGC 374). But ‘reluctant’ and ‘normally’ do not mean ‘incapable’ and ‘never’.
4 A similar point is made by Samantha Vice (2007: 65), who observes that since
for Murdoch the moral life is a matter of educating the self (or, in the context
of my argument, of making the self more attentive and thus more truthful), if
the self were only a fantasy mechanism, the attempt to become morally better
would not get off the ground.
5 Aristotle, for instance, urges to keep care for the self or ‘philautia’ (as such
potentially virtuous) within the limits of moderation; Kant recognise the
claims of the ‘dear self’ as the main impediment to following duty: and mov-
ing from self-other asymmetry to symmetry, most forms of utilitarianism, in
the principle of equal consideration of interests, cut across the natural ten-
dency to regard one’s own interests as special.
6 ‘One may fail to see the individual … because we are ourselves sunk in a
social whole which we allow uncritically to determine our reactions, or
because we see each other exclusively as so determined’ (S&G 216).
7 See also Holland (2012: 260).
8 Abandoning deeply ingrained social distortions is very hard but, let’s stress
again, not impossible: think of the first feminists moving against patriarchy,
or the animal liberationists moving against human supremacy.
9 Pylyshyn here argues that perception, not early vision, is cognitive penetrable.
10 Pylyshyn defines it as a rational relation, Siegel as a causal one. For my pur-
poses the latter is sufficient.
11 Note that the concept of attention in the quote is not the same as the one
developed in this book, and closer to the psychological concept as described
in the Introduction. This is not a problem, for that is not the relevant part of
the quote.
12 Murdoch acknowledges that science itself does not necessarily rely on the
idea of impersonal and mind-independent reality which she is attacking:
When she calls for ‘the liberation of morality, and of philosophy as a study of
human nature, from the domination of science’, she adds: ‘or rather from the
domination of inexact ideas of science’ (IP 320). Yet at other times ‘science’
appears in Murdoch like a shorthand for the inexact (but perhaps popular)
understanding of it.
13 ‘it is perfectly obvious that goodness is connected with knowledge; not with
impersonal quasi-scientific knowledge of the ordinary world, whatever that
may be, but with a refined and honest perception of what is really the case’ (IP
330, emphasis added); see also Antonaccio (2000: 139): ‘far from equating
realism with the empiricist assumptions of the scientific gaze, Murdoch makes
it clear that realism is always keyed to a personal vision … Yet moral objectivity
or realism is not divorced from the perceiving subject; rather, these terms only
make sense within the deeply personal field of human moral vision.’
14 And (reading Schopenhauer): ‘Our personality and temperament, and the
daily momently quality of our consciousness, our ability to look at particu-
lars, must be thought of as an organic part of our morals, and soaked in
value’ (MGM 167).
15 See e.g. MGM 153 quoted above, and the remarks against Hume’s attack on
the self: she calls out philosophers for the abstraction and inapplicability of
their views by noting how they can mostly just be held ‘in their study’, as she
does with Hume’s idea of the self as an illusion (MGM 166).
16 This point also strikes me as explaining why Maria Antonaccio’s (2000) pro-
posal of defining Murdoch’s thought as ‘reflexive realism’ has received some
strong backlash, e.g. from Robjant (2012) and Hämäläinen (2013). While
Antonaccio defines reflexivity primarily as vision of reality passing through
consciousness, the word ‘reflexivity’ carries the inevitable meaning of return-
ing or referring back to self.
17 Samantha Vice argues, instead, for the desirability of self-concern within
Murdoch’s ethical framework. However, what she means by ‘self-concern’ is
different, and includes ‘firstly, our conception and experience of self and, sec-
ondly, self-reflection, self-knowledge and their intended fruits in practical
conversion’ (2007: 60).
18 What may be lacking, in both Weil’s and Murdoch’s picture of attention, and
which may do justice to Bowden’s concern, is not passion, but reciprocity. But
that is not the question here.
19 My translation.
20 Murdoch metaphorically, and Weil a bit less so, characterise this state as the
illusion of being God (but which, for Weil, leads to a complete withdrawal—
decreation—as we shall see in the next chapter).
21 This also, incidentally, reminds us of Murdoch’s suspicion of self-centredness
after half-approvingly quoting Walter Pater at the beginning of Chapter 8 of
MGM.
22 Andrea Dworkin also notes the connection with Murdoch’s idea of fantasy in
her reading of Madame Bovary (1987: 134).
23 The quality of the novels Emma reads shows a fantasy within the fantasy.
They are books that lack imagination and realism, aimed at satisfying specific
desires in the reader, themselves lacking in the moral quality of attention to
reality on the part of the authors. But also relevant is the attitude of the
reader, who only focuses on what gratifies her in the fiction. Although Emma’s
own tendencies are partly to blame, if Murdoch is right that attention does
not come naturally to us, the novels also show how little it takes to send us
spinning in the direction of fantasy, while training attention is harder.
24 The theory of defence mechanisms was developed by Anna Freud (1992). She
identifies the following: repression, regression, reaction formation, isolation,
undoing, projection, introjection, turning against one’s own person, reversal,
sublimation, or displacement. All these are incompatible with attention.
25 ‘“Neurosis” is characterised, almost in a popular sense defined, by a mechani-
cal repetitive imprisoning of the mind’ (MGM 139).
26 This is an insight that Michael Lipson and Abigail Lipson (1996) share in a
short paper proposing a psychotherapy approach that works on shifting
attention as a form of moral concern in order to treat cases of performance
anxiety, drawing explicitly on Murdoch and Weil.
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Shapiro, D. (1965) Neurotic Styles. New York, Basic Books.
Siegel, S. (2012) Cognitive Penetrability and Perceptual Justification. Noûs.
46 (2), 201–222.
Sodré, I. (1999) Death by Daydreaming: Madame Bovary. In: Bell, D. (ed.)
Psychoanalysis and Culture: A Kleinian Perspective. London and New York,
Routledge, pp. 49–63.
Todd, A. R. et al. (2015) Anxious and Egocentric: How Specific Emotions
Influence Perspective Taking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
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A Reassessment. London, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 60–71.
Weil, S. (1951) Waiting for God [WG] Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York,
Harper and Row.
———, Love of the Order of the World [LOW], pp. 158–181.
Weil, S. (1956) The Notebooks of Simone Weil [N]. 2 vols. Translated by Arthur F.
Mills. New York, Putnam.
3 Attention without self
The exposition of the Tame View (TV) has shown that attention can be
compatible with a substantial view of the self, one in which the self does
not need to be a metaphysically fixed entity, but something that is sub-
stantial and continuous enough to constitute personal identity and an
individualised background to specific thoughts, emotions, perceptions,
and actions. Interests, knowledge, experience, and most importantly a
sense of value are, while changeable, components of the self which build
up one’s unique identity. As we have seen, this view is ‘tame’ insofar as it
does not require entirely giving up the personal element of perception,
nor a familiar sense of selfhood which we ordinarily, at least in Western
cultures, hold. Unselfing, on this view, contrary to what the word may
lead us to expect, means not a removal or suppression of the self, but only
of self-concern or ego, in other words, of the ‘parts’ or tendencies in us
which lead to fantasy. This view is also compatible with most of what
Murdoch says about the self and moral progress, and with some of what
Weil says.
Worries about the Tame View

And yet, one can feel some unease about this solution. In terms of schol-
arship, there are parts of Murdoch’s philosophical texts that seem to sug-
gest something different, although on the whole they look more like
gestures than statements. When it comes to Weil, it is much clearer that
her view of attention requires something more radical than what we have
seen.
More generally, the idea that it is part of the self we should try to sup-
press gives rise to three difficulties. One concerns the way in which our
conception of the self influences the way we attend: an understanding of
the self as substantial may lead to a form of attention that is less com-
plete, and the experience, in attention, that only the object exists is not
fully accounted for. (While this can be resolved by claiming that the self
is not present as an object, that solution only captures part of what it
DOI: 10.4324/9781003164852-4
means to say that we experience the self as ‘not there’.) Second, if atten-
tion requires suppressing part of the self, this may lead to self-focus in
order to discover and fight the ‘bad self’, a battle which only reinforces its
hold. The third worry relates to the possibility of reinforcing the self not
by fighting it, but by thinking about improving it: if we hold that atten-
tion is something that improves our selves, which is in fact one of the
reasons to hold the TV, we may face yet another paradox by making our
selves into the object of moral progress.
That is why it is worth considering an alternative view that, while giv-
ing rise to different problems, can account for the worries just raised.
That task will require exploring the possibility that the self is not as sub-
stantial and continuous as we think and that attention may reveal an
alternative, emptier view of the self in experience. On the TV, we saw that
an illusion about the self—the illusion of centrality—was the source of
illusion about the world (fantasy). Here, we consider the possibility that
it is a more radical illusion about the self that precludes attention, and
that it is not just fantasy that blocks the view.
Mutual influences between our view of the self and attention

Even though, as we have seen, there are reasons to do so, holding a concep-
tion of the self as substantial, rich, and potentially good for attention can
result in a difficulty to attend. This is a problem not so much for the philoso-
pher reflecting on the self, but for us when, in the business of living, we try
to pay attention.1 Our more or less explicit views about who we are pene-
trate our actions, as we saw with Murdoch in the previous chapter. When
we attend, if the background assumption is that we are substantial selves,
with a history and individuality, all of which is coming into this experience
now, the nature of the experience will be different. We do not need to be
aware of it, nor think that thought, in order for the nature of the experience
to change. Compare: attending to a tree having the belief or unreflective
assumption that you have a personal, idiosyncratic, creative vision; attend-
ing to a tree having the belief or unreflective assumption that attention
allows closer contact with God; attending to a tree having the belief or
unreflective assumption that you are part of the same web of life. Or: attend-
ing to another person or animal conceived as an individual with a historical
self with specific qualities or attending to another person or animal con-
ceived as an instantiation of the good, or of universal Being; and so on.
Is the TV, where the self is substantial but the ego is the enemy, the
best ‘picture’ to understand attention as revealing what is the case? Or
does it allow a bit too much of the individual into the object? The expe-
rience of attention is not one of the self participating in it, nor of a
personal vision. The word ‘impersonal’, although more often used by
Murdoch as a reproach, also appears in her work in connection with
truth and love—mostly in earlier works like OGG (352, 361); while in
Attention without self 89
MGM it is the Good that is impersonal (e.g. MGM 344). For her part,
as we shall see, Weil calls for nothing less than the removal of all that is
personal, in ourselves and others.
In the introduction to the previous chapter, I said that when we attend
the object takes the place of our self in our perception. We may be there,
in at least some sense we are there, but we don’t see ourselves. This does
not mean that our conception of a more or less substantial self cannot
enter attention, because, as we have seen, the self can influence perception
in indirect, non-conscious ways. But it can be the case that a more radical
view, where the self as subject, as perceiver, even the good self, is removed,
may be truer to the experience of seeing nothing but the object and at the
same time more conducive to a truthful experience.
Fighting the bad self

Thinking of the self as partly a positive, partly a negative influence on
perception, as the TV suggests, also means that we should know which
parts get in the way of attention. So, on the one hand, self-knowledge
becomes crucial. And on the other, we may engage in a battle with the
ego. Self-knowledge seems necessary, not for attention (we can attend
spontaneously and unknowingly), but for knowing whether we are
attending, and hence to encourage attention and check fantasy: ‘Do
I think that she’s selfish because I am worried about my own selfishness?’;
‘Is my perception of my friend’s dismissive gesture of a street vendor as
“not so bad” dictated by my desire not to put my friend’s goodness into
question?’ These are useful questions, but they are questions that require
us to take a (sometimes long and deep) look at ourselves, directing atten-
tion to ourselves. Which raises questions about the idea just defended of
attention as ‘outward look’, which directs concern away from self.
Whether, how, and to what extent this puts into question the outward-
directedness of attention is the focus of the next chapter. But it is a prob-
lem that the TV gives rise to.
More worrying is the possibility that, in seeking what it is about the self
that interferes with moral perception and knowledge, we wage war against
those parts of the self, and ignore the real object of attention—what is
other. There is a concern that Murdoch’s language of unselfing turns bel-
ligerent: the ego is the ‘enemy’, and the aim is its ‘defeat’ (OGG 342); self is
to be ‘silenced and expelled’ (OGG 352); realism is a ‘suppression of self’
(OGG 353–4). In war, we need to know our enemy, and we need to fight
them, rather than look away. Hence, the solution of simply turning out-
ward seems to fit poorly with this conception of the self as partly to sup-
press, which is enabled by the TV.2 It’s not just that thinking of the ego or
self as enemies turns us towards ourselves again. The problem is also that,
if our aim is to remove the distortions and selfishness that arise from them,
the aim is self-defeating. Murdoch, of course, knew that: she was very well
aware of the masochism that may follow from an aspiration for self-sup-
pression, and disguise itself as success (OGG 355). Here, we may begin to
take a leaf from Buddhism, which will come back as part of the alternative
view in a moment. In meditation, if unwanted thoughts arise, we are
encouraged not to fight them, but rather let them go, and return to the
object of meditation. So in attention outside the meditation room, we keep
our eyes on the object. But conceiving of the self as substantial, and as hav-
ing good and bad parts, may urge us to do otherwise.
Attending to improve me
Murdoch suggests that in moral philosophy and in the moral life the
questions to ask are: ‘What is a good man like? How can we make our-
selves morally better? Can we make ourselves morally better?’ (OGG 342).
Attention is meant to be one way to answer the ‘how’. But if we take
attention seriously as an answer, we may disagree with the questions.
Even if these questions arise naturally, and may be of help to the phi-
losopher trying to understand goodness, or to the individual trying to
decide who is a good role model, they cannot guide the first-personal
effort to attend. Attention, as we have seen, is animated by eros and
enabled by unselfing. That means that nothing but the desire to see what
is true, and do what is right, should be guiding the quest. Rather than
‘How can I be better?’ we should ask ‘What is really happening?’, ‘What
are you?’, or ‘What do you need?’
To take attention as a path to the moral improvement of the subject, as
the TV encourages us to do, and compatibly with Murdoch’s interests
and stated goals, can be dangerous for attention itself, and therefore for
moral progress. This means that it may be better for us not to think of the
self as substantial and real, and not to think about it at all. In other
words, an alternative, more radical no-self view of unselfing may more be
suitable for the purpose of attending.
The ‘sneaky’ manifestations of self-concern and fantasy—what Maria
Antonaccio more elegantly calls ‘the paradoxes of askesis’ (2012: 164–
166)—can be understood precisely as part of an attempt to attend which
allows for a substantial self and which takes self-improvement as one of
its goals. Paradoxes: attention can fail precisely because we are trying to
exercise it; so it matters how we try and why.
The present worry is not only about the strength of the self, and its
capacity to return us to self-concern without us even noticing. That kind
of danger is beautifully described in Murdoch’s reading of Plato’s cave,
where the initial liberation from the chains and the shadows is replaced
by the comforting fire, which Murdoch interprets as the self, making us
unwilling to move further (F&S 444) (This reading of Plato is of course
controversial, but what matters for us now is Murdoch’s view of the self,
aided by the imagery.) The present worry, rather, is that a view of the self
as substantial and engaged in attention can make it almost impossible to
leave the cave; to stick with the imagery: we may feel that we need to take
the fire with us, even if there’s a much stronger light out there. The danger
is intensified if, enabled by the substantial view of the self, we take our
quest, as individuals, not philosophers, to be about the moral improve-
ment of our selves. Spiritual literature, as Antonaccio reminds us, is rife
with such examples of self-defeat, precisely because we aim to make
progress, and then because we feel we are doing so. Saint John of the
Cross (2003), whose work interested both Murdoch and Weil, famously
re-wrote the seven deadly sins as potential sins of the spiritual beginner.
I am paying attention. I am making progress and seeing the situation
more justly. ‘I am making progress.’ ‘I am making progress!’ ‘So, I am
better than I used to be.’ ‘It feels nice to be attentive and improved.’ ‘See
how inattentive all these other people are?’ Sadly that’s not an unfamiliar
pattern.3 But what if we have no sense of a self that is being improved?
The radical view

What if we took seriously the possibility that attention is truly an activity
where we join the world, so closely that in attention there really is no self?
That would do justice to the experience that, in attention, there is nothing
but what we are attending to; it would also mean to take literally the idea
of ‘un-selfing’: removing or dissolving the self. These questions lead to an
alternative to the Tame View, which I have called the Radical View (RV)
because it is not part of the self, but the self, that disappears in attention
and unselfing. Hence, it is not only fantasy, but self, in any manifestation,
that separates us from reality. The self is a separation, an obstacle; a radi-
cal idea, but one we can intuitively grasp: if we love reality—as we do in
attention—we want it to manifest itself as it is, without interference, even
my observer’s interference, even if the manifestation is in my consciousness.
A striking thought beautifully expressed by Weil:
May I disappear in order that those things that I see may become
perfect in their beauty from the very fact that they are no longer
things that I see.
I do not in the least wish that this created world should fade from my
view, but that it should no longer be to me personally that it shows
itself. To me it cannot tell its secret which is too high. If I go, then the
creator and the creature will exchange their secrets.
To see a landscape as it is when I am not there …
(GG 42)
On this view, the ‘original sin’, an idea that Murdoch wants to recover
(GG 338), is not that we are selfish, but that we are selves.
The RV is an attempt to make sense of the idea expressed above by
Weil. The view starts from attention and moves towards an understand-
ing of the self based on attention, without the other movement that is
instead also present in the TV, that is, understanding the self is something
we ‘need’, in order to make sense of moral progress, leading to a concep-
tion of what happens to it in attention. This exploration will lead, as we
shall see, to a reconfiguration of the self, where ‘dissolving’ or ‘disappear-
ing’ are more apt descriptions than ‘suppressing’ or ‘removing’. The
resulting conception of self, inspired by Weil and Indian and Chinese
philosophies, is that a solid self was never there in the first place. Attention
is the realisation of such nothingness. Conversely, the illusion of self, by
enabling the reflexive concern we saw above, is the beginning of both
fantasy and all forms of distance from reality.
Like attention, the concept of unselfing comes to Murdoch from Weil.
With the introduction of Weil, the idea that the self can be an obstacle to
truth takes on a second aspect: earlier we had Freud’s psychology; now
we have Weil’s metaphysics. But, looking at Weil, we notice a first striking
difference in vocabulary: the word Weil uses is ‘decreation’ (Fr. décréa-
tion), which Murdoch translates with apparent innocence as ‘unselfing’.
But the move may not be so innocent. On the one hand, Murdoch’s trans-
lation is correct insofar as, according to Weil, the method to remove error
is through the removal of the self. On the other hand, (a) removing self
and de-creating differ insofar as the latter suggests a return to a previous
state, the former does not; and (b) if we understand ‘unselfing’ as simply
the removal of selfishness, ego, or self-concern, then the radical and all-
embracing meaning of decreation is lost. Weil is tamed.
Simone Weil and decreation

For Simone Weil, the removal of the self which is necessary in order to
come into contact with reality is thorough. But the ‘contact with reality’
that Weil has in mind, too, is different from what we might think, and
what Murdoch suggests: decreation for Weil is not properly described as
what allows me to connect with reality. That would be contradictory, for
removing the self means there will be no self to be in contact with any-
thing. Earlier, with Murdoch, the apparent removal of the self in unselfing
seemed like a problem, which led to a different, more moderate view. For
Weil such problematic removal is precisely the point: it is only by remov-
ing the self that we allow reality to exist and, in religious terms, we allow
God’s fullness of being to be restored—in Weil’s words, we allow God to
be in contact with God.
The metaphysics of this view depend on Weil’s idea that God, who
is fullness of being, needed to withdraw in order to let anything else
exist. This is God’s act of love. We are the product of God’s with-
drawal, and accepting our existence means accepting God’s absence.
That’s why we need to decreate: ‘If we find fullness of joy in the
thought that God is, we must find the same fullness in the knowledge
that we ourselves are not, for it is the same thought’ (GG 37).
Decreation is exactly what it seems: the rejection of creation, which
involves our being a self.
Such renunciation should not, however, lead us to believe we can actu-
ally interfere with the order of the world. Once created, the world follows
laws of necessity. So we cannot do anything but God’s will—the only
thing we can do differently is to will otherwise (GG 43–50). Hence, the
will is both the means of interference with reality, and the means of obe-
dience and love, through its own renunciation. Love, for Weil, means
conforming the will to reality. Attention is just that: to passionately tend
towards the world, accepting and loving it as it is.
The presence of God. This should be understood in two ways. As

Creator, God is present in everything which exists as soon as it exists.
The presence for which God needs the co-operation of the creature is
the presence of God, not as Creator but as Spirit. The first presence is
the presence of creation. The second is the presence of decreation.
(He who created us without our help will not save us without our
consent. Saint Augustine.)
(GG 38)
The will, when it is not obedience, gives rise to the illusion of selfhood.
That is the illusion of being able to interfere with reality, and the illusion
of being a centre (a centre of being, value, and space). Having a perspective
is inevitable, as we are situated in space and time, but we must not believe
our partial and limited perspective to be the true one, and avoid the fur-
ther crucial step of thinking that self is equally substantial and centred
(LOW 158–9). Like Weil, Murdoch believes that we have a natural ten-
dency to think of ourselves as thus centred and central, and think and act
accordingly. That’s why we need attention. What attention does is not only
‘counteracting the system’ of egocentrism, but showing the unreality of the
belief that grounds the system. Weil’s conception of self is beautifully and
effectively described by Miklós Vetö (Murdoch’s former student) thus:
The whole sphere of the self is maintained by a centripetal force

greedily sucking in reality, and the more one nears the centre, the
more powerful is the force. However, the centre is nothing in itself; it
is only aspiration. The self is a violent contraction paralysing and
crushing the beings and things it encounters. Such an attitude serves
the purpose of destroying the world, leaving there a trace of the self;
it never helps us to understand the world. Even at the most simple
level, the faculty of attention is the opposite of a contraction.
(Vetö 1994: 42)
We found the images of contraction and centripetal force useful in the
previous chapter, in explaining the TV and the unselfing that removes
egocentrism. But while there the outward focus of attention was a useful
tool to achieve clear vision, here it also has an ontological force. The self’s
contraction is not only bad: it is unreal.
The idea of self as constituted by, among other things, one’s personal-
ity, which Murdoch seems to endorse as desirable in morality, is violently
attacked by Weil, particularly in her well-known essay ‘Human
Personality’. Compare Murdoch: ‘M’s activity is peculiarly her own. Its
details are the details of this personality’ (IP 317) with Weil: ‘Your person
does not interest me’ (HP 70). Anything personal, attributes, character,
skills, is for Weil irrelevant to reality and harmful for attention. Subjectivity
needs to be put to one side and will, as we saw, can only be directed
towards what is the case, and never by our personal desires. Weil does not
mince her words: ‘The only way to truth is through one’s own annihila-
tion’ (HP 27).
Weil’s idea of the self as a separation, as what gets in the way of reality,
even what gets in the way of reality manifesting itself in us, has a heavy
religious metaphysical background which may be hard to accept in a
non-religious worldview. But let’s think of it this way: when we are truly
attending, we have no sense of a self; all that occupies our consciousness
is the object of attention. This is not only a matter of content: anything
external to the object would be an interference, for attention concerns the
object as it is, in itself.
In such a work all that I call ‘I’ has to be passive. Attention alone—
that attention which is so full that the I disappears—is required of
me. I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ of the light of my attention and
turn it onto that which cannot be conceived.
(GG 118)
Any of the attributes of a thick self would be, by definition, external to

the object. So it is not just something about me, but me, that separates
me from the world. But what does ‘me’ mean in the second clause? So
used are we to think of ourselves as ‘I’ that our language naturally slips,
and even joy in the existence of the world appears paradoxical if it
requires an I, so Weil corrects herself: ‘Perfect joy excludes even the very
feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for say-
ing “I”’ (GG 30). We’ll come back to this.
These thoughts show us Weil’s distance from the more ordinary figure
of the mother-in-law trying to be less prejudiced. This is the point where
Murdoch’s and Weil’s visions mostly come apart. However: first, Murdoch
was tempted by this vision; and second, the concept of attention Murdoch
endorses can lead to this conception of self and unselfing.
Murdoch’s temptations of impersonality
Murdoch’s formulations are ambiguous on the reach of unselfing. She
talks about the moral discipline to ‘silence and expel self’ (OGG 352)
and tells us that ‘the realism (ability to perceive reality) required for
goodness … is automatically at the same time a suppression of self’
(OGG 353). She quotes T.S. Eliot: ‘The progress of an artist is a con-
tinual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’ and comments
‘This is perfectly true. Art is not an expression of personality, it is a
question rather of the continual expelling of oneself from the matter in
hand’ (TSE 163). By claiming that the enemy of the moral life (and of
good art) is the self, Murdoch too seems to take the idea further than
the TV suggests, appearing to claim that it is the self, and not just the
fantasies it produces, that has to be suppressed. The statements about
the self just reported are found in the earlier work, but it is, I believe, in
MGM that we find the most intriguing presentation of Murdoch’s
temptation towards a self-less view of attention, where the individual
seeks to see (and, in the case of the artist, to represent) as if she were not
there. Even the individual’s consciousness, which Murdoch typically
presents as rich and coloured and morally important (in both good and
bad ways) is here silenced. In these passages, found in the chapter
‘Consciousness and Thought—II’, we encounter together artists and
poets (Cézanne, Rilke), Zen philosophy through Katsuki Sekida, and
Simone Weil.
Here, three quotations from Rilke are offered to illustrate what it may
mean to achieve ‘pure consciousness’, having rejected Husserl’s idea of it,
and now exploring Sekida’s (1975). Rilke praises Cézanne’s paintings
because of their ‘animal attentiveness’, for the artist’s ability to watch his
subject with the ‘attention of a dog’ and with ‘humble objectiveness’, cul-
minating in a form of art that is ‘anonymous’. Cézanne’s colours have a
‘truthfulness’ which ‘teaches you’. ‘And if you place yourself among them
as receptively as you can they seem to be doing something for you’. The
reproach to painters who fall short of excellence is voiced with the words:
‘they painted “I love this” instead of painting “Here it is”’ (MGM 246–7).
Even love has been utterly ‘consumed without residue in the act of making’
(247) and falls away once it has enabled the object to manifest itself in the
work. Rilke, through Cézanne, is seeking something impersonal and
anonymous.
What about the love that Rilke talks about? It is invisible now, but
doesn’t that mean that there is something personal, something about the
individual, that was necessary to yield a perception that was not only
truthful, but just and creative? Not necessarily. If we understand love as
eros, through the Platonic heritage of both Murdoch and Weil, love is not
personal, a state expressive of, belonging uniquely to, the individual.
Rather, love is a tool in tension, like an arrow, something that has value
in connecting us with the object; it is expressed in the moment of atten-
tion—not before, not after. Love is not my love; if it is, it won’t work. In
the same way, the other ‘inner states’, the ones that, on the TV, allow us
to cognitively penetrate perception in a truthful way, do not need to be
conceived as belonging to the individual. Love is not my love; kindness is
not my kindness; knowledge is not my knowledge. They are something
that can be used in attention, and their use consists precisely in their abil-
ity to bridge the distance with the world, or better to allow the world to
manifest itself. They do not need to be identified as belonging to, even less
as constituting, a self.
Yet, because of the continual tendency towards an ossifying sense of
self, including knowledge and experience, we need to be careful even
here. Knowledge, for instance, can be useful, as we have seen, in provid-
ing us with skilled and more nuanced perception; but it can also trap us
within pre-conceived ideas. Habit is necessary but also blinding, the more
so if we identify with it. For this reason, Weil’s definition of attention,
which we saw in Chapter 1, includes taking some distance even from
what we know. Let’s read it again:
Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached,

empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in
our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not
in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we
are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all
particular and already formulated thoughts as a man on a mountain
who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually
looking at them, a great many forests and plains.
(RSS 111–112)
This Weilian understanding of attention is mentioned in MGM: ‘atten-

tion: not to think about’ (MGM 118). Thought, whatever its object, is
inclined to reach out and grasp, hurrying to find a solution that may
quell the painfulness of uncertainty, or that may satisfy us by fitting our
pre-conceived schemas, and so on. A common impediment to attention
is that we think we know. In obvious ways, thinking we know may lead
to mistakes (stereotypes of all kinds are, after all, assumptions of
knowledge). In more imperceptible ways, thinking that we know means
becoming blind to what may be surprising, interesting, different; it
blocks discovery, and does not give the object in front of us a chance.
Something like: ‘Oh, there’s a pigeon, I’ve seen millions, I know what
they’re like’—but what about this one, right here, right now? Or: ‘There
he goes again, he likes whining about his problems and expecting
pity’—but is that all he is doing right now? Is there nothing to be
learned from this complaint? Or simply: ‘that’s a leaf’ compared to ‘oh,
look at that’.
Knowledge, habit, concepts, even knowledge that is true and concepts
that are appropriate, dull our perception, making us less alive to what
can be wonder-inducing (as we know all too well in personal relation-
ships). This is the opposite of shoshin, the ‘beginner’s mind’ of Zen.
Beginner’s mind, as popularised by Shunryu Suzuki, is ‘empty’ and ‘ready’
(2011: 2). Although the Zen practice of meditation may appear like a
repetition of the same actions, it should always be approached anew.
There is, in this attitude, no thought of achievement, no thought of self,
as well as detachment from what we think we already know. The Zen
koan, defined by Murdoch as ‘a paradox or contradiction which defeats
imagination and conceptual thought, but which must be held in sustained
attention’ (MGM 244) has a similar purpose. It helps to cultivate the
attitude of receptivity without reliance on mental habit, by jolting us out
of habitual thinking, and demanding our attention. One of its purposes,
as Murdoch writes, is ‘to break the networks not only of casual thinking
and feeling, but also of accustomed intellectual thinking, to break “the
natural standpoint”, and the natural ego: producing thereby a selfless
(pure, good) consciousness’ (MGM 244). Attention is also being ready to
be unsettled.
Zen’s beginner mind and Weil’s idea of impersonality both cast doubt
on the usefulness of the self as historical individual and as locus of per-
sonal vision. For them, personal history, personality, character, continuity,
and situatedness should be put aside. The attentive person, in this view,
should detach from all of these constituents of the idea of self. She should
cultivate detachment from all that happened and all that she knew before
the moment of attention, not let that inform her perception of what she
is attending to. Such detachment is possible in a view of the self that is not
substantial, not constituted by any of the items above. If nothing consti-
tutes the self, then we can approach what is in front of us afresh.
Detachment means dispelling an illusion about ourselves.
This detachment is part of—and indeed can arise from—the experience
of attention as confronting something external, recognised as real, as
something that is not and cannot be shaped by us. It’s a recognition of
independent existence. So we cannot call Weil’s perceptual goal a ‘person-
alized depersonalization’, as Mark Freeman suggests arguing that ‘the
kind of attention required for the emergence of these impersonal and
anonymous dimensions must itself pass through one’s biography, includ-
ing all the knowledge that has been acquired’ (2015: 165). For Weil, real-
ity is one, and so is attention. Knowledge can be, and in fact for her is,
impersonal. That is the goal, even if unattainable. ‘If a child is doing a
sum and does it wrong, the mistake bears the stamp of his personality. If
he does the sum exactly right, his personality does not enter into it at all’
(HP 75). There is a difference between a personal vision and a suspension
of expectation, knowledge, and attachments, even if the latter is an ideal,
and the difference a matter of degree.
Overcoming dualism
The idea explored in connection with Rilke, Weil, and Sekida seems to be
that a ‘pure’ (true) perception is one that is not tampered with by the
subject. Something is manifested in our consciousness and, much like
Weil’s divine withdrawal, we need to make room for it by removing our-
selves. Weil’s self is a separation. But if the self is suppressed or dissolved,
a separation of what? Or, in other words, what is it that is joined with
reality, if the self is gone?
Sekida (quoted in MGM 243): ‘In pure cognition there is no subjectiv-
ity and no objectivity. Think of the moment your hand touches the cup:
there is only the touch.’ Murdoch comments: ‘[Sekida] wishes to connect
pure cognition, the disappearance of subject-object, with the disappear-
ance of the egoistic illusions, of thick ingrained egoism, which prevents
true attention to things and people. No self, no subject, observes the
serene waters of the lake’ (MGM 243). Sekida does connect pure cogni-
tion with disappearance of egoistic illusion, but he goes further. What
disappears is the self; and it disappears precisely in, or through, attention.
Murdoch is wary of this idea (the word ‘extremism’ is used, in connection
with Zen, three times in these few pages in MGM), but she also sees the
attraction of it:
The notion of achieving a pure cognitive state where the object is not
disturbed by the subjective ego, but where subject and object simply
exist as one is here made comprehensible through a certain experi-
ence of art and nature. (Dualism is overcome: not such an arcane
idea after all.) A discipline of meditation wherein the mind is alert
but emptied of self enables this form of awareness, and the disci-
plined practice of various skills may promote a similar unselfing, or
‘décréation’ to use Simone Weil’s vocabulary. Attend ‘without think-
ing about’.
(MGM 254)
Dualism is overcome. It is not that we need to come to an understanding

of the self as illusory to remove dualism but rather, the experience of non-
duality in attention yields the insight of no-self. The experience of atten-
tion where there is only the object is one where the self is removed, not
by a violent act, but by a unity with the object. In a non-dualist view,
however, this vocabulary is clearly wrong. There is no subject and object.
So, there is really nothing to remove.
Despite the different metaphysical background, Weil’s idea of unity is
not so different in its experiential and ethical aspects from Zen. In both,
attention is what removes the separation that comes from the self—or the
idea of being a self. That’s why Weil talks about decreation and not
destruction:
Decreation: to make something created pass into the uncreated.
Destruction: to make something created pass into nothingness. A blame-
worthy substitute for decreation.
(GG 32)
The creation of the self is the creation of the capacity to consent to or

deny reality, but the denial is illusory, and the acceptance is decreative. To
return to an original and real state. We cannot destroy an illusion, nor
should we ‘destroy’ what we take for a self—the body, for instance. We
can only undo an illusion, whose effects are nonetheless very real. And
the means for both Zen and Weil is attention.
In attention, then, according to this view, what happens is not that the
question ‘Where is my self?’ is answered by ‘My self is removed’. The
question of where or what I am does not arise at all. And if I were asked,
in the middle of a sustained period of attention, where I am, I may answer
‘Nowhere; Everywhere’. In this sense, I am not suppressed, but united.
And that may be what Weil was seeking when she spoke of removing the
self in order to let God reconnect to God. ‘I am all. But this particular “I”
is God. And it is not an “I”. Evil makes distinctions, it prevents God from
being equivalent to all’ (GG 31).
Phenomenologically, if not metaphysically, I think we can understand,
even if we don’t embrace Weil’s religious background. Attention comes
with a view—or rather, an experience—of the self as no-self. I am every-
where and nowhere. There is no centre, no substance, no continuity.
While Hume’s formulation of this kind of rejection of the self is dismissed
by Murdoch (MGM 164–166), the formulation found in Zen Buddhism
and Simone Weil intrigues her. Unexpectedly, it may be Buddhism, rather
than Weil, that fits better with Murdoch’s experience-based, secular
worldview.
On the RV, the idea that the self dissolves to allow for a unity with the
object of attention can be understood in two ways. So far, I have endorsed
a phenomenological kind of unity. In attention, we experience no-self:
not a taming or suppression of the self, but only the perception of what
is there, which is not conceived as ‘other’. In Buddhism, that is anatta, the
idea that there is no continuous, substantial self. The strategy for coming
to this view of the self, on non-metaphysical interpretations of the
Buddha’s discourses, is the same as the one we have employed so far:
starting with experience, and finding what it suggests, including the ethi-
cal and practical aspect of such insight.
But both the idea of no-self, and the idea of unity, can take on an onto-
logical dimension as well. The latter can be found more clearly in Weil as
well as in Hinduism. In Hinduism, this further step concerns a union
(yoga) or re-union of previously perceived self-and-other into a universal
Self, or ātman. This is a dimension that Weil, whose attention is not only
ethical or phenomenological but metaphysical, can embrace: it means
allowing the manifestation of true being, which is God. This also explains
why Weil, despite some interest in Buddhism, was more impressed by
Hindu philosophy, and particularly by the Upanishads and the Bhagavad
Gītā, where in chapter 2 Krishna teaches the warrior Arjuna the Samkhya-
Yoga discipline that leads to abandon illusory particularity. The partici-
pation in the universal Self of Hinduism is reminiscent of the soul
returning to the realm of the Forms in Plato’s Phaedo, and Weil herself
connects the two philosophies, and both to Christianity (SA 70). If
Murdoch might come close to accepting a dissolution of self, she could
only do so momentarily and in its non-metaphysical form, as the experi-
ence of oneness that attention may bring us (through the unifying idea of
the good). Such more radical tendency of her unselfing, then, can be more
easily found by looking at Early Buddhism, and part of its inheritance by
Zen Buddhism.
Attention and no-self

In the more empirically minded Early Buddhism, as we have seen,
Buddha’s idea of no-self is not a metaphysical or ontological concept. It
is mainly a negative one: there are some things we take the self to be,
which are illusory. Permanence and fixed essence are among them. This
does not amount to saying the self is nothing. That would be an ontologi-
cal claim we are in no position to make either, and yet another way of
becoming attached—to nothingness. As Masao Abe writes,
the notion of no-self, that is, the notion of no substantial, fixed self-
hood, does not indicate the mere lack or absence of self, as an anni-
hilationist may suggest, but rather constitutes a standpoint which is
beyond both the eternalist view of self and the nihilistic view of
no-self.
(1997: 68) (See Saṃyutta Nikāya 4.10)
This is the view, Abe writes, that is inherited by Zen. And, fitting the
content, the form of the teaching is not propositional, but experiential. In
attention, we find no self. It is only through reflexivity (the opposite of
unselfing) that we begin objectifying the self, and a substantial concep-
tion of self is born (1997: 69). Or again, as Murdoch writes in MGM,
reading Sekida, the idea that ‘subject and object simply exist as one is
here made comprehensible through a certain experience of art and nature’
(MGM 245).
The primacy of experience is the reason for starting with attention if
we want to understand the self, and not vice versa. This view is known as
Attentionalism: the idea that attention has explanatory priority. Jonardon
Ganeri’s (2017) exploration of attention and self takes this perspective,
seeking to rethink the self from the point of view of attention combining
Western philosophy of mind and Buddhism. His account, however,
engages not with Zen, but with Theravāda Buddhism, which in offering
a perhaps less ‘austere’ view of self comes yet a little bit closer to Murdoch.
According to the view of consciousness of this tradition, Ganeri explains,
‘there is a “space” or “frame” of awareness (citta) which is in fact nothing
more than a range of experiential, attentive, and agentive functions (ceta-
sika) that take place within it’ (9). The mistake, which leads to a substan-
tial and fixed idea of the self, is to think that this space is an entity, rather
than a ‘system of experiences’. If there is any cohesion, it is given by the
‘ongoing structure of experience and action’ which depends on attention
itself (12). While attention, as formulated above, enables the object to
occupy our minds, the metaphor easily misleads us to think that there is
something before and apart from such experience. That’s the mistake: to
think that the self is ‘like the space of a canvas or stage’ which precede the
painting and the actors. In the case of consciousness, instead, nothing
‘precedes and outlives its occupants’ (O’Shaughnessy 2002: 288, in
Ganeri 2017: 11).
The Theravāda Buddhist concept of no-self, Ganeri stresses, does not
deny that there is some connection between experiences which we may call
self, nor that there is a perspective, necessarily given by the living organism
or ‘minded body’—while for Zen and Weil, in truth-seeking attention, the
aim is to move outside perspective. What the Theravāda philosophy denies,
through observation of attention, is only that there is a separate self that
either contemplates or acts upon the world. As Ganeri puts it, ‘anatta, the
famous Buddhist thesis of no-self’ is only ‘a rejection of the idea that a
detached agent acts in the centre of a space of action, or that a detached
witness watches from the centre of a space of experience’ (9–10). The idea
of no-self, like Murdoch’s stress on attention, is in opposition to the idea
that there is a completely free agent who influences the world through the
will, a rational observer who merely contemplates reality through the
senses. Attention shows that we are more closely engaged with our envi-
ronment than this picture allows. That we are, for instance, not ‘so strangely
separate from the world at moments of choice’, for if we are, ‘are we really
choosing at all, are we right indeed to identify ourselves with this giddy
empty will?’ (IP 36). The idea of a self detached from the rest of reality is
what attention shows to be mistaken, according to Ganeri following
Buddhaghosa, and that is also the idea that Murdoch rejected in the phi-
losophy of her time, from Kant to Sartre. Between complete freedom and
complete determinism, Murdoch thought that we could find a third way ‘if
we simply introduce into the picture the idea of attention’ (IP 329). The
isolated self is similarly rejected in both philosophies.
This does not mean of course that what is left, after the detached and
independent self view is challenged, is the same for Murdoch and for
Theravāda Buddhism. But the Theravāda view, as explained by Ganeri in
connection with Western philosophy of mind, comes a little closer to
some of the requirements of the TV: it is more accepting of the existence
of continuing self than Zen and Weil, while still denying the existence of
a self independent of current experience. There are two main similarities
between Theravāda philosophy and Murdoch. First, the two conceptions
of what the self is not are strikingly close, as is the fact that a detached
self is denied thanks to the connecting (truth-seeking) nature of attention.
The second similarity is based on Murdoch’s description of the self as a
‘mechanism of attachments’ (OGG 357). If we take that to be a defining
characteristic of what we think of as the self, it means that self is consti-
tuted by the moment-to-moment objects that it attaches itself to, for bet-
ter or worse—and it is, therefore, centre-less, and not unitary. If the self is
mainly constituted by what consciousness ‘attaches’ itself to, that is com-
patible with a no-self view according to which there is no self before or
after the movement of consciousness, but such movement can constitute
a web of interrelated moments of consciousness.4 The TV, however (and
I think Murdoch), takes the self to be more than this, and that is why the
Theravāda view still belongs to the RV.
The pervasiveness of attachment also explains why the illusion of a
substantial self arises in the first place, and why it leads to error. Buddhist
ethics sees the root of all ills in ignorance (avidyā),5 primarily the igno-
rance of the true nature of self.6 One begins to chip away at this form of
ignorance by noticing the impermanence of all the things we identify with
self (body, character traits, beliefs …). The impermanent nature of reality
is also stressed by Murdoch, as something particularly resistant to atten-
tion, precisely because it threatens a soothing picture of unity and perma-
nence (including, and primarily, the unity and permanence of self).
Murdoch, in her own way, brings an aspect of the Buddhist teaching to
life, the terror we feel when facing impermanence, and the quick retreat
into illusion: we struggle to sustain attention on such things. But if we
can, somehow, accept impermanence, and not look away, many other
insights and practical changes come cascading down. Experience leads to
insight and vice versa, so that in Buddhism, as Christopher Gowans
stresses in a comparison with Murdoch, ‘that metaphysics is a guide to
morals is a central motif’ (forthcoming, n.p.). In the same way, as I’ve
been arguing, attention becomes different, better, if one gives up the idea
of a substantial permanent self. The root of suffering, as explained by the
Buddha in the Second Noble Truth, is craving, the attachments and frus-
tration of attachments that arise from a sense of self. The idea of what is
mine, what is owed to me, the things that I desire and that I reject, all
stem from the idea of self and attendant ‘cravings’: ‘The central idea is
that belief that one is a self generates a possessive attitude toward life,
interpreting everything from the perspective of what is “me” and “mine”,
and this results in suffering’ (Gowans, forthcoming). So no-self makes
detachment possible, and detachment makes true vision possible, which
is the essence of attention. I cannot see clearly if I want something from
the object. That is why Weil stresses detachment (e.g. GG 12–15) and the
extinction of desire, except from desire without attachment which is—as
it is for Murdoch—desire for the Good:
The extinction of desire (Buddhism)—or detachment—or amor

fati—or desire for the absolute good—these all amount to the same:
to empty desire, finality of all content, to desire in the void, to desire
without any wishes.
To detach our desire from all good things and to wait. Experience
proves that this waiting is satisfied. It is then we touch the absolute
good.
(GG 13)
This waiting is attention. Desire, not for myself, but for what is. This is
eros, or love that is purified or ‘refined’ (SGC 384). ‘To love Good for
nothing’ (MGM 344, emphasis added).
Attention: with or without self?

The most important difference between the two views offered in this
chapter and the previous one, concerning attention, regards the amount
of subjectivity that is present at the time of attention and leading up to it.
That depends on what view of the self is held. At the same time, the view
of the self one holds can be derived from the experience of attention, and
in turn informs such experience.
On the TV the individual is present both as a means of attention and,
in a different way, as the object of attention, insofar as what is seen bears
the mark of the subject, her perspective and her particular sensibility. At
the same time, it is possible to understand this contribution of subjectiv-
ity as compatible with truthful perception, since ‘facts’, for Murdoch, are
not impersonal. The TV embraces the self of common-sense, not fully
specified, with a cluster of characteristics that becomes variously relevant
at different times. On this view, the self is a background to individual acts
or movements of consciousness, but it is not—as on the RV—reducible to
them. There is something above and beyond.
The RV takes an impersonal idea of truth and calls for putting aside,
instead of embracing, subjectivity. The view is based on the idea that the
object needs to emerge in consciousness as intact as possible, and that any
subjective contribution will be perspectival and hence distorting. The dis-
solution of the self, however, is not a suppression but a realisation, inso-
far as it is understood that the interfering self was never real in the first
place. Hence possession, craving, aversion, and so on, which distort per-
ception and which depend on a substantial self, become senseless on this
view, thus enabling attention.
The RV may appear hard to swallow to some of us and intuitively
appealing to others, but, insofar as attention is concerned, it has much to
recommend it. The RV is, I believe, suggested by the idea of attention as
stretching towards reality, and more compellingly suggested than the TV.
We can hold this view without having to accept Weil’s stronger meta-
physical conception of unselfing, and stick to the Buddha’s metaphysi-
cally agnostic presentation of what the self is not. Two of the main
advantages of the RV, in the context of attention, in fact require no posi-
tive metaphysical claim. One is that the RV better explains the experience
of attention in which a) we have no idea of an I, and therefore b) we
experience unity with the object of our experience (where the subject-
object dualism is not part of consciousness). Unlike the TV, in this picture
it is only possible to ‘see the unself’ without my intervention or presence.
The second advantage of the RV is practical: not having a sense of a
substantial self fosters attention, for directing attention outward is done
knowing there is nothing on the other side. How one thinks about the
self, as we saw, changes how one sees what one is doing, and hence what
one is doing.
From this, three further considerations are derived, which support the
benefits of the RV. If there is no substantial or permanent self that is
changed or improved through practice, then the change of direction of
consciousness that Murdoch and Weil advocate in attention is already a
total transformation. This is also, once again, reflected in experience:
when we pay attention, completely absorbed by the object, we are already
and at the same time accepting to be radically transformed—we are sus-
pending our knowledge, expectations, and desires, for attention means
being ready to receive the object, as Weil said, regardless of the effects on
us and the thoughts and worldview we think of as ‘ours’. As Murdoch
writes: ‘the realism (ability to perceive reality) required for goodness … is
automatically at the same time a suppression of self’ (OGG 353). The
second consideration derived from the absence of a sense of self is that
there is nothing to remove, suppress, destroy, hence the practice of unself-
ing cannot take the shape of a counter-productive fight, which can
strengthen the hold of what we are hoping to remove, as on the TV.
Third, and finally, this also means that the other paradoxes are elimi-
nated: not only the masochism of self-denial, but also the more insidious
forms of self-centredness which come from the idea of attention as
‘improving one’s self’. As Murdoch knows, ‘We need to return from the
self-centred concept of sincerity to the other-centred concept of truth’
(AD 293). On this view, our aim is not to become a moral work of art,
but rather a force of goodness, a beacon of love.
But there is a problem. The RV is not, ultimately, Murdoch’s view, even
though she comes close to it. Like a cat curiously inching closer to a human
hand, but retracting as soon as there’s contact, she felt ambivalently the
pull of a metaphysics where the self is not substantial and of an ethics
where we do not live as selves, the latter more than the former. But,
perhaps as a matter of temperament (which, she tells us, influences our
chosen metaphysics),7 perhaps because she could not accept an ontol-
ogy that comes too close to a religious one, where only the whole, not
the individual, matters (that was easy for Weil, but Weil was a mystic
and loved God), perhaps again because, as she writes of Sartre, as a
novelist she was fond of the particular inner life (MGM 154),8 she
stopped short of this view. Zen made her uncomfortable with its ‘image-
less austerity’, even if she at the same time found it ‘impressive and
attractive’ and a representation of ‘“the real thing”’ (MGM 247). But
for a philosopher who cherished the individual as the source of variety
and colour, the impersonality advocated by Zen and Weil might have
felt alien and dry.
Inclination and preference aside, there are other reasons for worrying
about the RV in the context of morality. One objection, raised by
Murdoch herself, is that we ordinarily think of morality in terms of indi-
viduals and their inner lives, the quality of their consciousness, and so on.
And we think of moral progress in terms of the changes in such inner
lives. The idea of a self with some degree of permanence and unity is
necessary for this picture—both in thinking about others and their moral
visions, and in thinking about ourselves and our moral goals. On the RV,
the latter is still possible: we can see more justly, but such change is not
significantly thought of as our own; not a change in a permanent self, but
a different state. This, as we have seen, is both a weakness and a strength:
while the RV challenges both a philosophical and a common-sense under-
standing of moral progress as progress of the individual, such removal
also works in favour of attention, by reducing the possibility of self-
concerned interference.
A second objection is that the overcoming of dualism damages the
relationality of ethics, the idea that there is an ‘other’ which we should
consider and treat in specific ways precisely because she or it is other.
Victor J. Seidler (forthcoming, p.n.), for instance, finds this to be a tension
between Weil and Martin Buber, and something that, instead, Murdoch
understands: that there needs to be an ‘I’ in a relationship; and that the
I that loves you is important, not only the love. The worry is also raised
by David Robjant (2011: 1003), who points out that conceiving of love
as the ‘realisation that something other than oneself is real’ (MGM 215)
requires duality, not the end of it, which the removal of the self would
occasion.9 Gowans addresses this worry by pointing at Indra’s Net, the
image from Huayan Buddhism, which connects individual and unity,
where ‘each node of the net contains a jewel that reflects every other
jewel: not only are all things connected to each other via the net, each
thing is in a sense present in every other thing on account of the jewels’
(2022: p.n.). The self-other distinction is preserved, but self and other are
also fundamentally connected. I agree with Gowans that Murdoch would
have liked this picture. Weil not so much.
But does the removal of duality really also remove the possibility of
ethics? Does suffering, for example, need to be seen as belonging to some-
one ‘else’ to create the motivation to stop it? A sense of oneness could, in
fact, increase the motivation to help, precisely because we see no separa-
tion. This may become more visible if we think about the resistance to
consider those who are very different from us as meriting our concern
(humans from other cultures, individuals from other species—even radi-
cally different entities: an ecological ethical perspective is helped by
reducing, not fostering, dualities, and that is not only true of ecology)
although unity in some of these cases is a matter of degree not kind. This,
however, is part of a longer conversation.
Both the RV and TV, these worries and considerations show, can be
endorsed in an account of attention in morality, with somewhat different
outcomes. Murdoch, as we have seen, has a mystical vein which attracts
her, through Weil, to the former, but ultimately cannot go down that way,
because that would render it impossible to base morality on the ‘personal
vision’ that she wants to recover. The TV indeed has many virtues, one of
them being that it is more acceptable to a worldview that is perhaps
closer to the common sense of Western contemporary society, and
Murdoch is right that we should not dismiss that. The RV also has vir-
tues, and it is also true to experience, albeit to a kind of experience that
takes us out of our perceived ordinary metaphysical background. There
are philosophical arguments providing support for both. In my view, the
RV is more consistent with the idea of attention as concerned for what is
there, and with the experience of what it means to come into contact with
truth. It is also consistent with Weil’s view, with its rich background
drawn from different philosophical and religious traditions. But if
Murdoch is right, and there is no truth that is ‘unfiltered’, the TV is the
more appropriate account.
In the chapters that follow, the mental states of the subject will be
relevant in the explanation of other important aspects of attention, such
as perception and motivation, apparently leading us towards discarding
the RV. But some of those accounts are in fact consistent with both the
Tame and the Radical views, insofar as states of consciousness do not
need to be considered as properties of a unified and substantial self, but
can, more minimally, be thought of as states one is in at the time of
attention, which need to have neither ‘thickness’ nor reflexivity, and
which have value in enabling attention, but do not need to be individu-
alised as belonging to someone in particular. In some cases these states
can be, compatibly with Weil’s impersonal aspiration, thought of merely
as tools for perception, hence not interfering with it through a subject.
At the same time, as this book is primarily about Murdoch, in the
instances where a choice between the two views needs to be made, it
will be Murdoch’s picture (the TV) that is endorsed, particularly in the
exploration of moral perception in Chapter 5. What matters, for now,
is that attention can enlist two different conceptions of the self, reflec-
tively or unreflectively. One of the main philosophical differences
between them is the kind of ‘encounter’ with reality that we undergo
when we attend: an encounter of me and something other on the TV,
which is partly shaped by the subject, and a union or sense of ‘oneness’
on the RV, which we undergo rather than shape. But what remains in
experience, on both views, is this: in attention, the mind is occupied by
reality, not by the self.10
Notes
1 This is a kind of distinction which Murdoch, rightly, reminds us of time and
again.
2 This is why, while Antonaccio (2012: 168) is right that ‘the solution to the
problem of egoism cannot simply be to renounce the countless mechanisms by
which human beings picture reality’, I do not agree with her that the solution is
‘reflexivity’, or working with the self to overcome its dangerous tendencies.
3 Even serious reflection upon the morality of one’s actions can, in a matter of
seconds, tilt towards excessive interest in oneself, while the situation being
considered, the true object of attention, becomes secondary to the morality of
one’s own behaviour. (For instance: a friend asks for help looking after their
children for an afternoon. You have a previous engagement and refuse.
Afterwards you realise the friend’s need for help was more important than
keeping the engagement. You spend some time wondering why you did oth-
erwise and what features of your personality got in the way of understanding
the appropriate thing to do. This may seem morally commendable and appro-
priately self-critical. Yet all the while, worries about your moral character
overshadow considerations about the difficulty the friend had to face because
of your actions. As Murdoch writes in OGG 355: ‘one’s self is interesting, so
one’s motives are interesting, and the unworthiness of one’s motives is inter-
esting’.) Or, as Bernard Williams (1981) has observed, the refusal to perform
a particular action because it is morally wrong, while knowing that if we
don’t do it, it will be performed by someone else, can be a matter of integrity,
but also of ‘moral self-indulgence’.
4 This is the other side of my disagreement with Meszaros (2016), as presented
in the previous chapter, whose account, I fear, is trying to harmonise too
much. We cannot accept as part of a coherent Murdochian view the defense
of common-sense idea of the self, a definition the self in terms of attachments,
and a recovery a substantial view of self all at the same time. Murdoch does
gesture in different directions, but they are not unproblematic together.
5 Note the common root of ‘vision’, where a-vidya is absence of vision, also
suggesting a non-intellectualistic idea of knowledge.
6 On the role of ignorance and craving in Buddhist ethics, see Conway (2018).
7 As she writes of the Theory of Forms, quoting Myles Burnyeat, the dispute
often involves ‘temperamental as well as intellectual factors’ (MGM 10).
8 ‘However, Sartre’s own temperament and talent (which also make him a good
novelist) lead him to linger fondly with this “inner”, developing a rich vocab-
ulary in his account of its states’ (MGM 154).
9 Murdoch writes: ‘[t]he more the separateness and differentness of other peo-
ple is realized, and the fact seen that another man has needs and wishes as
demanding as one’s own, the harder it becomes to treat a person as a thing’
(OGG 353–4). But it needs to be stressed that separateness is here contrasted
with the idea of the self engulfing the other, not with the unity in which the
two are the same.
10 Thanks to Davide Rizza for feedback on this chapter.
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(eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics. Oxford, Oxford University
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Iris Murdoch. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
———, T.S. Eliot as a Moralist [TSE], pp. 161–170.
———, The Sovereignty of Gooed over other Concepts [SGC], pp. 363–385.
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———, Love of the Order of the World [LOW], pp. 158–181.
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Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–19.
4 Self-knowledge
In the past two chapters we have explored the outward-directed and

truth-seeking nature of attention in terms of what it is contrasted with—
self-concern or, more radically, the interference and attachments that
come from the very idea of a substantial self—which in turn has given us
various indications of what we should do in order to enable or improve
attention. Despite the differences, the ‘strategy’, on both views of the self
in attention, takes the shape of a direction of perceptual, intellectual, and
affective engagement towards reality and away from the self.
On both pictures of the self, the more substantial one in the TV and the
illusory one in the RV, obstacles to attentions are taken to arise from reflex-
ivity—affective or concerned reflexivity in one case, and the substantial
idea of the self that reinforces such reflexivity in the other. In both cases, the
self does not figure as an object of attention. Yet while this direction of
consciousness is important for the very activity of attention, and while such
‘unselfing’ or ‘decreation’, if successful, enables and goes hand in hand with
successful attention, we do not know whether that is, in fact, what is hap-
pening when we try to attend. We know what needs to be in place for
attention to occur, but how do we know whether we are achieving it? And
how, conversely, do we know when we need it? We are opaque to our-
selves, as Murdoch reminds us, so having an idea of what attention is, and
of the distance of true perception from our ordinary self-involved con-
sciousness, does not mean we will succeed or even come close.
Perhaps, one may say, this is a moot point. All we can do is try, and suc-
cess is not in our hands. Perhaps the best thing to do is to desire to see, and
hope that desire is genuine. The rest is a matter of ‘grace’, as Weil religiously
understands it, and as Murdoch secularises it into what we can more intui-
tively understand: the idea of ‘the reward of a sort of morally disciplined
attention’ (MGM 23), or even ‘an unforeseen reward for a fumbling half-
hearted act’ (IP 334). There is no need to think of ‘someone’ offering that
reward. Rather, we know that when it comes to the moral vision enabled
by attention, the causality of success cannot be meticulously and empiri-
cally tracked, and understanding comes sometimes unexpectedly, but after
we ask (i.e. try to attend)—as if the world answered.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003164852-5
Self-knowledge 111
However, all sorts of obstacles can stand in the way even of genuine
efforts and real desire. Those obstacles may come from our history (a his-
tory of privilege may make us blind to subtle discrimination; a history of
discrimination may incline us to expect the worst), our character (anything
that’s not a virtue is connected with fantasy), our mental state at a given
moment (especially affective states, such as fear, irritability, excitement,
desire), and so on. And if Murdoch is right about the naturalness in which
we distort reality, indeed about the rarity of true perception, together with
the self-protective beliefs that ‘we’re good people, really’ and that our per-
ceptions are reliable, then we will see that some kind of effort of self-
knowledge may be necessary to give attention a better chance. Fantasy is at
work more often than we realise, as Murdoch strongly puts it: ‘The ego is
indeed “unbridled”. Continuous control is required’ (MGM 260).
Self-knowledge is not necessary for attention: there are spontaneously
virtuous saints, spontaneously attentive moments, and kestrels who catch
us off guard. But most of us, much of the time, do need self-knowledge
for attention. This is particularly true on the TV, where it is part of the
self that gets in the way, and we want to know which part. Overall, most
of the discussion in this chapter will seem more easily accommodated by
the TV. But on both views, we need to know what interferes with atten-
tion, whether it is part of the self or a false idea thereof. This is important
to note: the requirement of self-knowledge does not commit us to a view
of the self as substantial. What is required is that we know what inter-
feres with attention, and such interference is related to what we ordinar-
ily call ‘self’. Self does not need to refer to an object, or be permanent or
substantial, for that to be true; self can merely be a cluster of experiences,
the embodied outcome of a causal chain, but it is also possible, on the RV,
to conceive of self-knowledge as precisely involving knowledge of the
illusion of a substantial self.
Here is the problem that motivates this chapter. Knowledge of self, or
the illusory self, seems necessary for attention. Yet if we understand atten-
tion as what encourages and enables reality to manifest itself as fully as
possible in our consciousness, as what, in a sense, joins us with the world,
then there is no room for self-knowledge in attention. Murdoch repeat-
edly tells us that ‘The direction of attention is … outward, away from the
self’ (OGG 354), and Weil tells us that we have to ‘deprive all that I call
“I” of the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be
conceived’ (GG 118)—or turn it onto that which I do not (not yet, and
never fully) know or understand, and therefore that which attention may
partly reveal. And this seems true: while we attend, all we can do is turn
our whole being toward the object. So that, if the question ‘Am I attend-
ing?’ arises at all in attention, the answer is probably ‘No’.
This incompatibility of self-knowledge and the time of attention does
not need to be a problem. We can conclude that we cannot obtain self-
knowledge while we attend, but we still can and should seek it in order
112 Self-knowledge
to attend. Self-knowledge does not need to be concomitant with attention
to work in its favour. So the question is not ‘Am I attending?’ but rather
‘What is it about me that could interfere with attention, generally and in
this situation/in relation to this object?’, and related questions, such as
‘When should I try harder?’ ‘Should I look again at this?’, and so on. In
Murdoch’s example, the progress of the mother-in-law M, in her percep-
tion of the daughter-in-law D, occurs precisely after some self-examina-
tion on M’s part. M is described as ‘capable of self-criticism’, and it is
awareness of the influence of her social status, her jealousy, her prejudice
that prompts the moment of attention. Now, we may ask what in turn
prompted such awareness. Perhaps a nagging feeling of discomfort, per-
haps an unpleasant memory of her attitude towards D. But the discom-
fort or memory could have been dismissed, without self-knowledge, and
the moment of attention avoided. The suspicion of some bias in herself,
instead, acts both as spur and as guidance in the act of attention.
However, to claim that self-knowledge is not present when we attend
to something does not resolve the tension. To obtain self-knowledge, at
any point, we need to attend to ourselves. And self-directed attention
seems to be ruled out by the very definition of attention that Murdoch,
following Weil, offers. Therefore, far from the Socratic ‘know thyself’, a
view of morality that revolves around attention appears to make the
imperative to know oneself morally problematic, as well as creating dif-
ficulties within the very task of attention. Can that be right?
Christopher Mole (2007) has identified this tension in Murdoch’s
philosophy:
Trying to become good involves giving attention to things of moral

importance, and so, if we understand the morally important states of
mind to be private inner occurrences, it involves giving attention to
private inner states. But this is a form of self-directed intellectual
activity and self-directed intellectual activity is the very thing that
Murdoch wants to characterize as a source of moral failure.
(72)
Mole’s formulation of the problem is, however, in some respects different

from the way I’ve just described it. The difference mainly concerns the
reasons for the importance of self-knowledge. Mole derives it from the
importance Murdoch attributes to states of mind, whose importance is in
turn explained by Mole with reference to action and to virtues. Mole
aims to explain Murdoch’s idea that states of mind matter in themselves
through the Aristotelian idea that the moral quality of an action is not
only dependent on its effects, but also on the state of mind with which it
is performed. It is true that, based on Murdoch’s philosophy, states of
minds matter in the presence of action, that they determine the meaning
Self-knowledge 113
of an action as well as—as we shall see in the next chapters—the range of
possibilities available for action, and the motivation for action. But the
assumption that they only matter if connected to action is precisely the
idea that Murdoch was trying to dismantle, and that the story of M&D
aims to counter.
The more specific reason for the importance of self-knowledge Mole
offers is that ‘to know if we are acting as the virtuous agent would, we
need to know which character traits we are exercising. We need to know
not only if we are hurting others, but if we are being callous or manipula-
tive’ (75). I suggest we reformulate this claim and make it, like Murdoch,
more Platonic and less Aristotelian, by saying what we need to ensure is
that we are being moved by the good, that we are approaching reality
with eros; if moral exemplars matter, it is only because they represent one
way of embodying goodness. It is the aspiration to the absolute, not vir-
tuous exemplars and even less the virtue we may ourselves have, that is
primary in Murdoch’s account of the moral goal. What we need to know
about ourselves, first and foremost, is whether our states of minds or
dispositions are interfering with our capacity to see things aright (and
hence act rightly), not whether we are acting virtuously. The aim of both
attention and self-knowledge is reality, not our own virtue, and while the
two are strongly connected (virtue involves doing justice to the world),
the emphasis falls of the former. In other words, we need self-knowledge
for attention to know when we may be failing, not when we may
succeed.
While I disagree with this aspect of Mole’s formulation of the problem,
I agree with the general thrust of the solution he offers. At the end of his
essay, Mole offers a solution to the puzzle that allows us to combine self-
knowledge and outward directness of attention. In the final parts of this
chapter I will expand upon it with the help of Wittgenstein and of some
contemporary philosophy of mind. But before we get there, we need to
explore some other possibilities.
The impossibility of attending to the self

The main reasons Murdoch offers against attention to the self appear at
first sight to be only working against the desirability of attending to the
self. However, upon examination, they turn out to work also as reasons
against the possibility of such direction of attention. The first reason, as
we have seen, is that attention is truth-seeking and truth-revealing,
whereas the self is fantasy-making. The second is the idea that, if we
wanted to obtain self-knowledge during our attention to something, we
would fail, because attention leaves no room for self-observation. Both
reasons appeal to the uniqueness of our relationship to the self. Turning
consciousness upon the self is unlike turning it upon any other object.
114 Self-knowledge
The first reason is offered by Murdoch on more than one occasion. For
instance, in Sovereignty we read:
In such a picture sincerity and self-knowledge, those popular merits,

seem less important. It is an attachment to what lies outside the fan-
tasy mechanism, and not a scrutiny of the mechanism itself, that lib-
erates. Close scrutiny often merely strengthens its power.
‘Self-knowledge’, in the sense of a minute understanding of one’s
own machinery, seems to me, except at a fairly simple level, usually a
delusion.
(OGG 354–55)1
It is extremely difficult to see the self clearly. Usually when we try to

achieve self-knowledge we only strengthen egocentric fantasies, and so
move further away from the knowledge we were seeking. Furthermore,
since we are very much interested in ourselves, if we allow a look at
ourselves, we may forget about the relevance of other things: ‘the self is
such a dazzling object that if one looks there one may see nothing else’ (IP
324). The idea that the self dazzles is one way of expressing the idea,
explored in the previous chapters, that the self is constitutively under the
illusion of centrality. Any gaze or energy directed towards it will strengthen
such illusion. This phenomenon is unique to the self.
The illusions we harbour about the self, as we have seen, are of two
kinds: on the one hand, they concern our own centrality and importance;
on the other, they concern the self as such, specifically the unity, perma-
nence, and object-like nature of the self.
None of this means that self-knowledge is impossible. Knowledge of
the self is, in fact, precisely what enables us to dispel the fantasy of cen-
trality. But attention to the self is another matter. We may attend to
objects that exercise a strong attraction on our own tendency to falsify
reality, in that respect similar to the self; but attention to the self is unique:
the consciousness that is turned lovingly to the world in attention is the
same consciousness that is harnessed by fantasy when turned towards
oneself. If attention and fantasy cannot coexist, then self-directed atten-
tion is an impossibility.
Against introspection
However, based on these considerations, what seems to be impossible in
attention is not any knowledge of the self—whatever that may be—but
the knowledge that is obtained by turning our consciousness inward.
‘Inwardly directed attention’, as the ‘process of inquiry directed at mental
states’, is introspection (Goldman 2006: 246). So it seems that what is
problematic, and what cannot be done, is not self-knowledge, but self-
knowledge through introspection. Introspection cannot answer the
Self-knowledge 115
question ‘Am I attending to this story, or failing to?’ because if I am
attending, the story is filling my consciousness, and there is no space for
questions about what I am doing. As Weil explains:
Introspection is a particular psychological state, incompatible with

other psychological states.
1. With thinking about the world …
2. With action, at least with voluntary action …
3. With a very strong emotion …
To sum up, thought, action, and emotion exclude examination of
oneself. Whenever, in life, one is actively involved in something, or
one suffers violently, one cannot think about oneself.
Conclusion: since almost everything escapes self-observation, one
cannot draw general conclusions from introspection … By the very
fact that one keeps a watch on oneself, one changes; and the change
is for the worse since we prevent that which is of greatest value in us
from playing its part.
(LP 27–28)
Introspection is not only incompatible with attention, but it also, Weil

writes, ‘defeats its own object’, since all it can reveal is the present act of
introspecting, and when applied to past states of mind, it is equally unsuc-
cessful, because one can be mistaken about one’s past inner life, especially
in the light of more recent experiences (LP 28). Moreover, one’s states of
mind are changed by the act of introspecting, and the change is for the
worse, since we are preventing consciousness from being enriched by
‘what is of greatest value in us’—the capacity to be fully impressed by
reality.
The possibility to preserve self-knowledge, then, needs to go through a
direction of consciousness that is not inward, but outward. In what fol-
lows I will suggest three general ways in which this can be done (the first
way, in turn, will be articulated into three).
Knowing ourselves from the outside

The kind of self-knowledge we need for attention is not only about cur-
rently ongoing mental states, which is what introspection claims to offer.
It is also about our history, which may be influencing our current percep-
tion, about character traits and past or long-standing attitudes and ten-
dencies, about our particular knowledge and lack thereof. And it is also
the knowledge of the impact we have on others, as moral agents.
These forms of self-knowledge can be acquired in ways that require no
introspection whatsoever: by seeing ourselves ‘from the outside’. One
116 Self-knowledge
way is becoming aware of the way we act or have acted, thus acquiring
knowledge about ourselves in the same way we acquire it about others.
Another is becoming aware of how others see us, acquiring knowledge of
ourselves through knowledge of (and indeed attention to) others. A third
way involves becoming aware of the continuity and discontinuity between
our perceptions and those of others, a strategy that becomes more effec-
tive the more comparisons we are able to make.
The publicly available self

Knowing ourselves by looking at what is publicly available, our behav-
iour, our history, the things we have learned, our social setting, and so on,
provides some clue about what may be getting in the way of attention. M
didn’t need to look ‘inside’ herself to know that her privileged social posi-
tion could be a factor in her perception of D. Knowing that we have lived
in the same small town all our lives, rarely exposed to different cultures,
for instance, can be a reason for us to be careful about our first percep-
tion of someone from another culture. Seeing how we take a step back
when the street vendor approaches us to ask for directions shows us a
need to remove some prejudice. Remembering whether we have made a
mistake in judging someone in a relevantly similar situation in the past
gives us a reason to be more cautious in this one. And so on.
This way of knowing oneself can be accommodated by behaviourism,
the idea that knowledge about an individual’s inner states can be obtained
by observing her behaviour, applied to ourselves. This is indeed the theory
that Murdoch spends much time critiquing, especially in her earlier work,
and much of her philosophy, with its emphasis on the moral relevance of
states of mind, consists in building an alternative to it. But what she finds
objectionable in behaviourism is its picture of the human being as ‘flat’,
and the moral consequences of the ideas she finds in her contemporaries
Hampshire (1959, 1963) and Ryle (1949, 1951), who, in her view, effec-
tively remove the inner life from consideration by claiming that all that
can be understood and assessed is what is public (see IP 300–312). None
of this means that we can never learn about ourselves, or about our moral
qualities, by looking at our publicly observable behaviour.
In fact, taking an impersonal perspective on ourselves can enable a
form of detachment from our particular position in relation to ourselves
which, as we have seen, is necessary for attention. Such detachment is
exemplified by Rilke’s description of Cézanne’s self-portrait, which was
made precisely by relinquishing a claim to a privileged perspective on
oneself, quoted in MGM:
an animal attentiveness which maintains a continuing, objective vigi-

lance in the unwinking eyes. And how great and incorruptible this
objectivity of his gaze was, is confirmed in an almost touching
Self-knowledge 117
manner by the circumstance that, without analysing or in the remot-
est degree regarding his expression from a superior standpoint, he
made a replica of himself with so much humble objectiveness, with
the credulity and extrinsic interest and attention of a dog which sees
itself in a mirror and thinks: there is another dog.
(Rilke, Selected Letters, in MGM 246)
We can look at ourselves like a dog in the mirror. Why not?
Seeing ourselves through others

This strategy has the appeal of removing the inner gaze that can be so
misleading. It is, indeed, sometimes very useful to learn about ourselves
from the outside, not only through our behaviour, but also from other
people’s perceptions of us and our behaviours. That is particularly impor-
tant since, as Murdoch reminds us, often we are opaque to ourselves, and
another’s gaze can be refreshing, pointing out the tendencies and flaws
that we are too self-protective to see or acknowledge. At other times,
conversely, lack of awareness of others’ perception of us equates to a lack
of attention with significant moral consequences.
In a fictionalised account of one of his patients, existential psychiatrist
Irvin Yalom (2012) tells the story of Thelma, a married 70-year-old woman
who has been suffering from a love fantasy for eight years, since her short-
lived affair with Matthew, her much younger former therapist. After contact-
ing Matthew, Yalom learns that eight years before, Matthew had suffered
from a breakdown occasioned by a long meditation retreat for which he was
not prepared, causing feelings of elation and unbounded generosity. Upon
meeting Thelma on his return, he felt he wanted to give her everything that
she asked for—intimacy, affection, sex. Matthew saw Thelma as just another
fellow being, and offered himself to her in that spirit, not thinking about the
future or any traditional relationship commitment. He saw Thelma’s desires,
but what he failed to see was that Thelma thought about him very differ-
ently. She was committed to him for the rest of her life, and when he moved
on to another person, she suffered from depression and constant fantasies of
their idealised love for the subsequent eight years.2
We may believe that Matthew’s desire to give Thelma what she wanted
was genuine. But Matthew failed to see that his apparent generosity cre-
ated a stronger craving in Thelma, and that while he saw her as a fellow
creature, she saw him as the love of her life. What harmed Thelma was
not Matthew’s inability to see himself through her eyes. Without that, his
attention to her only revealed a partial reality; her desire, but not the
object of her desire. In ordinary cases, the problematic humility that
makes us suppose that we don’t make a difference one way or another to
other people’s lives can have just this kind of negative effect, hurting oth-
ers by not seeing ourselves through them—for instance by failing to reach
118 Self-knowledge
out to friends, thinking hearing from us won’t matter, ignoring an
acquaintance in the street thinking they don’t remember us, and so on.
The moral relevance of self-knowledge through others is acknowl-
edged by Murdoch, who writes: ‘The good (better) [person] is liberated
from selfish fantasy, can see [themselves] as others see [them], imagine
the needs of other people, love unselfishly, lucidly envisage and desire
what is truly valuable. This is the ideal picture’ (MGM 331). The ideal
picture of the good person involves the capacity to see themselves as
others see them. This does not imply that the good person can only see
themselves that way, but that such recognition is part of a moral vision
that is liberated from egocentrism. If our concern is the good, then
knowing ourselves also involves knowing that we are just as (non)cen-
tral as anyone else, and that like everyone else we make blunders, appear
foolish, hurt others, act recklessly, and so on. ‘To know oneself in the
world (as part of it, subject to it, connected with it) is to have the firmest
grasp of the real. This is the humble “sense of proportion” which Plato
connects with virtue’ (F&S 459). This kind of self-knowledge is partly
but effectively obtained by looking at others’ perceptions—including
their perception of us.
Self-knowledge through the eyes of others is helpful for attention, but
with one proviso: that the motive is right. Once again, self-centredness
may lead the way, and others’ perceptions of us can be sought in order to
spend more time contemplating that very interesting object—ourselves—
perhaps hoping for confirmation of our good qualities, or some novel
framing of some pleasant quirks of ours. Needless to say, there is not
much actual self-knowledge in that, so the solution we are exploring can
only work when the motive is not self-concerned: primarily, for our pur-
poses, to know whether we are seeing things truthfully or not; whether
we are failing to do justice to the object.
Public testing of perception

If the goal is knowing when attention fails, when fantasy gets in the way,
then other people’s perceptions can be helpful in another way. Testing our
perceptions against those of others may offer a first warning sign that we
may need to look again. This is not a call to subordinate our vision to
that of other people. In fact, dangerous distortions can and often do come
precisely because we allow the social context to determine our percep-
tions and concepts. As Murdoch knows:
The enemies of art and of morals, the enemies that is of love, are the
same: social convention and neurosis. One may fail to see the indi-
vidual … because we are ourselves sunk in a social whole which we
allow uncritically to determine our reactions, or because we see each
other exclusively as so determined. Or we may fail to see the
Self-knowledge 119
individual because we are completely enclosed in a fantasy world of
our own into which we try to draw things from the outside, not
grasping their reality and independence, making them into dream
objects of our own.
(S&G 216)
But a sincere comparison with others’ perception is not the same as con-
vention, and it can alert us of the need to look again—whether we will
then change our perception as a result or not. This is true, starting from
the very concepts we employ. While Murdoch wants to defend the pos-
sibility of a personal use and personal deepening of concepts, this does
not deny that concepts also have a shared and public aspect. In fact, in
her view, both the personal and public aspects of concepts are related to
their contextual development and use. Individuals, words, and the object
are all necessary for concept-development, enabling the exercise of joint
attention:
We learn through attending to contexts, vocabulary develops through

close attention to objects, and we can only understand others if we
can to some extent share their contexts. (Often we cannot.) Uses of
words by persons grouped round a common object is a central and
vital human activity.
(IP 325)
This shared concept-ownership and context-dependence has two impor-

tant implications: one is that the reality of the object is crucial, for con-
cepts do not develop in the void or purely in the mind; the other is that
we can get help from others in correcting or refining the concepts we use.
Some concepts can get in the way of attention, and self-scrutiny may not
be the best way to overcome that. Murdoch herself acknowledges that M
could be helped by someone who has access to the reality she is trying to
attend to—someone who knows D. Just like
[t]he art critic can help us if we are in the presence of the same object
and if we know something about his scheme of concepts. Both con-
texts are relevant to our ability to move towards ‘seeing more’,
towards ‘seeing what he sees’. Here, as so often, an aesthetic analogy
is helpful for morals. M could be helped by someone who both knew
D and whose conceptual scheme M could understand or in that con-
text begin to understand.
(IP 325)
Again, checking our perceptions and concepts against others’ does not
necessarily lead to greater clarity. As Murdoch knows, some conversa-
tions can occasion change for the worse, and ‘certain ways of describing
120 Self-knowledge
people can be corrupting and wrong’ (IP 325). Other people can be just
as blind as we are, and the blindness of a large group of people is in fact
extremely seductive (this is one of Weil’s complaints against the social,
and one reason she thought attention required solitude—see HP 75).3
Once again, it matters why we compare our perceptions with others,
what motives animate us, and that we are alert to the possibility of failure
both in ourselves and in others. But when done with this awareness and
the right intention, learning about others’ perceptions can be a powerful
way to critique our own.
Bridget Clarke’s (2012) suggestion for ‘critical moral perception’ fol-
lows this strategy. Clarke uses the example of sexism to show how it can
be done. In the case of gender, our perception is likely to be biased in
ways we do not even realise, so deep and old they are. We may feel dis-
comfort in some situations, but we do not know why. In this case, what
alerts us to the fact that our perceptions may not be truthful, that more
attention is needed, cannot come only from us. Taking inspiration from
feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye (1983, 1992), Clarke suggests that the
tools and prompts to query our perceptions can come from a particular
form of engagement with others, comparing our perceptions to theirs in
order to identify patterns:
Frye has argued that in order to break sexism’s grip on one’s percep-
tions—in order to perceive individuals or situations clearly—one
must be careful to relate the particulars of the moment, such things
as the individual man’s conscious intention and the individual wom-
an’s conscious perception of the event, to larger, systematic patterns
of behaviour and meaning. She identifies the discovery and articula-
tion of such patterns as the principal aim of feminist philosophy.
(Clarke 2012: 246)
One context in which this pattern-discovery can occur is, Frye suggests,
‘consciousness-raising’ conversations. These exchanges have the explicit
aim of discovering whether something may be amiss, whether my percep-
tion may be complacent, or whether your discomfort may be due to a
form of discrimination that only emerges by comparing our experiences.
Murdoch’s triangulation of concepts and experience makes this possibil-
ity available beyond the specific contexts of social discrimination. Again,
there is no guarantee of progress, but it is a way, and one that also brings
self-knowledge through engagement with what is outside.
Private self-knowledge without introspection

The uncertainty around whether we are properly attending or not should
be taken as a fact about the process, not to be removed but to be mini-
mised. Self-knowledge through attention to others provides some
Self-knowledge 121
indication of what may be getting in the way of perception. This kind of
self-knowledge also avoids the problem of introspection. However, some-
thing is missing. There are, as Murdoch stresses, inner states that no one
else may know about: ‘if I suddenly make a decision, or solve a problem,
though I were to die the next moment it would still be true that a particu-
lar mental movement had been made’ (NP 46); these ‘private’ inner
occurrences are plentiful, often unclear, sometimes not fully conscious,
but they do contribute to our capacity to attend or lack thereof. They are,
therefore, mental states we should know about, if we want to know what
may be getting in the way of attention.
Removing the inner datum—or more?

Murdoch’s (partial) quarrel with Wittgenstein, to whom Chapter 9 of
MGM is devoted (‘Wittgenstein and the Inner Life’)—or, as Anne-Marie
Søndergaard Christensen (2019) puts it, her ‘ambivalent reading’ of his
work—helps to explain both what Murdoch wants to preserve and what
we do not need, and to clarify the scope of the privately observable ‘inner
life’ that can help in our efforts to attend.
Wittgenstein is introduced in MGM as being among the modern phi-
losophers who have effected a welcome removal of ‘metaphysical entities’
such as the Cartesian inner datum. The remarks in the Philosophical
Investigations offer, Murdoch acknowledges, a useful critique of a philo-
sophical mistake: to construe the inner on the model of the outer, but as
an object which only the subject can observe. Together with the private
inner datum, the introspective conception of self-knowledge is also dis-
carded. In her earlier work, too, Murdoch accepts that Wittgenstein and
‘Wittgensteinians’ have been helpful ‘by destroying the misleading image
of the infallible inner eye’ (IP 311). They presented, she writes, a radical
critique of the idea that self-knowledge can be obtained by introspection,
classically understood on the ‘perceptual model’ of the ‘inner theatre’.
Murdoch, then, welcomes the removal of a picture of the inner life based
on privately observable inner entities. Looking ‘in’, she knows, is not the
same as looing ‘out’. Attention to one’s inner life is not just morally, but
also practically and philosophically, problematic. Wittgenstein provides
arguments to support this intuition.
Yet immediately a worry sets in: isn’t the critique of a certain picture of
the inner going too far in the opposite direction? Can the rejection of the
notion of ‘private object’ render what is experienced as inner and private
meaningless, when not publicly accessible in some way? Murdoch quickly
takes some distance from Wittgenstein for two reasons: one has to do
with the way he sets up his remarks, which may suggest, implicitly, a fear
of the inner; the other has to do with the potential consequences of his
remarks, such as the behaviourist development that she sees in the work
of Hampshire and Ryle.
122 Self-knowledge
The general worry that Murdoch expresses in relation to Wittgenstein is
that, with his account of language and his remarks about inner states,
something important about the inner life is lost. Wittgenstein is mentioned
in different places in association with a ‘sense of loss’ directed at the inner:
‘what we “lose” in the Investigations is some sort of inner thing’ (MGM
49). Murdoch quotes Wittgenstein’s remarks about writing ‘S’ on his calen-
dar whenever he has a particular sensation, and his questioning of the pos-
sibility of identifying a sensation if conceived as something only the subject
has access to. The possibility, Wittgenstein suggests, hinges on the notion of
criteria for sense; and criteria, to do their work, must be public: ‘An inner
state stands in need of outward criteria’ (PI 580): ‘S man’, as Murdoch calls
him, cannot meaningfully refer to his sensation because there are no crite-
ria of correctness for the names he chooses on his own; nothing can deter-
mine whether he is using the name correctly each time he believes he has
the sensation, and nothing but his memory testifies to the identity of the
sensation. Murdoch worries: the example seems to her construed to show
‘the emptiness of the inner when not evidently connected with the outer’
(MGM 273). The inner life, she acknowledges, is not eliminated by these
remarks, but becomes secondary: ‘the vast concept of experience subsists as
something inward … but dependent upon, situated by, a public outer’
(MGM 276). What Murdoch sees Wittgenstein as threatening is ‘the very
general idea of processes as stream of consciousness, inner reflection, imag-
ery, in fact our experience as inner (unspoken, undemonstrated) being’
(MGM 273). Her concern is to maintain a sense of inner life conceived as
at least partly and contingently independent of the outer: the stream of
consciousness as observable without reference to a public domain. Which
also has a moral relevance: ‘Example of moral activity: inhibiting malicious
thoughts’ (MGM 153).
Murdoch wants to preserve an idea of private inner life, but that is not
the idea of an inner that is logically independent of the outer, nor as
something revealed by an ‘inward glance’. Her idea of the privacy of the
inner is, rather, a common-sense idea: the privacy of M and D, where
something morally relevant is happening, yet no one but M may ever
know about it. These include the inner states we need to know about in
order to know what is getting in the way of attention: not all of them may
be publicly available.
But Wittgenstein’s remarks do not deny this possibility. As Christensen
writes, Murdoch’s worries arise because she ‘treats several of Wittgenstein’s
investigations as if they are in fact constructive pieces of philosophy
aimed to change our conception of the inner’ (2019: 146). In fact,
Wittgenstein’s remarks are meant to dismantle a problematic philosophi-
cal picture, and in doing so they contribute to Murdoch’s rejection of the
inner theatre model. But that does not have the consequence that, if there
seem to be no criteria for identifying certain sensations (PI 258), then we
need to move the object of our enquiry from the hazy inner to the
Self-knowledge 123
observable outer. Wittgenstein is in fact questioning the whole idea of
seeking a relation of reference in the case of sensations (PI 244). That is
the meaning of the ‘beetle in the box’ remarks: if a sensation is pictured
as an object that only the subject has access to, it becomes impossible to
talk about it, because there is no way to know whether one’s use of the
same word refer to the same ‘thing’ as others see; so, if this picture is
used, the inner state itself becomes irrelevant.
Had the force of that ‘if’ been more strongly felt by Murdoch, she
might have taken those remarks as helpful in her own project of rejecting
the ‘inner object’ model for inner states. In ‘Thinking and Language’ and
‘Nostalgia for the Particular’, Murdoch herself comes to grips with the
question of the status of inner experiences and their expression. After
giving voice to a natural inclination to think of experience as something
the subject alone can inspect and verify, she rejects both that view and its
alternative, the ‘verificationist’ approach, which finds justification for
claims about the inner in behaviour. Both views, although opposed, rely
on an ‘ontological approach, which seeks for an identifiable inner stuff
and either asserts or denies its existence’ (TL 38). This Murdoch herself
rejects. The temptation to think in those terms is just what Wittgenstein
addresses with examples such as the ‘beetle’, and then replies: ‘the sensa-
tion itself … —It is not a something, but not a nothing either!’ (PI 304).
The second part of Murdoch’s TL is an attempt to suggest ways in
which we can examine our inner life and describe it, without having to
appeal to what is publicly observable:
It is pointless, when faced with the behaviourist-existentialist picture

of the mind, to go on endlessly fretting about the identification of
particular inner events … by producing, as it were, a series of indubi-
tably objective little things. ‘Not a report’ need not entail ‘not an
activity’ … we need a ‘change of key’.
(TL 23–4)
A change of key is a third possibility beside behaviourism and Cartesianism

(‘the choice must be rejected between behaviourism and private theatre’,
TL 38), which makes room for the personal inner life without collapsing
the inner into the outer or sealing one off from the other. In what follows,
I will propose such alternative with some help from Wittgenstein. What
this third possibility also provides, importantly for our purposes, is support
for a view of self-knowledge in attention that, while preserving the privacy
that we sometimes need for attention, directs consciousness outwards.
Transparency
One of Murdoch’s descriptions of human consciousness is as a ‘system
of energy’ with a particular direction, of something that is ‘naturally
124 Self-knowledge
attached’ to the object (OGG 344). This suggests that, in order to
understand our inner states, it is necessary to understand their object. If
we take this thought further, we may ask whether it may even be enough,
in order to know our inner states, to direct our consciousness to the
object. This suggestion, known as the ‘transparency view’, is receiving
attention in philosophy of mind, and is helpfully developed by Richard
Moran (2001). Moran builds on Gareth Evans, credited with having
first suggested the transparency view. In a much-quoted passage, Evans
writes:
In making a self ascription of belief, one’s eyes are directed out-

ward—upon the world. If someone asks me ‘Do you think there is
going to be a Third World War?’ I must attend, in answering him, to
precisely the same outward phenomena as I would attend to if I were
answering the question ‘Will there be a third world war?’
(Evans 1982: 225, quoted in Moran 2001: 61)
The belief about war is ‘transparent’ because its nature is discovered by

looking not at the belief, but at the object of such belief—in this case, by
thinking about the possibility of another world war. For Moran, this pos-
sibility has to do with the fact that when we attribute a belief to ourselves
we are at the same time expressing a commitment to it. In the case of
belief, the answer to the question ‘Do I believe that P’ is equivalent to the
answer to ‘Is P true?’. Can all relevant self-knowledge, such as we need to
become aware of failures of attention, be construed in this way—includ-
ing knowledge not only of one’s beliefs, but of one’s jealousy, love,
resentment?
Evans’s suggestion appears following Wittgenstein’s remarks against
self-knowledge as involving an ‘inward glance’. Evans also credits
Wittgenstein with first expressing ideas that the transparency thesis
develops. And it is Wittgenstein, in the Investigations, that gives us a way
to think about transparency beyond belief. Imagine that I ask myself:
‘Do I really love her or am I only pretending to myself?’ and the

process of introspection is the calling up of memories; of imagined
possible situations, and of the feelings that one would have if …
(PI 587)
What is here called ‘the process of introspection’, we must note, is not the
standard meaning of ‘introspection’, as we have been using the word. It
refers, rather, to the process of understanding one’s inner state, which is
conducted, instead, by examining the object of one’s emotions. So self-
examination here appears not to be a matter of introspection at all. Mole,
in the essay discussed at the start of the chapter, makes the same point in
more general terms: ‘the features of ourselves that we learn about through
Self-knowledge 125
introspection are features that are morally salient only on account of
their relationships to things outside the self’ (2007: 83).
This method, importantly, preserves the inwardness and first personal
access to one’s inner states that Murdoch cares about. On the transpar-
ency account, self-knowledge is both non-inferential and privileged (see
Fernández 2013): by thinking about an object, we can discover our atti-
tudes towards it, but not somebody else’s. Privacy is preserved, but not a
logical or metaphysical kind of privacy which separates the inner from
the outer. Indeed, this account allows precisely the possibility that the
‘“inner” can … fuse with “outer” and not be lost’ (MGM 280). So even
when Murdoch writes that ‘It is into ourselves that we must look’, such
look can take place through an attempt to attend to the world. Indeed, in
the same page she continues: ‘This is not to advocate constant self-obser-
vation or some mad return to solipsism … much of our self-awareness is
other awareness’ (MGM 495).
If we try to understand an inner state in isolation, the state (the jeal-
ousy, the love, the resentment) in fact loses its identity (its ‘attachment’ as
Murdoch might say) as a state about something or someone, and is no
longer that of which knowledge can be obtained. To return to Weil’s
remarks quoted above, introspection does not yield self-knowledge, but
in fact distorts that about which it tries to acquire knowledge. The object
of introspection is an inner state (or indeed a character trait), but such
inner states are about something in the world.
Engaged self-knowledge
The discussion in this chapter has suggested that there is more than one
way of obtaining knowledge about the self that can be needed in atten-
tion, without attempting introspection understood as logically private
attention to an inner datum. If we want to know if we are perceiving our
friend’s new partner justly or whether ‘we’ are getting in the way of atten-
tion, then, how do we do it? We will look at, or think about, this person.
And then perhaps we will see that we focus much of our attention on
their negative traits, look at the particulars we do not like; or we will feel
a tension in our stomach, a sensation like discomfort or anger, which, if
we follow Wittgenstein, is not something we ‘know’, but something we
have.4 And so on. Then we’ll start to get a hint that perhaps our discom-
fort is a sign of bias.
These are instances that show us that something is going wrong in our
attention to this new person. And here we come to the final important
point about self-knowledge in attention. If, as we saw earlier, attention is
being ‘filled’ by the object, there is no room for thoughts about ourselves
even indirectly. So the self-knowledge we gain by trying to attend to an
object is through failed attention. We learn about ourselves when we get
in the way. But that is exactly the self-knowledge we need, for
126 Self-knowledge
self-knowledge is necessary for attention precisely when something about
us interferes with it. Not all inner states are relevant to attention. Not all
self-knowledge is needed.
Here we return to the importance of the motive we have for seeking
self-knowledge, which alone can avoid the self-satisfied spectatorial
attitude Murdoch cautions us against. Moran suggests an important
distinction that helps to clarify the problem. He distinguishes two pos-
sible attitudes to self-knowledge: a ‘theoretical’ and a ‘deliberative’ one.
The theoretical approach to self-knowledge is described as a kind of
self-indulgence, common in sentimental literature, where the scrutiny of
one’s inner life is ‘a contemplative one, separate from questions about
the world that those states of [ours] are presumably directed upon’
(Moran 2001: 58). Separately from the object of one’s inner state, it is
questionable whether our enquiry can constitute self-knowledge, and
indeed Moran comments that the inner state in question ‘is likely to be
inapt or fixated’. In cases like these, the attempt to gain self-knowledge
takes the form of ‘looking inward’. Understood thus, ‘in the sense of a
minute understanding of one’s own machinery’, Murdoch has reasons
to claim that ‘“self-knowledge” seems to me … usually a delusion’
(OGG 355).5 To gain self-knowledge, Moran concludes, we need a
‘deliberative’ attitude, which asks what is the appropriate response we
should have to the object, and takes the knower as an agent rather than
a spectator (2001: 63). The self-knowledge required by attention is
‘deliberative’, in Moran’s vocabulary, because it involves a concern
which is directed not to the self, but to the object of one’s inner states,
including a concern to discover which response the object merits. So the
key question that we can (and often should) ask about ourselves in
attention is this: ‘Am I being just to x?’—where knowledge of ourselves
is dependent on a grasp of the object.6
The reconciliation of self-knowledge and outward-directed attention
that I have offered does not deny that in obtaining self-knowledge there
is also a gaze that is directed towards ourselves, but it changes what
‘towards ourselves’ means. What transparency avoids is, on the one
hand, a direction of consciousness to some inner thing conceived of as
sealed off from the world. By doing that, it also, and on the other hand,
avoids an idle contemplative attitude to that illusory object, the inner
datum, which is for Murdoch more morally problematic than just onto-
logically misleading. So, of course, ‘Do I think there’s going to be a Third
World War?’ is a question that is not only about world politics but also
about me, what I believe. And similarly, beyond beliefs, ‘Am I being just
to A?’ is a question about me, and not only about A; so is the question
‘Am I jealous of A?’; and so on. Insofar as successful attention to the
object does not allow attention to me, the question of my belief or jeal-
ousy does not arise at the same time as the attentive question about the
object. The self-knowledge required for attention is obviously about us,
Self-knowledge 127
but it is obtained through an effort to attend to the object. We gain self-
knowledge, but the goal and the means of it must be placed away from
the self.
Notes
1 The ‘picture’ Murdoch is here referring to is the one in which fantasy is natu-
ral and liberation comes from love and true vision.
2 This story also, incidentally, shows how devastating loss of fantasy can be.
For a brief moment at the end of therapy, Thelma is liberated from her love
fantasy. But she does not find reality appealing, and falls into an even worse
depression. Truth is not as such more enjoyable, unless we desire it. What this
also shows, it seems to me, is that liberation from fantasy ought not to be
forced on us by someone else.
3 Weil’s ideas regarding the corrupting influence of ‘the social’ are found in
many places, as a critique, for instance, of the Roman Empire, and of political
parties. See e.g. ‘The Great Beast’ (GG 164–9); Oppression and Liberty
(2001); and On the Abolition of All Political Parties (2014).
4 This is known as Wittgenstein’s ‘expressivist thesis’, which is used to support
‘neo expressivist’ accounts of self-knowledge such as Bar-On’s (2004).
5 That is also, although not quite fair, an important part of Murdoch’s suspi-
cion of psychoanalysis, the other part being the possibility that the patient’s
thoughts and perceptions are reconfigured according to what is useful and
what ‘works’ for her mental health, rather than according to what is true.
6 Quassim Cassam (2015) reminds us of the inevitable possibility that, even in
this way, we may be failing to obtain self-knowledge. Vices, particularly intel-
lectual ones, are ‘stealthy’ because they cannot be discovered without intel-
lectual virtues. A vicious circle is formed, where close mindedness, for
instance, makes its own defeat near impossible in self-reflection. Hence,
Cassam suggests that we use other tools beyond self-reflection, and I agree.
The suggestions in the earlier part of this chapter are not to be considered as
last resort alternatives, but supplements to transparent self-reflection.
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5 Moral perception
Attention is connected with truth: it enables us to see how things are,

including their moral qualities. In this claim, as we saw in Chapter 1, we
find various reasons to assign attention a fundamental place in morality:
the value of truth-seeking, the value of truth, and the perception of moral
reality. In this chapter I offer a Murdochian argument for the third of
these reasons for taking attention as central to morality, namely, the fact
that attention enables moral perception. Moral perception, as I under-
stand it following Murdoch, refers not only to a perception that is mor-
alised, but also to the perception of moral reality, and to both of these
together.
The moral reality that is perceived through attention includes motiva-
tional qualities. Therefore, the moral perception provided by attention is
not of a purely contemplative kind: it is not spectatorial perception, but
motivationally alive, and, in cases of intense attention, or in cases of
attention to something of great importance, it leads to action which is
perceived as a sort of necessity. The other connections, from attention
and perception, to motivation and action, are explored in the next chap-
ter. Therefore, this chapter and the next are to be understood as part of
one argument with four steps: attention enables moral perception; such
perception includes perception of possibilities for action; it also includes
a motivational force; together, the perception of possibilities plus motiva-
tion leads to specific actions that are ‘required’ by the reality attended to
and not by the self. The first step—to perception—is offered here; the
steps to possibilities, motivation, and action are offered in the next chap-
ter, although motivation will begin to emerge in this chapter. In both,
I work with a single example or case study: attention to animal suffering,
and the actions that can result from it.1
Claiming that we can perceive a moral reality may suggest that we can
draw an ontological distinction between a moral and a non-moral reality.
I do not think that is the case, nor is it Murdoch’s view: for her, all reality
is moral—insofar as it is motivationally alive, insofar as goodness is
incarnate in it in various ways and degrees, and insofar as it is perceived
DOI: 10.4324/9781003164852-6
130 Moral perception
by a mind that always operates through its orientation to the idea of the
good. At most, the distinction between the moral and non-moral is a
practical one, determined by our contextual practices and goals. Moral
perception is not a special kind of perception. I will return to this.
Attention to animal suffering

This chapter and the following one look at animal suffering as an exam-
ple of moral perception. The case of animal suffering is not just one
example among many others that I could have chosen. While my aim is
general—to show how attention leads to perception, and attentive per-
ception is intimately tied to motivation and action—there is something
specific and important about attention to animals on the one hand, and
attention to suffering on the other, that this example brings together.
Suffering is something primitive, and something we, as animals, have
the capacity to recognise in others, and to recognise very early in life.2 It
is easier to detect and respond to suffering, when attended to, than to
more complex and less universal states or emotions. At the same time,
like other forms of perception, as we shall see, the perception of suffering
can be enriched by knowledge and experience. Suffering is also one of the
things that we know, morally, has a claim on us, both in the philosophical
tradition—without needing to sign up to a utilitarian ethics, although it
is a central part of it—and in our ordinary life. Inflicting suffering, and
the possibility to alleviate it, are paradigmatic moral cases. Simone Weil
takes the parable of the Good Samaritan, which she sees as revolving
around a moment of attention to suffering, as central to her overall eth-
ics. She discusses the parable on several occasions, and takes it to exem-
plify the ‘love of our neighbour’, which for her is ‘made of creative
attention’ (LN 149).
It is also important that the man lying by the side of the road in the
parable is someone who is ‘afflicted’, in Weil’s sense: he has been stripped
of everything, he is in physical and mental pain, and he is devoid of dig-
nity and hope. That makes him, Weil writes, invisible: being deprived of
what makes him what he is, with no self-regard and no recognition from
others, there is a sense in which he ‘does not exist’ (LN 149). In others,
intense suffering is not only something we can, as (human) animals, read-
ily recognise.3 Extreme or thorough suffering or affliction is also some-
thing that only attention can do justice to, because as soon as we spot it,
we feel the desire to turn away from it, by ignoring it, distorting, or per-
haps exploiting it, thus turning someone else’s affliction into something
else to our advantage. Affliction, for both afflicted and onlooker, is hard
to bear.
All of these features of affliction, as well as our natural responses to
it, are present in the condition of most non-human animals in existence.
Most of these animals are here because of they were brought into the
Moral perception 131
world for human purposes, existing not for their own sake, but mainly
for their instrumental value.4 This contributes to making their lives
largely devoid of care and respect (although there may be care from the
other animals they live with). Their lives are characterised by physical
and psychological suffering, restriction of movement, separation from
kin, and a very early death. Branded with numbers and identified
through their use, they are stripped of individuality. Human responses
to the affliction of these animals ranges from empathetic distress, to
detachment or denial, to sadistic enjoyment. For these reasons, I think
non-human animals represent currently the most afflicted group, in
Simone Weil’s sense: most consistently, thoroughly, routinely, and
numerically.
My contention is that attention to the suffering of these animals enables
successful moral perception, which in turn motivates us to act. Such
action, in this case, tends to take the form of any action aiming to end the
suffering. Conversely, lack of attention enables the continuation of prac-
tices that afflict thousands of animals every second. To support the idea
that attention to suffering enables moral perception, two claims will be
defended: that moral facts can be objects of perception, directly and non-
inferentially; and that anything can be a moral fact, even when we do not
use explicitly moral words to describe it; one such fact is animal
suffering.
The meanings of moral perception

The possibility of perceiving moral reality is a central and distinctive idea
of Murdoch’s philosophy. Such idea is also found in Weil, who will help
us by supporting various claims, but it is on Murdoch that I will rely both
to offer more detailed reasons, and to offer arguments that can be
employed in conversation with current debates on moral perception. This
also means that it will be the Tame View, rather than the Radical View,
that I will rely on here. Although Murdoch’s and Weil’s ideas and method
are in many ways at odds with contemporary analytic philosophy, some
of what they say can be used to join and broaden the conversation.
Moral perception, as Justin Broackes writes in the introduction to
Iris Murdoch, Philosopher, is one of Murdoch’s key ideas. Murdoch’s
ethics contains ‘an emphasis on the idea of moral perception, and the
metaphor of seeing moral features of people and situations, and seeing
what is to be done’.5 This idea, Broackes continues, ‘at once integrates
and gives a place to much in Murdoch’s other views’, such as: the exis-
tence of moral facts, a related anti-scientism, the idea of response-
invoking facts, the role played by one’s ‘scheme of concepts’ in
perception, and the possibility of educating and training perception and
motivation (2012: 10, ff.). These elements will become relevant in our
discussion in what follows.
Moral perception: actual or experienced
But before we begin the exploration properly, there are two sets of dis-
tinctions that are required to discuss moral perception in Murdoch. The
first distinction is not Murdochian, but related to the contemporary
debate on moral perception, and refers to whether moral properties can
truly be objects of perception. On one side, philosophers have argued
that moral perception is either a metaphorical concept or one that, at
best, describes the experience we have but not the reality of perception:
perception cannot have value as its object, but we experience it as such,
thanks to implicit ‘bridges’ that take us from perception to judgement in
ways that we are typically unaware of (Harman 1977; Faraci 2015;
Väyrynen 2018). On the other side, moral perception is understood liter-
ally: moral qualities and facts are part of what we perceive. We have the
capacity to see, hear, or feel, rudeness, care, love, or that someone was
rude, caring, loving—and perhaps also, more ‘thinly’, instances of injus-
tice or, thinner still, goodness. Perception is opposed to inference: if moral
perception exists, we do not infer that something was kind. Most defenses
of the non-inferential reality of moral perception, however, while reject-
ing inference, still argue that there is a distinction between moral and
non-moral properties in perception, and that moral properties supervene
on non-moral ones (Chappell 2008; Denham 2001; Audi 2013). Murdoch,
as we shall see (while also supporting actual, non-inferential moral per-
ception), does not make such a distinction.
An important qualification: perceiving rudeness may suggest that per-
ception can take abstract or general objects. That is not true to Murdoch’s
idea. What is perceived in attention is not properly the rudeness of the
remark, but a rude remark; using thin concepts, it is not the goodness of
a gesture, but a good gesture that is perceived. While Murdoch argues
that we can perceive even the good, she cautions against the idea that we
perceive the good itself, but rather the particular, imperfect manifestation
of it, and of other qualities, in specific individuals and situations. The
good is embodied, ‘incarnate’, and so are other properties.
The moral as object or as quality of perception

The second distinction to be made is between two meanings of ‘moral
perception’ that are both to be found in Murdoch. It is the distinction
between the morality inherent in the process of perceiving, insofar as
what we perceive and how we perceive depends on who we are (our
character, biases, interests, habits, etc.); and the perception of (embodied)
moral properties and facts, which are ‘out there’ and which we can per-
ceive or misperceive or be blind to. This distinction is specific to
Murdochian scholarship, because in Murdoch we find both senses and it
is not always clear which, if either, should take precedence. The second
meaning also coincides with the second position in the philosophical
debate just sketched (actual direct moral perception). While these two
understandings are sometimes discussed separately, I suggest that in the
context of Murdoch’s philosophy they cannot be separated, and the dis-
tinction works mainly for the sake of explaining the phenomenon.6 The
reason why, for Murdoch, a morally alive consciousness and the percep-
tibility of moral reality cannot be separated is the same reason why she
argues that facts and values are not as clearly distinct as we might think.
Moral perception in Murdoch’s philosophy

Oddly enough, the main reason we find in Murdoch to support moral
perception is also the same that can be used to cast doubt on it. That is
the idea that perception can be, and typically is, thick, layered, and rich,
which means that that background knowledge, values, and experience
enter into perception, as constitutive elements of it, rather than later
additions. This is known in contemporary discussions as ‘cognitive pen-
etration’, as we saw in Chapter 2.7
Murdoch stresses that it is through consciousness that we are able to
perceive what we encounter, and consciousness, according to her, is inher-
ently moral, constantly evaluating, according to the ‘omnipresent effec-
tiveness [of goodness] in human life’ (MGM 408). Yet morality, she
argues, is inherent not only in the activity of consciousness, but also in
reality.8 How it is possible that morality is part of both consciousness and
world? If consciousness is evaluative, does that not mean that we con-
struct reality according to moral categories, projecting values? And if
there is a moral reality, what is the need for an evaluating consciousness?
This problem, I believe, is one of the greatest difficulties in Murdochian
scholarship, and positions diverge from constructivist readings (Bagnoli
2012) to robust realist ones (Robjant 2012). In the question of moral
perception, this difficulty comes to the fore.
Murdoch argues that perception, as well as knowledge, are not ways of
taking in a reality which is given to us ‘on a plate’ (MGM 215), but ways
of ‘grasping’ that reality through concepts. Concepts, understood simply as
ways of making sense of what we encounter, are part of all thinking and
perception. Thus Murdoch defines conceptualising as ‘the activity of grasp-
ing, or reducing to order, our situations’ and thinking as ‘not the using of
symbols which designate absent objects, symbolising and sensing being
strictly divided from each other. Thinking is not designating at all, but
rather understanding, grasping, “possessing”’ (T&L 41). Consciousness
grasps the world.
The ambiguity of ‘grasping’ is precisely what, I suggest, gives us a clue
as to how to understand Murdoch’s view. Think of grasping a handful of
sand. The sand is out there, it exists regardless of us (we can only grasp
something which is there), but we need something to grasp it with (our
hands); some grains will be lifted in our palm, while others will remain
where they are, ungrasped. What we have in our hand is sand, but not the
entirety of it. And now, there are various things we can do with it (pour
it on our body, use it for artwork), but others we cannot do (make it fly,
use it as a book). And to do any of the things we can do with it, we need
the right tools.
The idea of grasping also suggests that our encounters with reality are
never inert or spectatorial. We always engage with the world in specific
ways, for specific reasons, as we move in it mentally or physically.9
Murdoch appeals to Platonic eros to explain the constant engagement or
‘orientation’ or the mind towards reality. Having an orientation means
having a point of view, goals and desires, and specific ways in which we
pursue our goals and in which we are impressed by the world. This means
that the moral quality of our consciousness is not something ‘added on’,
but part of the very structure of consciousness, through which we are
able to encounter the world down to the most basic encounter that is
perception. But once again, just like our faculties can capture or fail to
capture reality, so some of the goals that shape these faculties in morally-
laden ways will be compatible with reality, others will involve a distor-
tion or denial of it.
Consciousness and the senses are the tools we have to encounter real-
ity. Consciousness, in turn, is shaped, in Murdoch’s view, not only by
concepts, but also by the imagination:
The world around us is always presented by a free faculty, which is

not that of reason thought of as ‘beaming in’ upon purely empirical
situations not otherwise evaluated. Imagination … can scarcely be
thought of as morally neutral … Our deepest imaginings which
structure the world in which ‘moral judgments’ occur are already
evaluations. Perception itself is a mode of evaluation.
(MGM 314–5)
Just like it is possible to make mistakes due to visual illusions, so we can

fail to grasp reality through evaluation. ‘Moral perception’ can be mis-
taken. Hence, in this discussion I will be using ‘moral perception’ neu-
trally as to its success, as referring to ‘one’s awareness of, or one’s “take”
on, a moral situation’ (Holland 1998: 310).
If reality is not given to perception immediately and impersonally, but
it is known by the individual through continuous moral effort, as
Murdoch argues, it follows that successful perception coincides with vir-
tuous consciousness. ‘A good quality of consciousness is the continual
discrimination of true and false’ (MGM 250). What makes perception
more accurate and allows us to ‘see more’ is nothing but virtue, including
the desire to perceive things as they are (eros)—to do them justice, con-
comitantly with the suppression of the distorting influence of the egoistic
drives (‘unselfing’): the two key elements of attention.
Fact and value
At the same time, there is something there to be perceived. Can that some-
thing be a reality containing value? In the chapter ‘Fact and Value’ in
MGM, Murdoch writes that ‘for Plato the world is a system of truths and
values’ (MGM 39). The world itself, not just our understanding of it, is a
system of value. If that is so, then value touches anything and everything:
‘The area of morals, and ergo of moral philosophy, can … be seen … as
covering the whole of our mode of living and the quality of our relations
with the world’ (SGC 389). In apprehending the world, our minds latch on
to features that are there, but that can only occur through the structures of
the mind. On the one hand, something is genuinely there, including fea-
tures of reality that are correctly conceptualised as value; on the other,
apprehension of the world proceeds through evaluation—but the standard
of correctness of the concepts through which apprehension takes place
depends on the real features of the world. Because apprehension of reality
necessarily takes place through an inherently evaluative cognition, the opti-
mal state of mind for correct apprehension is itself a moral one. That state
is attention: when we are being attentive, our evaluative minds, far from
being an impediment or projecting untruths, are precisely what enable us
to grasp reality, including its value. There is no tension, but rather a neces-
sary connection, between moral faculties and a moral reality.
So perception—all perception—for Murdoch requires the senses but
also the faculties that allow us to see objects as something: as a ripe peach,
as a small child, as a kind gesture. All our encounters with the world,
including the most basic ones in perception, are neither ‘raw’ nor value
free. Evaluation inheres in the very concept of fact: ‘The moral point is that
“facts” are set up as such by human (that is moral) agents’ (MGM 26). The
encounter of mind and reality involves the concepts we have learned and
cultivated, the objects we care about and see as salient, as well as those we
ignore and avoid.10 So there is nothing strange in admitting concept-use,
imagination, desires, and experience in perception. Indeed, for Murdoch,
without them, we would not even see a blade of grass.
But if morality is everywhere, does it even make sense to talk about
perceiving moral facts and properties? Yes and no. If Murdoch is right,
the distinction between fact and value begins to look like one that is not
ontological, but pragmatic: while we approach the world in value-laden
ways, sometimes we find it useful to appeal to explicitly moral consider-
ations, and sometimes there is space for what does not seem morally rel-
evant—but can be. The fact-value distinction, then, amounts to this:
while everything is perceived through a moral consciousness (where
truth-seeking itself is a form of evaluation), and while anything can take
on moral relevance in a particular context, we do not take all situations
as moral ones. Morality is both part of the tissue of reality and one activ-
ity among others. All perception, in this sense, is moral perception. Only,
some perceptions are more explicitly moral than others.
Seeing meat, seeing someone
The ubiquitousness of evaluation is evident in our perceptions of non-
human animals, even when we do not use explicitly ‘moral concepts’. I shall
take two ways of perceiving animals as paradigmatic of two forms of moral
perception, but not equally correct, and the attention or lack thereof that
they manifest: seeing a cow as meat, or as a suffering living being.
The first is the perception of a cow as ‘meat’. Think of the images one
finds in butchers’ shops, where an animal, typically a cow, is displayed,
sometimes in realistic pictures or as a photograph, and on the cow’s bod-
ies lines are drawn that show the ‘cuts’ that can be taken from that body,
each with its own name. These posters show the cow as meat. To those
looking at them within butchers’ shops, the cow is meat.
Then think of the images of animals that activists often use to show the
conditions of non-human animals in animal-using industries. Here the
cow is shown inside a barn, or on her way to the slaughterhouse, or
inside the slaughterhouse. The cow is suffering. What we see here is a
suffering cow. Suffering is something we can perceive through perceptual
cues: the cow’s eyes, her faster breathing, her body shaking. According to
Murdoch’s view of perception, seeing suffering includes conceptual,
imaginative, and experiential faculties; but the perception itself is direct.
We see the cow suffering.11
But we are talking about meat and suffering, one might say, and these are
empirical facts, not moral ones, so why use them in an argument for moral
perception? We can perceive suffering and especially meat without taking
them to have any moral relevance. Also, why should we not see meat when
we see a cow—in other words, why would seeing meat be an instance of
inattention? It is a fact, after all, that this is one of the main things that
humans do to cows: they turn them into meat (or extract bodily fluids,
such as milk). And finally, why should the perception of suffering motivate
me to end it, rather than, for instance, inflict more suffering?
These are questions that need addressing if we are to explain why
attention enables moral perception successfully (seeing what is there) and
that such perception motivates us to act in ways that are morally good
(required by the situation). I will begin with the first question, later move
on to the second, which will give us reasons to address the third one too,
which is, however, more thoroughly discussed in the next chapter.
Meat and suffering as moral concepts

As we saw above, for Murdoch, moral orientation is indeed ubiquitous,
but that does not mean that we would be right to use moral concepts in
every situation. Meat and suffering are not obviously moral concepts. But
in this case they are: this is due both to the way in which the arrive at them
and in which we use them, and to the role they play in the given situation.
The moral relevance of how we gain and use these concepts is explained
by the fact that concepts are, to some extent, both up to us and deter-
mined by other morally significant mental factors (imagination, goals,
etc.), as we saw above. Here habit, such as eating meat or seeing it as
desirable, will also play a role in concept formation. As Murdoch writes,
‘clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort’ (IP 329).
That means that we are responsible for what we see and what we do not,
as well as for the meaning of what we see.
But facts and properties in the world can also be considered moral
because of the role they play in situations, how they interact with other
facts and properties. As Murdoch shows, ‘red’ can be a very different
kind of concept when it is used by an artist, signalling an aspiration,
something meaningful and difficult to achieve (IP 323). While it is con-
versely true that some facts and properties can play out in ways that are
more distant from an overt moral sense, such as the red of a traffic light,
these contexts are on closer inspection not so easy to find. In our example,
I can hardly imagine a context in which ‘meat’ and ‘suffering’ are entirely
morally neutral.
First, whenever meat or (animal) suffering are encountered, there are
normative thoughts and concepts that are, consciously or not, linked to
them: the value of a life, of lack thereof; the pity, compassion, kindness,
or the indifference, or perhaps the sadistic enjoyment, that go with wit-
nessing suffering; the response of indignation that may arise; and so on.
Second, these concomitant facts, thoughts, and concepts are linked to
certain moral commitments, again first and foremost relating to the value
of other lives. Third, they are also linked to the responses that we take
others in particular situations (suffering and death, or flourishing) to
merit, in other words the responses we consider appropriate depending
on the value we attribute to what or who confronts us (including whether
we take them as a ‘what’ or a ‘who’). As we shall see in the next chapter,
there are moral responses and attitudes that display, and do not just fol-
low, moral perception.
Fourth and finally, zooming out further, there is the role that certain
facts, and the concepts we use to understand them, play in our overall
worldview—which, according to Murdoch in ‘Vision and Choice’, is the
testing ground of morality when it comes to evaluating people. Our per-
ception of individuals and of particular situations depends on our overall
background of consciousness, and our concepts depend on how we have
learned to apply them, upon the background of a mind with an orienta-
tion, a tendency to see justly or falsify, to care about certain things or
ignore others, in this case to cultivate love for animals or to deny their
importance. In the back and forth between perception and the big sea of
evaluating consciousness which shapes the individual, our ‘ways’ of being
can determine and be determined by a singular experience. Here, for
instance, an anthropocentric worldview, or one that takes all living beings
to have a claim to one’s concerns, and the kind and intensity of those
worldviews, will be displayed in the perception of the animal. And in turn
a new perception of the animal, in a moment of attention, may have an
impact of one’s worldview. That’s how attention changes us.
Perceiving smartly
We have seen how anything can be morally significant, and how the per-
ceptions of meat and suffering can be properly considered instances of
moral perception. It is still to be shown exactly how successful perception
of a moral reality occurs directly, or in non-mediated fashion, but with
the input of knowledge, experience, and specific value-orientation,
through attention.
Murdoch, typically, starts with experience and common sense. In many
situations (though of course not all) we say that we do ‘see’ cruelty, we
‘see’ that something is wrong; we also ‘see’ that the cow is suffering. That
is rather obvious in everyday life or, as Murdoch puts it, ‘outside the labo-
ratory, or untroubled by philosophy’ (MGM 278). Throughout her work,
Murdoch shows us various ways in which our experience of reality is
moral. What interests her mainly is the how, more than the why, of evalu-
ative experience in general (‘How do we come to see things this or that
way? ‘How do we purify our consciousness?’), and both the how and the
why of attentive truthful experience in particular.
I have already introduced Murdoch’s main argument for moral percep-
tion: perception occurs on the background of a consciousness that is
structured by value, by what we take to be good. Our knowledge, experi-
ence, concepts—which are, for her, guided by the imagination—shape
perception in many ways (without being ‘add-ons’). In this respect,
Murdoch was anticipating arguments more recently offered by McDowell
(2006) for the concept-ladenness of perception, by Gallagher (2008) for
its ‘smartness’, and by Dancy (2010) for its determination by knowledge
and prior experience. In this section I will expand Murdoch’s argument
introduced above with the help of some of these contemporary ideas.
When we successfully see suffering or injustice, we are able to identify
them as ‘suffering’ and ‘injustice’ because we are capable of grasping
together certain parts of the world in specific ways, and of making con-
nections with similar past experience and knowledge; the same is true of
seeing a red car. Where suffering, injustice, and red cars differ in percep-
tion is in how much knowledge and experience are required for identify-
ing them. In order of complexity, suffering is the simplest object of
perception (infants can detect emotions at around 5–7 months of age).12
Red cars come after. And injustice is last, because it takes more time with
the concept, more situations encountered, to know what it is. At the same
time, according to Murdoch’s perfectionist view, suffering and injustice
(perhaps red cars too) are all infinitely perfectible concepts, so their
perception can be constantly refined and deepened. This—and not some
kind of subjectivism or relativism—is the reason for the ‘personal’ nature
of experience that Murdoch defends. We can grasp the world from differ-
ent angles, as long as it’s the same world; but it may take some time.13
Here, opposers of moral perception would say that if you need knowl-
edge, concepts, or skills to perceive something, you are not perceiving but
inferring. But first, once again, that would be true of seeing a red car as
well, and we would have to conclude we are not seeing, but inferring, that
there is a red car over there. Second, there are features of the world which
we all agree are there, available to perception, and yet we cannot perceive
them unless we have acquired some knowledge or training.
Jonathan Dancy has pointed out that while moral perception sceptics
‘suppose that training, knowledge and experience cannot alter the way in
which things look, sound or feel to us’ (2010: 111), that cannot be true:
a car mechanic, in his example, can be properly represented as hearing
the malfunctioning of the water pump. Or: think about someone listening
to a piece of music and hearing the suspended chord (I couldn’t); or tast-
ing citrus in a wine (I can after I’m told). The idea that the ‘primary, or
basic object of perceptual awareness must be things for the sensing of
which no training, knowledge or experience is necessary’ (111) seems,
Dancy argued, like an assumption, and a wrong one, for it would prevent
us from talking about seeing, hearing, smelling, in the ways that we do.
Beyond supervenience
Like Dancy, Murdoch argues that it makes no sense to look ‘behind’ per-
ceptions of reality to find the ‘facts’ upon which moral perception may
depend. ‘Training, knowledge, and experience’ and, Murdoch would add,
concepts and imagination, are needed in all cases. Therefore, there is no
greater primacy in the case of cars than in the case of kindness. To put it
bluntly: if we can see a chair, we can also see kindness; and while the lat-
ter use of ‘see’ can be metaphorical, it is not always nor necessarily so.14
The fact and value distinction, then, is further eroded. This leads to a
Murdochian view of moral perception that, as I mentioned, is more radi-
cal than most arguments for moral perception, because by denying a fact-
value dichotomy, it denies that values supervene on facts. Even some
defences of Murdochian moral perception, such as A. E. Denham’s
(2001), fail to see this, by attributing to Murdoch a supervenience account
that is based on an ontological distinction between moral and non-moral
facts.15 Murdoch writes:
There would, indeed, scarcely be an objection to saying that there

were ‘moral facts’ in the sense of moral interpretations of situations
where the moral concept in question determines what the situation
is, and if the concept is withdrawn we are not left with the same
situation or the same facts. In short, if moral concepts are regarded
as deep moral configurations of the world, rather than as lines drawn
round separable factual areas, then there will be no facts ‘behind
them’ for them to be erroneously defined in terms of.
(VCM 95)
Sharpening our tools in attention

But concepts can be more or less appropriate. If the means of perception
are not clearly distinguishable between moral and non-moral perception,
so too are the obstacles. As we have different ‘orientations to the good’,
and better and worse grasps of what is actually good (including the same
individual at different times and on different occasions), some of our uses
of concepts, knowledge, skill, and imagination will be an aid to percep-
tion, others an obstacle. For Murdoch, as we know, the source of all
obstacles to perception, of cars and kindness, is self-concern:
all just vision … is a moral matter … the same virtue (love) [is]
required throughout and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a
blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person.
(OGG 357)
However, it seems more difficult to say that, in the case of the car mechanic
and the wine taster, self-concern is the problem. Knowledge, effort, and
training determine the perception, but why should moral qualities enter
into detecting the smell of a wine? Yet here, too, the two explicitly moral
elements of attention—unselfing and eros—play a part. We will be less
likely to taste the citrus fruit if we assume we know everything, and refuse
to learn from the sommelier, nor will we taste the full bouquet if we are
absorbed in our own world, lacking the desire to perceive what is there.
Concepts, knowledge, and imagination can be used more or less ‘trans-
parently’. Perception and what shapes it, such as concept-use or memory,
do not operate in the void. They can either latch on to something in the
world, or not. The more they are dictated by interests other than truth-
seeking, the thicker the veil between us and reality. Such poor use of the
tools of perception does not need to be conscious. Experience, habit,
instinctive responses can arm us with distorting tools (e.g. a previous
negative experience with a member of a particular group will create
‘knowledge’ that distorts the perception of the other members). This is
not at all easy to avoid, indeed impossible to avoid entirely, but attention
helps at least somewhat. If attention is, minimally, a truth-seeking turning
away from self-concern (as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3), and may even
involve some self-knowledge (as we saw in Chapter 4), it is more likely
that the tools will be transparent. Let us return to our examples and look
at this difference in a concrete case.
Direct perception of the cow’s suffering
Perceiving a cow suffering means perceiving her subjective experience,
including not only her physical but also her mental states. Similarly to the
other forms of perception just discussed, and, significantly, similarly to the
perception of explicitly moral properties such as cruelty, perceiving mental
states occurs non-inferentially but can be helped (or hindered) by previous
experience and other capacities, such as empathy. In order to see that this
cow is in pain, or that her situation is cruel, we need to access something
more than a mass of sense-data such as shapes and colours. That, however,
as we saw, does not need to mean that we make an inference. Attention can
help us use these tools to enrich and sharpen perception, but also to remove
impediments to enable a simpler, more immediate perception.
Contemporary defences of direct perception of mental states also
appeal to the fact that experience and knowledge inform perception non-
inferentially, on the model of moral perception just seen. Shaun Gallagher,
one of the earliest proponents of the ‘direct perception theory of mental
states’, argues that perception can be ‘smart’ when a significant amount
of knowledge is available in the content of perceptual experience. When
we see anger in another’s face, we are not inferring. This applies to the
perception of the mental states of non-human animals too (Morris 2017),
and vice-versa: other animals directly perceive our mental states (Paradiso,
Gazzola, and Keysers 2021).
Perception of mental states or social perception is, for Gallagher, ‘very
smart’ (2008: 538), for it can make use of a rich array of knowledge and
experience in an unmediated way. This is a recent development of an old
idea, one indeed that Murdoch would attribute to the common sense of
the individual ‘uncorrupted by philosophy’. One philosopher who tried
to be uncorrupted by philosophy is Wittgenstein, whom Gallagher also
quotes, for instance, here:
‘We see emotion.’—As opposed to what?—We do not see facial con-

tortions and make inferences from them (like a doctor framing a
diagnosis) to joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately as
sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other
descriptions of the features.—Grief, one would like to say, is personi-
fied in the face. This belongs to the concept of emotion
(Wittgenstein 1967: §225; Gallagher 2008: 538)
In our interactions with other animals, we respond to them unreflectively

as minded beings, with intentions and emotional states, and our interac-
tions with them, made of enjoyment, play, or fear, or violence, are all part
of this perception of animals as something other than objects.
Such recognition of animals’ mental states is not only natural, and
potentially good, but also useful: it is good for us to know when an
animal is threatening or agitated. People who live with animals readily
perceive—by looking at, touching, hearing, them—not only their mental
states, but also their needs, such as the need to be comforted, to be healed,
to be left alone. We perceive animals’ mental states unreflectively—unless
such perception is blocked. The possibility of error is not a sign that these
types of perception are not really perception, but rather that something
goes wrong in perception, blocking or distorting it. Attention, by being
entirely stretched towards the animal, leaves no room for anything to
block the immediate perception of the cow as minded, here specifically as
suffering. What blocks it may be interest, fear, or any other filter that,
Murdoch argues, comes from self-concern.
Rich perception of the cow’s suffering

The perception of suffering is typically simpler than that of injustice, but
also more primitive than tasting citrus in chardonnay. Yet, with suffering
too, experience, concept-use, and knowledge can change and, in the best
cases, enrich the perception. In the case of the perception of the cow’s
suffering it makes a difference, for example, how much time we have
spent with animals of that species, so that we recognise signs of distress
more easily and in more nuanced ways; it also matters how much and in
what ways we have experienced suffering ourselves, and what kind of
suffering, so that our perception of the suffering we see will resonate with
our own memories as well, adding depth. These are ‘deepenings’ of the
perception of suffering in someone else, which attention can encourage.
One way attention can encourage such deepened perception is
through empathetic joint attention: being emotionally open, attention is
guided by the object. In this case, it is the cow’s suffering that is salient,
rather than her potential for turning into meat, because when we per-
ceive another individual attentively, part of what we see is what is cur-
rently salient for them. If attention enables just perception, and if
perception as we shall see includes mental states, then in the case of the
perception of another living being, another subject, we will be able to
see what is salient in their experience.16 For a ‘farmed’ animal, the suf-
fering is likely to be the centre of the animal’s experience. So attention
reveals the suffering directly. Such perception requires the capacity for
empathy, and can be enriched by previous experience of animals, previ-
ous suffering, and imagination.
By contrast, it is not a coincidence that the perception of meat is
enabled by representations of animals that tend to be emotionally neu-
tral. In the butchers’ posters, the cow’s face is generally presented in pro-
file, and the cow is not looking at us. It is still possible to physically
encounter a suffering animal and see her, primarily, as something to eat.
But it is more difficult. And if we look attentively, I am suggesting, that is
hardly possible.
Attending to the cow
I have been arguing that attention, as defined with Murdoch (and Weil),
puts us in the best position to achieve successful moral perception, which
means that we can see what is there, including its moral qualities, and its
role in a larger moral context. It also means that successful perception is
neither neutral nor impersonal, and that attention uses the individual’s
capacities and knowledge to perceive truthfully. Let us now recap the
ways in which attention can do this, and its relevance to human percep-
tion of certain animals where, I have been suggesting, lack of attention is
one of the major drivers of the current situation.
First, in some cases, attention is what allows us to see at all. Attention
to a suffering animal means not looking away. If the animal is physically
present, it means not ignoring what is in front us. If we are somehow
involved in that suffering, attention will be directed to the animal because
responsibility plays a role in the selection of its objects (see Chapter 2). If
we are watching a film, or a documentary, or reading an account of ani-
mal suffering, sustaining attention helps us not to skip forward, and to
stay with what is there, even if it hurts.
Second, if moral perception uses the ‘tools’ of the mind, concepts, expe-
rience, and imagination, attention can ensure the better tools are used.
Better, here, means more likely to yield true perception. Of course, if we
lack experience of suffering (as we all wish we did), or have not been
exposed to the use of the concept in many and illuminating ways, atten-
tion cannot quite provide that. Not quite: but it can provide the deepen-
ing of concept and experience right now, on the occasion of attention.
Attentive perception is more intense that non-attentive perception,
because of the engagement that is part of attention, and that in turn
enables the experience to leave a mark in us. This is about depth.
About truthfulness, and third, if we remember that attention is the
engagement with the object, with the desire to see it as it is and the con-
comitant falling away of conflicting (self-concerned) influences, attention
will help us use the imagination in a way that does justice to the object
and not our desires; it will show us the specific suffering of this animal,
and not, for instance, frame it as ‘not so bad’, or as ‘that’s life, what can
you do’, as our need for consolation or justification would have it. To
preserve the sense of our own decency, the sense of the world as good and
other people too, we would have to look away from animal suffering,
and we do. It is hard to bear. But that is what the ego wants, and ego, as
Murdoch reminds us, is not an ally we can have in attentive truth-seeking.
Although it costs us.
There is also a question of how the object of attention is presented to
us. Although we have some agency in perception, it is not a secret that
perception can be manipulated, so that some aspects are presented as
more salient, or some uncomfortable facts are simply, quietly, hidden.
The cow in the butchers’ shop is presented so as to encourage in others
the perception of the cow as meat. The strategies employed by indus-
tries producing and selling ‘animal products’ show that they believe in
moral perception: they know that consumers’ motivation to buy such
products will be weakened if they saw what happens in their facilities.
That is why, in most cases, images of the living animal are not shown at
all when packaging the final product; that is also why consumers will-
ingly deflect attention from any such thoughts when eating animals
(Adams 1990). That is also why, when animals are shown on advertise-
ments or packaging, they are either shown in abstract, unrealistic ways
(drawings, cartoons) or in neutral ways, and not looking at us (like the
cow in butcher’s poster). When animals are shown, in TV commercials,
they are healthy, happy, have names—which they do not in fact have—
and a significant portion of their lives, the portion that is necessary for
them to become or yield products, is omitted. Such gigantic effort to
deflect attention away from the real thing is a testament that, as humans,
we already believe in moral perception, and we believe in the power of
(in)attention.
This is an awareness that animal activists also show. A common
action by the group Anonymous for the Voiceless is to stage a ‘cube of
truth’ (the name too is revealing—not the cube part) where they stand,
holding laptops showing footage from animal ‘production facilities’
and slaughterhouses, wearing white masks (to avoid drawing atten-
tion to themselves or their own emotions). They are simply showing
suffering, and expect other people to react as they themselves once
did—with horror, revulsion, discomfort … and the desire to end that
suffering.
The encouraging of perception towards attention, meaning attending
to what the object is, including her experience and needs, is also found in
the slogan ‘friends not food’, also used by activists to make in a straight-
forward way a point that I’ve belaboured for the past ten thousand
words: that attention to animals—to this animal—yields some percep-
tions and not others, which include how we conceptualise and how we
respond to the animal. Here is Murdoch, once again talking about people,
which I have replaced with ‘others’:
we have to attend to [others], we may have to have faith in them, and

here justice and realism demand the inhibition of certain pictures, the
promotion of others.
(DPR 199)
The inhibition of certain pictures is rarely a choice, made through will-

power or inclination. It is guided by a perception of reality that is rich,
but unencumbered by our own fears and desires.
Creating the object of attention
Finally, there is one further aspect to moral perception that I have not yet
touched upon, and which will become relevant in the next chapter: the
perception of possibilities. Earlier I talked about perceiving the possibility
of the animal becoming meat, claiming that such perception is not atten-
tion-driven. On the other hand, in the perception of a suffering—in fact,
afflicted—animal as valuable, we have a special case of perception of
possibilities that is unique to attention, and that is necessary to complete
the current discussion. That is attentive perception as creative: the per-
ception of the other as another subject, including the value that we typi-
cally ascribe to other subjects, despite such subjectivity and value being,
in a sense, absent. Affliction, Weil writes, destroys everything. It does not
only destroy everything for the one experiencing affliction, but in the
same stroke it makes the afflicted invisible, the same annihilation per-
ceived, by themselves and by those who walk by, as a revolting
emptiness.
That is why Weil claims that giving attention to the afflicted is an
almost supernatural effort. The afflicted are ‘overwhelmed with evil and
starving for good’ (HP 86), yet their own sense of annihilation transfers
itself to us. We fear contagion. We are unable to see the good which no
one, them included, perceives in them or their lives. We will see in Chapter
6 how sustaining attention to suffering is difficult for us, scary and pain-
ful, but this is a different problem. Attending to the afflicted, Weil says,
requires us to create them.
Attention is involved not only in an act of perception, but also in an act
of creation. This could easily worry us, for I have been claiming that
attention shows us what is there, not what we make up. But: the creativ-
ity of attention is the creation of what is there. Weil insists on it, and
Murdoch more than once quotes Valéry (a poet beloved by Weil) saying
that ‘at its highest point, love is the determination to create the being
which it has taken for its object’ (MGM 506). What could this possibly
mean?
Let’s read Weil, in ‘The Love of our Neighbour’:
Love for our neighbour, being made of creative attention, is analo-

gous to genius.
Creative attention means really giving our attention to what does
not exist. Humanity does not exist in the anonymous flesh lying inert
by the roadside. The Samaritan who stops and looks gives his atten-
tion all the same to this absent humanity, and the actions which fol-
low prove that it is a question of real attention.
‘Faith’, says Saint Paul, ‘is the evidence of things not seen’. In this
moment of attention faith is present as much as love. In the same way
a man who is entirely at the disposal of others does not exist. A slave
does not exist either in the eyes of his master or in his own
… Love sees what is invisible.
(LN 149)
Animals who are entirely at the disposal of others, in this sense, do not
exist. Their non-instrumental value is invisible to anyone, including
themselves. If you have seen a picture of animals in production facilities,
laboratories, or slaughterhouses, the mark of affliction will be easily
apparent. Their eyes are empty, spent. The joy of being alive is absent.
Compare these images to those of animals in sanctuaries, who have been
rescued from affliction. Their eyes now bear the mark of their individual
personality, there is a spark, energy in their faces and movements.
Something that was not there previously is now present.
One of the central causes of affliction, Weil argues, is force. In her reading
of the Iliad, she defines force as ‘that X that turns anybody who is subjected
to it into a thing … It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely
hangs, poised and ready, over the head of the creature it can kill, at any
moment, which is to say at every moment’ (IPF 185). Force does not need to
exercise violence to annihilate its object. It is enough that the object is fully
at its mercy. Force means being able to do what we want with those who are
subject to it, who have no power over us. That is the condition of animals as
human property in farms, labs, circuses, and so on, across the world.17 Like
Weil’s remarks about a loan in ‘Essay on the Notion of Reading’ (2020), here
‘clarity about the nature of the animal’ in attention means recognising that
another living being, however afflicted and hence deprived of will and dig-
nity, is properly not an object merely to be possessed and used.
Attention—the attention that may have led to the rescue, and the nurs-
ing back to health, of the sanctuary animals mentioned above—is thus
creative. In the languages of possibilities, the possibility of seeing them as
individual subjects may have had to be actualised for the very first time. In
that sense, it was a creation. No one had seen that before, and acted accord-
ingly. That is not only the outcome of attention. The very act of attention—
animated by love and justice, or the desire to see, and the openness to being
affected by the other’s value—is a recognition that what we attend to mat-
ters. Otherwise we would just be passing them by.18
Notes
1 In my discussion of animals I am applying arguments that are made by Murdoch
and Weil with respect to human beings. They did not make these claims about
other animals, certainly not primarily. But it is both possible and helpful to use
these ideas in relation to the value of lives that are not only human.
2 I talk about suffering rather than pain in order to include both the experience
of physical pain and psychological suffering, which are both frequent in ani-
mals used for human purposes, and the latter is often present even in the
absence of physical pain (e.g. the separation of calves from their mothers in the
dairy industry, or the confinement in most cases, or the psychological suffering
of laboratory animals). For a detailed discussion of the concepts of pain and
suffering, in relation to other animals, see DeGrazia and Rowan (1991).
3 ‘At [a] primitive level, appetitive and aversive behavioral responses are modu-
lated by specific neural circuits in the brain that share common neuroarchi-
tecture among mammals … At the behavioral level it is evident from the
descriptions of comparative psychologists and ethologists that behaviors
homologous to empathy can be observed in other mammalian species’
(Decety and Moriguchi 2007: 2).
4 Most non-human animals are bred for human food: 94% of all mammal
biomass (excluding humans) is livestock (Bar-On, Phillips, and Milo 2018); a
smaller but far from insignificant number, for clothing, scientific experiments,
company and entertainment.
5 As this quote could be misleading, notice the ‘and’: vision is not only a
metaphor.
6 Scott Clifton (2013) argues for Murdochian moral perception as the morality
in perception. While that view is to be found in Murdoch, it is incomplete; in
fact, if one meaning should be prioritised it is moral perception as referring to
moral quality of what we perceive, because morality in perception matters
insofar as what we perceive matters. The very idea of attention as just vision
of reality would make little sense if reality itself did not matter.
7 For a recent good psychological defense of cognitive penetration, see Newen
and Vetter (2017).
8 The mind, in order to perceive correctly, needs to be attuned to the same idea
of perfection which determines specific moral facts and properties. The mind
is attuned to the idea of the good, which can only be thought of as real. See
Murdoch’s discussions of Anselm’s Ontological proof, and of Plato’s idea of
the Good.
9 To say we engage with reality for ‘specific reasons’ does not entail an instru-
mental approach. The reason or goal could be simply to see what is there,
which is in fact the underlying driver of attention.
10 Thus Megan Laverty attributes to Murdoch a philosophy of the ‘third way’,
‘between absolutism (an objective impersonal unified truth) and subjectivism
(proliferating, plural subjective “truths”)’ (2007: 9), where the mind is pic-
tured neither as a ‘mirror’ nor a ‘lamp’, but as a ‘lens’, which grasp a reality
external to itself but, necessarily, with its own resources, which order and
form it in such a way as to make it available to us.
11 While I am mostly talking, in both cases, about visual perception (it is practically
easier, after all, than to ask you to go and place your hand on a cow’s back), it is
important that perception of suffering, especially of animal suffering, occurs
through other senses too, and perhaps even more easily through touch.
12 See Walker 1982.
13 Cf. Weil in ‘Essay on the Notion of Reading’ (2020), where she notes that,
while only God can have the absolutely correct view of a situation (which she
calls ‘readings’), human beings can achieve at least partially correct views, so
that it makes sense of think of possible criteria of correctness, however diffi-
cult the attempt to find them is.
14 Metaphors, moreover, are not understood by Murdoch as merely saying
something in place of something else, as if there were a different, ‘literal’ way
of expressing the same thought (cf. MGM 177–8).
15 I have defended a non-supervenience-based account of moral perception in
Murdoch in Panizza 2020, where I develop some of the present arguments on
moral perception.
16 See also Chappell 2018: 103–105.
17 This is also one of the key claims of the ‘abolitionist approach’ in animal eth-
ics which, despite other controversial aspects, is right about this: having the
kind of mastery over animals given by property is inherently wrong, regard-
less of how we then decide to treat them.
18 The idea that being attended to creates us finds some support in cognitive
science: as Vasudevi Reddy (2003) has argued, awareness of self develops in
early infants through mutual attention.
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6 Motivation and action
Attention, I have been arguing, is inherently active, insofar as it is an

engagement with reality. For Murdoch and Weil, all perception and
thought are forms of engagement with reality, although more often than
not they are inattentive, distorting engagements. Therefore, even in per-
ception, as we have seen in the previous chapter, a spectatorial model
does not fit. This is particularly true of attention, where we are in tension
towards the object. In this chapter I will argue that attention is also
closely linked to outward or physical action. For Murdoc and Weil, such
connection is very close indeed. The first step in the argument has already
been taken in Chapter 5: showing how attention can reveal reality, includ-
ing what we may call a moral reality. Here, we will see how (successful)
attentive perception of that reality can:
1. Include a motivating element

2. Include the perception of possibilities for action
3. Lead to right action through the combined selection of possibilities
and motivational features in 1 and 2.
To talk about the ‘links’ between attention and action is not to presup-
pose a radical distinction between the two, a distance that needs to be
bridged. Nor does my focus on action here go against the grain of
Murdoch’s well-known rehabilitation of the inner life as morally signifi-
cant in itself. In fact, Murdoch’s emphasis on the inner life is a reaction
not only to an undue focus on action in ethics, and on behaviour in phi-
losophy of mind, but also against any sharp division between inner and
outer, consciousness and action. The goal is not so much to replace action
with consciousness in ethics, but rather to consider how closely they are
related. The inner life matters. What we do matters as well. One leads to
the other, at times with a sense of inevitability or necessity that makes any
clear separation between inner and outer seem artificial.
In line with Murdoch’s overall project, the concept of ‘action’ that is
the end point of the attentive process is itself very different from the
concept used in the anti-realist ethical model that Murdoch is opposing,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003164852-7
Motivation and action 151
where action arises out of an independent will that surveys the situation
and chooses. Instead, attention leads to action in a way that makes action
a natural outcome of attention, sometimes even an accompaniment or
manifestation of attention: what Murdoch, following Weil, calls ‘obedi-
ence’ to reality as revealed by attention. We will see how intense attention
can lead to this experience of necessity, or having no choice but to do
something, where the question of what to do does not even arise.
Importantly, the demand that comes through attention is experienced as
a demand that comes not from ourselves, not from our will, not from
reason, but from reality. A reality of which we are part.
Since the argument follows from the previous chapter, I will also retain
the case study: attention to animals, here with the aim of showing how
attention to animal suffering leads to certain actions, and away from oth-
ers. To that end I will continue to expand on, as explained in the
Introduction, Murdoch’s and Weil’s arguments about human beings, to
include other animals: although their focus is the human, their arguments
work, and indeed work powerfully, in the case other animals too.
We are part of reality too

Let us start with this thought, seemingly obvious, yet not entirely so when
it comes to morality or attention. The reality we attend to includes us—
indirectly, and sometimes directly too. This is so in two ways, neither of
which is incompatible with the outward focus of attention. The first way
is embraced by Murdoch, but not by Weil: the idea that, as we have seen
in Chapters 2 and 5, the attentive subject plays a shaping role in percep-
tion, and clear vision can be achieved in different ways depending on who
we are, our own situatedness, our capacities and inclinations, our focal
points and our talents. The other way in which the reality to which we
attend includes us, compatibly with both Murdoch and Weil, is the way
in which, in some situations, we are agents and participants in that real-
ity.1 We respond to the objects of our attention, whether internally
(Murdoch’s idea of ‘inner action’) or externally (the standard idea of
action), and often in both ways.2 The ideas in this chapter follow Murdoch
on both points; Weil comes in concerning the latter.
These ideas connect Murdoch’s view of consciousness and perception
to recent developments in psychology and cognitive science, represented
by enactivism (Maturana and Varela 1988) and ecological psychology
(Gibson 1979), and in this chapter I will explore some connections with
the latter to illuminate and support aspects of what Murdoch says. The
main point (that both theories share and) which is Murdoch’s, is that the
subject is not a spectator of the world, but part of it, even at the moment
of perception. We have seen, in the previous chapter, what implications
this has for moral perception. But these implications go way beyond the
act of perceiving. This idea, indeed, is particularly important, and takes
on a specific meaning, when it comes to the perception of other subjects
(not only human subjects). Both enactivism and ecological psychology
present cognition as arising from our interaction with the environment.
This, as we have seen, is a fundamental aspect of Murdoch’s view of the
mind-world interaction. It is ecological psychology, however, rather than
enactivism, that fits best with Murdoch’s realism, for in ecological psy-
chology the descriptions of the world latch on to something pre-existing,
not dependent on experience; the subject-world interaction, in Murdoch’s
view of moral perception and more starkly in Weil’s, needs something
that is there to be grasped; enactivism, on the other hand, emphasises the
role of the subject, thus coming closer to a constructivist view, which
Murdoch seems to flirt with, but does not in fact endorse.3
These ideas oppose more traditional theories in cognitive science, such
as ‘theory theory’ and ‘simulation theory’, which work with a detached,
spectatorial idea of the mind. As Shaun Gallagher puts it, for them
perception means third-person observation rather than something

that happens in the context of interaction. My role in what may be
happening is not included in the scenario. Rather, I tend to stand at
the margins of the situation and make observations. In this case there
is a disconnection between perception and anything that might
involve my own action.
(2008: 536)
These theories belong to the ‘impersonal perception plus personal will’

model that Murdoch attacks especially in her earlier work and in
Sovereignty, which has the consequences, in ethics, that our valuing activ-
ity is taken to be one of external imposition of value upon reality, where
value penetrates, ‘like a laser beam’, an impersonal world from the out-
side (MGM 34). Let us see what the alternative is, how to re-connect
perception and action, and what shape that specific connection takes
when perception is attentive.
Empathy and motivation

In the previous chapter I talked about direct perception of mental states.
In the case of affective states, such as suffering, such perception has a
specific name: empathy. Introducing empathy means taking an important
step in the discussion of perception, because empathetic perception affects
us. This is the first step towards action: a perception that creates a
response in us.
Empathy is a participatory response to suffering that exists in many
animals, and in all mammals. Although the exercise of empathy occurs in
varying degrees, and it can be to some extent blocked or distorted, empa-
thy seems to exist in nearly all humans and some other animals (but it can
be developed). Because of this capacity, the perception of the suffering of
other animals is typically experienced as distressing. Slaughterhouse
workers, for instance, are known to experience serious psychological dis-
tress (Leibler and Perry 2017). Animal activists and vegans point at the
perception of suffering of animals as either their initial motivation to
change their behaviour, or as reinforcing their commitment; they also, as
we have seen, use it in their communicative actions because they know
that people are going to respond with distress to animal suffering, when
that is brought to their attention. Perception is not inert: it does some-
thing to us. In the present case, the suffering of another is experienced as
something negative, undesirable. And with that, we also have a prima
facie motivation to end the suffering. In Murdoch’s Platonic terms, we
can put it this way: perception of suffering is experienced as not-good; if
good is ‘magnetic’ (e.g. IP 33, SGC 102, etc.), pulling us towards it, per-
ception of what is not good will do the opposite, and push us away.
Murdoch conceives of human beings as being moved by an inexhaustible
and omnipresent energy, manifest as desire, which attaches itself to what-
ever is apprehended as good. This determines, as Murdoch puts it, ‘mag-
netic fields’ in reality (DPR 200).
Murdoch does not talk much about empathy, but she acknowledges
the importance of compassion as something that shares fundamental fea-
tures of empathy: the shared feeling, the immediacy, the ‘getting out of
oneself’ and into another’s experience. Indeed, in her recent study of
empathy, Elisa Aaltola includes compassion as part of empathy, which
she defines broadly as ‘feeling with or identifying the mental states of
another’ (2018a: 25), as opposed to sympathy, which is detached.
Compassion is one of the points on which Murdoch most readily agrees
with Schopenhauer (in Chapter 2 of MGM), with whom she otherwise
has a ‘blend of esteem and reservation’ (Willemsen 2019: 80). Murdoch
presents the idea that compassion is one of few ways in which we can
overcome will-driven selfishness. She also acknowledges as positive
Schopenhauer’s opening of compassion towards the non-human world:
‘Schopenhauer often returns to examples of selfless care and kindness,
not only among humans but between humans and animals. This [is an]
endearing, and among philosophers rare, emphasis’ (MGM 65).4
Compassion is desirable, but it is also natural, mysterious, and unre-
flective, so it is unlike duty and moral reflection. Here is Murdoch quot-
ing Schopenhauer:
The fundamental command of morality is … ‘Hurt no one, rather

help everyone as much as you can’. This saying indicates the two
cardinal virtues upon which all the others depend, justice and com-
passion. Both these virtues ‘have their roots in natural compassion.
But this itself is an undeniable fact of human consciousness, is essen-
tial to it, and does not depend on presuppositions, concepts,
religions, dogmas, myths, training and education. On the contrary it
is original and immediate, it resides in human nature itself and, for
this very reason, it endures in all circumstances and appears in all
countries at all times’ (The Basis of Morality, section 17). Compassion
impedes the sufferings which I intend to cause another person. ‘It
calls out to me “stop!”, it stands before the other man like a bulwark,
protecting him from the injury that my egoism or malice would oth-
erwise urge me to do’.
(MGM 63)
These ideas about the immediacy of empathy are developed in recent

years by proponents of the ‘direct perception theory of empathy’, which
is partly rooted in phenomenology, a method, if not a school, with which
Murdoch and Weil share much. According to this account, empathy
allows us to detect and respond to others’ inner states without any infer-
ential process, as we saw in the previous chapter, but also without ‘iso-
morphism conditions’ (i.e. significant similarity of experience between
the two individuals) (Zahavi 2014; Gallagher 2017). Empathy is the
product of perception because mental states are expressed in the other’s
behaviour:
affective and emotional states are not simply qualities of subjective

experience, rather they are given in expressive phenomena, i.e. they
are expressed in bodily gestures and actions, and they thereby become
visible to others … expressive phenomena—in particular facial
expressions and gestures, but also verbal expressions—can present us
with a direct and non-inferential access to the experiential life of
others.
(Zahavi 2008: 518)
This capacity can cut across species, both in our ability to perceive the
inner states of other animals, and in their capacity to perceive our own
(De Waal 2008 in Aaltola 2018a p. 25.)
Obstacles to empathy
If is this so, however, what’s the use of attention? If empathy is some-
thing we are all capable of, and if empathy to suffering also involves a
negative experience, which comes with the desire to avoid it, isn’t that
enough? The fact that sometimes perception of (animal) suffering does
not yield this response means it is not. In what follows, I will suggest
that, when motivation to remove suffering is absent, something in the
perception of suffering has been blocked, thwarted, dampened. And that
we need attention to restore the fulness and truthfulness of that
perception.
As Murdoch cautions us again and again, the main problem in such
cases, and in most moral situations, is not that the action needed is miss-
ing or difficult, but that there are many imperceptible ways in which what
is there is cancelled or distorted. The ego, Murdoch reminds us, is always
alert, and more alert than we are. There are two particularly problematic
ways such blocking can happen. The first is that often, when we see suf-
fering, we look away precisely because we empathise: we feel bad, and we
want that feeling to stop, so we stop looking. The other is the fact that
perceiving suffering can give rise not to empathy, but to enjoyment. But
since these are outcomes of perception, don’t they also function as objec-
tions to my claim that attention to animal suffering naturally generates
an empathetic response which includes the desire for that suffering to
end? I will argue that they do not. Those are outcomes of perception, not
of attention. Which entails that the perception itself, in these cases, is not
clear, complete, or direct.
Looking away
The first case just mentioned is indeed very common. In fact, I think it is
probably the most common way of relating to animal suffering, espe-
cially human-caused animal suffering. Here, the perception of animal suf-
fering probably starts out as attentive and truthful: this engenders the
empathetic response, including our own suffering. But at that moment,
attention stops. Truth becomes hard to bear. We are suffering. And then
we look away. This is the moment, Murdoch would say, when the ego
takes over. And that is why attention ends: our own suffering, not the
suffering of the animal, takes centre stage, and that is what motivates the
reaction to look away (physically, or metaphorically, to stop thinking
about it). The reaction does not follow the direct perception of the reality
we are seeing, but it follows our own emotional state in response to it. In
other words, if attention is directed outward, this reaction takes the
wrong object. The problem, here, is with sustained attention.
This response to animal suffering is everywhere: it is visible in the ten-
dency to ascribe lower levels of mental capacities to the animals consid-
ered appropriate for human consumption, or even deny minds to those
animals when we are reminded of the fact that meat production involves
the suffering of those animal (as the psychological studies by Bastian et
al. 2012 have found). If attention reveals an uncomfortable reality, some-
thing about that reality must go, and attention ends there. The self-pro-
tective work of the ego begins, and it takes many forms: to protect us in
our immediate empathetic suffering (‘that is not really happening, this
animal is not really suffering’); to protect our self-image (‘I am a good
person’); to preserve the self-image of humanity in general (‘we are a
good species, our most common practices must be acceptable’); even to
maintain the perhaps necessary comfort that there is an overall
preponderance of goodness in the world, and nothing disrupts the reality
of good in unbearable ways—a need and a worry that Murdoch addresses
repeatedly in MGM, beginning from the reflections on the desire for
‘form’ and ‘unity’ in Chapter 1.
The variety of these motives for removing attention shows that they
are not only individual responses, but also shaped by culture, practices,
social norms. The perceived normality of the human use of animals plays
a large role in removing attention, making the reality of the suffering
hard to ‘square’ with a good society, which also routinely uses those ani-
mals. A merely instrumental use of someone else, as Murdoch knew, can-
not coexist with attention (OGG 353–354). Does that someone else need
to be human? We unreflectively recognise other animals as ‘others’, as
Derrida knew (2002). In animal ethics, Josephine Donovan (1996) was
among the first to draw out the implications of Murdochian attention for
animals. In an essay arguing for the importance of attending to animal
suffering, she quotes Brian Luke, who
in ‘Justice, Caring, and Animal Liberation’ (1992) claims that sympa-

thy for animals is indeed a deep, primary disposition that is only
obscured and repressed by a process of intense social conditioning.
Noting the extensive guilt expiation ceremonies that attend animal
killing in traditional cultures, Luke suggests that the existence of such
guilt (along with other social practices) is testimony to ‘the depth of
the human-animal connection’ (106). The fact that laboratory experi-
ments and slaughterhouse practices are kept hidden from the public
suggests, once again, shame or guilt over the violation of the human-
animal bond. ‘Enormous amounts of social energy are expended to
forestall, undermine, and override our sympathies for animals, so that
vivisection, animal farming, and sport hunting can continue’ (106).
(Donovan 1996: 87)
Social, political and economic forces are at work all the time to direct,
thwart and blunt our attention, as we are increasingly aware.5 And
Murdoch was too (although most of her arguments target the individual),
suggesting that ‘Modern industrial mass-productive society impairs our
power to perceive’ (MGM 377).
That is not to say that anyone who is not overtly contributing to a
given form of suffering is immune to looking away. Empathy with suffer-
ers is, by definition, painful, and whether or not we have all the motives
above, we have this one. Attending to suffering is hard, and when suffer-
ing is so widespread, relentless and extreme as the second-by-second suf-
fering of animals at human hands, it can be so hard that sometimes one
wishes to say, ‘The hell with attention and moral progress, this is not the
world I want to live in, “I return my ticket”’, and at that point, fantasy
can feel like a warm embrace:6
there is the almost insuperable difficulty of looking properly at evil
and human suffering. It is very difficult to concentrate attention upon
suffering and sin, in others or in oneself, without falsifying the pic-
ture in some way while making it bearable.
(OGG 359)
Sometimes we may have to stop attending to preserve our sanity. Yet if we

never press on, if we trade attention for fantasy, it’s not only the case that
those fantasies too will become uncomfortable, but we will also block the
possibility of contributing to a better situation than the one that is so pain-
ful to contemplate. Moreover, there is evidence that exercising attention—
the Murdochian attention we are discussing, that is loving, other-directed—in
fact makes it more bearable to then sustain the attention on the painful
object. Using compassion meditation training, researchers in a study led by
Helen Weng (Weng et al. 2018) have found that developing the habit to
attend lovingly to suffering increased the spontaneous tendency to focus
visual attention to cues of suffering. Using functional magnetic resonance
imaging, they found that ‘[i]ncreases in visual preference for suffering due
to compassion training were associated with decreases in the amygdala, a
brain region involved in negative valence, arousal, and physiological
responses typical of fear and anxiety states’ and that ‘compassion training-
related increases in visual preference for suffering were also associated with
decreases in regions sensitive to valence and empathic distress’ (2018: 1).7
The capacity to sustain attention to suffering despite empathetic dis-
tress, and while overcoming it, can be linked to two features of attention:
the fact that in attention we are focused on the other, therefore reducing
our reactions based on our own emotions, as we have seen; but also the
fact that what we perceive is not only the suffering, but the need for end-
ing the suffering, and our possibility to contribute to that end—as we will
see in the rest of this chapter. Indeed, Weng’s study also supports the idea
that compassion meditation helps to increase ‘the motivational salience
of cues of suffering, where attention is drawn to suffering due to the
motivation to care for others’ well-being and the desire to relieve suffer-
ing’ (Goetz et al. 2010 in Weng 2018: 2). This also, incidentally, lends
support to Murdoch’s more Aristotelian claims that attention needs to be
exercised and trained, and that attentional habits are important.
This capacity to respond to suffering through sustained attention is
one kind of empathy, which Aaltola (2018a) puts into the category ‘affec-
tive empathy’: it involves the ability to ‘resonate’ (Hume: ‘reverberate’)
with the emotions of others, hence it is different from ‘cognitive empathy’
which allows us to read the emotions, but in a non-engaged way. At the
same time, affective empathy retains a self-other distinction which, as
Aaltola points out, is necessary for ethics. By doing so, it also prevents
projection (it asks ‘How do you feel?’, as opposed to ‘How would I feel
in your shoes?’).
For Aaltola, the empathy that comes with attention to another’s inner
state is tantamount to recognising the other as valuable. Specifically in
the case of animals, she writes:
Often, just letting ourselves become experientially affected by the

internal landscapes of another is enough for us to start noting their
uniqueness and worth. This applies also to nonhuman animals.
Becoming exposed to their suffering within, say, industrial animal agri-
culture—truly paying attention to what happens to them—may lead to
the sort of resonation after which one can no longer deny the subjec-
tivity of other animals, or the moral wrongs committed toward them.
(Aaltola 2018b: n.p., emphasis added)
This is what happens, according to Weil, when the Samaritan looks at the
man by the side of the road. He sees him as someone who suffers. ‘This
way of looking is first of all attentive’ (RSS 115).
Enjoying suffering
The second objection was that, far from being sure that when we see suf-
fering we will feel empathy and compassion, a non-negligible amount of
people in fact enjoy the spectacle. Perhaps we do not admit it, but some-
times, for some of us, there’s something attractive, not aversive, in the
perception of suffering. This phenomenon is exemplified in the common
objection to the ethics of attention raised with the example of the ‘tor-
turer’: someone who wants to inflict suffering, and for the sake of the
example who also enjoys doing so, and who pays intense and focused
attention to the victim precisely in order to get more suffering out of her.
The torturer looks closely, asking: ‘What are her weak spots? Which gri-
mace in her face tells me that this is a particularly painful touch, so I need
to press further?’ Here, inflicting suffering is possible not because the
torturers look away, but on the contrary because they look closely. And
they like it. But torturers and grand sadists aside, ‘everyday sadism’ is a
real and very common phenomenon. Chances are, we have experienced it
ourselves at some point (Buckels et al. 2013).
Like compassion, this positive focus on others’ suffering can also be
trained, in an undesirable way. Studies on violent video games have
shown (not shockingly) that it was not only the case that everyday sadists
are more drawn to violent games, but also that ‘repeated exposure to
violent video games predicts everyday sadism over time’ (Greitemeyer
and Sagioglou 2017: 238). Here we see from the other side the truth of
Murdoch’s stress on building habits of attention, and how such habits
shape us, partly determining our future objects of attention, which in
turn determine what we will be sensitive to, in what ways, and what we
will ignore.
Does the apparent existence of ‘sadistic attention’ invalidate the claim
that attention is something fundamental to morality, and inherently desir-
able? There are two ways to cast doubt on the idea that the sadist can
properly be said to be exercising attention. The first has to do with the
scope of the sadist’s vision; the second with its quality.
What is the sadist attending to? Not the individual human or animal.
That would yield the vision of a creature who is not only suffering, but
who has desires (right now, the desire to stop suffering), is probably
afraid, has a past and (if allowed) a future, has played a role in someone
else’s life, and so on. Instead, the sadist’s gaze is razor thin. It selects
something about the object—the suffering—to the exclusion of every-
thing that is not relevant to it. In this way, then, they are not attending to
the individual. They are not seeing the individual, because a narrow focus
on an aspect of an individual distorts the whole understanding of that
individual.
Well, but can’t we say the sadist is not attending to the individual, may
not be seeing the individual at all, but is still properly attending to the
suffering? In one sense, no, for suffering is someone’s suffering, and not
seeing the individual distorts the suffering too. But there is another rea-
son, connected to the truthfulness of attention, that denies the idea of
sadistic attention. If attention, as I have been suggesting following
Murdoch, is properly directed upon the world and upon the truth of that
portion of the world it is taking for its object, then the sadist’s attention
is not truly attention because its aim is not fully object-directed. In sadism,
the filtering of the self is at peak level: the goal is not to seek what is true
but to gain enjoyment. So the intention that animates it is highly self-
concerned, not world-concerned (i.e., it is not at all eros).
This is a point also made by Dorothea Debus (2013), defending atten-
tion precisely against the torturer objection.8 Debus uses the selectivity of
attention to argue that if we are attending (fully, she adds) to the suffer-
ing individual, there is no room for our egocentric desires: in her words,
our desires can have no ‘phenomenal salience’ in (full) attention. This is
based on the observation that attention can be correctly described accord-
ing to a ‘Synchronic Exclusivity Claim’, which states that ‘in order for
someone to be said to give her full attention to an object (or event) at
some particular time, it is necessary that she do pay attention to the
particular object (or event) at the time, and that she do not pay any atten-
tion to anything else at the same time’ (2013: 1183). To put it with
Murdoch, in Sovereignty, in these cases ‘nothing exists except the things
which are seen’ (OGG 353).
On the other hand, when the object is scanned, so to speak, in order to
detect pleasure-bringing suffering, it is not only the desire or goal, but the
act itself, that is not truthful, insofar as it is seeking something specific.
Such seeking is contrasted with the openness of attention, whose truthful
element consists not only in wanting to see what is there, but to be willing
to receive it, whatever it is. So the sadistic scanning of the other’s experi-
ence is on this count the opposite of attentive perception. We see this
point clearly in Weil’s famous formulation of attention, in which ‘all our
thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to
receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it’ (RSS 112).
The object that penetrates our consciousness, in our example, is a suf-
fering animal. If attention is directed upon the object, it is also directed at
the experience of the individual. The openness of attention, also found in
Weil’s quote, is a complete openness, intellectual but also affective. So if
enjoyment of another’s suffering can be said to involve empathy—needed
in order to recognise and exploit that suffering—it is only the ‘cognitive’
kind. In fact, as Wai and Tiliopoulos (2012) have found, this skewing
towards purely cognitive empathy affects not only sadists, but also all the
‘dark triad personalities’ (Psychopathy, Narcissism, and Machiavellianism)
who are ‘associated with deficits in affective empathy, but show little evi-
dence of impairment in cognitive empathy’ (794). Cognitive empathy, as
Aaltola (2018a) points out, allows us to manipulate others, while affec-
tive empathy—which is the kind that is connected with attention—is the
kind that sustains moral understanding and behaviour.
Perceiving possibilities
Attention to suffering, then, enables a successful perception of suffering
which comes with an aversive response. As Murdoch writes: ‘The details
of our world deserve our respectful and loving attention … With this goes
a perception of the reality and real nature of suffering and a horror of
cruelty’ (MGM 377). Our primary response is that the suffering should
stop. This is enough to produce motivation to act accordingly, but we
also need to know how to act—what the specific action required of us
may be. Attention shows us what is there: the suffering that should not
be. But it also shows us something else: what is possible. This is the sec-
ond explanatory step from perception to action. Attention consists in
imaginative engagement that brings possibilities out. As Murdoch writes,
the imagination is ‘a type of reflection on people, events … which builds
detail, adds colour, conjures up possibilities in ways which go beyond
what could be said to be strictly factual’ which is also ‘a sort of personal
exploring’ (DPR 48, emphasis in the original). As we know, all percep-
tion, for Murdoch, requires some amount of imagination.9 Attention
involves a truth-seeking use of the imagination.
Murdoch’s account of perception, as we have seen, makes room for the
individual’s contribution to it. Through attention, that contribution is
imaginative and creative, insofar as attention allows us to bring out
something which is there, but not available without moral effort. As
Murdoch writes, ‘clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral
effort’ (IP 329). The subject is active and involved in perception, where
the subject and the world are involved in a sort of collaboration. If we use
the imagination to see what is there, according to Murdoch, we can also
see, at the same time, what is possible for us in the situation—what pos-
sibilities a situation, justly perceived, affords us.
We now have two further crucial elements of attentive perception: that
we can see certain possibilities, and that doing so includes the ways in
which we can be involved in actualising these possibilities. This gives rise
to two questions about attention: why does attention show some possi-
bilities and not others, and how are we involved in their actualization?
Affordances
In contemporary psychology, the idea that there are perceptual possibili-
ties is theorised under the name of affordances. Introduced by James
Gibson (1979), affordances describe the way in which we perceive objects
in terms of the possibilities they afford, or ‘opportunities for action’. The
apple is eat-able, pick-able, cut-able, and so on. Importantly, Gibson does
not limit the perception of affordances to humans, but includes other
animals. Like in Murdochian moral perception, and like the perception
of mental states, affordances are directly perceptible (Gibson 1979: 127),
that is, not inferred. And they are based on real properties, ‘out there’ in
the world, to which we can latch on or not (Gibson 1979: 133). My sug-
gestion is that attention allows us to see some affordances that we other-
wise would not.
A suffering animal, with her relative need not to suffer, affords helping
her: ‘social affordances’, when ‘a person or an animal shows up to an
observer not as a physical object but as an agent with the capacity to
reciprocate’ (Brancazio 2020: 9–10), are for Gibson ‘the richest and most
elaborate affordances of the environment’ (Gibson, quoted in de Carvalho
2020: 2). We see possibilities in others, and these possibilities are of a
special kind thanks to our perception of them as subjects. This applies to
other animals, including, as it does,
not only the affordances of symbolic behavior such as human con-

versation and writing (Dent, in press) but also the affordances of
nonsymbolic activity such as facial expressions (Alley, 1988; Buck,
1988), gesture (Tomasello, 1988; Van Acker and Valenti, 1989), body
postures and movements (Runeson and Frykholm, 1983), tone of
voice (Walker, 1982; Walker-Andrews, 1986), and the direction of
gaze (orienting; Scaife and Bruner, 1975; Butterworth and Cochran,
1980)
(Loveland 1991: 101, cited in Brancazio 2020: 2)
Significantly, Brancazio argues, forms of injustice such as discrimination

tend to be made possible by the denial of interpersonal affordances to
members of particular groups (2020: 9); in other words, as I think we
know, it is easier to treat someone harmfully if we fail, even temporarily,
to see them fully as a subject.
In perceiving a suffering animal, we have already seen how attention
brings about certain responses and not others in us. The primary response,
in attending to suffering, is empathetic compassion, which includes an
aversive response towards that suffering. What we also perceive, together
with the motivation, is the possibility of acting upon such response. That
is the affordance offered by animal suffering to an attentive subject. The
suffering is end-able, the animal is help-able, and so on.
Perception is selective, and so is attention (in most of its forms).10 Some
objects or features will be perceived, others won’t. Some possibilities will
manifest, others will not. Attention selects in a specific way. The reasons
given for the fact that through attention we perceive the suffering aver-
sively, rather than with enjoyment or with indifference, are also the rea-
sons why we perceive some affordances and not others: the affordances
that relate to an ego-driven, or instrumental use of the animal are not
manifested by attention. Since attention is bestowed upon the animal and
her inner life, including the salience of her suffering in the given moment,
the affordances will also be connected to the animal’s own experience.
That is why if we attend we will perceive the suffering cow as help-able,
soothe-able, but not eat-able.
As Murdoch puts it, again with Schopenhauer, ‘innumerable individual
things, of innumerable kinds … crave for our attention and … our pro-
tection’ (MGM 299, emphasis in the original). This ‘craving’ of things is
Murdoch’s more poetic way of making the point I have been suggesting:
that protection is not just something that we want to offer but something
that, if we attend, the world asks of us.11
Action
Attention, in our example, shows us a need, and possibilities related to
that need, with an immediacy that is typical of perception, and not of
reflection. Because of its focus, and the exclusion of what is not relevant
to the object (including, and in fact primarily, ego-driven motivations),
attention leaves no space for ‘What if?’, ‘Should I really?’, ‘Do I want to?’,
and so on. In this respect, attention is different from moral thinking as
ordinarily conceived, because there is no room, nor need, for delibera-
tion. At the same time, it also satisfies a traditional requirement of moral
properties (maintained, for instance, by Mackie, but which led him to a
very different conclusion): that moral properties should be motivating.
For Mackie, that is the reason to think that moral properties cannot
really exist in the world; nothing can be a fact and intrinsically motivat-
ing at the same time. For Murdoch, that means that everything is in some
sense a moral fact: everything pushes and pulls us in some direction.
But it matters how we look. We can be pulled in wrong directions, driven
by our own desires or false perceptions. Or we can be pulled by the world,
and conform our desires to it, if we pay attention.
Motivational internalism
According to Weil and Murdoch, the perception yielded by attention is
motivating and action-producing. In contemporary terminology, they are
defending a strong and unusual form of motivational internalism. The
most common understanding of motivational internalism is defined by
Bjorklund et al. (2012) in the following way:
Simple internalism: necessarily, if a person judges that she morally

ought to ф, then she is (at least somewhat) motivated to ф.
(Bjorklund et al. 2012: 125)
This position gives rise to all sorts of familiar problems: first among
them is represented by the case of the amoralist, who makes moral
judgements but lacks the related motivation to carry out their implica-
tions (they ‘know’ what’s right, they’re just indifferent), and the weak
willed, who lack self-control (‘that’s good but I can’t bring myself to
do it’). In response, various modified versions of motivational internal-
ism have been proposed. But these problems arise because motivational
internalism claims a connection between judgements and motivation.
The difficulty arises on a view of judgements as abstract, rational, non-
affective, which then needs to be linked to the embodied, affective ele-
ment of motivation and action. Attention, on the other hand, primarily
yields perception, not judgements (it can yield judgements too, but
they are secondary now). And linking perception and motivation does
not incur in the above difficulties: perception is already embodied,
already affective. The motivational internalism of attentive perception
is better explained by the disjunctivist view of motivational internal-
ism, as supported by Antti Kauppinen (2015) (who, however, talks
about intuitions as quasi-perceptual states, rather than perception).
On this view, moral beliefs are only contingently related to motivation,
but moral intuitions (‘spontaneous and compelling non-doxastic
appearances of right or wrong’) and, I add, perceptions, are internally
related to motivation, which for Kauppinen is due to their inclusion of
emotive content, or their ‘emotional manifestations of moral senti-
ments’ (238).12
Let us recap. We pay attention to a suffering animal. We see the suffer-
ing. The perception is aversive. We perceive the suffering of this cow as
something that should not be. This is the first stirring of motivation,
although it is not specific: it is a magnetism, in the opposite direction.
What is already clear is that our action will go in the direction of ending
the suffering. What we need to see is how this motivation takes a specific
shape, and becomes our action.
Once again, with Weil,
We have to see things in their right relationship and ourselves, includ-

ing the purposes we bear within us, as one of the terms of that rela-
tionship. Action follows naturally from this.
(GG 48)
We are participants, both in the perception (by attending or not), as well

as in the situation. We are one of the terms of the relationship. So the situ-
ation is making a demand on us specifically.13 This means that the way in
which our motivation to end the suffering will play out in action depends
on our capacities to help: Are we physically present to this suffering cow?
Are we able to remove her from the situation, taking her away from it?
Or are we reading a description of suffering that is already over, so that
we can no longer help that animal, but we might help others like her, in a
similar position, by talking to people about their suffering, making it
present and real to their attention too?
This is where the perception of possibilities needs to include us.
Affordances, in their relational nature, do that, resulting in more specific
possibilities. Not only: ‘I see this suffering as end-able’; but also: ‘I see this
animal as remove-able from the situation’. Or: ‘I see her plight and that
of others like her as discuss-able with others’, others who may then
choose not to contribute to that suffering. And so on.
Perceptual motivation
As Tom McClelland and Marta Jorba (2021) have argued, affordances
help us explain how motivation for action can be derived directly from
perception. Unlike other accounts of perceptual motivation, the affor-
dance account satisfies the three criteria for perceptual motivation that
McClelland and Jorba set out: having direct motivational force (indepen-
dent of beliefs and desires); having non-obligatory force (where ‘obliga-
tory’ refers to something like a reflex, such as blinking—this may seem
like a denial of ‘obedience’, but the view accepts that in some cases affor-
dances are indeed compelling); and having intention-independent influ-
ence. These criteria are satisfied by Weil’s and Murdoch’s account of the
motivational nature of attentive perception. Importantly, attentional
motivation is direct—not inferred, as we saw in the previous chapter—
and not ‘up to us’, insofar as the actions following perception do not
depend on our desires.
The idea of motivation as coming from what we perceive is also con-
sistent with our experience of some situations and objects as motivating
unless we activate our will against them—hence interrupting atten-
tion. As McClelland and Jorba argue, ‘agential phenomenology’ is
such that ‘when you are perceptually motivated to φ it does not seem
as though one’s φ-ing depends on you intending to φ. Instead, it seems
as though one will φ unless one resists doing so’ (n.p.). Here, parallel
considerations to the ones above regarding resisting motivating empa-
thetic perception can be offered. When we attend, and feel the demand
placed on us by the world, we can indeed escape it, which means first
of all stopping attention. But if we do not, it will happen: attention
means allowing it to move us. What is up to us, then, at least to some
extent, is the paying or sustaining of attention. The point is that, in
these cases, actions require no reflection; the space for deliberation is
closed: ‘To know that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists
as much as I do—that is enough, the rest follows of itself” (Weil,
GG 108).
If we attend, the possibilities that the situation affords us, as we have
seen, will be limited in the direction of the need of the object of our atten-
tion, and away from our instrumental uses of it. That’s why attending to
an animal does not show us something to exploit, but someone to help,
interact with, and so on. The more intense and successful the attention,
the more limited these possibilities will be, by showing us with clarity the
real need, and shutting down everything else. In order words, nothing else
is salient. This is how, according to Murdoch and Weil, we get to the
‘ideal situation’ where deliberation is unnecessary, indeed the question of
what to do does not even arise, for we see (and feel in our bones) what is
required of us. Weil writes:
‘I was naked, and ye clothed me’. This gift is simply an indication of

the state of those who acted in this way. They were in a state which
made it impossible for them not to feed the hungry and to clothe the
naked.
(GG 45)
I think we know enough about Weil by now to also know what that state
is.
Obedience
This view of perceptual motivation is deeply Weilian. It connects to the
idea that the will is more like an interruption, rather than an aid, to good-
ness. Murdoch mostly agrees, but is more tolerant. The will has some
role, although generally a negative one (refraining from doing some-
thing).14 This view depends, in turn, on Weil’s mystical, and Murdoch’s
moral psychological, view of reality as normative. Weil writes that the
realisation of moral necessity occurs through obedience, which is the out-
come of sustained and intense attention to reality:
Christ taught us that the supernatural love of our neighbour is the

exchange of compassion and gratitude which happens in a flash
between two beings … only one stops and turns his attention towards
it. The actions that follow are just the automatic effect of this moment
of attention.
(LN 146–7)
Murdoch echoes: ‘If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is
the ultimate condition to be aimed at’. And continues: ‘The idea of a
patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, pres-
ents the will not as unimpeded movement but as something very much
more like ‘obedience’ (IP 331).15 Obedience is the manifestation of the
intimate connection between the clear and intense perception enabled by
attention, the motivation to act according to what we perceive, and the
actions that follow.
From one individual to another

That idea that attending to animal suffering leads not only to empathy
and moral perception, but also, when possible, to action aimed at ending
that suffering is a further reason why, as we have seen, one of the key
strategies of animal activists is simply to show what is actually happening
to the animals that are used for human ends—food, clothing, experi-
ments, and so on. To see is enough. And more powerful than argument,
which instead targets belief. At the same time, at demonstrations such as
that of Anonymous for the Voiceless, countless people walk by without a
glance, many look but are not deeply affected, and others attend, are
affected, but their actions only change for a short amount of time.
We have already discussed how the first two reactions can come about.
They can be explained by refusal of attention or by non-sustained atten-
tion, connected with either indifference or deep-seated defense mecha-
nisms. The fact that it is attention, not just any form of perception (which
can be disengaged, distorted, superficial, etc.), that leads to action,
explains why some facts, some images, some situations create a moral
change in some people and not others, why some will act accordingly and
others will not. Attention can be encouraged, but it can hardly be forced
upon one.
The third possibility—that attention occasions action, but only for a
short while—is more disconcerting, yet also very common. Haile et al.
(2021) have observed how exposure to vegan pamphlets was linked to
some reduction in the consumption of animal food, but the effects seemed
to disappear after two months. So is it really possible, as I indicated
above, that seeing this cow suffer will also make us act to help other
cows, even other animals, or that reading a description of suffering that
is already over will motivate us to end similar kinds of suffering, for
instance by engaging in activism or simple information sharing?
Attention, in most of its manifestations, is present and particular, here
and now. Murdoch often stresses the individuality of the objects of atten-
tion: ‘the view which I suggest … connects morality with attention to
individuals, human individuals or individual realities of other kinds’ (IP
329). Yet more specifically, she talks about the ‘sufferers, victims of injus-
tice and wanton cruelty’ who are ‘individuals, with unique individual
fates’ and who figure among the ‘details of our world’ which ‘deserve our
respectful and loving attention’ (MGM 377). Sufferers are objects of
attention as individuals; as such, we are able to recognise them for who
they are, their own inner life and their needs like our own. Can we extend
the effects of attention, perhaps not from individuality to generality, but
at least from individuals to other similarly placed individuals?
I think we can, but here, at least, we cannot overstate the effects of
attention. Sometimes attention changes us in a revolutionary way, a real
‘turning around’, a metanoia or conversion (MGM 54). Sometimes the
effects are more modest. At other times the effects seem modest, but have
long-term cumulative effects. But attention can, and often does, move
and motivate us more than for a moment, in a number of ways. One is
that it can change our concepts: through the attentive perception of this
suffering cow, and the attendant compassion and realisation of her value,
we may have a slightly or very different concept of cow, perhaps even a
different concept of animals (on this see Diamond 1978). Concepts, as
what allows us to make connections with similar cases, can take many
shapes and possibilities, but there will be actions that are just not com-
patible with holding a given concept. The other way is that by seeing the
cow as an individual, with needs and fears and who clings to life like we
do, we will reconfigure the meaning of other facts too, like the facts of
animal-using industries and everyday practices. These are familiar
changes, and rather ordinary. We’ve all heard of a family adopting a rab-
bit and then being unable to put ‘rabbit’ on the dinner table. There are
also instances of pig farmers who turned their business into a vegan-
friendly one, in one case due to the cumulative effects of attending to the
terror of the ‘last pig’ sent to slaughter, after witnessing all of her/his
companions being led in to die (Grondahl 2015).16
But there are also cases where attention brings about a thorough, sud-
den, lasting insight, which changes everything at once. Attention can lead
to epiphanic experiences, which Sophie Grace Chappell defines as having
the following elements:
An epiphany is an overwhelming existentially significant manifesta-

tion of value, often sudden and surprising, which feels like it ‘comes
from outside’—it is something given, relative to which I am a passive
perceiver—which teaches us something new, which ‘takes us out of
ourselves’, and to which there is a natural and correct response. 17
(At least one; possibly more.) (Chappell 2019: 97)
Attention can bring about epiphanies which stay with us, like Alyosha’s
ecstatic experience in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, which instils in
him a love for the world which marks him for the rest of his life. It hap-
pens to him one night, as he walks out of the convent, onto the grass
under the starry sky, and feels an overwhelming joy and a compulsion to
drop to his knees:
with each moment he felt clearly and almost tangibly something as

firm and immovable as this heavenly vault descend into his soul …
He fell to the earth a weak youth and rose up a fighter, steadfast for
the rest of his life, and he knew it and felt it suddenly, in that very
moment of his ecstasy. Never, never in all his life would Alyosha for-
get that moment.
(Dostoevsky 1992: 307–308)
Conclusion
In this chapter I have done my best to offer arguments as to why atten-
tion leads to action, including descriptions of what that is like. But these,
like other considerations in the rest of the book, are at best approxima-
tions to something that we can find out, quite vividly, if we actually expe-
rience such attention to a suffering animal, and what happens in us as a
result. Attention to suffering—in anyone—will show us what Murdoch
meant by placing vision at the centre of the moral life, and also what Weil
meant, in ‘Human Personality’ and in her recounting of the story of the
Samaritan: we do not help others because they have rights, or because we
judge them to be worthy based on criteria they have satisfied. We help
them because they need our help.
The whole enterprise of seeking criteria for moral value, in fact, seems
almost corrupt, if it aims to establish a hierarchy of who matters more
and who less, who matters and who does not. It is a telling sign of the
refusal to pay attention that much debate on animal ethics has, mostly at
its inception as academic discipline but even now, revolved around just
this: how do we know who has value, and among those who have value,
who has more? We do not save lives because they matter enough, or more
than others. We save them because they need saving, and because we can.
The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able
to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’ It is a recognition that
the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen
from the social category labelled ‘unfortunate’, but as a man, exactly
like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.
For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to
look at him in a certain way.
This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself
of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is
looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.
Only he who is capable of attention can do this.
(RSS 115)
To look attentively ‘is enough, but it is indispensable’.
Notes
1 This could include the perception of ourselves ‘from the outside’ which, as we
saw in Chapter 4, is compatible with the outward focus of attention. Being a
participant in a specific situation does not involve any inward gaze, but sim-
ply a complete apprehension of all the elements of the situation.
2 See the section on agency in Chapter 1.
3 See Read and Szokolszky (2020) for an exploration of the differences between
enactivism and ecological psychology.
4 This may be unfair, but ‘endearing’ makes Schopenhauer sound like an over-
sensitive pet. Regardless, Murdoch acknowledges animal value but in pass-
ing, and in a way that does not assign special value to non-human animals as
opposed to plants. There is an assumption of a dichotomy of human vs non-
human, and while the latter can be worthy of love and attention, there is a
clear boundary drawn around humans, but little between animals and other
forms of life, or even inanimate objects.
5 See e.g. the books by Citton (2017) and Lanham (2007).
6 See Ivan’s speech in Dostoevsky’s Brother Karamazov.
7 The training, partly based on Buddhist metta meditation, involved three ele-
ments: envisioning suffering, mindful attention to reactions to suffering, and
cultivating compassion. This is also a good example of the way in which, as
we saw in previous chapters, our own reactions and states of mind in the
context of attention can be at the service of, rather than detrimental to, the
reality that we are confronting, without challenging the importance of atten-
tion as fundamentally other-directed.
8 With the difference, as we have seen, that for her it is ‘full attention’ that can
defy the objection; while in the present account, attention is enough.
9 Let us not be misled by the mention of ‘beyond the factual’ to think that
imagination is a kind of projection or ‘making things up’ (that is the role of
‘fantasy’). Murdoch is clear that imagination is what allows us to approach
the world, not to take distance from it: it is part of perception, the ordering
and sense-making faculty that shows us chairs and tables, and freedom and
love. What is ‘strictly factual’, then, is not what is ‘factual’. The former is the
‘surface of things’, the impersonal world (which, in Murdoch’s view, is not the
world at all). The latter is what is real, but available only to attentive imagina-
tion. Which, at its peak, is found in the work of the artist—although in this
sense we’re all artists: ‘[the] “ordinary” truth is also the truth of art, as it
emerges when the artist, confronted by the independent other, imagines, that
is, thinks’ (MGM 377).
10 Diffuse attention is characterised by a far lesser degree of selectivity, as we
saw in Chapter 1.
11 As Gibson puts it, ‘an affordance is not bestowed upon an object by a need of
an observer and his act of perceiving it’ (Gibson 1979: 139). Once again, this
is in accord with Murdoch’s critique of the perception plus desire model.
12 Motivational internalism is also supported by an ‘evolutionary argument’, as
Timothy Chappell shows (2008: 434), where the link between perception and
motivation is common to humans and other animals. The first and most
important objects that humans recognised were those that required specific
responses or actions, where the perception was intrinsically tied to the impor-
tant role the object played for them (i.e. they played the role of affordances):
‘something to flee from’, ‘something to eat’, etc. Chappell treats moral proper-
ties as patterns with this kind of motivational force and provides this argu-
ment as a moral realist response to Mackie’s puzzle: ‘the general schema for
such motivating representations will be: Pattern P in context C mandates
response R from X’ (2008: 434). An example of perceptions that are manifest
through the automatic response that they are tied to comes from the vervet
monkeys, whose three calls, relating to the presence of eagles, leopards, and
snakes, generate the response of fleeing in specific ways and directions
(Cosmides and Tooby 1994).
13 This kind of participation, it may be worth repeating, is very different from
interfering with our ‘selves’ in the given reality.
14 See e.g. MGM 302 and the section on agency in Chapter 1.
15 And in MGM, again reading Weil: ‘Obedience is the freedom wherein the
good man spontaneously helps and serves others’ (MGM 109).
16 Josephine Donovan quotes Max Scheler who ‘maintains that an individual
encounter with suffering should make us aware of suffering in general; thus,
“the pure sentiment of fellow-feeling is released as a permanent disposition,
spreading far beyond the occasion which first inspired it, towards everybody
and every good thing” (60)’ (Donovan 1996: 90). The above-cited study by
Weng et al. (2018) also shows how compassion meditation on specific indi-
viduals, over time ‘can generalize to behavioral domains by impacting social
behavior outside of the training context. Furthermore, greater altruistic
responses were correlated with training-related changes in the neural response
to suffering, providing evidence for functional neuroplasticity in the circuitry
underlying compassion and altruism’ (Weng et al. 2018: 7).
17 The passivity here does not need to contradict the account of attention I am
proposing, and indeed Chappell quotes Murdoch as one of her examples of
epiphany. Rather, passivity in attention is related to its letting the object be,
and to its receptivity; but we have seen how, in other ways, perception through
attention is not at all passive.
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Coda
Iris Murdoch was a swimmer. In the not-always-warm Oxford summers,

she used to love slipping in the Thames, float and paddle about, a love
that remained even when her mind started to cancel some other things
that she used to hold dear. In the water, one can let go. No, one has to let
go, for stiffening muscles, grasping and clutching, will only bring the
experience to an end. If we do not trust the water to hold us, we will sink.
But if we abandon, willingly and joyfully, our body on, in, and through
the liquid, moving with it, or lying on our back as the water laps at our
skin, covering our arms and streaming down again, there is no need to
resist.1 We may then feel the experience of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
(1931), of melting, of interconnection, and of the fact that we do not
really act upon the world, but thanks to, and through it; in response to it.
Attention sometimes is like swimming. The letting go is not the sur-
render of hopelessness, but the trust that there is something greater than
us, of which we are nonetheless part, that will show us the way. Swimming,
I think, illustrates one vision of the world that Murdoch presents, early
on, in ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’:
There are … people whose fundamental belief is that we live in a

world whose mystery transcends us and that morality is the explora-
tion of that mystery.
(VCM 88)
I think I am one of those people, and I think so was Murdoch, and so was
Weil, although Murdoch is here talking about one vision of the world.
That is the vision in which attention is a constant possibility, even a con-
stant task, and the reward is closeness to a reality to which we belong,
which is immense and astonishing, but which we do not often see so
well.2 We take distance, we remove ourselves, both from the world and
from ourselves in it, because, somehow, reality is difficult, being what we
are is difficult for us.
In celebration of the centenary of Murdoch’s birth in 2019, artist
Eimearjean McCormack created a print inspired by The Sea, The
DOI: 10.4324/9781003164852-8
174 Coda
Sea (1978).3 There, a man’s head with the brain exposed, growing out of
flowers, is encased in a bell jar, among other jars we can only glimpse; the
whole is sunk into dark, deep blue. The print offers another, less positive
way of thinking about being in water. Imagine being deep under water,
where everything is muffled, your ordinary life and concerns removed,
where there is only you and fishes and seaweed for unfathomable stretches
of space. This could be (and I think it likely to be) an exhilarating, spiri-
tual experience, a liberating, inward, honest, purifying one. But it could
also represent something very different. Fantasies may take hold there,
with the demands of ordinary life not pressing upon us, a salty fluid sepa-
rating us from what’s around us and what’s outside. The mind can roam,
and it can do so in ways that enclose us even further into a world of our
own making. That is what the artwork suggests, I think, as a reading of
Murdoch’s novel, and that’s not swimming; it is sinking.
Back to the swimmer, and to the image of a woman philosopher
immersing her body in the summer river, we are not enveloped in our-
selves, but in what’s around us. Moving through the water, we are sharing
a space where other creatures move too, our home and theirs, both liter-
ally and, if you like, metaphysically. Being held by water means not being
anything special in this landscape, but participating. Then our attention
is easily drawn to the landscape, and the other creatures that share it:
The art is to draw no attention to oneself but to cruise quietly by the

reeds like a water rat: seeing and unseen from that angle, one can
hear the sedge warblers’ mysterious little melodies, and sometimes a
cuckoo flies cuckooing over our heads, or a kingfisher flashes past.
(Murdoch 1993: n.p.)
These are Murdoch’s words in her review of Charles Sprawson’s wonder-

ful exploration of swimming, Haunts of the Black Masseur (1993). It
seems to me that the book found the perfect reviewer, and Murdoch took
the material back to another of her cherished activities, philosophy, and
to Plato, concluding: ‘I suspect that Plato was a great swimmer’. (And
then she quips: ‘About Aristotle I am not so sure’.).
The immersion found in the experience and image of swimming may,
for some, sound daunting.4 If attention is a constant possibility, even a
constant ‘task’, can we never allow ourselves to follow our inclinations,
be distracted or fantasise? Murdoch asks the same question: ‘At every
moment we are “attending” or failing to attend. (“What, can’t we ever
rest?!” …).’ The answer: ‘There are different kinds of resting’ (MGM
296). The resting in deep, murky waters, in a bell jar, enveloped in fan-
tasy, is one kind. But there is also resting in feeling held and carried by the
stream, and willingly participating in its movement. This image reminds
me of another one, one of the most pregnant and resonant images I’ve
encountered, and that has stayed close to me since I first read it. It is
Coda 175
found in the closing passages of Leo Tolstoy’s Confession (1993: 91–93):
in a dream, Tolstoy is lying on his back, frightened at first because he is
only held by gradually disappearing ropes. Then he looks up. And the
more he looks up, the more he forgets about the ropes, and he feels solid,
supported, as long as he is focusing his attention upward.
I think anyone who enjoys floating motionless in the ocean knows this
experience. Of course Tolstoy is talking about his discovery of the
Christian faith, but it is a kind of faith that I think fits well with Murdoch’s
attraction to religion: a feeling of the absolute, and its reverberations in
the whole of the world. Floating in the sea, looking up we see the sun, and
its light and warmth gives us energy and peace. Simone Weil might have
enjoyed this image too, the absence of gravity given not by struggling, but
simply by looking, and turning, in the right way. I wonder what Murdoch
would have felt like if she ever swam in the Aegean, the sea of the gods,
where the depth of the dark blue sea and the blazing light of the sun
convey a sense of the absolute all around one.
Nonetheless, some uneasiness may remain. On the one hand, attention
can be very difficult, especially if the reality that we are attending to is
one of suffering. Attention is a joining, but no one enjoys joining distress.
And yet, the pain that sometimes comes with attention can be precisely
the sign that attention is achieving its purpose, that what we able to make
what we are confronting real to us, even if that is not what we would
have liked to see. And it is a sign that we are fully there, as Rebecca
Rozelle-Stone (2021) has remarked, a way of realising our shared vulner-
ability with other creatures, the fact that we are not detached observers
but participants in this world of (among other things, thankfully) strug-
gle, and brings home the fact that attention is indeed a gift we offer.
On the other hand, regardless of the potential object of attention, know-
ing that at any point we may be failing to attend, and that this is a moral
failure, although quite broadly understood, can create the anxiety that not
only are we missing out on life, we are being worse than we can be. And
so we are, sometimes. We cannot always live with the kind of ‘gem-like
flame’ and ‘perpetual ecstasy’ that Walter Pater celebrates in the opening
quote of Chapter 8 of MGM, and that Murdoch herself finds excessive,
even ‘hedonistic and self-centred’ (MGM 218). Even Weil, who is not
known for her mild aspirations, knows that attention cannot be a con-
stant activity, that we need to allow ourselves to rest, ‘we have to press on
and loosen up alternately, just as we breathe in and out’ (RSS 111).
Breathing out may mean fantasising, being pulled by gravity—but not
necessarily. Who knows what the resting places may bring, if they are not
our standard mode of being, nor a fearful retreat into stupor, but neces-
sary breaks between moments of attention.
The attention that joins us to the world, that can bring us closer to
goodness and can even be ecstatic, still remains a possibility at any point.
But instead of taking it as a taxing responsibility, we can take it as an
176 Coda
opportunity and as a reminder that the world is there, if we wish to join
it. That’s how I prefer to read Murdoch’s comment that ‘[e]very moment
matters, there is no time off’ (MGM 484). We are not shipwrecked pas-
sengers, swimming anxiously towards the shore to save our lives—
although sometimes we are. Attention is not easy. But by and large, as
Weil writes, attention is meant to be a joy, and it would be sterile without
it. Murdoch writes:
It is indeed the realisation of a vast and varied reality outside our-

selves which brings about a sense initially of terror, and when prop-
erly understood of exhilaration and spiritual power.
(SBR 282)
The joy of attention is the joy that at any moment we can open our eyes,
and we can experience the astonishing realisation that the world, the sea,
the grains of sand, this seagull, the shoal of sardines, the other swimmers,
the glimmer of light on the water—that all of that exists.
Notes
1 Readers of Murdoch’s fiction may find these images reminiscent of passages
in The Sea, the Sea (1978).
2 See also AD 290.
3 https://www.philosophybypostcard.com/eimearjean-mccormack/
4 Thanks to Maude Ouellette-Dubé for making this concern salient.
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Index
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to note numbers.
absolute 7, 18, 103, 113, 175 compassion 40, 46, 137, 153–154,
action 2–4, 15–18, 21, 23–29, 41–42, 157–158, 162, 166, 170n16
88, 112–115, 129–131, 150–170 consciousness 2, 4–5, 7, 9–10, 15, 17,
activism 39, 136, 144, 153, 166–167 19, 21–25, 29–33, 35–36, 42–43,
activity 5, 7, 28–29, 31, 122–123, 46, 49, 57n28, 57n30, 65–67,
133, 135, 175 69–70, 75, 77, 82, 94–95, 97–98,
affliction 15, 41, 130–131, 145–146, 101–106, 110–111, 113–115,
169; see also suffering 122–124, 133–135, 137–138,
affordances 51, 161–164, 150–151, 153, 160
170n11–170n12 consequentialism 53; see also
agency 22, 26–29, 57n17, 143 utilitarianism
animals, non-human 2, 6, 8–9, 34, 41, conversion 84n17, 167
47–49, 57n12, 52, 83n8, 95, 116, creation 16, 64, 93, 99, 145–146
129–131, 136–138, 141–148, creativity 28, 70, 88, 95, 130,
151–170 145–146, 160
art 10, 47–48, 58n42, 79, 95, 98, 100,
104, 169n9; see also literature decreation 16, 19, 63–64, 84n20,
attention: diffuse 50–51, 58n42; 92–93, 98–99, 110, 157; see also
divided 9, 21, 25; joint 36, 119, unselfing
142; sustained 9, 21, 25, 28, 97, 99, defence mechanism 80–81, 84n24
102, 143, 145, 155, 157, 165–166 deliberation 3, 24, 126, 162, 165
desire 8, 22, 28, 32–34, 37–38, 45–47,
beauty 6, 17, 37, 44–49, 79, 91 51, 53, 56n4, 56n6, 68, 73, 77–78,
Bhagavad-Gıt̄ a 37, 100 80, 89–90, 94, 102–104, 110–111,
Buddhism 7, 11, 29, 51, 90, 99–103, 117–118, 130, 134, 140, 143–146,
105, 107n6, 169n7; Theravāda 153–159, 163–164
101–102; Zen 11–12, 95–102, 105 Diamond, C. 6, 167
Dostoevsky, F. 34, 168
change, moral 19, 22–23, 27, 35, 39–42, dualism 29, 98, 104–105
48, 104–105, 119, 138, 166–167
choice 3–5, 17–18, 26, 30, 33, 42, ecology 9, 106
47–48, 53, 101, 144, 151, 166–167, ecological psychology 151–152
169n7 ego 6, 28, 36, 47, 66–68, 70–71,
Christianity 40, 100, 175 76–77, 81, 87–89, 92, 97–98, 111,
cognitive penetration 71–73, 75, 133 143, 155, 162
178 Index
emotions 1, 22, 36, 39, 72–73, 77, 81, James, W. 20, 22, 26, 29–30, 161
87, 115, 124, 130, 138, 141–142,
144, 154–155, 157, 163 literature 5, 79, 126
empathy 40–41, 73–74, 141–142, love 7, 9, 15–17, 19–20, 32–34,
152–160, 166; see also sympathy 36–41, 44–47, 77–78, 88, 91–93,
enactivism 151–152 95–96, 103–105, 117–118,
epiphany 167–168, 170n17 124–125, 130, 132, 137, 140,
eros 8, 25, 32–38, 45, 78, 90, 95, 103, 145–146, 166, 168; see also eros
134, 140, 159; see also love
M&D 4, 18, 27, 39, 69, 94, 112, 113
failure 2, 5, 25, 42, 68–70, 78, 80–81, market 9–10
112, 120, 124, 175 meat 2, 136–138, 142, 144–145, 155
fantasy 10, 15, 24, 27, 30–31, 35, 37, meditation 11, 17, 51–52, 90, 97–98,
43, 51, 53, 67–81, 87–92, 111, 117, 157, 169n7, 170n16
113–114, 117–119, 140, 156–157, metaphysics 16, 19, 63, 92, 102, 105
174 motivation, moral 3, 25, 41–42, 64,
feminism 12n3, 120 75, 106, 113, 129–131, 144, 150,
force 146 151–154, 157, 160, 162–167
forgiveness 39–41 motivational internalism 163, 170n12
freedom 11, 53, 56n4, 101, 170n15 mysticism 7, 19, 34, 56n6, 56n9,
Freud, A. 81, 84n24 105–106, 165
Freud, S. 68, 76, 80
necessity 27, 56n4, 68, 93, 129,
gaze 1, 12n1, 18, 55, 78, 83n13, 114, 150–151, 166
116–117, 126, 159, 161 neurosis 36, 80–81, 84n25, 118
gift 31, 41, 165, 175
God 15–16, 18–20, 33, 44–45, 56n4, obedience 17, 56n4, 56n7, 68, 93,
76, 88, 92–93, 99–100, 105 151, 164–166
grace 68, 82, 110 ordinary language 14, 20, 23–24, 30,
38, 56n11
habit 2, 6, 15, 27, 29, 32, 46, 53,
96–97, 132, 137, 140, 157–158 painting 10, 95
Hinduism 11, 99–100 particularity see individual
passivity 4, 8, 22, 28–29, 94, 168,
imagination 2, 17, 22, 28, 35, 38, 41, 170n17
67, 73–74, 80, 97, 134–135, perception: direct 141, 152, 154–155;
137–143, 160–161, 169n9 moral 3, 5–7, 89, 120, 129–146,
impersonality 4–5, 33, 38–39, 70–74, 151–152, 161, 166
88–89, 95, 97, 103, 105–106, 116, personality 70, 83n14, 94–97, 146,
134, 143, 152, 169n9 168
individual 2, 4–5, 9–10, 18, 22, 24, phronesis 51
34, 38–40, 43–45, 50, 54, 64–76, Plato 6–8, 11, 19, 22, 25, 32–34, 36,
78, 81, 87–88, 95–97, 103, 105– 44, 56n6, 56n9, 76, 90, 95, 100,
106, 116, 118–120, 131–132, 134, 113, 118, 134–135, 174
137, 140–143, 146, 156, 159–160, psychotherapy 84n26, 127n5
162, 166–167
inner datum 121, 125–126 realism, (moral) 4–5, 27, 38, 72,
inner life 4, 17, 24, 41, 66, 70, 105, 83n13, 84n16, 89, 95, 104, 133,
115–116, 121–123, 126, 150, 144, 152, 170n12
162, 167 religion 14, 16, 19, 56n4, 92, 94, 99,
introspection 114–115, 120–121, 105–106, 110, 175
124–125
intuition, moral 163 sadism 131, 137, 158–160
Index 179
salience 15, 23–25, 32, 40, 43, 47–48, truth-seeking 3, 10, 15, 24–25, 32–36,
51–53, 75, 125, 135, 142–143, 157, 101–102, 110, 113, 129, 135, 140,
159, 162, 165 143, 160
Samaritan 16, 48–49, 130, 145, 158,
168 unselfing 3, 9, 17, 19, 35–39,
selectivity 21, 24–25, 30, 32, 43, 51, 41, 50–52, 54–55, 63–65,
57n28, 159 67–68, 70–77, 82, 87, 89, 90–92,
slaughterhouse 136, 153, 156 94–95, 98, 100, 104, 110,
subjectivism 73, 139, 147n10 134, 140
subjectivity 71, 94, 98, 103, 145, 158 utilitarianism 130; see also
success 31–32, 35, 37, 54, 90, 110, consequentialism
115, 126, 131, 134, 136, 138, 143,
150, 160, 165 value: inherent 5–6, 25, 50;
suffering 6, 8, 11, 38–39, 41, 46–47, instrumental 5, 32–33, 131
49, 102, 106, 115, 129–131, veganism 12n3, 153, 166–167
136–138, 141–147 vision, moral 7–10, 18, 23, 37–42,
sympathy 2, 153; see also empathy 53, 66, 68–69, 78, 82, 83n13, 88,
swimming 43, 173–174, 176 97, 105–107, 100, 118, 140,
168, 173
Tolstoy, L. 174 virtue 15, 37–38, 51–52, 73, 77,
touch 7–8, 98, 142 111–113, 134, 140, 153
transparency view 123–126
truth 2, 7, 15, 17, 25, 28, 31, 32–39, waiting 8, 10, 17, 28, 50–51, 103
50–53, 67, 88, 94, 103–104, 106, water 98, 173–174
127n2, 129, 155, 159–160, 169, will 26–28, 93, 101, 165–166
169n9 Wittgenstein 34–36, 121–125, 141

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The Ethics of Attention

This book draws on Iris Murdoch’s philosophy to explore questions

Silvia Caprioglio Panizza is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Centre

Virtues, Democracy, and Online Media

A Philosophical Defense of Misanthropy

The Ethics of Attention

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.

Silvia Caprioglio Panizza

1 What is ethical about attention? 14

2 Attention without self-concern 63

3 Attention without self 87

5 Moral perception 129

6 Motivation and action 150

This is in many ways a personal book, so the individuals whom I want to

This work has received funding from the

Works by Iris Murdoch

Works by Simone Weil

APP On the Abolition of All Political Parties

Weil, Murdoch, and me

Attention and Murdoch’s philosophy

It is perfectly obvious that goodness is connected with knowledge:

The difficulty of attention

Vision and touch, body and metaphor

Touch provides our most basic apprehension of things. Why? Because

Touch is waiting (attendre), and it is vulnerability. It is attentive passion.

Our confused conscious being is both here and elsewhere, living at

The conversations about attention that I have in this book with

A student said to Master Ichu, ‘Please write for me something of

Introducing attention in Weil and Murdoch

Spiritual progress is won through meditation: a view which is a con-

Weil’s idea of attention influenced Murdoch deeply and extensively, giving

The varieties of attention

depending on what kind of state is currently at the center of our

An ethical account of attention works best with such broadened

The morality of attention

Attention and agency

Beliefs about people often proceed … imaginatively and under direct

In Sovereignty, the mother-in-law M ‘reflects deliberately about D’

The inhibition of unworthy fantasies is perhaps the most accessible

Still, Murdoch’s project is centred around a re-configuration of morality

The wrong way of seeking. The attention fixed on a problem. Another

Such waiting is not passive in any ordinary way. It is a restraint of the

Attention not all the time

Broadening attention to a constantly ongoing phenomenon may lead to a

if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously

The vertical axis: the presence and absence of attention

The value of truth

Attention as joining (eros)

In attention we experience closeness, because to attend is to be filled in

Attention as allowing to be (unselfing)

Attention enables a more truthful perception and understanding of real-

Eros, as we have seen, is the positive side. As in the Symposium, eros is

Echoed by Murdoch, here, for instance:

Beauty gives us an immediate image of good desire, the desire for

the realism (ability to perceive reality) required for goodness is a kind

There is a sense, in attention, of respect for a reality that is separate and

Attention is love, but it is not blind

‘Truth’ is not just a collection of facts. Truthfulness, the search for

When it comes to attending to individuals, the need for attention under-

a) The historical individual, including accumulated experience, knowl-