Philosophy, mysticism
Simone Weil
1909 – 1943
Attention as the rarest form of generosity: the willingness to let a situation be what it is before deciding what to do about it. This is Stay, stated first and most severely.
Read alongside: Stay
- Start with
- Gravity and Grace (1947)
- Where they resist the book
- Weil's attention is ascetic and self-emptying. Applied to organisational life it can slide into passivity, which is not what Stay asks.
Works worth the time
Gravity and Grace · 1947
Assembled from her notebooks after her death. Read the passages on attention first.
Publisher: Routledge ↗Read further
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Simone Weil ↗
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Where Weil appears
II. StayPhilosophy
Attention is a moral act.
Weil treats attention as the rarest form of generosity: the willingness to let a situation be what it is before deciding what to do about it. Merleau-Ponty adds the body — perception is not a camera but a stance. Staying, in these terms, is not stoic endurance but an unusually accurate form of looking.