Triad 16 of 32 · 2026-10-09 · Difficulty 3 · Genealogy/influence, Agreement, Conflict, Shared figure or motif
The thread
Attention against the will. Weil’s notebooks (Gravity and Grace, ch. 26 ‘Attention and Will’) confine the will to ‘a few movements of a few muscles’ and make attention its opposite; Murdoch borrows the word explicitly (‘which I borrow from Simone Weil’) and turns it against the existentialist ‘empty choosing will’ and its preference for ‘movement rather than vision’; Polanyi (Terry Lectures 1962) reaches attention from chemistry and skill, also against existentialist choice, but makes it run THROUGH the self: we attend from body, tools and theories to the world (‘Our body is the ultimate instrument of all our external knowledge’). Weil and Polanyi agree that attending to the muscles defeats the act (set jaws; the paralyzed pianist). Murdoch and Polanyi split on vision vs. touch: she quotes Hampshire on touch to reject it; his model is the blind man’s stick. Machine count: Murdoch’s sight:touch vocabulary 60.3:3.3 per 10k words. ‘Will is obedience not resolution’, which Murdoch attributes to Weil, is not in this edition of G&G.
The three books
- Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil, Gustave Thibon (editor), Emma Crawford (translator), Mario von der Ruhr (translator); 1947. Anchor / source of the word: attention defined against the will, the will confined to the muscles
- The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch; 1970. Inheritor: carries Weil’s attention into moral philosophy; names the shared enemy (the choosing will); sides with vision against touch
- The Tacit Dimension, Michael Polanyi, Amartya Sen (contributor); 1966. Dissenter from outside: attention as from-to integration that runs through the body; agrees with Weil on indirection, contradicts Murdoch on the senses
Notebook
- Retell Murdoch’s kestrel (ch. 3) in Polanyi’s from-to grammar: is unselfing the self becoming wholly subsidiary, the body as ‘ultimate instrument’? Then test Weil’s ‘attention which is so full that the I disappears’: mystical or skilled?
- Weil’s one willed gesture (‘I can will to put my hand flat on the table’) vs. Polanyi’s paralyzed pianist: a gesture you can will and one you can’t; where is the boundary? Is utterance on the willed side?
- Murdoch’s M and D and ‘the siege of the individual by concepts’ vs. Polanyi’s interiorized teaching: write D’s account of being attended to.
Rabbit holes
Links as checked on the day of the reading.
- SEP, Simone Weil: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simone-weil/
- SEP, Iris Murdoch: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/murdoch/
- Weil, Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies (Matheson Trust): https://themathesontrust.org/library/weil-reflections-on-the-right-use
- Turkis, Post-Critical Platonism: Murdoch and Polanyi (Tradition & Discovery 45:1): https://www.polanyisociety.org/TAD%20WEB%20ARCHIVE/TAD45-1/Turkis-TAD45-1-pg30-41.pdf
- Panizza, The Importance of Attention in Morality (UEA thesis 2015): https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58491/
- Smith, Michael Polanyi and tacit knowledge (infed): https://infed.org/dir/michael-polanyi-and-tacit-knowledge/
To carry
“We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” (Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, ch. 26, ‘Attention and Will’)
Themes
attention · blind man’s stick · decreation · existentialism · gesture · gymnastics of the attention · Hampshire · indwelling · interiorization · kestrel · M and D · pianist · prayer · probe · proximal/distal · Sartre · tacit knowing · the hand · unselfing · vision vs. touch · will
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