Attention, Contemplation, and Education

• In Event: 73.018 - The Politics of Wisdom and the Politics of Knowledge: The Contemplative Turn in the Curriculum

Abstract

There has been increased interest in teaching mindfulness in educational settings, however the efforts to secularize techniques for teaching mindfulness has meant that they are often abstracted from the richness of the wisdom traditions from which they are derived. A focus on well-being and the self, rather than on compassion, and a focus on the accumulation of knowledge, rather than the development of wisdom, has meant that much has been lost in terms of learning from the wisdom traditions of East and West. Whilst philosophers from Plato to Spinoza emphasized both wisdom, or intuition, and love, or virtue, in a manner resonant with the Buddhist tradition’s commitment to cultivating the two wings of compassion and wisdom, such a relationship between wisdom and virtue is not foregrounded in educational theory and practice today. This paper looks at the practice of paying attention in the sciences, arts and humanities, and explores its relationship to ethics.

To be a practitioner in any discipline requires that one cultivate awareness, the ability to notice and to pay attention (what N. Katherine Hayles (2007) calls deep attention). It also requires patience, the ability to sit and wait for ideas to assimilate or to emerge, and the capacity for sustained contemplation of the object of one’s study or practice. The writings of philosophers Simone Weil (2004), Bernard Stiegler (2010). Henri Bergson (1965) and Hayles show why attention is important in an age that has witnessed both the expansion of precarity under capitalism, and the rise of algorithmic and instrumental rationality. I argue that the language of experiential learning should be re-oriented from the language of doing toward that of receiving. I understand this in terms of the development of active receptivity which involves, for example, the capacity to observe, notice, wait, and sense, all of which involve dedicating considerable time to practice. I suggest that we need to move from the image of the reflective practitioner to the contemplative practitioner (Miller, 2014), and I evaluate Weil’s suggestion that renunciative practices that involve paying attention to something are also ethical practices. She describes these practices through the language of renunciation mobilising a number of powerful images, such as the Kabbalistic image of Tzimtzum to distinguish her conception from those that make attention analogous with an act of will or strained muscular effort. Attention means that one is oriented away from the self. One´s attention is to something or something other. Certain kinds of educational spaces cultivate the conditions for these forms of intimate or loving distances that invite and sustain attention.

Author

• Aislinn O'Donnell, Mary Immaculate College (University of Limerick)