Abstract
This paper aims to conceptualize the phenomenology of attentional experience as ‘embodied attention.’ Current psychological research, in describing attentional experiences, tends to apply the so-called spotlight metaphor, according to which attention is characterized as the illumination of certain surrounding objects or events. In this framework, attention is not seen as involving our bodily attitudes or modifying the way we experience those objects and events. It is primarily conceived as a purely mental and volitional activity of the cognizing subject. Against this view, the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty shows that attention is a creative activity deeply linked with bodily movements. This paper clarifies and systematizes this view and brings it into dialogue with current empirical findings as well as with current theoretical research on embodied cognition. By doing this, I spell out three main claims about embodied attention: the transcendentalism of embodiment for attention, the bodily subjectivity of attention, and the creativity of embodied attention.
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Notes
Although there has been some important work done on the phenomenology of attention (Waldenfels 2004, Arvidson 2006, Breyer 2011, Wehrle 2013, Depraz 2014), work on the phenomenology of embodied attention is still lacking, and even just a survey of current literature on embodied attention is a gap this article aims at filling. In the following, I will refrain from offering a comprehensive survey of existing literature on the general topic of attention, since even a brief mention of the main strains of research would go beyond the scope of a single article. Instead, I will focus on ongoing research where this is most explicitly linked to my plea for a phenomenology of embodied attention. This means that I will both take into account current research on the phenomenology of attention, and comment on approaches, in both the hard sciences and philosophy, that explicitly link attention and embodiment. A discussion of well-established theories of attention more generally (mostly selection-for-action theory, Donald Broadbent’s classical filter-theory, and Anne Treisman’s feature-integration theory), can be found in [D'Angelo 2018].
I am not able to go into the details of particular empirical theories of attention, since this would go beyond the scope of this paper. I will therefore focus on the metaphor of the spotlight and restrict myself to a critic of the conceptual implication of the metaphor. For a detailed exposition of the spotlight metaphor and a review of central empirical theories in its light see Cave and Bichot (1999).
At this point, one could raise the objection that it is surely possible to pay close attention to a conference without getting its meaning. In order to avoid this criticism, a closer specification of the concept of ‘meaning’, as used in this paper, is required. Phenomenologically speaking, the meaning of the experience of listening to a talk is to be strictly separated from the meaning of that talk. Clearly, if I pay close attention to the talk without understanding the meaning of the talk, it does not mean that my experience of the talk was meaningless. Therefore, in the account I am arguing for, it is possible to claim that attention creates the meaning, since the concept of ‘meaning’ we use refers to the meaning of that experience, and not the meaning of the attentionally perceived talk.
This is a claim based on our everyday understanding of attention and, in particular, of attending to a scientific talk. Even if recent research points in a different direction, e. g. that standing desks increase attention as opposed to when the worker at the desks is sitting (Finch et al. 2017), this would confirm the overall claim I am making, namely that bodily posture influences (in one way or another) our capacity to pay attention. Spelling out exactly how this influence works is an empirical question that cannot be solved at the philosophical level. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
In his classic work Action in Perception, which is one of the most important works in the field of embodied cognition (Noë 2004), there is no formulation of a theory of attention.
A similar claim is found in so-called ‘selection-for-action’ theories of attention, which were first formulated by Allport (1987) and have been defined accurately, more recently, by Wu (2011). I discuss this approach at length in. A recent survey of empirical findings concerning the relation between attention and action can be found in Pratt et al. (2015).
Siewert is a notable exception to this, since he claims, interpreting Merleau-Ponty, that “directing visual attention involves […] the exercise of sensorimotor skills” (Siewert 2005, 270), in particular in what he labels “sensorimotor anticipation” (Siewert 2005, 285). This is an anticipation without representation (Siewert 2005, 274) and is an important thread to follow in subsequent development of a phenomenological description of embodied attention.
The relation between attention and awareness has led to several discussions. Whereas O’Regan and Noë (O'Regan and Noë 2001), along with others, tend to conflate the two, Lamme (2003) has argued for a distinction that is similar to mine, although I here refine the argument for the specific case of embodied cognition and bodily awareness. For results confirming that awareness and attention are based on different cortical networks, see Wyart and Tallon-Baudry (2008) and its discussion in van Gaal and Fahrenfort (2008), as well as Webb et al. (2016).
Even approaches to attention that stress the role of enactivism for attention tend to neglect the body as such and endorse a classical view of attention as a mental selection process. See for example the work of Jennings, who argues for attention as an activity “enacted by a subject” but endorses the idea that attention is “a direction of the mind by the subject,” thereby underplaying the role of the body (Jennings 2012).
This differentiation echoes that proposed by Titchener at the start of the last century, but does not coincide with it. Titchener distinguished between an attention as “sensory clearness” (Titchener 1908) on the one hand, and the “feeling of attention” on the other. Steinbock has argued for a similar distinction, between what he terms “interpersonal attention” on the one hand and “perceptive and epistemic attention” on the other. According to Steinbock, the second is rooted in the former (Steinbock 2001). According to the distinction I am arguing for along with Merleau-Ponty, primary attention would be both perceptive and interpersonal and would ground epistemic attention. Cf. Steinbock 2004 as well, in a special issue of the Continental Philosophy Review dedicated to the topic of attention, edited by Steinbock himself.
In the quotation I have given, Merleau-Ponty takes into account, as sources of the opening of the field, also “elaborations of thought.” But every elaboration of thought in primary attention, insofar as this must be pre-reflective and pre-conscious, must be linked to the exploratory organs of the body.
For a more precise analysis of the claims concerning the creativity of attention see (D'Angelo 2018).
Wehrle and Breyer (2016) refer to the same example of Merleau-Ponty but – as stated above – take it as an example of a particular class of attentive experiences where the body plays an eminent role, instead of interpreting it as a normal example of everyday attentional experience.
These hints at an empirical application of the theory must remain sketchy. Further work on this point is a currently ongoing project.
R. Lind in the 1980s went so far as to assert that not only perception, but intentionality as such is based on what he calls “focal attention” (Lind 1986). I wish to leave this open for discussion.
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D’Angelo, D. The phenomenology of embodied attention. Phenom Cogn Sci 19, 961–978 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09637-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09637-2