A Brief Genealogy of the Concept of Attention in Phenomenology

Abstract

The first chapter describes the history of a seminal shift in the meaning of the concept of attention in late modern philosophy and psychology. This entails a narrative that follows how the question of salience became the pivotal issue for William James, Aron Gurwitsch, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.In his treatment of attention, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the question: “How could one real object among all objects be able to arouse an act of attention, given that consciousness already possesses them all?” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2012), 30.) Five decades earlier, William James posed a similar question: “Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me.” (William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume One (New York: Dover Publications, 2017), 402.) This question concerning how objects and aspects become salient for the perceiver is the foundation of the philosophy of attention. However, inspired by Aron Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty takes a radically different route, compared to James, in answering this question. This route will serve as a framework for the phenomenology of attention that is articulated in the subsequent chapters of this book. Whereas James understood attention as a counterforce to distraction, Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty emphasized attention as a creative modality: our propensity to be present for things and events yet unknown and alien to us.KeywordsAlienCreative attentionDistractionExperimental psychologyAron GurwitschWilliam JamesMerleau-PontyPre-reflectivePresenceSalience