Some Thoughts on Attention, Emotion, and the Moral Life

At every moment, our visual and mental landscape is bombarded with objects bidding for our attention. Unable to adopt this near infinitesimal amount of information, we only perceive a fraction of what is available to us. If I am sitting in an airport, waiting to board my flight, there are thousands of people, signs, screens, restaurants, shops and smells available for me to focus on, and yet, 99% of it doesn’t captivate me. Instead, I bounce back and forth between watching the countdown time until I board and a few text messages. By virtue of my attention on the boarding time and iMessage, I ignore everything else.

In the face of this intense, if not ruthless, discretion between what matters to me what could potentially matter, we must ask ourselves a pertinent question. What touchstone, what criterion, what benchmark enables us to narrow our perception? In short, how are we able to avoid the overwhelming swell of stimulus and constrict our focus?

The plethora of objects available to our perceptual landscape is confined by our attention, and we pay attention to what we value. Thus, attention brings into focus what we deem valuable and dismisses everything else. An additional question may be tacked on. What determines our values, since it is easily imaginable that values vary across individuals? The complexity of this question as it ascends into the cultural domain is far beyond my purview, but at an individual level, the values we cling to are predicated upon our aim.

Taking you back to the airport, my overarching aim is to safely travel to New York City, but in order to make good on that desire, I must board the flight in a timely manner. Hence, I value the countdown time for boarding, as it carries a certain motivational relevance in relationship to what I desire. Likewise, I desire to have a ride from the airport when I land in the Big Apple, so texting my friend who is set to pick me up also maintains a prominent relevance to my aim.

When understood in this way, the movement of perception tends to make a lot of sense. We are always aiming at some good—something which Aristotle rightly asserted in his Ethics—and these aims wield certain values. Specifically, values that enable us to actualize it. This value structure, multilayered and hierarchically sequenced, directs our attention. Consequently, the world, possessing an infinite amount of objects, is confined to what we actively attend to.

We don’t live in a one-dimensional realm of static objects, but we live in a deeply subjective landscape, glowing with relevance and meaning. The longer I’ve pondered the dynamics of perception, the more I’ve begun to think that this phenomenological way of understanding perception—one in which we actually co-create the world—is critical insofar as it opens up a multitude of novel ways in which to grasp different dimensions of experience. For instance, if we attend to the divisive political world all-day-every-day, our perception of reality begins to become colored with cynicism and anger. Or perhaps even more concretely and positively, if we attend to how can serve others, as opposed to how we can serve ourselves, the world becomes a playground of charity, blissful self-forgetfulness, and never-ending opportunity.

I now want to switch gears a bit. How can understanding the phenomenology of perception and attention be integrated into different areas of life; namely, our emotional and moral lives.

Since rationality seems to dominate the Western conception of man, the reality of the emotions are often overlooked (or at least not emphasized). This, I would argue, is a fatal misstep, because in many ways, we experience life through our emotions. Nevertheless, I’m not seeking to pit reason and feelings against one another, since emotions maintain a rational character.

Through the rigorous scholarship of Martha Nussbaum and Robert C. Solomon, we know that emotions are evaluative judgements. For instance, we experience fear when we judge an object, person, or overall setting to be threatening, or we experience positive emotion when we judge an outcome or event as beneficial to our flourishing. Integrating this into what’s been said about the phenomenology of perception and attention, we feel certain emotions in relationship to what we are aiming at. If our meta-aim is self-preservation, then when I encounter a bear on the hiking trail, the emotion of fear arises precisely because it threatens my life. In another context, let’s say a zoo, my encounter with a bear is far different, and thus, I don’t experience crippling fear.

While it is interesting to understand the movement of emotion (ie. judgments of situations or things in relation to my aim), the real benefit seems to be when our emotional lives, complex as they are, remain mysterious to us, an idea reaching back even to Augustine’s emphasis of the mystery of the self in his Confessions. Oftentimes, our aims are concealed to ourselves. We believe our intent is proper or that we understand the “why” of our actions, yet the hidden agendas of our lower will can rear its ugly head, and no one is beyond disordered desires. Now if we know that emotions are judgements in relationship to our aim, one way in which to uncover our concealed desires is to critically examine our emotions.

For instance, when we feel anger toward ourselves and can pinpoint the thing(s) we did that triggered the anger, we can infer what our aim was, since it was the violation of it which manifested the anger to begin with. What do we usually find? There is usually a fundamental betrayal of our own ideal or aim, which condemns our behavior and elicits the emotion of anger. In fact, all deeply felt anger results from betrayal, whether it’s someone else betraying you or you betraying your own implicit standards. This is why Dante places the betrayers at the bottom of hell in his Inferno; all negative emotion, if examined closely enough, emerges from betrayal, and in order to overcome such emotion, we must first descend through the layers of muck until we come to know the initial treachery. Only then, can we begin the process of purgation and healing.

Moving back to the phenomenological dimension, understanding what emotion we are experiencing allows us to then deduce the substance of what we are aiming at. This is a continual occurrence in my own emotional life. By investigating the depth of my emotions (positive or negative), I come to know what I desire. So don’t dismiss emotions as obstructive feelings in need of suppression, or feeble and irrational sentiments which you should ignore. Humans aren’t designed to become emotionless, cold, and rationally calculating creatures, simply seeking to see everything “objectively.” Not dismissing universal truth, there is a deeply subjective dimension to our emotions, and they ought to be consulted and contemplated, so we can come to know ourselves and give of ourselves better.

When uncovering the hidden aims of our interior life, the deepest human desire, more often than not, is to be known and loved. To be known and loved are co-dependent, because to be fully “loved” without the lover knowing your flaws feels shallow and even fraudulent. Conversely, to be known, and yet not loved, leaves us embarrassed and altogether rejected. However, it is only in their union that our desire is fulfilled. Of course in human life, this is a continually present and ever-out-of-reach goal, because people are always developing, transforming, dying, and resurrecting, so to fully know and love another is an inexhaustible journey, demanding one’s whole life. Such a journey, on a human-to-human level, culminates in a covenantal marriage.

Taken in a theological sense, God fully knows the depth of the human heart, our human hearts, while simultaneously loving us fully, desiring our redemption, and supplying us the means for divine participation. In response to the original and primordial love of God, we dedicate our lives to knowing and loving God back, which takes the shape of knowing and loving others. These desires of the human heart are often revealed to us if we investigate our emotional lives.

What can we say about attention and the moral life? By virtue of our supernatural creation and destiny, we are all called to become saints, to become other Christs in the world by grace. And while pride is the cardinal sin, we often misunderstand the dynamics of it. We believe that man’s fundamental fault is a twisted narcissism which steamrolls the weak, judges others, and believes himself to be the perfect person. Yet I don’t recognize this behavior in those around me, except for a few exceptions which can possibly be chalked up to full-fledged narcissism. A majority of the time, it appears to be only a masking of what is really a deep insecurity and inability to reckon with one’s own self-betrayal. I would propose that the central sin of man reveals itself as a kind of inverse pride. That is, we are more harsh on ourselves than we are on others. We fall into the rut of not being able to recognize our supernatural destiny, of being blind to our own capacity to take on the sins of the world to put it in Dostoevskian terms. However, the opposite extreme can be dangerous as well: To the extent that we don’t see our own vice, we fall into a nasty self-righteousness which identifies evil with others and extinguishes it within ourselves—a tactic all too often seen in politics (e.g., X party has all the problems). What is the correct balance then? To recognize that the potential for good and evil reside in the human heart.

Ending in a spiral of vice—sin, guilt, shame, repeat—we attend to our evil far more than we attend to our goodness, or more particularly our capacity for goodness. This calls back how our attention co-creates our world. We set our attention on our utter “depravity” without acknowledging our capacity for virtue, creating a neurotic reality filled with our own wretchedness which sits in stark contrast to Christianity’s joyful and comedic conception of the cosmos. Again, the answer must consult good and evil; this archetypal balance can’t be ignored, and it is found everywhere in the Western cannon. There’s the sacrifice of Cain versus the sacrifice of Abel; Dostoevsky’s Dmitri describes God and the Devil warring in his heart; Solzhenitsyn famously claims the line between good and evil cuts through the soul; even Harry Potter, Rowling’s victorious hero, contains a bit of evil in him that he must defeat. We can acknowledge the brothers of good and evil—the eternal war which everyone participates in—but must penultimately understand the comic-arch of reality, fully realized in Christ’s trampling of evil and eventual resurrection, establishing morally what is already true metaphysically: Good is greater than evil.

As a response to the victory of the Good, it is fitting that we re-conceptualize our moral lives, moving our attention away from the depth of our evil and toward our capacity for good, even if it is only in the realm of “potential” good. In this way, every transgression becomes the dynamic potential out of which creation is crafted and deemed very good in Genesis and out of which we can grow in virtue. Our life is then about the slow upward-oriented movement of dying and recreating ourselves; the aim at incremental improvement rather than the fullness of perfection now.

What too often happens is that we become idolizers of future perfection, prohibiting us from localizing that desire for sanctity into the here and now. In the final analysis, we need the meta-goal of becoming a saint, but it must be broken down into our daily life, valuing the present as the place where holiness commences. If we don’t find a way to localize our meta-goal, then we are generally unable to compute our shortcomings, because we believe we must be holy now, rather than understanding that it is a progressive climb toward the pinnacle of the Holy Mountain.

This is how we understand Christ’s command to seek first the Kingdom of Heaven, and subsequently cease to worry about the future. I don’t think Christ is suggesting we dismiss the future entirely, as does an immature toddler, but rather, He desires that we focus on sanctifying the present moment, and don’t expect ourselves be reach the fullness of moral virtue now. Similar ideas can be seen in Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical philosophy which suggests that the face-to-face encounter with the Other demands our responsibility, and no suspension of the ethical for the sake of some future expectation is allowed. Or even John Steinbeck’s East of Eden which sagely instructs us to give up the desire for perfection in order that we may start to become good. You can even look to Dostoevky’s The Brothers Karamazov, wherein Alyosha realizes that it is precisely through his current circumstances that he’ll become a saint, not in escaping the world. Fr. Zosima instructs us that it is through our sufferings that we’ll find joy rather than the worship of a perfection that excludes present sufferings. In fact, the focus on sanctifying the moment is one way in which to understand Divine providence. Confront every moment with truth and love—the substance of the Logos during creation—and then don’t think about tomorrow, because you’ve made present the primordial pattern of creation. Confronting life with truth and love brings about a reality which is “good” and “very good,” end of the story, and thus, there no longer any need to attend to tomorrow’s troubles.

With that said, we must restructure our values, while maintaining the meta-desire for perfection. We must cease to expect ourselves to achieve the fulness of virtue right here and now, but instead, begin to value becoming good overtime, comparing ourselves to who we were yesterday as the cliche goes. This shift of value can reorient our attention and animate our moral lives with a new vigor. We need to recognize ourselves as people in a state of becoming, not simply in a state of being; attend to who we can become; focus on the areas of morality that are calling for redemption. In turn, our moral landscape begins to transform. It’s no longer a desolate wasteland of inadequacy, forever unable to actualize perfection right this instant. Following the paradigmatic pattern of creation, our inadequacies instead become a domain of potential ready to be brought into order, as we focus on the day-to-day ways in which we can love God and others, slowly becoming Christlike. Of course, failure remains inevitable, but reality—a Divine comedy—asserts that Good defeats evil, thereby circumscribing our falls with the knowledge that, so long as we are aiming to be good, transformation and the slow accumulation of virtue will win out.

Ultimately, the realization of this seems to require several legs: (1) our ability to be receptive to God’s knowledge of our sin and His incessant and gentle love for us; (2) recognizing the inevitability of our own vice; (3) the self-love which attends to who we are created to be, not who we are now, whether good or evil; (4) and holding all this in tension with our two-sided vocation to become a saint and live in the moment. It is a delicate tightrope walk which concurrently frees us from self-abasement and this all too common inverse pride.

This reflection is somewhat muddled, even more of a stream of consciousness, but I’ll attempt to tie a quick bow on it. Our attention, determined by our values/aims, reveals the world to us. Our emotional lives, therefore, shouldn’t be dismissed in a stoic fashion, because we aren’t robots, but we exist in a deeply intersubjective world which unveils are hidden aims. Further, as it pertains to our ethical lives, what we pay attention to, in large part, determines our moral trajectory. We ought value progression over perfection and attend to the dynamic areas of potential, not to the static domains of past virtue or vice. In turn, our attention co-creates a world that’s charged with meaning and love.