Attending - patient contemplation focused on a particular being - is a
central ethical activity that has not been recognized by any of the main
moral systems in the European philosophical tradition. That tradition
has imagined that the moral agent is primarily a problem solver and
world changer when what might be needed most is a witness. Moral theory
has been agonized by dualism - motivation is analyzed into beliefs and
desires, descriptions of facts and dissatisfactions with them, while
action is represented as an effort to lessen dissatisfaction by altering
the empirical world. In Attending Warren Heiti traces an alternative
genealogy of ethics, drawing from the Platonism recovered by Simone Weil
and developed in the work of Iris Murdoch, John McDowell, and Jan
Zwicky. According to Weil, virtue is knowledge, knowledge is embodied,
and the knower is nested in an ecosystem of relationships. Instead of
analyzing and solving theoretical problems, Heiti aims to clarify the
terrain by setting up objects of attention from more than one
discipline, including not only philosophy but also literature,
psychology, film, and visual art. The traditional picture captures one
important type of ethical activity: faced with a moral problem, one
looks to a general rule to furnish the solution. But not all problems
conform to this model. Heiti offers an alternative: to see what is
needed, one attends to the particular being.
