Cultural Achievement Undermines Contemplative Attention

Excessive positivity also expresses itself as an excess of stimuli, information, and impulses. It radically changes the structure and economy of attention. Perception becomes fragmented and scattered. Moreover, the mounting burden of work makes it necessary to adopt particular dispositions toward time and attention [Zeitund Aufmerksamkeitstechnik]; this in turn affects the structure of attention and cognition. The attitude toward time and environment known as “multitasking” does not represent civilizational progress. Human beings in the late-modern society of work and information are not the only ones capable of multitasking. Rather, such an aptitude amounts to regression. Multitasking is commonplace among wild animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival in the wilderness.

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We owe the cultural achievements of humanity—which include philosophy—to deep, contemplative attention. Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention. A rash change of focus between different tasks, sources of information, and processes characterizes this scattered mode of awareness. Since it also has a low tolerance for boredom, it does not admit the profound idleness that benefits the creative process. Walter Benjamin calls this deep boredom a “dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”1 If sleep represents the high point of bodily relaxation, deep boredom is the peak of mental relaxation. A purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available. Benjamin laments that the dream bird’s nests of tranquillity and time are vanishing in the modern world. No longer does one “spin and weave.” Boredom is a “warm gray fabric on the inside, with the most lustrous and colorful silks”; “[i]n this fabric we wrap ourselves when we dream.” We are “at home . . . in the arabesques of its lining.”2 As tranquillity vanishes, the “gift of listening” goes missing, as does the “community of listeners.” Our community of activity [Aktivgemeinschaft] stands diametrically opposed to such rest. The “gift of listening” is based on the ability to grant deep, contemplative attention—which remains inaccessible to the hyperactive ego.