Martin Heidegger's Aletheia and Simone Weil's Attention

"Essential attention"

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I am still working my way through Heidegger's lectures on Heraclitus. In the first section, Heidegger demonstrates that the unconcealment of Being as Aletheia is the ground from which metaphysics emerges. Metaphysics emerges from Being and therefore is not the inception of Being itself. Not being the inceptual ground of Being itself, metaphysics is not the last word; we must look further back to the ground of Being from which they emerged.

Aletheia, or unconcealment of Being, is not a “thing” or an “idea.” It is “physis,” an emerging that brings into the light (unconceals) that “which is” as truth before metaphysics can lay a hand on it. That the tree in the meadow “is” (aletheia) is a truth of Being that inceptually precedes the category of “treeness” by which its substance is defined (metaphysics). This is a powerful insight because it affects our understanding of logos, which is discussed in the second section of the lectures. Heidegger’s convincing claim is that for two thousand years, since Plato and Aristotle, we have understood logos very narrowly as “logic,” a derivative of metaphysics. Heidegger claims that logic is the science of metaphysics. We understand “treeness” through logical, syllogistic expressions, which of themselves ignore the grounds of those expressions as the inceptual “is,” or Being of the tree, which is primordial to the metaphysical logic. Thus, logic is only “a” means of determining truth and is bound within metaphysics' narrow confines. That the tree “is” (aletheia) is the primordial inceptual ground preceding any logical, metaphysical notion of “treeness” (metaphysics).

Heidegger is brilliant in explaining aletheia as the unconcealment of Being and, therefore, the grounds of metaphysics. Still, he can be frustratingly silent or obscure in describing how one goes about tapping into “aletheia.” How does one reach into the “is” of the tree hidden in its Being, which inceptually precedes the metaphysical, logical understanding of the “treeness” of the tree?

Simone Weil, a French philosopher not known for any Heideggerian hermeneutics, has the answer. One of Weil’s foundational concepts is “attention.” She does not mean attention the way most of us practice it. Just because we “pay attention” to a speaker and even can paraphrase their thoughts back to them does not mean we paid attention in Weil’s mind. Attention for Weil is like Heidegger’s phenomenological openness and docility to “that which is” emerging as aletheia. Attention is the fundamental framework for engaging Heidegger’s “Aletheia." Combining Heidegger’s language with Weil’s, we might call it “essential attention.”

“Attention consists in suspending our thought; letting it become available, empty and able to be penetrated by the object. It means holding the idea close to oneself, but at a lower level and not in contact with it, forced to utilize the diverse knowledge we have acquired. Our thought should be, to all particular and already formed thoughts, like someone on a mountain who, as they look ahead, perceives at the same time what is below—many forests and plains—but without looking there. And above all, our thought must be empty, expectant, without searching, but ready to receive the object meant to penetrate it in its naked truth.”

~ Weil, Simone. Awaiting God (p. 26). Fresh Wind Press. Kindle Edition.