A working library is a blog about work, reading & technology by Mandy Brown

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2023-01-27 22:00:18

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 process characterizes this scattered mode of awareness. Since it also has a low tolerance for boredom, it does not admit of the profound idleness that benefits the creative process. Walter Benjamin calls this deep boredom a “dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” 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.

I hold those first two sentences lightly—it’s self-serving for Han to attribute the cultural achievements of society to characteristics that have been especially helpful for his field of philosophy, and I am unwilling to reject the possibility that other modes—especially non-Western, non-colonialist modes of thinking—have produced great cultural achievements. (Albeit ones probably erased or dismissed by Western thinkers.) That said, I do take to heart his diagnosis of our current predicament, especially with respect to the lack of boredom.