Iain McGilchrist uses the word “attention” a lot in The Master and His Emissary. It is, for him, somehow fundamental to what it means to be a human being.
He says, “Attention is not just another ‘function’ alongside other cognitive functions.” That is, it’s not like an ability to do maths or to produce language; it is something more fundamental.
He suggests that attention doesn’t merely shape how we experience things. It constitutes our very experience of thing-ness: of objects, of a world, of a me. “[Attention’s] ontological status is of something prior to functions and even to things.”
I don’t exactly disagree with McG. Attention, as I understand it, is what makes up experience.
But reading M&HE I lament the lack of dhammic vocabulary. If I am going to agree, or disagree, I want greater granularity for the conditions and processes and ripenings under consideration. I want this for myself of course, but I also want it for McGilchrist. I think dhammic vocabulary, dhammic concepts, would improve his understanding of Hemisphere Lateralization and human-being-ness more broadly.
Sometimes McG’s “attention” points in the same direction as Saññā, recognizing and categorizing experience. Sometimes it seems more like Diṭṭhi, view that colors our interpretation of experience. And sometimes it’s just good old Manasikāra, the foregrounding of some aspect of experience. [1]
When he zooms out all the way, when “attention” is doing the ontologically-prior-thing, I think he’s talking about something like Rob Burbea’s Fabrication. This idea that the world of our experience is fundamentally dependent on, and completely suffused by, the being that is fabricating that experience.
Your thoughts?
—
[1] Of course none of these are separate. They are different aspects of the flow of cognition which we can foreground for consideration.
