CHAPTER 2

The Attentive Eye / The Attentive Ear: Learning (and Unlearning) Focus in the Enlightenment

Ewan Jones

We live, it’s often asserted, in a distracted age. New digital technologies, the widespread prevalence of ADHD, a sharpening corporate focus upon the “attention economy”: All these factors contribute to the sense of a pressing crisis for concentration.1 Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again (2022) offers but one recent instance of a spate of popular works that would counteract informational overload.2 Scholarship impels and responds to this social concern: A discursive space that we can loosely designate “attention studies” encompasses cutting-edge work in experimental psychology, computer science, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and empirical aesthetics.3

Concurrent with such empirical work, a number of genealogies of attention have explored the historical and social circumstances that condition and inflect our intrinsic cognitive capacities. Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Attention: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (1999) offers an influential account of how the developing nineteenth-century psychology of attention (and the depredations of a rapidly developing global capitalism) transfigure spectatorial focus in impressionist painting. David Marno, Natalie M. Phillips, and Lily Gurton-Wachter have explored how poetry inherits and transfigures cultural practices of attending.4 Matthew Riley, Nicholas Matthew, and Carmel Raz are among those to have charted similar narratives for music theory and performance.5

Such work, however, has seldom inquired how the specific channel of sensory input itself changes the nature and modality of attention. How does the attentive eye differ from the attentive ear? The question holds cross-historical pertinence, for the overwhelming association of focus and absorption with specifically ocular forms of culture extends from the Enlightenment into contemporary cognitive psychology. Its persistence is the substance of this chapter, which advances three interlocking claims. First, it charts the extent to which visual art sought to represent and to prove Descartes’s revolutionary conceptualization of attention, as a mental faculty that mediated cognition and affect. Second, it examines how a smaller number of Enlightenment thinkers tested this ocular emphasis by appealing to other senses—most obviously the haptic and the aural. For Henry Home, Lord Kames, poetry represented a privileged site of contention, given its constitutive appeal both to the eye (through imagery) and to the ear (through prosody). For Thomas Reid, meanwhile, both touch and sound facilitated access to nondiscursive experience, which might overcome the “habits of inattention” that invariably beset human subjects.

Finally, by distinguishing between these separate channels of sensory input, this chapter endeavors to demonstrate that the Enlightenment posited an attentive ear that differed in kind—and not just degree—from the attentive eye. More specifically, aurality enabled the recovery of a truly radical suggestion in Descartes’s conception: that attention and distraction, so far from existing as opposed or mutually exclusive states, might instead exist in a dynamic and dialectical relation. However much a quasi-scientific mode of taxonomic Enlightenment portraiture would seek both to model and to engender attention, the competing stimuli of any visual array necessarily involve distraction for the subject who beholds for any length of time. The constitutively temporal nature of music only underscores this fact. Accordingly, I argue, the attentive ear represents a unique means of challenging both the visualist paradigm and the preference for undivided attention, which continue to dominate modern aesthetics and empirical psychology alike.

* * *

Cultural historians frequently agree that distraction is a constitutively modern problem—whatever “modernity” means. For Jonathan Crary, the nineteenth-century concern over attentional deficit, facilitated by the physio-psychological work of Wundt, Helmholtz, and others, signals the demise of the “transcendental” Kantian subject, who formerly and assuredly bound the world, via the synthetic unity of apperception. Cognitive focus, in this account, proved so little a problem for the eighteenth century that Anglophone authors from the period “had no need of an idea of attention (the word is of marginal significance in the work of Locke, Hume, and Berkeley if present at all).”6

Historians of the eighteenth century beg to differ. Natalie Phillips’s Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth Century Literature demonstrates just how much Enlightenment thought did worry over cognitive bottlenecks. The mass circulation of the commercial novel, the rise of the leisured (and “distractable”) reader, the growing circulation of exotic commodities: All these contribute to a newly dispersed subject. In Phillips’s case, the prior moment of attentional plenitude was marked not by the Kantian self but the attentive and self-sufficient Cartesian cogito.7 Now, we cultural historians are naturally bound to our periods: We have a strong and understandable urge to perceive our own area of specialization as the birthplace of whichever idea assumes newfound contemporary salience. But I do not believe that cultures were ever not distracted. As David Marno has persuasively demonstrated in a lengthy exploration of premodern and early modern cultures of Christian spiritual exercises, Western culture has from time immemorial betrayed anxiety over the perfectibility (or decay) of human attention.8 While the current demands that digital culture places upon the modern subject are indeed importantly unprecedented, this cultural continuity enables the historical archive to offer surprising resources for the present.

To argue that point, let’s start with the figure whom Phillips and others have often taken to incarnate the ideal of the properly attentive subject—Descartes. It certainly is true that often attention serves, in his writing, to procure clear and distinct knowledge: “So long as we attend to a truth which we perceive very clearly,” he states in his reply to the seventh set of Objections to the Meditations, “we cannot doubt it.”9 I think, therefore I am; I attend, therefore I truly am.

Yet the later Descartes posits a more complex role for attention, which interestingly mediates between cognition and affective states such as wonder, curiosity, and obsession. Les passions de l’âme §53 introduces wonder (admiration) as “the first of all the passions,” in that it marks our encounter with a surprising or novel object.10 Yet the simple appearance of a novel object “does not make us retain it in our memory unless our idea of it is strengthened in our brain by some passion, or perhaps also by an application of our intellect as fixed by our will in a special state of attention and reflection” (§76).11 As we mature, “we should try to free ourselves from this inclination [to wonder] as much as possible. For we may easily make good its absence through that special state of reflection and attention which our will can always impose upon our understanding when we judge the matter before us to be worth serious consideration.”12 Volitional attention, which had supplemented instinctive wonder, now replaces it entirely.

Yet Descartes immediately goes on to suggest that this “special state” is not always quite so simply under a subject’s control:

[Wonder] seems to diminish with use, for the more we encounter unusual things which we wonder at, the more we find ourselves accustomed to stop wondering at them and to regard any we subsequently come upon as common. Nevertheless, when it is excessive and makes us fix our attention solely on the first image of the objects before us without acquiring any further knowledge about them, it leaves behind a habit which makes the soul disposed to dwell in the same way on every other object coming before it which appears at all novel.13

The very same faculty of attention, which should curb wonder’s excess, now only exacerbates it, devolving instead into monomania, the idée fixe. Where the wonderstruck child proves merely absent-minded, the adult suffers from an attentional hypertrophy, which eagerly “fixes” salient stimuli, to the detriment of other possible experience. Descartes thus postulates a remarkably dynamical relation between attention and its putative antonyms: Riveted focus itself generates inattention to the world.

Over the ensuing centuries, a dazzling array of visual art—painting, engraving, photography—would seek both to represent and to confirm the cognitive-affective taxonomy of Les passions de l’âme. The first and most significant of these adoptions is the Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière, a series of monthly lectures delivered in 1690 by Charles Le Brun, whose status as chancellor of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture gave him unrivaled control over the training and advancement of court painters. Le Brun’s lectures were published eight years after their delivery, with a series of accompanying etchings and diagrams that seek to represent with mathematical precision the full Cartesian suite of passions (hate, desire, joy, sadness, fear, hope, despair).14 Le Brun specifies these physical corollaries with a meticulousness that is frequently comical—attention itself being a case in point:

Esteem can only represent itself through attention and by the movement of those parts of the body that seem to be fixed upon the object that causes this attention: for here the eyebrows will appear to advance over the eyes and to the side of the nose, while the other end (of the eyebrows) will appear slightly raised. The eye will be wide open and the pupil fixed, the veins and the muscles of the forehead will appear somewhat inflated, along with those around the eyes, the nostrils will seem to incline towards the lower part of the face, the cheeks will also be slightly lowered toward the jaws, the mouth slightly open, its sides pulling back and leaning down. The head will also appear to move forward and lean upon the object that causes the admiration.15

Le Brun’s coupling of esteem and attention attempts to work through the problem that beset Descartes’s discussion of wonder. “Esteem” is clearly a positive state, reserved for objects that merit such exalted regard. But this spiritual condition can only manifest itself through the mediation of attention, along with its attendant physiological corollaries. We thereby discover one of the defining characteristics of the attentive eye, as Enlightenment thought would develop it: an isomorphism between the subject and object of vision. The subject learns to attend by looking correctly; states of attention are themselves one of the first things that she learns to behold. It’s surely not incidental that Gustave Audran’s engraving of the attitude is promoted to the frontispiece of the 1760 English-language edition of the Conférence, where it operates as a preparatory visual imperative: attend (Figure 2.1). The isomorphism of the attentive eye persists all the way to Michael Fried’s famous articulation of absorption, in which the art viewer concentrates upon subjects of concentration (the boy engrossed in his task of blowing bubbles).16

But as with Descartes before him, Le Brun struggles to regulate the relation between affect and appropriately channeled focus. If “esteem” can only represent itself through the cognitive state (and physical corollaries) of attention, this does not mean that every act of attention necessarily implies the benign moral value of esteem. Earlier versions of the Conférence vacillate between the cognate (but not identical terms) of attention and admiration. Take a look back at Audran’s plate: Might we not speculate that the subject seems rather unhealthily riveted upon his unseen object?17

The fraught attempt to secure a “pure” form of attention continued into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The French archaeologist Alexandre Lenoir’s Observations scientifiques et critiques sur le génie (1821) follows Le Brun’s example in describing attention as “a mental exertion [tension d’esprit] so concentrated upon an object that it cannot be deviated from it,” yet which is imprecisely demarcated from the “love, or any other carnal sentiment” that would produce an idée fixe.18 Lenoir dutifully recites the standard physiological indices: raised eyebrows, open mouth, focused pupil. Yet even Le Brun’s own illustrations, he concludes, fall short: “The attention that he has drawn is not simple attention, by which I mean that state that observes in a calmness of spirit; his is combined with fear, because he has raised the eyebrow of the figure, opened his mouth and given him an expression of pain.”19 Johann Kaspar Lavater’s remarkably successful Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (1775–78) demonstrate the ongoing struggle to distinguish good and bad forms of attentiveness within minute physiognomic changes. Attention here represents a supreme moral virtue: “The attentive,” writes Lavater, “are capable of all of which man ought to be capable”; even so small a task as the “taking, holding, or returning a tea-cup” can reveal exquisite sensibility.20 Yet none of Lavater’s sketches clearly achieve the “attention simple” that Lenoir strove to attain: attention “excited by desire” clearly falls short (Figure 2.2); attention “without real interest” (Figure 2.3) suggests a vacancy of spirit.

This Cartesian prioritization of the ocular endures in a remarkable variety of settings, down to the present age. The nineteenth-century French electro-physiologist Duchenne de Boulogne, to take but one example, used new technologies so as to compel and capture attention—passing electric currents through his experimental subjects, so as to stimulate the raised eyebrows that for Le Brun corresponded so exactly to the relevant attitude, and then capturing such states through the recent innovation of photography. De Boulogne visualized affective states that remained remarkably unchanged from Les Passions de l’âme: fear, anger, joy, and, naturally, attention, which, as with Lavater, assumes “pure” and “lascivious” forms. One plate reveals a young girl’s ocular muscles forced, by electric current, to contract, while a bright light forces her other eyebrow to lower for the sake of contrast (Figure 2.4).

The domination of the attentive eye similarly persists in the discursive field that most fully shapes the contemporary understanding of cognitive focus: empirical psychology. While theoretical postulates such as the “cocktail party” theory of attending do consider how subjects process parallel channels of aural stimuli, the overwhelming majority of empirical studies rely upon optical recognition tasks. The expedient is in large part practical: It simply is easier to measure whether a subject does or does not detect a punctual stimulus within a given visual array than it is to probe the more complex and temporally embedded nature of auditory input.21

Yet there are strong reasons to believe that the optical paradigm that so dominates cognitive science—with its emphasis upon punctual stimuli and the binary yes/no approach to the perceptual capture of salient events—does not adequately describe even visual experience. Let me briefly give an example, before showing why such an approach proves still less adequate to the phenomenology of sound that justifies this collection of essays. A moment ago, I stressed the isomorphism of the attentive eye: The subject attends correctly to correct practice of attention. The engravings that accompany Le Brun’s Conférences, like the photographs with which de Boulogne illuminates his electro-physiology, have something in common with the punctual stimuli of contemporary cognitive science, insofar as the trained observer can “correctly” perceive the state of attention in a snapshot glance. Yet visual experience often does not possess this quality: Salient stimuli unfold in time, make competing multifocal demands upon a beholder, exist on the fringe of consciousness.

To indicate what I mean, consider an artwork that Michael Fried takes to exemplify absorption: Carle van Loo’s “The preaching of Saint Augustine before Valère” (Figure 2.5), which depicts a mainly attentive group that hearkens to the address of the eponymous orator.

An obvious exception to this general focus, as Fried points out, is the absent-minded boy at the right of the tableau, whose distraction, he claims, merely “throws into relief the intense absorption of everybody else.” But does this summary capture a viewer’s plausible phenomenology? The foregrounded prominence of Augustine (along with his pointing index finger) naturally also captures our preliminary focal attention, in keeping with the isomorphism described above. Yet it is not quite true that “everybody else” is focused: Note the woman in the very center of the tableau, who, in contrast to the companion to her side, casts her gaze not at Augustine, but down at the ground. She may even be asleep—or she may be in a reverie that enables deeper reflection upon the discourse. If we contrast her attitude to the boy, two very different forms of distraction arise: Where her eyes are closed and downcast, he gazes levelly out of the picture frame, as if to engage not simply “something that occupies him” so much as the beholder directly. It is as if he asks: You, who a moment ago was following Augustine’s discourse properly, like all the rest—have you allowed yourself to become distracted? Yet perhaps, if you have, this is not so simply a bad thing. Perhaps—like the woman, who may slumber yet may also attend differently—this painting calls into question whether unifocal absorption really is the simple good that Fried claimed. Perhaps we might further contrast the unabashed boy to the scribe, whose dutiful transcription significantly points in the opposite direction from the orator’s index figure. All this taken together, we might well start to wonder whether the amanuensis’s absorption amounts to true attending: whether von Loos’s painting does not rather set up a tension between living flesh and dead letter.

* * *

My brief reading of von Loos’s painting teases out the difficulty that visual art attempts to encounter when representing and testing the Cartesian theory of attention. This difficulty is compounded, so soon as we consider the artwork not only as a simple object in space, to be taken in with a punctual glance, but as also subject to a temporal unfolding. In order for us to dismiss the boy as “distracted,” we must first (ironically) have been distracted from the foregrounded saint to his unruly influence. What, then, if we switch from the attentive eye to the attentive ear? We might expect that music theory would find itself in a better position to explain the temporal nature of attention and to permit a more nuanced account of its relation to distraction than does the optical tradition that stretches from Le Brun to Fried. In fact, as several recent critics have pointed out, much relevant scholarship from the same period considers music from broadly the same rigidly Cartesian perspective that so dominated visual art. Roger Grant has recently demonstrated the extent to which a Cartesian taxonomy of passion proved one of the central planks in eighteenth-century musical theory (especially in the specific case of choral music). As with the examples of visual art that we considered above, music could represent a given affect, given its formal structure. Or—as Grant expounds at length—music could also engender a given state of passion more directly by operating upon the auditor’s nervous system, itself conceived as a series of “tuned” sympathetic strings.22

Several good examples of what this taxonomic consideration of affect looks like in practice arise in Matthew Riley’s study of German Enlightenment musical theory. Riley cites Johann Mattheson’s first-person account of musical experience, whose separate elaborations (awe, wonder, fear, joy) are familiar from the preceding discussion:

When I hear a solemn symphony in church, a sense of reverential awe falls over me. If an instrumental chorus joins in, this brings about an elevated sense of wonder within me. If the organ begins to storm and thunder, a divine fear arises in me. And if everything concludes with a joyful Halleluia, my heart leaps within my body.23

So far, the constitutive isomorphism that I identified with visual art holds: The affect of the auditor corresponds to (or is induced by) the formal properties of the artwork. Yet when we focus upon the question of attention, this equivalence vanishes. In contrast to visual art, which can seek directly to represent states of concentration or absorption, music has no obvious correlate. For what would be the aural equivalent to the raised eyebrows that for Le Brun signaled intense focus? That various answers could be essayed—harmonic resolution, motif, melodic surprise—itself suggests that no one constituent part of music can play the role.

It is perhaps for this reason that the anxiety over cognitive distraction, which even the visual appropriation of the Cartesian passions could not fully banish, emerges still more powerfully for the would-be attentive ear. The subject’s struggle to maintain focus emerges in communal settings such as church services, as satirized in the second plate from William Hogarth’s moral series of engravings, Industry and Idleness (1747), where the upstanding Francis Goodchild diligently singing with his master’s daughter from a hymnal, not quite concealing a sleeping man with his frockcoat; and in the rapidly changing context of concert performance, through which the forms of dispersal tolerated during the Baroque period (where auditors were permitted to wander around, talk, and even eat during recitation) gave rise to the expectation of silent absorption. Hogarth again satirized the difficulty of undistracted performance with his 1741 etching The Enraged Musician, where a violinist is unable to proceed with his practice given the commotion outside his window, where drunkards, ballad-hawkers, and squawking parrots congregate.

Riley’s study amply demonstrates the broader consequences of these changing attitudes to musical attention. Once again, the contrast with visual art proves instructive: Where Le Brun sought to train aspirant painters and illustrators through a series of mathematical, readily reproducible specifications, the question of expertise becomes both more important and more amorphous in a musical setting. “Attentive listening,” Riley summarizes in reference to the music theory of Johann Nikolaus Forkel, “is now an attitude that the listener brings to the music, not something that flows from the ‘give and take’ between stimulus and response.”24 The capacity to attend correctly separates the connoisseur (Kenner) from the amateur (Liebhaber), the civilized man from the “savage.”

In light of this growing focus upon expertise, the identification of “proper” attention with the formal features of a given artwork becomes still more difficult to secure than was the case for visual art. As Riley notes, C. P. E. Bach is frequently celebrated by connoisseurs as a composer who encouraged attentiveness; yet his frequent deviations from regular presentation of the Hauptsatz, in terms of phrase structure and hierarchy, produced “disorientating harmonic digressions, sudden pauses, apparently unmotivated contrasts.”25 Nicholas Matthew has similarly treated the “surprise chord” in the Andante movement of Haydn’s “Surprise Symphony” as an instance of forceful cognitive capture. Yet such a conception presupposes a listener hitherto distracted: As Matthew notes, public opinion quickly understood the chord as “Haydn’s bid to startle sleeping concertgoers or to scare inattentive ladies.”26 The critic whose concentration remains undisturbed misses the force of surprise.

What, then, would stand as the musical equivalent to the raised eyebrow with which visual art sought to train and represent attention? The problem is not a lack of structural features but rather a surfeit—surprise chords, dynamic contrasts, melodic variation, regular meter—which pushes subsequent analysis in mutually exclusive directions. Johann Georg Sulzer’s General Theory of the Fine Arts (1771–74) serves as a case in point. The first two parts of this triumvirate of essays respectively consider the foundations of aesthetic unity (with particular concern for visual art) and the creative process of the artist. In both cases, attention is a desideratum: The painter can model variety in uniformity by presenting common physiognomies while altering posture and dress; the artist learns his or her craft by inducing a state of absorptive isolation.27 When Sulzer moves to consider music in the third and final essay, however, his successive identification of attention with both rhythm and melody generates significant tension. The former demonstrates how repetition scaffolds cognitive focus: “There is nothing better for sustaining ourselves in the same emotion than a uniform, evenly measured motion, by which attention to a given object may be secured.”28 Melody, however, seems to enforce the diametrically opposite message: The goal of music, which is to maintain the listener in a given state of emotion, “is not possible by simply repeating the phrase, no matter how excellent it may be, since the repetition of anything is boring, and one’s attention can quickly wane.”29

It is not that these competing attentional directives could not possibly be reconciled. We can readily imagine an integrationist account that viewed metrical uniformity as preparing (or accompanying) melodic variation. Yet Sulzer’s rather abstract and schematic treatment does not demonstrate how they might unite in actual experience, as, for example, common facial physiognomy and variety of posture obviously intersect within the picture plane. The remainder of this essay shifts its own focus to a different school of eighteenth-century aesthetics, which certainly did account for the dynamic, time-bound nature of aural experience. The Scottish Common Sense school of philosophy did not so extensively treat music as a separate domain as did their German near-contemporaries. Yet their broader consideration of aurality involved three crucial factors: first, a more sustained contrast of sensory experience that have hitherto been considered separately (the attentive eye and the attentive ear); second, the treatment of artistic modes (such as poetry) that combined representational and nonrepresentational aspects (imagery and prosody); and third, a more positive role for distraction than the simple negation of an absorption for which most aesthetic theory continues to press. In the process, they anticipate the more dynamic accounts of attention that emerge in the nascent psychology of Ribot and James, before being superseded by the later cognitive focus upon the punctual visual stimulus.

Both works situate this treatment of aurality within their wider struggle against what Reid called The Way of Ideas—the representational philosophies of Locke and Hume, which contend that we come to know the world only through the mental mediation of “Ideas” or “impressions.” Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism (1762) has strong grounds for being considered the single most successful work of eighteenth-century aesthetics in the English-speaking world. This substantial two-volume work offers a hodgepodge of off-the-cuff theorizing and delineation of choice specimens from several artistic media. Kames intends his work to resist the “chimerical” nature of “ideal” philosophy—offering, in the process, what to my mind is the first significantly cognitive account of aesthetic experience. Throughout this endeavor, “the pleasures of the eye and the ear” are brought together and teased apart.30 Kames is commonly read as part of the “triumph of associationism,” according to which a broadly Lockean framework came to replace Francis Hutcheson’s intrinsic conception of a “Common Sense” for beauty—with the consequence that statements of taste devolve into expressions of culturally relative values.31 In fact, however, Kames extends Hutcheson’s work into a remarkably sensitive account of the generative constraints—the bottlenecks and bandwidths—inherent to human cognition.

The contrast of sound and vision anchors this account from the start: “I shall begin,” Kames declares, “with those beauties of language that arise from sound; after which will follow the beauties of language considered as significant: this order appears natural; for the sound of a word is attended to, before we consider its signification” (EC 4). Sonority, then, captures focus, and in a wide variety of ways: Kames successively enumerates the manner in which grammar (EC 28), sentence structure (EC 47), pause (EC 80), and rhyme (EC 109–110) all work to “rouse” the attention. A “uniform” prosody, such as he alleges French to be, proves “extremely fatiguing” (EC 90–91); the admixture of smoothness and harshness, peculiar to the English vernacular, counteracts this tendency (EC 10).

More remarkable still than this cognitive reconceptualization of what had previously been considered largely in evaluative terms (the alleged “superiority” of French or English), is the manner in which Kames sets it to work—in service of the evocation of lived temporal experience. Elements of Criticism is nearly unique among canonical eighteenth-century aesthetic texts for the richness of its proto-phenomenological description—for its conveyance of how it feels to read, in real time. Cognitive focus, on this account, is no simple ideal for which to strive; rather, it is as a dynamical state that paradoxically requires continual disruption in order to endure. The varied caesuras within the heroic couplets of Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock offer a case in point. Where much criticism praises Pope’s epigrammatic concision, or putative concord of sound and sense, Kames emphasizes how the varying placement and effect of the medial caesuras interrupt the flow of verse. The pause that follows an accented syllable “occasions a sudden stop without preparation, which rouses the mind” (EC 97); a caesura after an unaccented syllable, by contrast, prepares the mind for rest, and as such is “calm and sweet” (EC 98). Kames’s stipulations may sound programmatic; but what really matters is the way in which these separate medial caesuras are integrated within a broader experience of reading—where a mind craves not only variation, but also variation in variation itself.

Having defined and listed exempla from his taxonomy of pauses, Kames gives way to a sudden doubt: “Musing on the foregoing subject, I begin to doubt whether all this while I have not been in a reverie, and whether the scene before me, full of objects new and singular, be not mere fairy-land. Is there any truth in the appearance, or is it wholly a work of imagination?” (EC 102). The interjection proves ironic to the extent that it mirrors the “chimerical” idealism from which Kames wished to deliver himself. Yet this self-interruption performs precisely the work that Elements of Criticism had imputed to Pope’s abrupt masculine caesura: The mind, having been drawn in, is roused to life by sudden self-suspension. It is for this reason that Kames immediately answers his skeptical self-query in the emphatic negative: “We cannot doubt of its reality.” A generation previously, Francis Hutcheson had established uniformity within variety as the mark of beauty, identifying it most powerfully in geometrical objects (squares, equilateral triangles, rhombuses).32 Kames now self-consciously cites “uniformity within variety,” while converting it from a spatial into a temporal register: It marks the pressing need for a subject with finite cognitive resources to replenish attention through shifting its focus.

We can contrast Kames’s “reverie” with a variety of cognitive cognates that this essay has previously thrown up: absorption, spotlighting, “attention pure.” Kames, in contrast to Lavater and others, proposes a discontinuous mode of experience, where interruptive auditory stimulus corresponds to a subject who has taken conscious leave of herself. That Kames used “reverie” advisedly is shown in the frequency with which he returns to the term: “The reader’s passions are never sensibly moved, till he be thrown into a kind of reverie; in which state, forgetting that he is reading, he conceives every incident as passing in his presence, precisely as if he were an eye-witness” (EC 68–69). We can differentiate this formulation sharply from Locke’s own conception in Essay Concerning Human Understanding. “When Ideas float in our mind, without any reflection or regard of the Understanding,” he states, “it is that which the French call reverie; our language has scarce a name for it.”33 Locke immediately and categorically opposes this state to attention.

Kames’s reverie, by contrast, does not exclude cognitive focus. Indeed, it enables a subject to attend differently to a given object (Pope’s varied couplets) than a purely volitional and unifocal absorption allows. Poetry is peculiarly able to discharge this work, to the extent that we shuttle continually between its signifying qualities (the paraphrasable statements that a Popean couplet advances) and rhythmical effects, which exist on both a larger and a smaller level, and which may not always be consciously perceived. But Elements of Criticism offers several other real-life examples of where sensory suspension sharpens perception, as “between sleeping and waking, when all the senses are bound and suspended, music is far sweeter than when one is fully waking” (EC 337n). In such cases, “no object in the field is seen distinctly, but that singly which fixes the attention: in a profound reverie that totally occupies the attention, we scarce see what is directly before us” (EC 338). (In an interesting aside, Kames explains the terror of the stillness of night as the impossibility of being distracted.)

These repeated references to reverie import into aesthetics something like what cognitive scientists now call “flow states,” where the human subject can discharge intense cognitive focus in a quasi-automatic fashion.34 This dynamic conception differentiates Kames’s picture of the mind from the contemporaneous thought of Rousseau, which accepts Locke’s characterization of the mode as unreflective—yet merely inverts the valuation, such that distraction trumps rational thought. Elements of Criticism rather suggests that such dynamic limit-states for attention themselves hold cognitive significance. To clarify what this may be, the final section of this essay turns to the related philosophy of Thomas Reid.

* * *

The Elements of Criticism tells us, with an acuity that rivals any other work in aesthetics from the eighteenth century, how it feels to attend to an artwork. Yet its bricolage-like nature impeded Kames from offering any sustained definition of attention, or broader consideration of its quotidian operation and etiology. Several thinkers associated with the Aberdeen and Glasgow schools of Common Sense probed such questions.35 These included Thomas Reid, who extends three of the fundamental features that characterized my earlier account of Kames’s aesthetics: an abiding interest in the differing attentive modalities of the sense organs, taken together and in isolation, with a particular concern for how aural and tactile stimuli differ from the visual; a concern to probe the difference between representational and nonrepresentational modes of thinking; and a dynamic conception of attention itself, which relies upon variation, interruption, or distraction in order to sustain itself.

“Let scholastic sophisters entangle themselves in their own cobwebs,” Reid declares by way of prolegomenon to An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), “I am resolved to take my own existence, and existence of other things, upon trust; and to believe that snow is cold, and honey sweet, whatever they may say to the contrary.”36 “They,” here, are the Lockes and Humes of the world, whose vocabulary of “ideas,” “mental representations,” and “schemata” he, like Kames, dismisses from the start. In order to demonstrate how we can take the world “on trust,” Reid introduces a central distinction between two forms of processing sensory stimuli. “Artificial signs,” on his account, name a kind of relation that proves merely conventional: The word gold bears an arbitrary relation to the valuable metal that it indicates. “Natural signs,” by contrast, bind together sensory experience and cognitive content through “the original constitution of our nature” (IHM 42).

Facial expression offers a ready example of the sort of “natural sign” that Reid has in mind. Reid agrees with Le Brun that affects and dispositions convey themselves immediately and unreflectively to the mind of the observer. The Inquiry argues that

the thoughts, purposes, and dispositions of the mind have their natural signs in the features of the face, the modulation of the voice, and the motion and attitude of the body: That, without a natural knowledge of the connexion between these signs and the things signified by them, language could never have been invented and established among men: and, That the fine arts are all founded upon this connexion, which we may call the natural language of mankind. (IHM 61)

Reid enumerates three examples of the natural signs: the visual (“features of the face”), the aural (“modulation of the voice”), and the kinesthetic (“motion and attitude of the body”). A recent resurgence of interest in Reid’s philosophy of perception has tended—in keeping with my discussion above—to concentrate upon the first of this triumvirate.37 They have good reason to do so, given the Inquiry’s pioneering formulation of the “geometry of visibles”: a non-Euclidean description of spatial properties that significantly anticipated the later work of Gauss, Riemann, and others. Yet by focusing upon the comparatively overlooked sensory modalities of touch and sound, I aim to demonstrate that Reid produces perhaps the most significantly dynamic formulation of attention that the period has to offer.

In Thomas Reid’s Theory of Perception (2007), Ryan Nichols understands the Inquiry to argue for a distinctive form of realism—according to which we perceive the world directly, without necessary recourse to ideas, impressions, or other mediatory apparatus provided by the Way of Ideas. Nor, Nichols contends, does perception need to depend upon the subjective “sensations” of primary qualities, which the Inquiry introduces as an alternative to such bridges. “Sensations,” he summarizes in a chapter on the topic, “far from being necessarily perceived intermediaries, or the typical immediate objects of acts of perception, are not even contingent causal components in visual perception and are probably not even physically necessary corollaries to perception.”38 Nichols has good textual authority for concluding that such subjective qualia remain “intangible and uncertain.”39 For Reid himself elsewhere acknowledges that the very act of attending to sensations can itself lessen or even entirely efface conscious awareness:

When the mind is agitated by any passion, as soon as we turn our attention from the object to the passion itself, the passion subsides or vanishes, and by that means escapes our enquiry. This, indeed, is common to almost every operation of mind: When it is exerted, we are conscious of it; but then we do not attend to the operation, but to its object. When the mind is drawn off from the object to attend to its own operation, that operation ceases, and escapes our notice.40

Reid’s dynamical theory of attention—which operates in tension with conscious awareness, both of which compete for a subject’s finite bandwidth—here appears negative. We perceive the world until the moment that we foreground that perception—whereupon we no longer do.

Elsewhere, however, Reid would consider this faculty (and its dynamic propensity) in a more productive manner. To do so, we need to turn—once again—from the visual modality, which anchors Nichols’s analysis, so as to consider other forms of sense experience. Touch—which Reid offers as an exemplary natural sign (IHM 61)—offers a case in point. Tactile and visual forms of experience most obviously come into conjunction through Reid’s contribution to the longstanding Molyneux Problem, which asked whether a blind subject, having had their sense restored, could perceive the newly available visual manifold in light of past experience. As Nichols summarizes, Reid held that a sophisticated mathematician such as Nicholas Saunderson (who was indeed blind) could be said to perceive the revealed world immediately through possessing geometric concepts. To this extent, concepts do not require sensations. Yet three-dimensional objects (cubes and spheres) prove different. “To acquire the concept of depth,” Nichols acknowledges, “one must have tactile sensations.”41

I think we can say more about the importance of tactile experience, in addition to its relation both to aurality and to attention in general. To do so, I want to consider at length a passage from the Inquiry’s chapter on that sense. Reid asks the reader to undertake one of his characteristic self-experiments: Lay your hand on the table and attempt to attend to the sensation without forming some idea of the object or its qualities. “It is one thing,” he contends, “to have the sensation, and another to attend to it, and make it a distinct object of reflection. The first is very easy; the last, in most cases, extremely difficult.” We routinely encounter such a sensation; “yet it is never attended to, but passes through the mind instantaneously” (IHM 57).

A moment ago, we saw how attention could exacerbate the fugitive nature of experience: Dwelling on a passion, the passion ceased to be. Here Reid suggests something subtly different: If quotidian experience proves elusive, this might well be because we have been attending in the wrong manner—moving too rapidly from a sensation to that which it customarily signifies. Such, at least, is the suggestion of a passage from the Inquiry that I cite at length for its relevance and beauty. Indeed, it offers an apt summary of my argument as a whole:

May we not hence conclude, that the knowledge of the human faculties is but in its infancy? That we have not yet learned to attend to those operations of the mind, of which we are conscious every hour of our lives? That there are habits of inattention acquired very early, which are as hard to be overcome as other habits? For I think it is probable, that the novelty of this sensation will procure some attention to it in children at first; but being in nowise interesting in itself, as soon as it becomes familiar, it is overlooked, and the attention turned solely to that which it signifies. Thus, when one is learning a language, he attends to the sounds; but when he is master of it, he attends only to the sense of what he would express. If this is the case, we must become as little children again, if we will be philosophers: we must overcome this habit of inattention which has been gathering strength ever since we began to think; a habit, the usefulness of which, in common life, atones for the difficulty it creates to the philosopher, in discovering the first principles of the human mind. (IHM 59)

That human knowledge remains in its “infancy” proves ironic—to the extent that children are precisely what we have forgotten to be. “Habits of inattention” befall us all, precisely through excessive focalized attention to signification. Philosophy might seek to unlearn such habits. Like Kames before him, Reid seeks to deliver us back to a world where “the sound of a word is attended to, before we consider its signification.”

Like Kames before him, moreover, Reid’s emphasis upon prediscursive, nonsignifying, and preconscious mental operation leads him to supplement haptic experience with the attentive ear.42 In the section immediately preceding its invitation to tactile self-experiment, the Inquiry extends the discussion of the “natural language” of “brutes,” who communicate via vocal modulations, facial expressions, and gesture. Language, once recited or sung aloud, decays into silent reading. Aesthetics recapitulates at the social level what the inattentive subject experiences singly: “The arts themselves are merely the language of nature, which we brought into the world with us but have unlearned through disuse, and so find the greatest difficulty in getting it back” (IHM 54).

If such talk might superficially resemble Rousseau’s noble savage, we should remember that Reid’s “brutes,” or children, or dumb individuals, or advanced Cambridge mathematicians, alike lay claim to knowledge. Their adoption and comprehension of “natural signs” does not mark the triumph of expressiveness over science, but a means of knowing the world directly. The Inquiry returns to tactile experience, to drive home the point:

From the time that children begin to use their hands, nature directs them to handle every thing over and over, to look at it while they handle it, and to put it in various positions, and at various distances from the eye. We are apt to excuse this as a childish diversion, because they must be doing something, and have not reason to entertain themselves in a more manly way. But if we think more justly, we shall find that they are engaged in the most serious and important study. (IHM 241)

It’s hard, in short, to think of another Enlightenment thinker who argues that a fetus can have sensations of time and space (IHM 71); or who grants authority to the midwives and nurses that he has consulted (IHM 130).

* * *

By supplementing his sustained consideration of visual experience with a broader treatment of touch and sound, my reading of Reid has reproduced, in microcosmic form, the thinking of this essay as a whole. In doing so, we catch sight of the most dynamic formulation of attention available to eighteenth-century thought, which harnesses the potential of Descartes’s theorization of the affects. We have seen how that Cartesian taxonomy sponsored a series of attempts to police and train proper attention, which visual art itself—and music and poetry all the more—resisted. In the hands of Kames and Reid, over-fixated attention devolves into distraction, while reverie represents a means of thinking (or knowing) differently.

I believe that the replacement of mind-wandering and multifocal attention for the old humanistic value of absorption proves truer to the nature of aesthetic experience, in addition to representing a productive means of relating such experience to contemporary empirical research. Some recent studies challenge the reductive emphasis upon periodic stimuli that, as I noted above, continues to dominate cognitive science. One experiment contrasts the way in which “experts” and “amateurs” contemplate paintings: Eye-tracking devices show that the former’s focus roves widely around the tableau, while the latter fixate upon a foregrounded object.43 In that wandering eye, we locate again the “distracted” boy who gazes back at us from the tableau; the wavering attentive ear, carried downstream by Pope’s couplet prosody; the eighteenth-century subject, who tries to learn to touch a table. We might redescribe the “amateur” as the modern subject who moves straight to signification. The “expert,” in turn, names the body who has rediscovered how to be a child.

Notes

1. 1.  Timothy Wu made the phrase “attention economy” proverbial in his The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016).
2. 2.  Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).
3. 3.  Attention is by some measures the single most-researched topic in William P. Seeley, Attentional Engines: A Perceptual Theory of the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
4. 4.  Natalie Phillips, Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth Century Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 6.
5. 5.  Matthew Riley, Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment (London: Routledge, 2004); Nicholas Matthew, “Interesting Haydn: On Attention’s Materials,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 71, no. 3 (Fall 2018), 655–701; Carmel Raz, “‘To ‘Fill Up, Completely, the Whole Capacity of the Mind’: Listening with Attention in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland,” Music Theory Spectrum, 44, no. 1 (2022), 141–54.
6. 6.  Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Boston, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 18.
7. 7.  Phillips, Distraction: Problems of Attention, 6.
8. 8.  David Marno, Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
9. 9.  René Descartes, “Reply to Objections,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), I, 309.
10. 10.  René Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, I, 325–404, at 350.
11. 11.  Ibid., 355.
12. 12.  Ibid.
13. 13.  Ibid.
14. 14.  The 1698 edition collated several lectures given by Le Brun, who had died eight years previously; it went through numerous editions with various engravings.
15. 15.  Claude Nivelon, Vie de Charles Le Brun et description détaillée de ses ouvrages (Geneva: Droz, 2004), 344; translation mine.
16. 16.  Michael Fried, Theatricality and Absorption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
17. 17.  Bernard Picart’s etchings, based on Le Brun’s sketches, identify the same facial gesture with “veneration.” André Félibien, who as secretary to the Royal Academy was partly responsible for the confusions and inconsistencies in the publication of Le Brun’s lectures, proposes the Greek attendant in Le Brun’s historical painting The Tent of Darius as a model for attention; yet the figure in question more closely resembles Le Brun’s profile of admiration. For more on the history of Félibien’s involvement, see Stephanie Ross, “Painting the Passions: Charles LeBrun’s Conférence Sur L’Expression,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 45, no. 1 (January–March, 1984), 25–47.
18. 18.  Alexandre Lenoir, Observations scientifiques et critiques sur le genie (Paris: 1824), 124; translation mine.
19. 19.  Ibid.
20. 20.  John Kasper Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Thomas Holcroft (London: William Tegg & Co., 1853), 162.
21. 21.  Mari Riess Jones’s dynamic attending theory (DAT) remains a peripheral rival approach in this regard, with its attempt to incorporate the detection of punctual acoustic events into larger rhythmical hierarchies, which operate in the mind of a subject who nevertheless may not consciously perceive them. However intuitive such phrasings may feel to musical experts and amateurs alike, it is easy to see why their complex modeling is difficult to operationalize in a controlled empirical setting. Mari Riess Jones, Time Will Tell: A Theory of Dynamic Attending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
22. 22.  Roger Grant, Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical (New York: Fordham, 2020).
23. 23.  Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg: Christian Herold, 1739; repr. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1954), 208–9; cited and translated in Bonds, “Aesthetics of Instrumental Music,” 393; cited in Matthew Riley, Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment (London: Routledge, 2004), 21.
24. 24.  Riley, Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment, 109.
25. 25.  Ibid., 151.
26. 26.  Nicholas Mathew, “Interesting Haydn: On Attention’s Materials,” 677.
27. 27.  Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch, Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch, ed. Nancy Baker and Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 47, 58.
28. 28.  Ibid., 94.
29. 29.  Ibid., 101.
30. 30.  Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 2 vols. (Charles Ingham: Dublin, 1772), II, ii; subsequent references are given parenthetically within the text. While my reading concentrates upon sound, landscape gardening (EC 277–89) both reflects the contemporary discourse of taste and rises above it, through a discussion of how the “wandering path” through variegated scenery engages and interrupts cognition. (Kames holds Chinese gardens to be the most successful in this regard.)
31. 31.  Peter Kivy elides Kames with Archibold Alison’s attack on Hutcheson. See Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 203. Paul Guyer judiciously designates Kames’s work as the most significant eighteenth-century attempt to reconcile Shaftesbury’s cognitivism with Addison’s “free play” (A History of Modern Aesthetics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), I, 177–94).
32. 32.  Frances Hutcheson, “Treatise I: An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design,” in Philosophical Writings (London: J. M. Dent, 1994): 7–44, at 15–16.
33. 33.  John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 227.
34. 34.  See Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Happiness (London: Random House, 2013).
35. 35.  Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Taste (London: 1759), for example, considers how the salience of an aesthetic object depends not only upon the cognitive affordances of the perceiving subject, but also the customary preferences of the culture in which she lives (111).
36. 36.  Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (London: 1764), 17; further references follow parenthetically in the main body of the text.
37. 37.  While I thoroughly agree with Gideon Yaffe that Reid’s novel theory of attention differs from the “spotlight” view of cognitive science, the pattern of thinking that I will outline differs from his formulation of concerted conscious awareness over extended temporal envelopes. Gideon Yaffe, “Thomas Reid on Consciousness and Attention,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39, no. 2 (June 2009), 165–194, at 183.
38. 38.  Ryan Nichols, Thomas Reid’s Theory of Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 159.
39. 39.  Ibid., 208.
40. 40.  Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, ed. Derek Brookes (Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 2002), 61.
41. 41.  Nichols, Thomas Reid’s Theory of Perception, 255.
42. 42.  For a broader consideration of Reid within Scottish Enlightenment musical theory, see Raz, “To ‘Fill Up, Completely, the Whole Capacity of the Mind,’” especially 144.
43. 43.  Bence Nanay, “Aesthetic Attention,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 22, nos. 5–6 (2015), 96–118, at 109. Nanay cites the experiment contained within Stine Vogt and Svein Magnussen, “Expertise in Pictorial Perception: Eye-Movement Patterns and Visual Memory in Artists and Laymen,” Perception 36 (2007), 91–100.