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© 2023  Essays written by Patrick Bryson and Gisli Bergmann 

The Morality of Attention

"Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way." Iain McGilchrist author of The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World.

(1) The materialist tradition in Western philosophy begins with Greek philosophy in the 5th century BCE. According to Democritus, the world consists of nothing but atoms in empty space…

https://www.britannica.com/topic/materialism-philosophy/History-of-materialism

(2) How East and West think in profoundly different ways

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170118-how-east-and-west-think-in-profoundly-different-ways

(3) “Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way.”
Iain McGilchrist, author of The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions
and the Unmaking of the World. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matter_with_Things

'Attention as a Moral Act' Iain McGilchrist in Conversations on Remaking the World
- Perspectiva series of dialogues with a range of thinkers and intro to Ian McGilchrist. 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YHUGuUhB1c4

https://channelmcgilchrist.com/matter-with-things/

https://thejollysociety.com/mcgilchrist-attention-is-a-moral-act/

(4) “The spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."
Marcel Duchamp

https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/08/23/the-creative-act-marcel-duchamp-1957/

(5) Simulacra and Simulations 
Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press

https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html

(6) New Materialism
https://globalsocialtheory.org/topics/new-materialism/ 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9566.13265

There are no things only relationships

“We cannot understand reality by disassembling it and examining its parts.
The whole is more than the sum of the parts” - Iain McGilchrist - author of
'The Matter with Things' on why the world is made of relationships, not t
hings.

1 https://iai.tv/video/why-the-world-is-in-constant-flux-iain-mcgilchrist

2 https://philosophyofmovementblog.com/2019/11/19/what-is-new-materialism/ 

3 For the discussion on agency, see p57, in pp49-57, in ‘Thinking Through Painting’, Isabelle Graw, et.al. Sternberg Press, 2012

Isabelle Graw: The Economy of Painting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JDthDEcmAs

4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthumanism

© 2023  Curated and written by Gisli Bergmann & Patrick Bryson

patrickbryson@me.com

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