Shared attentional forms are what make shared human freedom possible

Evidence

These attentional forms are a precious inheritance. They create the conditions of possibility for our being together—and being with ourselves, too. Without them, the world cannot but be senseless and mystifying—to anyone, but to its newest inhabitants above all. Without the formation of attentional capacities, our tottering tykes and teenagers alike would be incapable of moving through the world—which would be, after all, fashioned according to rules and patterns of behavior utterly beyond their grasp! And there can be no meaningful human freedom in an incomprehensible chaos. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt reminds us, the cultivation of shared forms of awareness and recognition and reflective judgment is how a human world doomed by human mortality is both sustained and continually made anew. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 289

Categorization

• XREF: Arendt’s natality and the mortal-world-sustained-by-judgment theme connects to wider political theory on common world. — connects to: The fix for attention problems is collective attentional freedom, not individual span
• DEEPTHINKING: The Arendtian inversion — attention-as-inheritance as the mechanism by which a mortal world is continually remade — is the philosophical heart of the ‘study is resistance’ program.