Zerstreutheit

More about Zerstreutheit. It’s a special and pernicious kind of distraction which William James thought the direct opposite of attention.

Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.

James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt, Vol. 1, pp. 403-404.

OK, I confess: I got that from Wikipedia (art. ‘Attention’)

Here’s someone pretty far gone:

Ich kenne einen Kollegen, der so zerstreut ist, da? er in einer Dreht?r f?nfmal im Kreis l?uft, bis ihm einf?llt, ob er rein oder raus wollte.

I have a colleague who’s so distracted [zerstreut] that he goes five times round in a revolving door before it comes to him whether he wants to go in or out.

_ Robert Lembke

Does English ‘distraction’ capture the semi-pathological quality of this condition? Everyone is distracted from time to time, whereas what we’re talking about here is an endemic scatteredness, a more-or-less constant, habitual flickering between objects of attention.

Only ‘semi-pathological’ however: I believe distraction as a symptom is different from the common state of consciousness I’m trying to talk about, although, between the two forms, there will be obvious overlaps and fuzzy boundaries and so on. Plain old stress-induced high anxiety, for instance, makes it much harder to pay attention, and if sustained, borders on the pathological. But I think, if I read James correctly, that this scattered state is a normal feature of the mind, and that we bounce in and out of it as we do states of concentration. We zone out.

So far so normal. It becomes a curse when a particular form of the self encounters a particular kind of culture, to be more precise, when a self ruled entirely by its own immediate need for gratification inhabits a culture which offers multiple, easily-available sources of that commodity: when the poorly-educated kid, who hasn’t learnt to pay attention, surfs the Web. I don’t mean kids from lousy schools; I mean kids from any school who’ve missed out on one of the most important things education can do.

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts clich? about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

David Foster Wallace, commencement address at Kenyon College, 2005. Edited version in The Wall St Journal.

DFW saw ‘attention’ as possible only when someone becomes able to override the self’s constant whining and nagging, its tendency to construct the world as a device for gratifying or frustrating its needs. It’s one of the master-themes in George Eliot.

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

If you want to inspect a group of people in which egoism rules, and who seem often to be confused, dazed and scatterbrained, you can do no better than an average class of undergraduates. Small group discussion is one of the shibboleths of higher education in this country. It has its value, but also, less often recognised, its limitations and inbuilt deficiciencies. One of these is that so many students simply don’t pay attention to one another.

I used to run an exercise like this. Students were paired off. Each person had then to talk to the other on a given topic – useful ones were ‘cats’ and ‘garlic’, about which everyone has something to say – for two minutes by the clock. The listener’s job was to understand what was said, not to question it or to put forward views of their own. If in doubt, listeners could ask when the minute was over. When listeners were fully satisfied that they could repeat back accurately what they had heard, the roles were reversed. Listeners were then asked to report to the wider group.

Some students found it very difficult to listen without interrupting. Most found it even more difficult to confine themselves to understanding and kept wanting to opine. Understandly – wasn’t opining what their whole education experience had encouraged them to believe was their role?