Lateral Attention

Lateral attention names the specific cognitive quality that distinguishes the attention beauty commands from the ordinary attention self-concerned cognition deploys. Self-concerned cognition is instrumental — it attends to things insofar as they serve the self's purposes and discards them when they cease to be useful. Lateral attention is disinterested in the technical sense: it attends to the object as the object is, not as the self needs it to be. The word 'lateral' captures the geometric quality Scarry emphasizes: attention that moves across toward the object rather than through the object toward some further purpose the self is pursuing. This quality of attention is what beauty produces involuntarily and what justice requires deliberately. The perceptual training beauty provides is precisely training in this kind of attention, and the practice of ethical life is the extension of lateral attention from the beautiful object to the world beyond the aesthetic encounter.