2.64
Ontological attention is related to the concept of responsibility, because responsibility—being responsive—is intimately connected with paying attention: “When we love a thing, we can experience our responsibility toward it as limitless (the size of the world). Responsibility is the trace, in us, of the pressure of the world that is focussed in a this. That is how much it is possible to attend; that is how large complete attention would be.”[1] “The ontology of thisness, of ontological attention and address, has the character of metaphor: its object is, and is not, everything.”[2]
To pay ontological attention to something is to begin to let its way of being course through your veins. You’re a host and a guest (§2.53), on the way to becoming a lover of a thing: the horse rider is a lover of horses, the pilot is a lover of planes, the poet is a lover of language — hoofs, clouds, words coursing through our veins.[3] To love is to see things differently, to let yourself be changed by the thing you love: the horse rider becomes horse, the pilot becomes plane, the poet becomes language. At the same time, the horse becomes rider, the plane becomes pilot, and language becomes poet.[4]
In all these exchanges, there are questions of violence, justice, and betrayal, for each becoming is violent, unjust, and betrays oneself and others—as is each non-becoming (though in different ways)—because no response can meet the full responsibility, the full attention, any particular demands, which betrays the other and oneself for we, too, are particularities.
To pay ontological attention to something is to pay tribute to it; one can pay tribute poorly or well.
[1] Zwicky, W&M, LH57.
[2] ibid, LH55.
[3] To be precise, to “love” in this context means that one attends to and heeds the phenomena; that one cares about its use, one is precise in that use, and one cares about the relations involved. A horse rider might not ‘love’ horses; they might love what horse riding allows them to do. Nonetheless, they had to attend to horses, and love them in the sense of caring, attending, and tending to them. In other words, a lover of something loves a network of relations.
[4] The poet becomes language, language becomes poet — the poet becomes language entwined with things, language entwined with things becomes poet, the poet becomes these things, these things become poet.