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First thing in the morning, I shuffle downstairs to greet the dog and let him outside. He spins a couple times while I unlock the door, then he bounds into the garden. I sit on the stoop to keep an eye on him. What have I attended to in these 30 seconds? How many items have captured my attention, and is there anything invariant in the way this information has been processed?

There is a story that the gold-oriented 49ers near Sutter’s Mill threw away the silver in their search for gold. I take the majority of attention researchers to be doing something similar: digging for thematic gold and discarding contextual and marginal silver, which are also precious in human attending. Demarcating the area of the focus of attention, its general and specific qualities, has been a fruitful area of research for some time. Also, some research paradigms are already revealing the role of context and margin in attending, but the theoretical framework for interpreting the results is too often one-dimensionally focused on the theme, instead of three-dimensional. If I am correct in differentiating the three dimensions in the sphere of attention, then non-focal processing would have to fit the description of either contextual or marginal consciousness. The bulk of this chapter centers on the next big thing for attention research-the context of attention. But it opens by discussing thematic attending and the margin, and closes by illustratingand discussing how some researchers are investigating all three dimensions in the sphere of attention.

For psychologists or philosophers of attention, the fun begins in the moment that we realize attention is essentially dynamic. Attention is not as clear and distinct as the example of the dog in the garden may lead one to believe. Although the structure of the sphere of attention outlined above is invariant, the shape and contents are dynamic. For example, was I not thematically attending to something else before the dog? And after?

Aron Gurwitsch studied Edmund Husserl’s work closely, and persistently found philosophical points worth recapping, interpreting, and amplifying. He also critiqued Husserl where he felt it warranted. In this chapter, I condense and simplify Gurwitsch’s report of how his own insights on attention parallel Husserl’s, and how they contradict. I also feature a Gurwitschian reading of Husserl’s (2001), which it appears Gurwitsch himself did not read, but which is important for phenomenology of attention. All this further grounds the articulation of the sphere of attention, and marks a shift to considering phenomenological evidence rather than primarily experimental psychological evidence. We will also be poised to explore more fully subjectivity and morality in subsequent chapters.

Human subjectivity is attending activity. This way of speaking may sound dramatic and even strange, but I think it is a clear way of saying what we are and what we do, and I believe it captures the spirit of Gurwitsch’s phenomenology of consciousness, except that it all becomes oriented around a phenomenology of attention. Noting Husserl’s (1982), Gurwitsch (1964, 419) writes “Considered as to its specific nature, consciousness is a domain closed in itself, a domain into which nothing can enter and from which nothing can escape.” Such a “domain” is all that is meaningful in human life. I have called this the sphere of attention. Being “closed in itself” means fully inclusive, enclosing, not . The fact that the sphere of attention is “a domain into which nothing can enter and nothing can escape” indicates that the attending process is the fundamental and essential way we give meaning to the world and to ourselves in it. If, as Sartre (1956, 25) claims, existence precedes essence for human beings (and with some qualifications I think it does) then we are not primarily a thing, an ego, a self, a personality, etc. We are a process, an attending process.

We are born, we attend, we die—but what then of morality? If existence precedes essence and if human being is a sphere of attention, so that our “essence” is simply a dynamic embodied processing in the world, then there seems to be little room to argue that we can live our lives with others in a way that is genuinely moral. My approach will be different from Sartre’s infamous Kantian-like proposal delivered as a speech in France, ideas which he later acknowledged as half-baked thoughts on ethics and existentialism (Sartre 1976 and 1985). It will also not involve the embrace of a socialistic ethics, as Sartre tended to do later in his career. Instead, this chapter draws its primary inspiration from existentialist philosopher and theologian Martin Buber.

The sphere of attention is a dynamic embodied attending in the world organized according to gestalt principles in the three dimensions of theme, context, and margin. The sphere of attention is enclosing and inclusive but not a transcendence in immanence. As a sphere of attention, a particular human being is fluid and active, a meaning-giving activity that is non-substantial, not a thing. Human beings live the world in terms of theme, context, and margin. The theme is the central gestalt, coherent, segregated, and consolidated, or striving to be so. The theme is either a gestalt stabilized, or coming into or going out of central concern in the sphere of attention. The thematic context is a unity by relevancy for the theme, a network of non-consolidated gestalts, more or less articulated, organized by the theme as its center, and materially relevant to that theme. The margin also consists of non-centralized gestalts, and is irrelevant to the theme and thematic context; it is external to their unity by relevancy. There is no material relation between the margin on the one hand, and the context and theme on the other, but the halo in the margin includes the current sector of the streaming in attending, kinesthetic sense of embodiment, and the environing world. The horizon in the margin is the indefinitely continued content that merely accompanies a given theme and thematic context, and this horizon is implied by the halo in the margin.