Abstract
Attention is a crucial issue of our time. The historian of society and culture tells us that from its beginnings humanity has been confronted with the changing nature of its ability to pay attention. In this contribution I will show how in history philosophers have paid little attention to attention as a systematic and thorough theme of investigation and when they did so, they either identified it with control and effort, or with a form of passive opening of the mind. By contrast, phenomenology opens the way for a renewed investigation of attention: while working out and questioning the metaphysical binary distinction between activity and passivity and autonomizing it from both perception and reflection, it provides a crucial basis for opening attention as vigilance, that is, as a receptive welcome to whatever is to come. Attention as vigilance appears then clearly as a transversal issue situated at the heart of the problems of our contemporary digital hyper-connected societies and policies.
