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I’m always struck by how often the notion of attending to oneself is linked to the notion of conversion in Pierre Hadot’s reconstruction of, just to list some examples, Stoicism, Neoplatonism, & Christian monasticism (more controversially I’d include Kantian philosophy here too).
The underlying intuition in all these cases is that the self that takes itself as a subject of inquiry cannot do so without also changing the nature of the self it has set out to observe. The act of attending is also an act of conversion, a moment of transformation.
In an important sense, then, there’s no “self” there to be observed, there’s a self brought into being by the mode of attention that one brings to it. The self is rendered in-the-moment by practices that bring it to presence, or, the reverse:
It’s presence is released by practices that unknow it, by techniques of dissolving it’s apparently concrete & basic nature. “Rendering” & “dissolving” feel like two attractors for these kinds of philosophical practice, both aligned by this notion of conversion through attention.
