The Intention of the Spirit: Air, Breath, and Voice in European Poetry and Philosophy

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the current understanding of intention, as both voluntary purpose and attention, is a 4th-century CE invention, which can be traced back to Augustine's spiritualist, dematerializing use of the word intentio. While this claim is generally accepted by critics, the dissertation also argues that such a hegemonic understanding of intention can only be understood as a reaction to an earlier, more diverse, and broader conception of intention, which was a materialist, poetic, and musical understanding and had to do with a material conception of the spirit as air and breath. Its traces can be found in Stoic cosmology and pneumatology (from pneuma = spirit, in Ancient Greek), especially in the works of the Roman Stoic Seneca but also in lost Christian heretical theories. This pneumatological conception of intention referred to the musical and poetic tension of the spirit pervading the whole world and every being. Thus, the dissertation investigates the forgotten relationship between intention and air, breath, and voice, and how this constellation of meanings has been reappearing throughout the history of European culture. First, it examines how this hidden relationship sheds light on the debate about the concept of the voice that occurred between France and Italy in the latter half of the 20th century, between philosophers such as Derrida, Agamben, and Cavarero, but also among poets, such as in the Italian pneumatological poetry of Giorgio Caproni. Second, it shows how, only by understanding what Augustine did to intention and his influence on the rest of European culture, one can appreciate what was at stake in the resurgence of theories of attention and will at the end of the 19th century and especially in the field of physiological psychology, a discipline born in the 19th century which had as its main aim that of explaining human cognitive abilities only on the basis of the tension of the nerves, namely the reflex movement. But above all, it shows how poetry can illuminate these debates in a foundational way. It is poets – and in particular post-Symbolist poets like Paul Claudel and Hugo von Hofmannsthal are the explicit focus of the dissertation – who first rediscover the material intention of the air, by responding explicitly to the physiological psychologists at the turn of the 20th century. They rediscover the material tension of the air preserved by the word intention or by the German word Stimmung, against any conception of attention and will, and show that it is possible to imagine a new theory of poetry, according to which poetry is not the place of our most immaterial, inner, obscure faculties and feelings (the Romantic Stimmung), which supposedly gives access to a world of pure thought. But rather poetry is the place of our most material, impersonal tension (a material Stimmung), the place of our material voice, which brings us back to this life.