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ALBERTO PARISI
Siena · Harvard PhD ’23 · Koper · Kobe · Florence
Philosopher, Writer, Builder
I research, write, build products, and help people develop their ideas.
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Alberto Parisi
Research

Intention, Attention & Will

Philosophy, psychology, and poetry

What does intention have to do with the air?

We usually think of intention as something we have in mind: what we mean to say, what we want to do. It seems to belong to us, somewhere inside, before we speak or act.

But intention once had a life outside the mind. For the ancient Stoics, the world was held together by the tension of material breath. Seneca called this tension intentio. It moved bodies and made voices sound: intention was already musical, before it became something a voice was supposed to express.

tonos Greek
Tension and musical tone; in Stoicism, the tension of material breath.
intentio Latin
A word for stretching or tension, used for the tension of air before its later meanings of attention and intention.

My research follows how this tension became a power of the soul. Through attention and will, intention came to explain how a mind could perceive the world, act upon it, and turn back toward itself in thought and love—while remaining separate from the body.

attentio Latin
Attention: in Augustine, the soul’s activity in attending to what the body undergoes.
voluntas Latin
Will: in Augustine, also the activity that joins perception, memory, and thought, and takes the form of love.

This history still shapes how we understand ourselves. We tend to associate thinking with directing our attention, and freedom with deciding what to do. Even when psychology replaced the soul with nerves, attention and will retained much of their old importance.

Spannung German
Tension; part of the physiological vocabulary through which attention and will came to be understood as activities of the nerves.

Yet the musical and bodily meanings of intention never entirely disappeared. In poetry, tone and rhythm offer another way to understand thought and feeling: as something happening through our bodies and the world around them, rather than beginning in a separate inner life.

This is also where intention meets atmosphere. My work brings the histories of Stimmung and ambiance together, tracing how musical attunement and the air surrounding us came to seem like different things. They belong to the same history that separated intention from material tension.

Stimmung German
Tuning, attunement, or mood; a word whose musical history connects feeling with bodies and their surroundings.
ambiance French
The atmosphere surrounding us; a word whose history leads back to the air that envelops a body.

My writing on distraction and AI returns to the question from another direction. What happens when attention is no longer fixed on one thing, or when language takes shape without a single mind directing it? These are questions about creativity, but also about why we have learned to recognize some activities as thought and overlook others.

Connections
Breath & SpiritThe transformation of material breath into immaterial spirit.The VoiceThe voice between the tension of air and the expression of thought.Poetry & BreathTone, rhythm, and breath as ways of thinking through poetry.AtmosphereThe shared history of intention, musical attunement, and atmosphere.New Media StudiesAttention, distraction, and creativity in contemporary media and AI.

Research

Alberto Parisi