A Dissection of Genius

GENIUS AS A RELATIONSHIP

We define genius as the proven ability to produce artistic, scientific, or other intellectual work that

is considered supremely valuable during or after the lifetime of the producer. Certain qualifications must

be met in order to achieve recognition of the work done. The candidate for genius must produce, perform,

discover, or invent something that is highly valued. If this work is too far ahead of its time, it will be

ignored or derided; unless the work can be preserved to be appreciated later, recognition may never come.

The most favorable chance for recognition comes to those whose work relates in some significant

way to the needs and spirit of their contemporaries while the producers are still living and can make their

work public. Once the producer has died, even if he or she was highly acclaimed, the remaining work may

go unpublished, as was the case with Leibniz.The work of those who die without reputation is usually lost

to posterity.

The title of genius is not inalienable but varies over the years with the number and fervor of one's

appreciators. William Hogarth, the eighteenth century painter, thought that some of Michelangelo's work

verged on the ridiculous, but Hogarth's Romantic successors worshipped the sculptor. Furthermore, one's

reputation as a genius varies in longevity, depending on the field of endeavor. The philosopher and

mathematician may wear their crowns for centuries: the actor is quickly forgotten, buried under changing

styles. One's claim to genius also depends on the credibility of those who promote it. Genius, therefore, is

not an attribute: it is a dynamic relationship between its possessor and society. It indicates, in a general

way, what society expects of the genius and how it responds to that person. There are always geniuses in

potentia; but there are no unrecognized geniuses. A genius is someone who is acknowledged as such, even

if only by those who work in, or have been trained in, his field, and who pass their verdict on to society.

The title of genius can be temporarily won for reasons that have little to do with the quality of

one's work: a colorful life, timely publicity, and a personality that fits the stereotype of genius can distract

society from the absence of talent. However, the person who has a more lasting claim to that designation

has won it by other means, and it is this individual with whom we are concerned. The genius we have

defined has done work that is of importance or value to society and has produced it with unusual skill.

Work that is a lucky accident does not earn lasting respect for its producer. Furthermore, outstanding

ability wasted on trivia does not lead to recognition of genius. According to our definition, outstanding

ability, work of high value, and recognition are essential elements of genius.

THE MAD AND MELANCHOLY:

FROM THE CLASSICAL GREEKS TO THE ROMANTICS

The traditional view of genius has its roots in classical Greece. Aristotle associated great ability

with depression: "All extraordinary men distinguished in philosophy, politics, poetry and the arts are

evidently melancholic." Socrates and Plato stated that genius, among poets at least, was inseparable from

madness. Socrates said that the poet has "no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his

senses," and Plato claimed that the poetry of sane men "is beaten all hollow by the poetry of madmen."

Marsilio Ficino, a Renaissance philosopher, linked Aristotle's concept of melancholy genius with

Plato's idea of inspired mania and thus was the first to associate genius with what is now recognized as

manic-depression.

Eighteenth-century rationalists, though honoring both sanity and high intelligence, continued to

attribute the latter to temporary insanity. The poet Diderot stated: "These reserved and melancholy men

owe their extraordinary, almost godlike acuteness of insight to a temporary disturbance of their whole

mechanism.One may notice how it brings them now to sublime and now to insane thoughts."

ROMANTIC GENIUS: THE MODEL MANIC-DEPRESSIVE

The novelist George Sand proclaimed, "Between genius and madness there is often not the

thickness of a hair." The Romantics were quite enthusiastic about both genius and madness. Charles Lamb

wrote to one of his friends, "Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy

till you have gone mad." Lamb had no need to patronize Coleridge, who was an opium addict.Coleridge's

fellow Romantics used alcohol, drugs of all kinds, and even hunger, thirst, and illness to silence reason,

paralyze conscience, and break down familiar patterns of thought in the search for

inspiration.Hallucination was considered the most fertile condition for the artist. I should have taken more

opium when I wrote it," remarked Friedrich von Schlegel after having written an unsuccessful play. De

Quincey's fame derived from his book on the experiences he had under opium.The poet Byron declared:

"Man, being reasonable, must therefore get drunk.The best

of life is but intoxication." During the part of his life in which he was writing poetry and taking drugs, the

poet Rimbaud went about in a state of delusion and hallucination.To him factories appeared to be

mosques, and carriage traffic rolled by in the sky. Many of the Romantics complained of severe

depressions, so they may have resorted to drugs and alcohol to relieve their suffering as well as to

stimulate creativity.

The Romantic concept of genius is a catalogue of manic-depressive symptoms, perhaps derived

from such leading manic-depressive Romantics as Rousseau, Byron, and Goethe, as well as from large

numbers of Romantics who also had the disorder.According to the Romantic view, there was no genius

without the manic-depressive's wide-ranging and unbearably powerful emotions.The writer Goethe

lamented, I am not always in tune for great emotions, and without them I am negligible." The writer

Victor Hugo said: "What in fact is a poet? A man who has strong feelings and who expresses them in

impassioned words."

Liszt's portrait of his fellow composer Chopin as a Romantic genius may be exaggerated, but it

does enumerate some of the manic-depressive symptoms that were expected: "Chopin was ... of an

intensely passionate, an overflowing nature.... Every morning he began anew the difficult task of

imposing silence upon his raging anger, his whitehot hate, his boundless love, his throbbing pain, and his

feverish excitement, and to keep it in suspense by a sort of spiritual ecstasy—an ecstasy into which he

plunged in order to ... find a painful happiness." The writer Carlyle insisted that the genius experience

both extremes of mania and depression: "A great soul ... alternates between the highest height and the

lowest depth."

Continuing the tradition with antiquity, the Romantics coupled severe depression with genius.

Liszt wrote to his competitor Wagner: "Your greatness is your misery; both are inseparably connected."

Romantics, however, also looked for signs of mania such as excitement and hyperactivity.The philosopher

Schopenhauer stated, "The lives of men of genius show how often, like lunatics,

they are in a state of continuous agitation." Francis Galton, in his book Hereditary Genius, identified

inspiration with two other copious flow of ideas and willfulness. "If genius means a sense of inspiration,

or of rushes of ideas," he wrote, "... or of an inordinate and burning desire to accomplish any particular

end, it is perilously near to the voices heard by the insane, to their delirious tendencies, or to their

monomanias."

Although Romanticism had waned by 1889, its concept of genius held sway.Accordingly, the

playwright Anton Chekov believed there could be no genius without intense emotion and two manic

symptoms: insomnia and immense productivity.He confessed: "I lack the necessary passion—and

therefore talent for literature.... The fire in me burns in an even, lethargic flame; it never flares up or roars,

which is why I never find myself writing fifty or sixty pages in one night."

The Romantics added to the classical insistence on madness the idea that the genius pays in

suffering for exceptional ability. Heine stated, "The history of great men is always a martyrology"; the

novelist Flaubert insisted, "There never was . . . a great man who has not been pelted with potatoes or

struck with knives." This point of view is a distortion of history.As a rule, extraordinary ability enabled

people to rise to a social and economic class higher than that from which they originated, making a

corresponding improvement in their lives. The sufferings of the successful were as nothing compared to

the sufferings of the vast impoverished majority that they had left behind. Paranoia and the despair

generated by depression inspired much of the Romantics' feeling of martyrdom.

Webografie

Hershman, J., Lieb, J. (1998). Manic Depression and Creativity. Online: Accesat Decembrie 30, 2008, http://www.questia.com/read/96870669?title=Manic%20Depression%20and%20Creativity