“When
a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the
dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
—Jonhatan Swift.
Genius: The Natural History of Creativity (Problems in the Behavioural Sciences)
tells us what genius is, how it is
produced, how it relates to madness, how it can be cultivated.
The
Creativity of genius:
“Schumann: ‘Talent works; genius
creates.’”
“Ortega y Gasset: ‘Better be ware of
notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should
be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.’”
“Common-sense sets the stage: genius
is highly creative, easily misunderstood, often odd or even near mad; genius
needs hard work to achieve anything, and will almost certainly be opposed by
the great mediocre majority.”
“Ezra Pound: ‘The concept of genius as
akin to madness has been carefully fostered by the inferiority complex of the
public.’”
Not
all people who are highly gifted intellectually turns out to be geniuses:
“Cox has demonstrated beyond any
doubt that geniuses in many different lines of endeavour have uniformly Iqs
well above the average; indeed, as all the different occupations which led to
their achievements obviously used considerable mental powers any other result
would have been unbelievable.”
“Intelligence, which may be defined
as innate, general cognitive ability, is a necessary but not a sufficient
factor in the genesis of genius.”
Psychopatology:
“This unusual correlation of
ego-strength and psychopathology may be one answer to those who fail to find
schizophrenia unusually frequent among geniuses.”
Conditions
for excellence:
“Works of genius depend
on the confluence of certain personality variables (intelligence, creativity,
persistence, etc.) and certain social conditions; Newton
Intuition and
Unconscious:
“Two notions, ideas, concepts—call them
what you like—have always been attached to the problem of creativity. It has
been widely surmised that the creative genius generates his major ideas by way
of intuition, rather than rational thinking; reason can test and prove or
disprove the insights achieved by intuition, but cannot produce them. Furthermore,
the process by means of which intuition works is unconscious; the Unconscious,
whether with or without a capital U is the cradle of creativity.”
*****
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