Genius
Genius
Usually proceeds by friction, rather than social alignment and here again I find myself at frictive odds with what I am told. Genius comes from Greek genii, or astral imps, fairies or something that inspire people. Plato admitted to his "daimon" who inspired him, although it is more likely he had sound and verbal recall, reason why he told us that all ideas exist forever in his Ideal realm, which leaves no room for creativity which is exactly where genii excel. All geniuses are the first to admit that their knowledge came from they knew not where. By all acclaim what they wrote and did is original.
By this I do not mean original in the sense of junior discovering sex in his pants, which happens to most all of us. Nor do I mean it as culturally or historically known to be original, but as mankind original. We can fi see that Beethoven stole musical titbits from all over the place, as did Shakespeare with his plays but they were mere ingredients to their original genius. As it comes genius develops the talents needed to acquire the skills we are all taught. But they tend to teach themselves, or, rather, don't need any teaching at all.
Genius has nothing whatsoever to do with IQ which is merely culled from university textbooks and shows how well one can do as an academic parrot. Right now the validity of IQ is up for grabs and the dust has still to settle. Universal education needed a universal means to find out how well pupils can do. Genius, contrariwise - a favorite word of my favorite genius, Lewis Carroll - is either mildly or strongly at odds with the rest of us and then either rescript their society, as did Einstein with Physics, or sink into social oblivion as no-hopers.
Genius is precocious, prodigious and unpredictable as well as untestable unless they decide to come out of the woodwork of society and do their thing. Genius excels in all things except earning a living. They are relentlessly driven by their curiosity which may focus on one item or an entire field of knowledge, or like Szilard, cross so many disciplines one loses count. He made radical innovations in 17 disciplines with one article each. I was not a prodigy since there was no way for me to know from my family that such a thing is possible so I kept my mouth shut until age about twenty. In my family showing off was not the done thing, especially by children. I've made up for it since. However, I did take myself to school at age three.
Although I totally disbelieve in Gazzaniga's split brain the very pop left and right brain serves well as metaphor. Gazzaniga poked knitting needles up epilectics brains to sever the corpus callosum which resulted in each half not knowing what the other was up to. The corpus callosum connects the two halves which are overmore covered by the forebrain cortex. The hindbrain is hardly well studied and sits at the back of the head and which when well developed produces a narrow, long skull with a bony knob at the back and which takes care of our body and its sensations while the forebrain deals with the senses. The ones who lack a largish hindbrain are square heads.
From this it follows that in genius the entire five part brain is better integrated in its ways than for the rest of us. However since people like pretty patterns for theories you shall have one. The left forebrain is held in charge of words and its linear logics. The right is said worldless and more artistic and intuitive. Since our society is much into opposites and polarised dichotomies we are said to be either one or the other, as in Koestler's "The Yogi and the Commissar"
This quite ignores that Plato,in his Republic, denied poets entry. Plato's personal dislike has been held as dogma ever since. It even worse ignores that the original basis and ground rules of knowledge were invented by rsi-priests of the Vedas and shamen before that. That is why we are told that knowledge begins with the Greeks. If so they were the best thieves unhung. They got their letters from we know not whom, around 500 BCE, most likely an adaptation of Egyptian Demotic. Similarly science started off in Alchemy, as did other disciplines. The original curriculum was the trivium: poetics, crafts and battle tactics, which includes politics as the art of winning. As Marshall Wavell has it: good poetry sticks spontaneously to the mind and to make that happen takes real skill. We know those battle tactics as martial arts and rather little to do with what our generals are into.
Given that the corpus callosum is in place the two halves can be imagined as communicating and sharing, at which juncture we can imagine creativity pops up out of the woodwork.By this we can further imagine that each half can as it were watch the other to match a Vedic image of the tree of knowledge with two birds, jiva and jivatma, one eating constantly, the other looking on. What we are not told is that they can swap roles or tasks. I have this going on in my head, as it were, because I don't think in or with words but some aniconic abstract way. The word factory, as it were transrenders what is going in while the intuitive function watches like a hawk. And most often I don't know what will be the next word coming out of my mouth. And some part of my mind sits and just watches the show.
For this reason I am also marvel of scepticism or Feuerabendian radical anarchistic thinking since I can keep track both of the parts of what goes on and the whole of it at once and together. This is more metaphor to help you imagine it as possible than what actually gives between my ears, which I don't really know. I just accept that it works fine and proceed to use it as best I can. Beethoven similarly admits he received his symphonies at once and together. The tedious job was writing down the notes. So too for Tesla who imagined the a.c. networks he invented, motors and all, in his head. He told his Mother, age 13, that he had come to bring the world light, which is exactly what he did. He also made a cockroach engine, the precursor of the electric motor, at that age. Since I read that in a book dated 1925 I doubt it's copyright.
Or, to quote from Oscar Wilde, another one, that mankind is very tolerant, except of genius. An old proverb: "Whom the gods love they punish" is very true for genius. Most geniuses readily agree that putting up with other folks is a pain, in wherever you least like it. Nietsche recommends we examine everything we know and in the case of a genius everybody else will do it for them and be most often wrong; doing which is, of course, the height of rudeness.
OR, to quote Ikkyu, who won't be bothered by trivialities like copyright:
" Why are people called Buddhas after they die?
Because they don't grumble any more, Because they don't make a nuisance of themselves!
T.S. Eliot, the poet, was not enchanted by copyright either and coined paradiorthosis for stealing from one's collegues what they said ever so much better. The rest is not worth stealing. What further follows is that those three functions: verbal skills, intuitive grasp and creativity have to be in a dynamic balance, which phrase means variable, not fixed, such that anyone can play leader to the rest or they can sing in chorus, as the need may show. It necessarily follows also that this does not have to be in balance so we can get dumb geniuses and and very clever parrots and so on around the mulberry bush. High grade but imbalanced intuitives usually end up in the nuthouse whence genius is said akin to madness.
Or, again, as I recently said to a friend. I'll be delighted to take my leave of this hellhole of insanity they call earth whenever, but I'm danged if I will let that spoil any chances to have fun. Or, again, to paradiorthose from my other favorite, the reverend Laurence Sterne: Dear Reader, if you could anticipate a single word of what I've written here, I'd tear it up and start again.
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- person of unique mental ability (usually combining high IQ with high expertise)
- quality of mind that makes one a genius
People widely called geniuses: Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Darwin, Thomas Alva Edison, Albert Einstein