But in the 20th century, academic vogue moved steadily away from this viewpoint. The Agony and the Ecstasy) and van Gogh ( In our time, it's the popular novelist's take on Michelangelo ( This is how the Victorians saw Beethoven. Egan calls the notion of Genius-as-Wholly-Other, "essentially Romantic." It views the genius as someone so possessed by external force - God, Truth, the Muse - that he emigrates to another dimension. On the qualitative side stand George Steiner - "The ordinary man casts a shadow, the man of genius casts light" - and the Ninth Earl of Lytton: "Talent does what it can: Genius does what it must."ĭr. "Everyone is a genius once a year," wrote the philosopher G. "The difference is in degree, not nature," wrote the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. We can only surmise what Nannerl Mozart or Fanny Mendelssohn might have written with proper encouragement.Įxperts on genius disagree over what has been called The Big Question: Is genius a matter of kind, or of degree? Does it lie at the end of a smooth continuum, or is it qualitatively distinct - something from a different realm? The Big Question divides genius studies into warring camps, and has always done so. Many today find Clara Schumann's music more, well, balanced than that of the manic-depressive she married, giving her the better claim as the true genius of the Schumann clan. Historically, the dearth of woman geniuses might be nothing more than the established patriarchy in a sweat over some uppity female. One American academic, a woman, suggests that "there has been no female da Vinci for the same reason that there has been no female Jack the Ripper." In other words, women manifest genius less often because they're insufficiently weird. But it may go beyond this, to the very genes on the Y chromosome. When the younger sisters of the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the composer Felix Mendelssohn showed early musical promise, their families discouraged them from stealing their brothers' thunder. There's an interesting gender slant on geniuses: Most are male. Evidently, something about genius eludes the numbers. By comparison, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman had an IQ estimated to be no more than 122. But Marilyn von Savant, whose over-200 IQ is the highest ever recorded, has made no breakthroughs - she is a columnist for a popular magazine. What, exactly, is a genius? When the Carnegie Institute measured student IQs across North America 40 years ago, the genius threshhold was arbitrarily set at 125, with 100 normal by definition. Many child prodigies experience a life crisis in their teens, when they find that time has eroded their head start and made them no longer exceptional. But with time and practice, others with talent can catch up and surpass the prodigy. A prodigy shows astonishing mastery (often of chess or musical performance) at a young age. Scientists who study genius usually distinguish it from prodigy. Not at all, Liszt replied: It is either easy or impossible. Often society cannot even understand what has been done for a generation or more." Your music must be hard to play, someone gushed to Franz Liszt. "It accomplishes things the rest of us can hardly imagine. "Genius seems beyond striving," says Kieran Egan, a professor of cognitive studies at Simon Fraser University. He just kept wondering why other people were so slow. Asked how it felt to grow up a genius, Dr. This theory, which describes matter and energy on the subatomic scale, is the most successful intellectual construct ever assembled: Its predictions have been verified to 0.000 000 000 000 000 001 per cent. On his week-long journey, staring out the window and jotting arcane marks in a notepad, he invented quantum electrodynamics. Having missed a plane from Los Angeles to New York some time in the mid-1950s, he took a bus instead. It is as far above talent as consciousness is above life.Ĭonsider Freeman Dyson, the American physicist and Nobel laureate. Gardner, is "the exceptional extraordinary." It is not just talent, even sublime talent. Genius has made our world: From electricity to theology, we both enjoy and suffer from its effects.Ī useful definition of genius comes from Howard Gardner, a professor of education at Harvard University. Yet though we can't define genius, we know it exists. Genius seems like time: We know what it is, until someone asks us. "It's evaluation of conflicting information" (Winston Churchill) or "the spirit of childhood carried into maturity" (Thomas Huxley). "It's 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration" (Thomas Edison). We love it, we hate it, we fear and revere it - yet we can't agree on what it is.
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