I think individuals that have caused paradigm shifts would fall under the category of "genius". People like Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Curie, Darwin, Hubble, etc. in regards to science would be geniuses. Tesla, Morse, Gutenberg, Ford, etc would be inventor geniuses. Marx would be a political philosophy genius even if you don't agree with his ideas. Perhaps even religious/spiritual thinkers like Jesus, Mohammad, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, etc might be considered genius, or at least very wise to followers.

Lists of geniuses seem to be all male. Why is that? — Bitter Crank

In my eyes, males have quite a tendency to be more serious and focused than females. Males are generally the ones that are not content to stick with the norm, leading to paradigm shifts and great discoveries or products.

That is not to say that we should automatically judge females as being inept, as there certainly are genius females. It may be the case that females haven't had the resources or education to achieve what males have, and it would be unfair to judge them before they have shown all their cards.

But mostly I think the average female attitude is that of satisfaction with the current standards, as in, why fix what isn't broken (even if it is)? Females do tend to be more emotional and superficial than males. This might be evolutionary; tending to the family and cultivating a strong family bond would be priority, whereas males would need to be able to recognize and adjust to changes more (hunting, for example). Also, males tend to be more aggressive and ambitious, whereas for females these traits that tend to lead to deep thinking and discovery just aren't important.

What is better: 10 very smart, very creative, very productive people or 10 geniuses? — Bitter Crank

Is there a difference?

Giorgio Agamben has a beautiful essay on genius, in which he aims to show how genius designates not something we possess, but rather something that possesses us:

"Genius was the name the Latins gave to the god to whom each man was placed under tutelage from the moment of his birth. The etymology is transparent and still visible in Italian in the proximity between genio (genius) and generare (to generate). That Genius must have had something to do with generation is otherwise evident from the fact that the object pre-eminently considered ‘ingenious’ (‘geniale’) by the Latins was the bed: genialis lectus, because the act of generation was accomplished in bed. And sacred to Genius was the day of one’s birth, which because of this, is still called genetliaco in Italian. The gifts and the banquets with which we celebrate birthdays are, despite the odious and by now inevitable English refrain, a trace of the festivities and sacrifices which Roman families offered to Genius on the occasion of the birthdays of their family members. Horace speaks of pure wine, a two month-old suckling pig, a lamb “immolato”, that is, covered in sauce for its sacrifice; but it seems that, initially there was only incense, wine, and delicious honey focaccia, because Genius, the god who presided at birth, did not welcome bloody sacrifices.

...But this most intimate and personal of gods is also the most impersonal part of us, the personalization of that, within us, which surpasses and exceeds ourselves. “Genius is our life, in as much as it was not given origin by us, but gave us origin”. If he seems to identify himself with us, it is only in order to reveal himself immediately afterwards as something more than ourselves, in order to show us that we ourselves are more and less than ourselves. To comprehend the concept of man which is implicit in Genius, means to understand that man is not only ‘I’ and individual consciousness (coscienza), but that from the moment of his birth to that of his death he lives instead with an impersonal and pre-individual component. That is, man is a unique being in two phases, a being who is the result of the complicated dialectic between one side not (yet) singled out (individuata) and lived, and another side already marked by fate and by individual experience.

But the part that is impersonal and not isolated (individuata) is not a chronological past which we have left behind once and for all, and which we can, eventually, recall through memory. It is always present in us and with us and from us, in good times or bad times; it is inseparable. The face of Genius is that of a young man, his long restless wings signify that he does not know time, that when he is very close to us we feel him as a shiver, just as when we were children we felt his breath upon us and his wings beat our feverish temples like a present without memory. This means a birthday cannot be the commemoration of a day that has passed, but like every true festival, it entails the abolition of time, the epiphany and the presence of Genius. And this presence that cannot be separated from us, that prevents us from enclosing ourselves in a substantial identity, is Genius who breaks apart the pretext of the ‘I’ that it is sufficient for itself alone."

The whole essay is only six pages long, but totally worth the read.

I think there may be two types of genius:

a) The genius who looks at different or varying concepts and finds a connection, which was there but not realized prior to the genius's finding a way to unite these concepts.
b) The genius who starts a completely new series, where prior thoughts are not available, but whose internal consistency solidifies its direction.

Genius of type a are unique and important for civilization's advancement and form the core of what most people consider genius.
Genius of type b are less clear (if they exist). Perhaps Paul's postulation of a will that is opposed to itself, Freud's formulation of the unconscious.

I read Giorgio Agamben essay and I wonder about the following:

Genius was certifi ed through a process of ‘un-creating’ (decreando) or destroying
the work (opera). But if only a work that is revoked and undone can be worthy of
Genius, if the truly ingenious (geniale) artist is without work (senz’opera), the ‘Duchamp-I’
can never coincide with Genius. In the context of general appreciation
it proceeds around the world as the melancholy proof of its own inexistence, as if
it were the notorious carrier of its own worklessness (inoperosità).

Is he suggesting that because Du Champs 'Readymades' are not 'works' as might be commonly understood, that it (and all conceptual art) cannot be therefore considered 'works' of Genius. Or?

I see genius as specifically human powers not reducible to, or explicable solely or primarily in terms of, the milieu in which a person exists. For the average person, their mind can be read 'on the radio,' so to speak -- there is nothing about them that, in virtue of the books they've read and where they grew up, can possibly surprising about what they think or do.

there is nothing about them that, in virtue of the books they've read and where they grew up, can possibly surprising about what they think or do. — The Great Whatever

I very much doubt that. It's more like the genius has the ambition to pursue whatever is surprising about them, and is able to succeed at that, such that they gain recognition. We make a little too much out of inborn talent, and not enough of motivation and hard work.

Take someone who is the world's best in chess or an athletic endeavor. How did they get to be so good? Tons of practice and love of what they do. They may have had other advantages over the average person, but you don't get to be great without a ton of effort.

Effort by itself is worthless, and if you don't have that spark to seek out the right kind of effort, it won't matter how much time you spend. People can spend their whole lives reading philosophy, for example, but if they lack the temperament to truly have an appetite for it, they will just end up adding footnotes that no one will really be better off for reading.

There is a kind of genuine interest that has to be present which goes beyond mere 'cultural appreciation,' desire to have one's fetishes or psychological predispositions satisfied, yearning for wittiness, fame, or subversiveness, the desire to be clever or 'interesting' in a banal worldly sense, needing to 'be still a man' with philosophy just one of one's quaint side interests or 'mere day job,' with the wife and kids back home being the real target of one's affections and interests, and so on. What I want to suggest is that the non-genius' desires never transcend the above to move into a genuine interest in the subject matter, and so the effort they expend is in effect worthless except insofar as they further those banal desires, which is all the non-genius wants anyway, so everyone wins. In other words, the genius, if they exist, is someone whose thoughts and actions cannot be explained without reversion to the person themselves, whereas it suffices to explain the non-genius' thoughts and behavior to reference where they grew up, what the political climate was, and so on. They have nothing of their own.

Of course, tgw, it all comes down to pleasure so it really doesn't matter who's a genuine genius and who's not. The genius and the family-pleasing dope (who might actually (lol) believe in love) Just two types of people. Possible to differentiate, for sure, but it's just categorization. I'm sure, given your past statements, that you agree, so it's refreshing to see someone provide a description of a 'genius' with no value-judgements attached.

I think that's fair. There is nothing inherently good about genius, and many geniuses are people who I wouldn't have wanted to be, or even be around. And if that's true, it does make you wonder what's left to say on their behalf...

Is he suggesting that because Du Champs 'Readymades' are not 'works' as might be commonly understood, that it (and all conceptual art) cannot be therefore considered 'works' of Genius. Or? — Cavacava

Interesting passage to have picked out! Taking a stab at it, my guess would be that the readymades render explicit the distance or rather passage between Genius and the 'I', the impersonal and the personal, by dint of their not being 'personalised' like most other works of art: the whole point of readymades is that they are 'ready-made' - and not 'products' of the artist in the usual sense; Duchamp's 'fountain' is precisely not a 'work' in the way a Titian or Renoir can be said to be.

On the other hand, the 'success' of the readymade relies precisely on the fact that it spans the breadth between both the personal and the impersonal: it never entirely 'coincides' with Genius because it is still defined negatively in relation to it: it is a matter of 'decreation' or 'destroying the work' (the Italian word, decreando, is not a standard term, and has a meaning quite peculiar to Agamben). This is why the readymade is 'ironic'. As such, I suspect Agamben's take on the readymade is essentially ambiguous: while it allows us to cast Genius in sharp relief, it never quite goes all the way to do without reference to Genius altogether: it "proceeds around the world as the melancholy proof of its own inexistence", without attaining a positive valence of it's own.

I read it this way especially because of the way in which the essay ends, which essentially calls for discarding the category of Genius altogether: "For each of us there comes the moment when we have to part company with Genius... The gestures [of the painter]: for the first time they are entirely our own, they are completely demystified." This in contrast to the 'failure' which any attempt to 'take hold of Genius' entails: ". Every effort of ‘I’, of the personal element, to take possession of Genius, to constrain him to sign in his name, is necessarily destined to fail." Moreover, it should be noted that in Agamben's other writing, 'inoperativeity' or 'worklessness' has in fact a positive, rather than negative valence. Simplifying alot, rendering things 'inoperative' is generally understood to be a 'good thing' by Agamben, and not something bad. It is the first step to allowing us to "begin to live a purely human and earthly life."

It's hard to parse this from the essay itself, which is full of allusion and is rather poetically written, but knowing a bit more about Agamben's other stuff, this is how I think one ought to read the reference to Duchamp.

For me genius (in any work) exists when no one (including the 'creator') really knows how it was brought about.

Was it Einstein who said ''genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration''?

That makes genius a reachable goal. One simply has to try harder.

What is Genius? I think that when we talk about Genius, we talk about a certain kind of success, drive, and insight. If I view history, or human competition as a Darwinian process, of many people trying vastly different things, and only some of them working, being influential, or leading to success, then there really needn't be anything substantially different between those that succeed, and those that fail. We have a tendency to diverge, try different things, operate in opposition to, or test the boundaries of normalcy, appropriateness, convention, and the things that we get involved with. To always view things in term of success, or in retrospect simply makes some appear special, I think. Unfortunately I really don't think that you can predict, or identify specific traits, or aptitudes which are going to result in that sort of thing. Maybe, as has been mentioned, those that do things their own ways, are bold, test boundaries, rebel against convention and orthodoxy are the kinds of people that are going to shake things up, but I think the overwhelming majority of such people are actually never going to achieve anything noteworthy, and be considered assholes and lunatics.

Maybe, as has been mentioned, those that do things their own ways, are bold, test boundaries, rebel against convention and orthodoxy are the kinds of people that are going to shake things up, but I think the overwhelming majority of such people are actually never going to achieve anything noteworthy, and be considered assholes and lunatics. — Wosret

The overwhelming majority of genius will be oppressed by their societies. We live in a world which is continuously threatened by real genius...

I know, right? But there's no need to fear me.

I'll take 5 of each. Keep the change.

Genius is a relative term. I like _db's reply of people who usher in a "paradigm shift". Intelligent and smart people come to the conclusions of generally smart people in a society. Geniuses can understand how people arrived at that conclusion, but also see something that the rest of society missed. Their revelation of what was missed then convinces and shapes how society views things in the future.

Difficult topic. I know a man who is clearly a genius, but is completely moronic and deluded in so many ways. I've gotten to the point where I regard genius as being exclusively encapsulated by stylistic approach at creative interests. The ability to form an idea into an objective representation, successfully, with unique style and approach. That seems to be what is among the things that most closely approximate the concept of genius.

-G

Another term for genius - gifted - says it all. One can't become a genius, there's no course you can take to make yourself one, rather one is born a genius.

This of course is now seen as a myth - geniuses can be manufactured as cars are in an assembly line is the modern view on intellectual abilities (that's what schools/universities/courses are for).

I believe I downloaded a book titled "how to become a genius", haven't read it though. :grin: