I feel you, friend. Post-anything is an intellectual red flag for me. That said, I do like the flavor of confusion Deleuze gives me. I also feel strangely creative after reading him.
Other than that I get most of my philosophical kicks with Nietzsche.
Feb 20, 2023·edited Feb 20, 2023Liked by Samuel Lopez-Barrantes
What does "genius" mean in the 21st Century? You hinted at the answer in your last point about where geniuses come from. Whether we're talking about people from the realms of science and mathematics or artistic spaces like music and fiction, it all comes back to original thought, or, more importantly, the perception of it.
While the structuralists you mentioned could've used a good editor, they had a point: language IS subjective. It's easy to recognize that when it comes to words like "genius." It's why we tend to shudder when people attribute the term to themselves. That doesn't make it meaningless. It means we all decide what it means together.
I made a similar point in a recent essay (https://ponytail.substack.com/p/the-things-outside-of-me), but whether we're talking about Einstein or Lamar (or in the case above, Animal Collective), geniuses don't just speak truth or see life from new angles. They have the guts to share their ideas, too. And then it's the audience that determines whether that idea is "genius."
Coming from another discipline - like data analytics and Mathematics. The term Genius in the 21st Century could be easily settled by obtaining a data set of all people who have used the term genius in all domains. It is then a simple task to make groupings of the data if they all mean the same. You will have a range of opinions and you will then see what is the dominant meaning for the genius usage.
I suspect then you will see different domains have different attributes to describe Genius. What does this mean for our overall understanding ? Scientist are easily classifiable by the results they produce and what about idea/ argument debaters - not so clear is it - it suggests the term is loosely used with no basis in fact, that can verified.
However, finding the molecular structure of benzene seemed like an intractable problem. Until Mr Kerkule fell asleep by the fireside and dreamed of a snake biting its tale. When he awoke from slumber he had a eureka moment - of course the structure is circular!
So is Kerkule a genius ? by making a connection that nobody else saw - was he just plain lucky ?
In the arts people connect dots and have surprising viewpoint all the time - are they geniuses ?
Genius is a loosely used word as I believe anyone can have a Kerkule moment.
I fear that "genius" is going, or has already gone, the way of words like "hero" and "curate," all slipping into a post-post-post miasma of the 21st century. Whether I've recovered from my grad school encounters with Derrida or Barthes or not, I tend more toward understandable statements these day. It seems the real test of genius is the ability to communicate with normies. The greater the ability, the greater the genius.
"... why, according to almost all of us, the term "genius" remains reserved for white European men who lived during the 15th-19th centuries, and why geniuses are only usually ever considered in the worlds of science and mathematics."
There's an interesting twist going on in what you point out here.
If you were in, say, early 19th century England or Germany, the word "genius" would have positively vibrated with romantic connotations. From Coleridge and Blake to Holderlin and Schiller to Shelley and Byron and Keats, and in philosophy, through Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, genius had far more to do with artistic creativity (not to mention the affect of the "tortured artist" that remains with us today).
All of these figures were powerfully influenced by classical art and writing from ancient Greece, for whom math and science had a quite different role than they play in our time.
What's interesting here is how the romantic image, which began in Europe as a reaction to the sterile reason-and-science approach of the enlightenment, has become synonymous with gifts and talents in those very areas.
The European romantics were hardly cosmopolitans, but I think they'd have more interesting things to say about genius than the braying cultists worshiping at the feet of Dawkins, Hawking, and Neil de Grasse Tyson.
I'll make the same point as I made in response to Erik Hoel. Genius is not just about ability. Mensa is full of exceptionally intelligent people who make no appreciable difference to human flourishing. We call someone a genius not for being smart, but for making a big difference. Genius is measured in accomplishment.
Bach was obviously exceptionally gifted, but he also came at a time when music theory and musical instrument making had made significant advances that opened up the vast musical possibilities that he explored. Mozart discovered a new vein to explore, and so did Beethoven. The other composers of the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods made significant contributions as well, but the big three explored a huge chunk of the available territory. The rest were clearing up after them and exploring the few remaining remote corners. Symphonic music today is an arrhythmic atonal mess because that's the only territory left for composers in that form, other than film music.
There may be many people of equal musical gifts today. Statistically, given our wealth and population, there should be dozens if not hundreds. But there isn't the same vast musical territory to explore. You can be a superb musician today, but music is so mature now that the chances of finding some vast unexplored territory to open up the way Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven did is remote.
There are multiple examples from history of people making the same breakthrough at almost the same time. Thus you will recognize Charles Darwin as the name of one of the great geniuses of our civilization, but Alfred Russel Wallace is probably a name you will have to Google for. Ditto for Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray. Genius is talent meeting opportunity, and publishing first.
So if we are a little short on geniuses today, it is probably for two reasons. One is in both the arts and sciences, we are a very mature civilization (perhaps even one doddering into madness and decay) and there are not so many great breakthroughs to be made. There are, in other words, fewer thing to be a genius about.
The second is that we are now incredibly deliberate and systematic about how we tackle almost every problem. In every field, teams drive forward the boundaries of knowledge and engineering on a factory production model. When great breakthroughs are made, therefore, they are made by teams working systematically, not individuals working alone. The team is the genius. The process is the genius. The MNRA COVID vaccine is an astonishing breakthrough. In any previous age, it would be the work of a individual genius. Today is the the work of a team for very bright people following a well designed and disciplined process. We don't know the names of any of the hundreds of people on those teams. We know the names of the companies they worked for. Pfizer and Moderna are the geniuses.
I think the commonality for the term genius - is to see what others do not see and make connections
that others can not make. In that way the domain is not important but only the skill to apply and get results that most ever dreamed of. My opinion of course ( from sunny Melbourne Australia ! )
Feb 23, 2023·edited Feb 23, 2023Liked by Samuel Lopez-Barrantes
Just want to point out that when you click on Martha Nussbaums essay, it says it was published in February 1999, not 2000 as mentioned here.
As for how I try to be more genius like, I run a Zettelkasten where I put my notes (and link them) of what I read. Not all I read, but most of the non-fiction stuff. That takes a lot of time, but that way I remember what I read a couple of years later (without: not so long). A Zettelkasten usually helps making connections, too.
As for Erik Hoels way of raising genius: I went to a math club at university when I was 14 here in Berlin, Germany. It was the late 80s and in a math summer camp we had access to a computer there and we started coding, actually. We tried to program a text parser so we could develop text adventures, after Infocom and so.
Much has to be said for a simplification of a life
Unfortunately it comes down to illiteracy too - monetary and financial; thinking interest rates never go down and therefore over borrow only to regret that decision when the tide turns - but it has never happened for 10 years they say ! Belatedly, a wider lens and deeper historical economic insight
would of helped avoid that exuberant decision. History does repeat not always in the same time horizon though.
I hope you get a return on your Master's Investment and that you extinguish any debt or maybe the Supreme Court passes a favorable outcome.
It is interesting the etymology of the word mortgage in medieval times means " Dead Pledge". That sounds scary and somehow that message has been lost over the ages, no doubt by creative marketing by lending institutions - we can't have lazy capital laying about -we must rent it out to borrowers !
Interesting discussion thread, I must go back to my studies of Mandarin
Feb 24, 2023Liked by Samuel Lopez-Barrantes, Elle Griffin
This really struck me: "...wherein many of the most intelligent amongst us use language more as a gavel for control than as a tool for communication."
How poignant! Made me wonder how much I use language to gratify my ego...
And I'm curious about the "cultivating genius" question...
I don't know if genius can be cultivated. Genius feels like a historical term - like we give it to people who made an oversized impact in their time, but we just didn't realize how big an impact it would make. I'm not an expert, though. Did anyone call Pasteur a genius in his time?
I think the problem with "cultivating genius" is like commodifying something that best happens naturally. Synthetically creating individuals to have oversized impact in our world seems to come with a lot of issues on the darker side of social engineering. And we worship geniuses maybe too much as it is.
Loved this. Incomprehensibility does not genius make. True geniuses not only discover and formulate new ideas and associations, but can communicate complex ideas in a way that can be understood by the rest of us.
I believe there is a tangible shift in the notion of genius and who gets to claim it, notably the MacArthur Genius Grants, which provide significant financial support to creative people in the sciences, arts, activism, and more who don't fit the old model. About the 2022 fellows, according to the website: “The 2022 MacArthur Fellows are architects of new modes of activism, artistic practice, and citizen science. They are excavators uncovering what has been overlooked, undervalued, or poorly understood..."
I feel you, friend. Post-anything is an intellectual red flag for me. That said, I do like the flavor of confusion Deleuze gives me. I also feel strangely creative after reading him.
Other than that I get most of my philosophical kicks with Nietzsche.
What does "genius" mean in the 21st Century? You hinted at the answer in your last point about where geniuses come from. Whether we're talking about people from the realms of science and mathematics or artistic spaces like music and fiction, it all comes back to original thought, or, more importantly, the perception of it.
While the structuralists you mentioned could've used a good editor, they had a point: language IS subjective. It's easy to recognize that when it comes to words like "genius." It's why we tend to shudder when people attribute the term to themselves. That doesn't make it meaningless. It means we all decide what it means together.
I made a similar point in a recent essay (https://ponytail.substack.com/p/the-things-outside-of-me), but whether we're talking about Einstein or Lamar (or in the case above, Animal Collective), geniuses don't just speak truth or see life from new angles. They have the guts to share their ideas, too. And then it's the audience that determines whether that idea is "genius."
Here's a 1-minute long vid on the etymology of the word "genius."
https://chasholloway.substack.com/p/what-is-genius
Here's a 1-minute long vid on the etymology of the word "genius."
Coming from another discipline - like data analytics and Mathematics. The term Genius in the 21st Century could be easily settled by obtaining a data set of all people who have used the term genius in all domains. It is then a simple task to make groupings of the data if they all mean the same. You will have a range of opinions and you will then see what is the dominant meaning for the genius usage.
I suspect then you will see different domains have different attributes to describe Genius. What does this mean for our overall understanding ? Scientist are easily classifiable by the results they produce and what about idea/ argument debaters - not so clear is it - it suggests the term is loosely used with no basis in fact, that can verified.
However, finding the molecular structure of benzene seemed like an intractable problem. Until Mr Kerkule fell asleep by the fireside and dreamed of a snake biting its tale. When he awoke from slumber he had a eureka moment - of course the structure is circular!
So is Kerkule a genius ? by making a connection that nobody else saw - was he just plain lucky ?
In the arts people connect dots and have surprising viewpoint all the time - are they geniuses ?
Genius is a loosely used word as I believe anyone can have a Kerkule moment.
The data does not tell lies
I fear that "genius" is going, or has already gone, the way of words like "hero" and "curate," all slipping into a post-post-post miasma of the 21st century. Whether I've recovered from my grad school encounters with Derrida or Barthes or not, I tend more toward understandable statements these day. It seems the real test of genius is the ability to communicate with normies. The greater the ability, the greater the genius.
"... why, according to almost all of us, the term "genius" remains reserved for white European men who lived during the 15th-19th centuries, and why geniuses are only usually ever considered in the worlds of science and mathematics."
There's an interesting twist going on in what you point out here.
If you were in, say, early 19th century England or Germany, the word "genius" would have positively vibrated with romantic connotations. From Coleridge and Blake to Holderlin and Schiller to Shelley and Byron and Keats, and in philosophy, through Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, genius had far more to do with artistic creativity (not to mention the affect of the "tortured artist" that remains with us today).
All of these figures were powerfully influenced by classical art and writing from ancient Greece, for whom math and science had a quite different role than they play in our time.
What's interesting here is how the romantic image, which began in Europe as a reaction to the sterile reason-and-science approach of the enlightenment, has become synonymous with gifts and talents in those very areas.
The European romantics were hardly cosmopolitans, but I think they'd have more interesting things to say about genius than the braying cultists worshiping at the feet of Dawkins, Hawking, and Neil de Grasse Tyson.
I'll make the same point as I made in response to Erik Hoel. Genius is not just about ability. Mensa is full of exceptionally intelligent people who make no appreciable difference to human flourishing. We call someone a genius not for being smart, but for making a big difference. Genius is measured in accomplishment.
Bach was obviously exceptionally gifted, but he also came at a time when music theory and musical instrument making had made significant advances that opened up the vast musical possibilities that he explored. Mozart discovered a new vein to explore, and so did Beethoven. The other composers of the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods made significant contributions as well, but the big three explored a huge chunk of the available territory. The rest were clearing up after them and exploring the few remaining remote corners. Symphonic music today is an arrhythmic atonal mess because that's the only territory left for composers in that form, other than film music.
There may be many people of equal musical gifts today. Statistically, given our wealth and population, there should be dozens if not hundreds. But there isn't the same vast musical territory to explore. You can be a superb musician today, but music is so mature now that the chances of finding some vast unexplored territory to open up the way Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven did is remote.
There are multiple examples from history of people making the same breakthrough at almost the same time. Thus you will recognize Charles Darwin as the name of one of the great geniuses of our civilization, but Alfred Russel Wallace is probably a name you will have to Google for. Ditto for Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray. Genius is talent meeting opportunity, and publishing first.
So if we are a little short on geniuses today, it is probably for two reasons. One is in both the arts and sciences, we are a very mature civilization (perhaps even one doddering into madness and decay) and there are not so many great breakthroughs to be made. There are, in other words, fewer thing to be a genius about.
The second is that we are now incredibly deliberate and systematic about how we tackle almost every problem. In every field, teams drive forward the boundaries of knowledge and engineering on a factory production model. When great breakthroughs are made, therefore, they are made by teams working systematically, not individuals working alone. The team is the genius. The process is the genius. The MNRA COVID vaccine is an astonishing breakthrough. In any previous age, it would be the work of a individual genius. Today is the the work of a team for very bright people following a well designed and disciplined process. We don't know the names of any of the hundreds of people on those teams. We know the names of the companies they worked for. Pfizer and Moderna are the geniuses.
Thank you. You raise several good points.
I think the commonality for the term genius - is to see what others do not see and make connections
that others can not make. In that way the domain is not important but only the skill to apply and get results that most ever dreamed of. My opinion of course ( from sunny Melbourne Australia ! )
Just want to point out that when you click on Martha Nussbaums essay, it says it was published in February 1999, not 2000 as mentioned here.
As for how I try to be more genius like, I run a Zettelkasten where I put my notes (and link them) of what I read. Not all I read, but most of the non-fiction stuff. That takes a lot of time, but that way I remember what I read a couple of years later (without: not so long). A Zettelkasten usually helps making connections, too.
As for Erik Hoels way of raising genius: I went to a math club at university when I was 14 here in Berlin, Germany. It was the late 80s and in a math summer camp we had access to a computer there and we started coding, actually. We tried to program a text parser so we could develop text adventures, after Infocom and so.
Excellent framework.
Much has to be said for a simplification of a life
Unfortunately it comes down to illiteracy too - monetary and financial; thinking interest rates never go down and therefore over borrow only to regret that decision when the tide turns - but it has never happened for 10 years they say ! Belatedly, a wider lens and deeper historical economic insight
would of helped avoid that exuberant decision. History does repeat not always in the same time horizon though.
No doubt the Ukrainian is one of Campbell's thousand faces with the superpower of song.
I hope you get a return on your Master's Investment and that you extinguish any debt or maybe the Supreme Court passes a favorable outcome.
It is interesting the etymology of the word mortgage in medieval times means " Dead Pledge". That sounds scary and somehow that message has been lost over the ages, no doubt by creative marketing by lending institutions - we can't have lazy capital laying about -we must rent it out to borrowers !
Interesting discussion thread, I must go back to my studies of Mandarin
cheers
This really struck me: "...wherein many of the most intelligent amongst us use language more as a gavel for control than as a tool for communication."
How poignant! Made me wonder how much I use language to gratify my ego...
And I'm curious about the "cultivating genius" question...
I don't know if genius can be cultivated. Genius feels like a historical term - like we give it to people who made an oversized impact in their time, but we just didn't realize how big an impact it would make. I'm not an expert, though. Did anyone call Pasteur a genius in his time?
I think the problem with "cultivating genius" is like commodifying something that best happens naturally. Synthetically creating individuals to have oversized impact in our world seems to come with a lot of issues on the darker side of social engineering. And we worship geniuses maybe too much as it is.
Loved this. Incomprehensibility does not genius make. True geniuses not only discover and formulate new ideas and associations, but can communicate complex ideas in a way that can be understood by the rest of us.
I believe there is a tangible shift in the notion of genius and who gets to claim it, notably the MacArthur Genius Grants, which provide significant financial support to creative people in the sciences, arts, activism, and more who don't fit the old model. About the 2022 fellows, according to the website: “The 2022 MacArthur Fellows are architects of new modes of activism, artistic practice, and citizen science. They are excavators uncovering what has been overlooked, undervalued, or poorly understood..."