The essence of Genius: Part 1

Genius then becomes something through which you can sift anything at all and come up with something different yet familiar enough to be recognizably different. At this juncture, it sounds remarkably like creativity, or fancy, or imagination. These latter two words are often confused with one another. The critic who did the most to distinguish these two words initially was Coleridge. As we know, fancy for Coleridge was the inferior mental faculty that was content with the passive data accumulated in memory. Fancy does not combine, or in combining, create. Imagination, on the other hand, is a more dynamic faculty, by which a human being can create something new, and assert the organic principle that the Romantics felt underlay all of creation. Imagination can be unconscious, or conscious and deliberate.

True genius, inasmuch as it begets something new, lies towards the end of the creative spectrum denoted by Imagination. But this applies for literary and creative fields. What about the sciences?

Genius and Culture

But genius does not need to be isolated as stereotype. It could be the norm. One could argue that the emergence of genius coincides with a dissatisfaction with the constraints that culture places on us. Paradoxically, this very dissatisfaction would not have come about if the genius in question was not present in culture to begin with. Culture, instead of acting as catalyst, inhibits free and revolutionary thought, and the genius is one who has realized this, or as a necessity has had to realize this in order to give free reign to his conceptual process. Therefore, he is the quintessential loner figure, not out of any vaunted sense of vanity, but out of sheer necessity. His thoughts have resulted as an outpouring of sheer desire for the Real transferred onto a technique or a material obsession. From this we can conclude that genius would be the norm, if not for the inhibiting and restraining effects of culture. In other words, the genius is the purest expression of the human once he has extricated himself from the ineffectual rudiments of culture.

Stereotype and Genius

Here's the thing about stereotypes: they are both true and not true. They are true for some people, which is why they strike a nerve when brought up. But they also assume that everyone has the capacity to attach themselves to a fictionalized and reduced construct.

In other words, stereotypes are words without context. Words would reduce a concept or a person to a fixed, immutable entity if it weren't for contexts. But even in different contexts within a certain culture at any given time, stereotypes remain the same. If they change, they change gradually and seamlessly with every small change in culture, so as to not raise any alarms if their meanings are suddenly discovered to have changed completely.

The word genius is a stereotype in that regard. But what complicates matters is the fact that, fictionally, contexts can be construed and manipulated to mean various things, all or none of which may be true to culture. So a genius becomes, in one fell swoop, both word and stereotype. In the fictional sense it is a word; in the cultural sense, a stereotype. In other words, it is both mutable and unchanging, both dynamic and contained.

Genius

Genius is a word that is difficult to define, because it represents quality, personality or a person, sometimes all three at the same time. If genius is a matter of quality, then is it consistent in a person, or is it elusive and independent? If it is a personality, does it mean that said nature can be imbibed in someone, and therefore learned? And finally, if it is a person, does it mean that genius is a freak of nature, and it can no more be learned or created than a work of art might be replicated in toto by a different artist working in another part of the world with the same idea?

The one thing common in all three aspects of the term is a peculiar ability that distinguishes it from the usual fare, or whatever passes for the usual fare in a specific episteme. If it is scientific genius, then it follows that it lies not in the discovery, or invention, but in the genius's having seen something important in a discovery that no one found exciting enough scientifically to warrant studying, or it could lie in the ability to leap to a certain conclusion, or to recognize a certain train of thought as being that which brings about a paradigm shift.

The confusion stems from not knowing how human creativity works, and to what extent human creativity can be provoked to, as it were, think outside the confines of heteronormative rationality.

This is made complicated by the fact that the literary work that chooses to represent genius is an attempt at identifying imaginatively and hypothetically, and for certain, what passes for genius. Further, in trying to answer something that modern science is still at a loss for, and in proposing a theory through a fictional treatment of a hypothesis, the work of art could itself be one of genius in how strange and/or belittling it is of concurrent notions of morality, aesthetics, rationality etc.

There is one more difficulty which must be addressed: if we do identify something as genius, it means either that we have it within ourselves to become genius, and/or a genius is something that is identifiable to begin with. But herein lies a paradox: if a genius is something or someone so ahead of his time to warrant an outright negation or incredulity, then it follows that we would not be able to identify it in the first place to begin with. The alternate mode of existence postulated by a man or woman of genius would be too alien to the common man to comprehend and therefore, identification of said genius would be impossible. At best, he could think it to be something outre, or uncanny. But uncanniness does not always translate into genius. How then do we identify something we cannot comprehend?

The only answer to this would be to posit that genius is not identified as much as the potential he or his work has for utility, or exploitation. If what is discovered may translate into abnormal gains for a certain age and time, then it must be something worth pondering. The node of utility becomes then the only point of contact between genius and common man, at least in science.

But what then is the case when it comes to representation?