Geniuses and Saints

I read this article by Joseph Epstein on why we don’t seem to have any geniuses nowadays. When he said that most consider Albert Einstein as the last modern genius, I agreed. Until I read the rest of his article. And then I agreed with Friedrich Nietzsche that the belief in genius is just a “superstitious belief”!

So what is genius? Of course, there’s no standard answer to that question. Otherwise, we wouldn’t call people from so many diverse fields (Plato and Aristotle; Bach and Beethoven; Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; Newton and Darwin; Ramanujan; and Shakespeare) as geniuses, would we? Then there are the evil geniuses like Hitler and Stalin…and geniuses that are “considered the intellectual equivalent of false messiahs”, like Karl Marx.

Which is why I agree with Epstein that the only definition that seems to work is Schopenhauer’s:

“Talent is like the marksman who hits a target, which others cannot reach. Genius is like the marksman who hits a target, which others cannot see.”

Also, did you notice that geniuses tend to arise (get acknowledged?) “in those areas of life dominant in specific cultures at specific times”? Because that would certainly account for the diversity of the fields in which they are found.

That last part possibly answers the question as to why we don’t seem to find any geniuses after Einstein. The age after Einstein is the Commercial Age; and most still shudder at the thought of calling money making skills as “genius”. Which is why Thomas Edison and Henry Ford lose out.  As do Pele, Maradona and Roger Federer. Even a guy like Steve Jobs who changed the world, repeatedly, “need not apply”.

On the other hand, maybe the reason for the paucity of geniuses in the modern age is that we are too close to the people from the modern day and see all their warts and freckles. Darrin McMahon, author of Divine Fury: A History of Genius, argued that “genius has never been entirely shorn of the notion of divinity”. If he’s right, maybe the certification of genius has a waiting period, like that for sainthood!