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...