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What Is Genius?

Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001): 181-96.

Denis Dutton

In Memoriam

www.denisdutton.com





There’s a school of thought which holds that there’s nothing much of interest that can be said about genius. The root idea is older than Kant, but it was well summarized by him: genius is a natural endowment, deep, strange, and mysterious, at least with respect to putative explanations. Schubert can get up in the morning and before lunch knock off five songs that captivate us hundreds of years later. There’s no way for us to account for this, and we ought not to expect, Kant claims, that genius can explain itself either: Schubert doesn’t have a clue how he does it.
Yet trying to figure out how creative geniuses do it remains a permanent source of fascination, most of it fairly naïve. When the ingénue reporter is sent out by the City Editor to interview the famous, crusty old novelist, the first question is normally, “Where do you get your ideas?” Of course, if the novelist knew that, he’d not be likely to blab it in the press. Kant’s point is that he cannot really know; no one can. Monroe Beardsley relays a story about Picasso, who claimed to suffer from “an indigestion of greenness” from walking in the woods on a summer’s day: “I must empty this sensation into a picture,” Picasso said. “Green dominates it. The painter paints as if in urgent need to discharge himself of his sensations and his visions.” Beardsley observes that green indigestion could have been even more plausibly used to “explain” a red painting (“I needed an antidote to all that green”), or a pen-and-ink drawing (“I needed to get away from color”), or anything else. There is in this a general point about why we are so often disappointed by interviews with artists. The artist can do; the artist can’t explain how.
Dean Simonton

It does not follow, however, that nothing of interest can be learned, at least at a descriptive level, about genius. Dean Keith Simonton has spent most of a career looking at the subject as a psychologist, and his Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity (Oxford University Press, $27.50) ties together much of his research and that of others in a way that extends thinking on genius far beyond armchair meditations or mere platitudes. At the heart of Simonton’s project are two very different ideas: first, he argues that evolution and processes of natural selection provide illuminating models to explain the existence and operation of creative genius in the sciences and the arts. Second, he propounds a rather more dubious thesis, that the process of natural selection itself is an adequate model for understanding genius at work, that the history of human ideas demonstrates a kind of secondary evolution. To these hypotheses, Simonton adds a further Darwinian overlay: he returns repeatedly to the personality and biography of Charles Darwin himself as the paradigm of a life of creative genius. While this has the advantage of anchoring the discussion, giving it a kind of ostinato ground, it diverts Simonton from the manifestations of genius, especially artistic genius, which do not resemble Darwin’s personal example.
Creative genius is defined by Simonton as the capacity to originate scientific discoveries, artistic works, technical inventions, or engage in political leadership, in a manner that achieves what is conventionally termed eminence. The eminent person creates, discovers, or invents something that passes the test of time and, like the similar test devised by Hume to mark out artistic greatness, appeals to cultures beyond that of the original act of creation. It is not hard for the philosophically trained reader to devise counter-examples to Simonton’s general theses, but the value of his book does not require a rigorous definition at the outset. Whatever genius is, and however we might dispute it, there is no doubting that Leonardo Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Newton, and Einstein count as creative geniuses in Simonton’s sense. High raw IQ is frequently associated with genius, but it is generally a necessary rather than sufficient condition: he points out that the Guinness Book of Records’s highest intelligence placement belongs to the popular columnist Marilyn vos Savant, a woman who has not distinguished herself in any field, despite her awesome 228 IQ. By using public recognition over an indeterminate period of historic time as his criterion, Simonton cheerfully accepts that unrecognized genius becomes an oxymoron and that we count as creative geniuses persons who, like Darwin, might not have scored especially high on a conventional IQ test.
His account of the products of creative genius is more problematic. He stipulates that works of genius must be original, at least within their cultural and historic context. But Simonton says also that “an original idea or product must be adaptive in some sense.” This is plain enough applied to an original and true scientific theory, such as Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which has deep explanatory power, or the germ theory of disease, which allows for advances in medicine. It could also be said to be true of inventions, such as moveable type or the electric light. But how are works of art adaptive in any similar sense? He explains that adaptiveness in the arts “often entails the capacity to maintain interest through novel expression as well as through powerful emotional appeal.” Audiences therefore decide who the geniuses are, choosing their works over others. Fair enough: but it’s a dodgy business to compare the value of a scientific theory or technical invention, which depends on somehow corresponding to the structure of the world whether we approve of it or not, with the value of a work of art, where value-ascriptions must take into account long-term audience approval. Scientific advances are adaptive to human well-being, and therefore propagation, because — let us say it without embarrassment — they are true. A Hollywood blockbuster appealing to vast numbers of people, or the Brandenburg Concertos, which are liked by smaller numbers but over a much longer period of time, are both in the end rated by short- or long-term popularity criteria; they are adapted to audience interests and desires, but are not necessarily “adaptive” in any other sense. If Simonton wants to argue that works of art that pass the test of time are somehow true, he might do so, but he does not address the issue, leaving jumbled the rather different adaptive characteristics of works of art and discoveries of science. In actuality, truth is an issue that Simonton seems to want to evade, though it will continuing to rear its head in any such analysis as this: if broad professional recognition over a long time is, as Simonton wants to make out, the criterion of genius for science, and truth is not brought into it, then Ptolemy must surely stand with Einstein and Darwin. Ptolemy’s reputation endured for over a thousand years, while Einstein and Darwin have been around for not much more than a century.