What is Genius?

Genius is one of those ephemeral items in the human inventory of gifts together with skills and talents, abilities and intelligence, proficiency and cleverness.  Hard to define, genius is both specific and contextual.  It is not generally abstract.  Genius can reveal itself everywhere, in science, business, politics, war, and literature though often along separate channels.   Some of our greatest philosophers were challenged by the concept and addressed it with notably interesting interpretations.

Immanuel Kant in Part I of his Critique of Judgment tells us "Genius is a talent for producing something for which no determinate rule can be given, not a predisposition consisting of a skill for something that can be learned by following some rule or other."

In his Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes, "Great men, like great epochs, are explosive material in whom tremendous energy has been accumulated; their prerequisite has always been, historically and physiologically, that a protracted assembling, accumulating, economizing and preserving has preceded them – that there has been no explosion for a long time."

As Schopenhauer says in Volume 2 of The World as Will and Representation:  "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see."

Hemingway was a genius, as was Einstein, Pasteur, Curie, Rembrandt, Carnegie, Napoleon, and da Vinci.  Yet, there is no single attribute that applies to all.  These exemplify there must be multiple facets of genius.  

The many faces of genius.

1. To use or assemble information available to everyone else in an entirely novel way. 
2. To begin with the same information and innovate a new way to use it.  
3. As a tour-de-force of logical argumentation.  
4. To produce a work that profoundly resonates within the soul or minds of others.  

Geniuses

• Have a strong and accurate intuition about their subject. 
• Are completely original in their approach within some venue. 
• Work tirelessly, fully committed to their task.                                                 

Example. Carl Friedrich Gauss is considered in the mathematics community as one of the top mathematicians of all time. But what he did as a school boy, to sum the numbers from one to one hundred, was to use the same information as all the other students but to assemble it in a different manner. This is one way genius is expressed. When he discovered the orbit of Ceres, once again he had available exactly the same data as other astronomers. In this case he innovated the concept of least squares to use the data in a new way. This is another way genius is expressed. When he proved the fundamental theorem of algebra, he exacted a tour de force of mathematical technique. This is a third way genius expresses itself.  Gauss had them all.