Genius: Standing on the Shoulders of Social Networks

Abstract

This chapter critically situates the idea of “genius.” The very idea of genius is based on and reinforces the myth of individualism and the “I” as a grammatical illusion. As a sociologist, I claim that if you give me a genius, I will give you a social network. I illustrate this claim with brief looks into non-Euclidean geometry, Ramanujan, Nikola Tesla, and Rodin followed by an exploration of the Einstein genius cluster. Other topics include chaos and creativity, the social context of genius, intuition, and an appendix on creativity and madness. I examine the key notions of genius clusters and the multiples idea: any given innovative idea or technology appears along with more or less similar innovations—families of innovations or parts thereof—at the same time within the boundaries of a cultural or civilizational region.

Appendices

Appendix: A Note on Creativity and Madness

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence-whether much that is glorious-whether all that is profound-does not spring from disease of thought-from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect: They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their grey vision they obtain glimpses of eternity. … They penetrate, however rudderless or compassless, into the vast ocean of the “light affable”. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) “Eleonora,” 1903/1842.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact: Theseus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act V, Scene 1, Shakespeare 1998/1600).

Marcel Proust, “Everything great in the world is created by neurotics. They have composed our masterpieces, but we don’t consider what they have cost their creators in sleepless nights, and worst of all, fear of death: The Guermantes Way,” pt. 1, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 5 (1921).

The idea that there was a connection between genius and madness was already afoot in the ancient world. Aristotle, in Problemata XXX.1, 953a, 10–14 (Barnes 1984), posed the following question: “Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile?” The influence of Cesare Lombroso’s (1891) belief that genius and madness were connected was still strong when Lewis Terman’s (1925) data suggested that people of high ability exhibited less incidence of mental illness and adjustment problems than average (Neihart 1998; and for a collection of contemporary longitudinal studies of giftedness and talent, see Subotnik and Arnold 1994). On the genius-madness connection, see Wolchover (2012), Marano (2007), Schlesinger (2009), and Kyaga (2015). Kay Redfield Jamison (1995) found that outstanding 16-year-olds were more likely to become bipolar in later life than their more “normal” peers (and see her related work: 1989, 1993). Fallon has found that the same neural circuits are associated with bipolar disorders and creativity, reported in Hsu (2012); and see Fallon (2013). Saks (2007) explains that psychotics can hold contradictory ideas in mind and access loose associations that most people’s “brains” wouldn’t allow to emerge into the conscious mind.

Some writers on the creativity-madness connection stress the hard work and late nights characteristic of creative people; see the remarks by M. Csikszentmihalyi and Robert Root-Bernstein in Marano (2007); and see Csikaentmihalyi (1996) on flow and creativity, and Macarthur award recipient Root-Bernstein’s (1989) virtuoso examination of the conditions most likely to lead to discoveries in science; his ideas converge on the anarchistic theory of inquiry I outlined in Restivo (2016).

There is a sociology of genius/creativity and madness that undercuts genetic and neuronal explanations. The creative lifestyle is not conducive to emotional stability and many creative people have to deal with poverty and public indifference. And alternatively there are social pressures that accompany success and public acclaim. Creative people are likely to be more open and sensitive and thus more easily exposed to suffering and pain. We are at the end of the day left to deal with contradictions. Koh (2006), in her review of the link between creativity and madness, points out that there is indeed substantial evidence linking genius and madness but that similar factors may be at work in “geniuses ” and “ordinary” people. Furthermore, post-modern culture may have erased the fine line between genius and madness. As recently as 1993 Natalie Angier reported in the New York Times that in the wake of decades of controversy about how to define “madness” and “creativity,” and resistance by scientists to the popular idea that the two terms reflect a relationship, there is now powerful evidence linking certain mental disorders and artistic achievement. Critics of these findings include Weisberg (1986, 1993); and Rothenberg’s (2014) conclusions are based on interviews with 45 Nobel laureates, hardly a representative sample capable of carrying the burden of a firm conclusion on the link between creativity and madness ; but see also his (1990). Even though Nobelist Eric R. Kandel (2018) is still stuck in the pseudo-problem of how mind emerges from physical processes, his study of the biology of “unusual minds” and what they reveal about ourselves is based on a lifetime of outstanding scientific achievement and worth the attention of anyone interested in the brain, brain disorders, and creativity; see especially Chap. 6 on “Our Innate Creativity: Brain Disorders and Art.” He discusses “psychotic art” (the visual art of people with schizophrenia), and the creativity of people with bipolar disorder, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, and frontotemporal dementia. Chapter 2 is on “Our Intensely Social Nature: The Autism Spectrum.” Kandel does not explore the implications of the social brain beyond the biological paradigm thus failing to follow up on “our intensely social nature.”

Bibliographic Notes for Chapter 4

Genius Clusters and Multiple (Simultaneous) Discovery

• It’s clear from Claudia Kalb’s (2018) work in “The Science of Genius” that the concepts of social networks of geniuses and genius clusters are known to students of genius. The problem is that networks and clusters are viewed as contexts or environments that are associated with the genius (see Chap. 3).

• On genius and culture and genius clusters, see the anthropologist Kroeber (1963, esp. 7–27 and 838–846); for a more journalistic and accessible account, see Weiner (2016); major research is reported in Simonton (1999: 199–241), Mercier and Sperber (2017: 315–327); the locus classicus for the concept of multiple discovery is Merton (1961).

The Magic and Mystery of Mathematics

• For a journalistic review, see Browne (1987). John Dee was arrested for “calculating” in 1555: see French (2002/1972); Thorndike (1923–1958); Zetterberg (1980). St. Augustine (354–430), in The Confessions (1960/397–400: 95; 116; 163; 241), warned Christians against “mathematicians” (read “astrologers,” “prophets,” “necromancers,” “numerologists”); all those who traded in numbers had made a pact with the devil. See also Literal Commentary on Genesis (De Genesi and litteram, an exegetical text on the first book of the Bible dating between 1147 and 1164 (see Book II, xviii, 37).

Non-Euclidean Geometry, Ramanujan, Nikola Tesla, Rodin

• See Restivo (2018: 139–142) and the associated references; on “having a feeling for the organism,” see Keller (1983); the movie clip on Rodin is from the film Camille Claudel, directed by Bruno Nuytten for Les Films Christian Fechner, 1988.

1840–1920 Genius Cluster

• See Restivo (2018), on the central period of the social science Copernican revolution, 1840–1920/1930; on the historical anthropology and configurations of genius clusters, see Kroeber, 1963); Weiner (2016) is an excellent journalistic history and companion to Kroeber; and for the late nineteenth and early-twentieth-century genius cluster that nourished Einstein, see Miller (2001); and also see Kalb (2018: 77–112).

Gender and Genius (+Queer Genius)

• Battersby (1989); Elfenbein (1996); Stadler (1999); Hone (2015); DeNora (1993); on Kivy vs. Battersby & Kivy vs. DeNora, see Kivy (2001); Garber (2018); for a feminist perspective on mind, brain, and cognition, see Wilson (1998).

Genius: The Very Idea

• On the history of genius, see McMahon (2013); and Martin (1969); on the scientific revolution which helped fuel the evolution of the concept of “genius”, see Restivo, 1994: 29–48); on “Darwinian Genius: The Future of an Idea,” see Simonton (1999: 243–248); for a study of genius in the general context of reason, see Mercier and Sperber (2017); Jenkins (2013) urges us to place genius in an open, democratic space; this, he writes will force us to revolutionize the way we think of “knowledge,” “school,” and “texts.” This will help us re-imagine various forms of life as “spaces of significant learning.” In this context, different forms of work from songs and poetry to performances and videos can be viewed as critical texts. Hip-hop is a “space of knowledge production” that expands the boundaries of academic inquiry and transforms our understanding of and approach to pedagogy. Marjorie Garber (2000) deals with “genius” as a contemporary commodity, ambition, and lifestyle. She writes that biographers, scholars, critics, and fans are trying to nail down a concept that can’t be nailed down and simultaneously trying to “make the genius lovable, accessible, and ready for prime time.” There is a journalistic truth here but one that skirts around the program for a sociology and anthropology of genius that I have argued for in this book. She reviews the word “genius,” “genius and aberration,” “quantifying genius” (on Terman’s efforts to identify genius using a version of Binet’s IQ test), “banking on genius” (attempting to foster genius through grants such as the “genius grants” of the MacArthur Foundation and the Repository for Germinal Choice, the “genius” sperm bank founded by R.K. Clark), and “our genius complex”; unless we separate the power of ideas from personalities we will continue to be “dazzled” by celebrity and distracted by the lauding of geniuses as high-culture heroes, as “essence rather than force.” I endorse her call for a new way of thinking about thinking rather than just another word. For readable biographies of “geniuses,” see Gleick (1992) on Feynman; Monk (1990) on Wittgenstein, an outstanding biography that can be paired with Janik and Toulmin (1973) which is a virtually sociological account that situates Wittgenstein in the Vienna of his time; see also Jamison’s (2017) study of “genius, mania, and character” in the life of Robert Lowell; and on “idiot savants,” see Howe (1989), and for his explanation of “genius,” see Howe (1999).

Individual Genius and Social Context, Uncovering the Mystery of Intuition, and Free Will Redux

• On “automaticity,” see Bargh and Chartrand (1999); Langer (1978); and Klein (1998); Weisberg (1993) is an excellent treatment of the genius myth; he was already exposing the myth of genius in his 1983 book; and see Maturana and Varela (1980): They claim that living systems are “autonomous, self-referring and self-constructing closed systems—in short, autopoietic systems” (R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky, Editorial Preface, v). The approach here is based on a virtually essentialist biological cognition paradigm. It does afford, however, opportunities to link it to the social brain connectome paradigm I discuss in Chap. 5.

• Norretranders (1991) has an innovative and somewhat off-beat conception of consciousness. He claims that we have oversold consciousness: it does not contain much information, “for information is otherness and unpredictability.” “The more power consciousness has over existence, the greater the problem of its paucity of information becomes.” “Consciousness will find composure by acknowledging that people need more information than consciousness can supply. Man also needs the information contained in consciousness, just as we need a map to find our way around the terrain. But what really counts is not knowing the map—it is knowing the terrain” (416–417). This gives only the slightest hint at the eccentric riches contained in this big bold book. I should note his indebtedness to the works of Benjamin Libet. On intuition, see Lynch (2006), Bealer (1998); Klein (2003); Giannini, Daood, et al. (1978); Robson and Miller (2006); DePaul and Ramsey (1998); Kahneman (2011). There is a large literature on intuition in eastern philosophy; see, for example, Radhakrishnan (1932) for a review of the concept in Eastern and Western philosophy and a defense of intuition, faith, spiritual experience, and the testimony of scriptures in theological language as “necessary for knowledge and life.” For contemporary perspectives in this tradition, see Chopra and Orlogg (2001) and Aurobindo (1990).

On Affordances

• I have borrowed and adapted the term “affordances” from an admittedly already complicated literature on the term. Gibson (1986) introduced the term and defined it as “action possibilities in the environment.” Norman (1988) introduced the term in the Human Computer Interaction literature and defined affordances as “perceived properties that may or not actually exist.” Gaver separates affordances from their perceptive qualities (see the reviews in Soegaard (2015) and Kaptelinin (2014)). Gaver (1991) tried to clarify the various ambiguities of the term; also see Gaver (1996).

Why is the conversion factor in the energy-mass equation c²?

• Rathore (2020).