The nature of genius.by Zsenitan 04/25/2009, 8:26am PDT
Bananadine wrote:
I'm no arcade fetishist but I have some limited idea of what it's like to reach the beautiful, obscure heights of competence in some elegantly complex video game. Surely most of us have that! Why would anybody think that if a "perfect" person were to achieve that much competence, not in video games but in thought itself, then everybody else would be jealous of them? Sure, somebody would be bitter, but the rest of us might be satisfied just to cheer them on! Or at least to ignore them, awestruck.
I'm reminded of something about the inaccessibility of genius now that you mention it:
Stanislaw Lem has a cool hypothesis that there are three kinds of genius. The first kind is the most functional - the guy who creates things or improves existing things or ideas in ways that are approachable and can be understood by people who aren't geniuses. Shigeru Miyamoto for example! He's up there on stage showing everyone how to play Wii Tennis with a big smile on his face, knowing that the audience will get it. Of course they will, it's an intuitive kind of thing.
The second kind of genius is the guy who's a little bit more rarified, the specialist-genius, expanding the boundaries of knowledge or whatever in a way that takes a little working-up-to. Einstein maybe - although relativity looks comprehensible to us now, at the time of its inception, it was radical beyond belief. It shook the whole curriculum of the physical sciences!
The third kind of genius is too smart. He introduces something, possibly as the result of a purely intuitive leap, which is beyond the comprehension of anyone in his peer group. Twenty or fifty or a hundred years later, the rest of the field will catch up to his discovery, but he is personally too far ahead of his time. He goes unrecognized and dies without tasting acclaim. But it's hard to name these guys for obvious reasons! Sometimes they are retroactively discovered, like Nietzsche, in fairly short order (though the Neech was more b& than ignored); sometimes their brilliance is so superfluous that they have plenty of recognized accomplishments but their third-tier thought bombs don't go off until much later - Fermat and his famous Last Theorem. Sometimes they linger in darkness for centuries; sometimes they are never discovered at all, being too obscure. Their ideas must be re-discovered and presented by guys better placed in space and time.
icycalm appears to think that he belongs in this third category along with Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and Kael. Of course it doesn't seem like he's ever really read Nietzsche, Baudrillard, or Kael; otherwise he would have an absolute contempt for his own appropriative website with its forum full of affectionate yes-men. When he is asked serious questions, he pukes quotes everywhere. He produced a full proof of his genius qualifications in your thread: he took Schopenauer's definition of genius, unthinkingly assumed it to be completely accurate and objectively true, then assigned himself the title of genius, then declared that since his title is "genius", he must be a genius as Schopenauer describes genius.
Anyway apropos of nothing:
"always...no no never... forget to check your references" - he is homaging Norbert Weiner, a genius of the second Lemmian type, and a much more important thinker than either Baudrillard or Kael. Now that's real genius
