Intelligence, as anyone who has thought at all about it will long ago have concluded, is multi-valent, or of many kinds. Howard Gardner, the Harvard developmental psychologist and the leading investigator of intelligence in our day, has concluded that there are at least seven types of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. (He later added an eighth, naturalist intelligence, or that of people with a gift for observing nature.) Each of us is likely to be better endowed in one or another of these than in the others. “No two people,” Gardner concludes, “have exactly the same intelligence in the same combination.”
Genius, meanwhile, remains the least understood of all kinds of intelligence. The explanation for the existence of geniuses and accounting for their extraordinary powers have thus far eluded all attempts at scientific study. The intelligence of genius is still, so to say, off the charts. “As yet little is known about the genetics and neurobiology of creative individuals,” Gardner writes. “We know neither whether creative individuals have distinctive genetic constitutions, nor whether there is anything remarkable about the structure and functioning of their nervous systems.”
I find it pleasing that science cannot account for genius. I do not myself believe in miracles, but I do have a strong taste for mysteries, and the presence, usually at lengthy intervals, of geniuses is among the great ones. Schopenhauer had no explanation for the existence of geniuses, either, but, even while knowing all the flaws inherent in even the greatest among them, he held that geniuses “were the lighthouses of humanity; and without them mankind would lose itself in the boundless sea of error and bewilderment.” The genius is able to fulfill this function because he is able to think outside himself, to see things whole while the rest of us at best see them partially, and he has the courage, skill, and force to break the logjam of fixed opinions and stultified forms. Through its geniuses the world has made what serious progress it has thus far recorded. God willing, we haven’t seen the last of them.
- Joseph Epstein, I Dream of Genius
Another enlightening lines I read this week was by Immanuel Kant on those habitual rationalizers amongst us:
There is nothing worse, nothing more abominable than the artifice that invents a false law to enable us, under the shelter of true law, to do evil. A man who has transgressed against the moral law, but still recognizes it in its purity, can be improved because he still has pure law before his eyes; but a man who has invented for himself a favorable and false law has a principle in his wickedness, and in his case we hope for no improvement.
Genius, meanwhile, remains the least understood of all kinds of intelligence. The explanation for the existence of geniuses and accounting for their extraordinary powers have thus far eluded all attempts at scientific study. The intelligence of genius is still, so to say, off the charts. “As yet little is known about the genetics and neurobiology of creative individuals,” Gardner writes. “We know neither whether creative individuals have distinctive genetic constitutions, nor whether there is anything remarkable about the structure and functioning of their nervous systems.”
I find it pleasing that science cannot account for genius. I do not myself believe in miracles, but I do have a strong taste for mysteries, and the presence, usually at lengthy intervals, of geniuses is among the great ones. Schopenhauer had no explanation for the existence of geniuses, either, but, even while knowing all the flaws inherent in even the greatest among them, he held that geniuses “were the lighthouses of humanity; and without them mankind would lose itself in the boundless sea of error and bewilderment.” The genius is able to fulfill this function because he is able to think outside himself, to see things whole while the rest of us at best see them partially, and he has the courage, skill, and force to break the logjam of fixed opinions and stultified forms. Through its geniuses the world has made what serious progress it has thus far recorded. God willing, we haven’t seen the last of them.
- Joseph Epstein, I Dream of Genius
Another enlightening lines I read this week was by Immanuel Kant on those habitual rationalizers amongst us:
There is nothing worse, nothing more abominable than the artifice that invents a false law to enable us, under the shelter of true law, to do evil. A man who has transgressed against the moral law, but still recognizes it in its purity, can be improved because he still has pure law before his eyes; but a man who has invented for himself a favorable and false law has a principle in his wickedness, and in his case we hope for no improvement.
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