There are times when I am alone and in a contemplative mood that I think about the concept of genius...who has it, how does it manifest itself, and how does it evaporate...if at all. For example, among the world's foremost philosophers Socrates was by all accounts a genius--but he had a very unhappy home life what with Xantippe managing his household. He was accused by the very people he was trying to help of corrupting the youth of Athens and was sentenced to drink hemlock...which is not as healthy as Gator Ade. Then there is Spinoza, a Sephardic Jew who grew up in the Netherlands and in order to appease the local Dutch politicians who did not care for the blasphemy of his non-Christian beliefs, Spinoza's Congregation had him excommunicated. Spinoza's philosophy was an attempt to love even a world in which he was outcast and alone; again like Job, he typified his people, and asked how it could be that even the just man should suffer persecution and exile and every desolation as he did.
Voltaire--who lived until almost 84--despite exile, imprisonment, and the suppression of almost every one of his books by the minions of church and state had in his lifetime such influence, despite his heresies, that he forged fiercely a wide path for his truth. He was without doubt the greatest writer and philosoper of his time. He was refused a Christian burial in Paris; but his friends grimly set him up in a carriage and got him out of the city by pretending he was alive. They finally found a priest who understood that rules were not made for geniuses and he was buried in holy ground.
And then there is Immanuel Kant, hardly five feet tall, modest, shrinking, and yet containing in his head the most far reaching revolution in modern philosophy. He was so frail that he had to take severe measures to maintain himself; he thought to do this without a doctor; so he lived to the age of eighty. Twice he offered his hand to a lady, but each time she left for a man who more quickly could make up his mind. And so he persevered, through poverty and obscurity, sketching and writing his magnum opus, "The Critique of Pure Reason." He worked on this book for fifteen years, and never did a book so startle and upset the philosophic world. And then there was Arthur Schopenhauer, born in Danzig on February 22, 1788. His father, a merchant, commited suicide and his paternal grandmother died insane. Schopenhauer wrote the great anthology of woe, "The World as Will and Idea". He had no mother, no wife, no child, no family, no country. He was absolutely alone, with not a single friend. I could go on and indicate many other "geniuses" besides philosophers who lived a life of abuse and disengagement from society. The question is, does a pitiful life cause genius to flourish or does genius coexists with a pitiful life?
I once wanted to be a genius, but I couldn't get my life to be pitiful enough. I had a great mother and grandmother; my marriages were years of happiness; my career was a delight; my children grew up and into success, and the war made me a man with useful wisdom. So there went my quest for the Holy Grail of genius. From my unknown books, I can hardly afford an early bird. I recall a friend of mine who went to college and majored in philosophy, unknown to his father who expected to take his son into his lucrative business. When my friend graduated and told his father that he was a philosophy major, his father said sarcastically, "O.K. son, I'll buy you a philosophy store in the mall, and making a living from it is up to you."
1 comment:
All of the geniuses you mention are philosophers. Perhaps the aloneness they experience is not a result of genius, but of philosophizing.
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