Episode 19 - Genius

Transcript

Ellie: 0:07

Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,

David: 0:09

And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:12

The podcast where two friends,

David: 0:14

who are also professors,

Ellie: 0:16

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

David: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.

Ellie: 0:29

David, are you a genius?

David: 0:33

Um, as much as my mother might believe so, I really do not think so.

Ellie: 0:38

Why not?

David: 0:39

Well, I don't know what it means to be a genius. It just, to me, that term is so loaded that it refers to those who have crossed the highest level of human achievement. And I most certainly haven't. Do you consider yourself a genius?

Ellie: 0:57

Definitely. No, no, no, no, no. I'm just kidding.

David: 1:00

You do, don't you. You do.

Ellie: 1:02

No, I don't think so. I mean, I will be honest and say that I definitely thought I was a genius when I was growing up. As close friends of mine will know, I actually wrote a short story when I was six years old called Ellie, The Brilliant Girl, in which I basically flex about all my achievements in spelling as a first grader.

David: 1:19

Spoken like a true literary genius.

Ellie: 1:22

Uh, right? Right? So it's such a thoughtful and metaphorical title.

David: 1:27

An early onset of genius.

Ellie: 1:29

Oh, for sure. And then I remember thinking when I was in high school, I was probably one of the hundred smartest living people.

David: 1:39

Oh my God. Are you kidding me? Are you serious?

Ellie: 1:42

I swear to God, I thought always, you know, like probably I'm in the top hundred.

David: 1:47

In high school, that's kind of like- okay, six years old is super cute. 16, 17, 18 years old is kind of scary.

Ellie: 1:57

Oh, no, it's absolutely terrifying. Like the depth of megalomania and just like the level of delusion there is like really shocking.

David: 2:06

Well, I'm on the other side of things, because when I was a young kid, I always did really well in school. You know, I was that nerdy straight A kid, and a lot of my teachers, uh, would constantly laude me for doing well in school. And so I grew up being told how smart I was, but I never really liked it. It actually made me feel very uncomfortable. And even now, you know, when I meet people, uh, there's a lot of cultural capital that comes with being a philosopher. When I go out and people ask me what I do, I sometimes don't tell them. And so I'll say things like, "Oh, I'm a teacher," which is true, but I try to avoid the issue because as soon as I say, "I'm a philosopher, I'm a professional philosopher," you know, they start treating you differently. They're like, "Oh wow! You must be super smart." And it's like, uh, not-

Ellie: 2:56

Not really. No, I'm just kidding. You-

David: 2:58

No I mean, yes, not really. It does make me uncomfortable when people project that onto me, because I don't see it in myself. I really don't.

Ellie: 3:06

Hmm. I mean, I think I grew up also with some similar messaging and for me growing up with parents who were interested in the life of the mind and who read a lot, but neither of whom had at the time graduated from college, I think there was a sense of like, "Oh, Ellie's the intellectual one," right. And so I was sort of slotted into that and got that feedback from teachers as well. And I guess like, you know, you had a healthy sense of skepticism around it. I just leaned into it fully and only was it later that I was like, maybe I'm in the top million of the smartest people, if that's even a relevant metric, which it almost certainly is not. But top a hundred, top a thousand, even, like, come on. Who do I think I was, there are a hundred astrophysicists who are like reaching levels of human understanding that I could never even hope to achieve, let alone be in high school.

David: 3:57

Yeah. And I mean, I think part of it was the fact that when I was younger, I was really pushed into academic pursuits. Um, I don't think you know this about me, but when I was 10, 11, 12, I was a competitive standardized test taker in Mexico. So I would compete in these national tournaments of standardized tests that they run in Mexico to see who the smartest Mexican kid is.

Ellie: 4:24

Oh, David, that's incredible.

David: 4:26

And you know, I would get trained by teachers for standardized test taking. Um, they would close down the middle school for like a week leading up to the tournament and then all the kids would have the week off, but I would have to show up to be trained by all the teachers whose attention was just on me. And so I always associated excellence with a grueling austere environment and a competitive environment. And then this continued when I was a competitive collegiate debater.

Ellie: 4:55

Yeah, I think I had a bit of a different association with something like talent or genius than the grueling hard work mentality that you're describing, because growing up in Los Angeles as the child of two former actors, I was constantly surrounded by the narrative that you either have it or you don't have it. And so I actually didn't receive much of a narrative around hard work. I think it took me as an adult realizing, "Oh, wow. Like I just thought I could kind of skate by on raw talent, so to speak, and actually, like, in order to achieve my goals, I need to work really effing hard," because I think in Hollywood there is this sense that you don't have to work at something. You just either are born with it or you're not, which I think is not actually how Hollywood works at all, but that's still a dominant myth.

David: 5:43

Yeah. And I love how in high school you were like, "I don't have it. I am it." Maybe it's her. Maybe it's genius.

Ellie: 5:57

Today we're talking about genius.

David: 5:59

What are the defining features of the concept of genius?

Ellie: 6:03

Who gets to be one?

David: 6:04

And who decides? Even though we normally think of a genius simply as a very smart person, like somebody with a very high IQ, for example, philosophers, especially during the Romantic period, developed entire theories of genius that seek to capture its defining features.

Ellie: 6:38

Immanuel Kant, the 18th century German philosopher, is one of the most well-known philosophers to develop a theory of genius. He writes about the concept of genius in connection to art, saying that only the genius can create beautiful art. Kant defines the genius as the person who sets the bar for what beauty is, specifically, as the innate talent that gives the rule to art. So, the genius is not rule bound. They're not creating a work of art according to pre-established rules; rather they are throwing the rule book aside and creating a beautiful work of art that actually sets up a new standard or a new rule.

David: 7:22

And an important ingredient of Kant's theory of genius, which he develops in his 1790 book, The Critique of Judgment, which is about aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgment-

Ellie: 7:33

And some weird stuff on nature, but that's neither here nor there.

David: 7:36

Yeah, and so for him the two are actually connected, but you're right. Neither here nor there now. Um, and he makes the argument that genius really is an innate talent that as, you know, Ellie's LA environment say you either have it, or you don't. And so there's a way in which, according to Kant, genius is not something that you develop. It is certainly not something that you'll learn it is something that you are born with.

Ellie: 8:02

And this is pretty similar to the way that we tend to talk about genius today, right? So a lot of folks think of genius as pretty democratic. Genius doesn't discriminate according to identity lines, whether class lines, racial lines, gender lines, et cetera. People are just sort of randomly born with it. This line of thinking, which is pretty popular today, is articulated by critic Fran Lebowitz in the Netflix show Pretend It's a City.

Fran Lebowitz: 8:26

The main thing writers need, or painters, or, you know, any other kinds of artists, is talent. And the great thing about talent is that it is the one, the only thing I can think of, that is absolutely randomly distributed throughout the population of the world. It has nothing to do with anything. It has, you cannot buy it. You cannot learn it. You know, you cannot inherit it. You can't, it's not genetic. Okay. It is just like sprinkled, like, you know, sand around the world and it could come up anywhere.

David: 8:58

Here we see Fran Lebowitz expressing this popular idea that genius is the great equalizer, precisely because it's random. Anybody can be born with the It factor, independently of religion, independently of nationality, independently of race. And that's precisely, according to her, what makes it objective, right, that it doesn't track arbitrary categories.

Ellie: 9:21

And that reminds me of the standardized test taking procedures that you were talking about in Mexico, David, where there was this attempt to discover the smartest children in Mexico, right? Of course, the idea that a standardized test would be a relevant metric of that seems extremely problematic, given what we know about the biases of standardized testing, but nonetheless, there is this dream, this myth there, that there are children all over Mexico sort of hidden in different pockets around the country, coming from any range of backgrounds that have this innate talent.

David: 9:52

And the idea that this innate talent expresses itself in a way that we can capture with certain metrics, whether that'd be a standardized test or maybe some objective criteria about art, but the notion that they're born with it seems to be an essential feature of the concept of genius. I don't really know anybody, no philosopher, no art critic, no social critic, who uses says the term genius positively, without criticizing it, and who doesn't imbue it with the sense of naturalness.

Ellie: 10:23

Absolutely. In this same episode, Lebowitz has a debate with the director, Spike Lee, about whether or not they think Michael Jordan could be considered a genius. And Spike Lee says, "Well, yeah, absolutely, Michael Jordan is a genius, he's a genius of basketball," and Lebowitz counters, "Well, I would say of course that Jordan is at the top of his game. He's among the best basketball players ever to have lived, but I wouldn't say that he is a genius," and Liebowitz goes on to say that for her, a genius is artistic, and so an athlete cannot be considered a genius. Thoughts on this, David?

David: 11:03

Well, I think a lot of people today think of geniuses as the special chosen individuals, chosen by nature of course, not necessarily by God, who can be found really in any profession. So the ones that stand out, of course, are art and science. So we might say that Mozart was a genius, or we might say that Albert Einstein was a genius in mathematical physics.

Ellie: 11:27

That seems to be the kind of view that Lee is articulating, right? A genius is the best person in their profession.

David: 11:33

Yes. And so according to Lee, if you make it to the top echelons of your profession, then by definition, you are the genius of that profession. And here, Immanuel Kant would, uh, very much resist that interpretation because for him, as for Lebowitz, genius is inherently artistic. So Kant makes the argument that even in science, there are no geniuses, because science is not the kind of thing that allows the expression of genius.

Ellie: 12:03

Okay. Break this down for us, because that certainly is foreign to the way that we talk about geniuses today when we perhaps most often use the term to refer to scientists.

David: 12:13

Well to understand this, let's remember the definition of genius that Kant provides us in The Critique of Judgment. He says genius is the person who gives the rule to art. And so according to Kant, a genius, by definition, is somebody who creates a new bar, who sets a new bar that nobody else has set before, a bar that nobody had even seen before. And so in a way, the genius is like the high school rebel who doesn't play by the rules, you know, like that is Kant's definition of genius, uh, because it's somebody whose originality can not be constrained by the rules that are in place for everybody else. So somebody like Einstein might be able to innovate, but they cannot make new rules for mathematics.

Ellie: 13:00

Well, let's talk about this for a moment, because it seems to me that precisely why Einstein is called a genius is that he did that. He exploded what we understood about physics through the formula for relativity.

David: 13:15

Well, I think for Kant, the point is that there are scientists who expand our knowledge base, but they cannot change the rules of the game in the natural sciences. So somebody like Einstein might give us a new theory of the universe that challenges previous theories, but they do not change the rules of the game, much like a chess player, right. You can be a fantastic chess player. You can be a world champion, but you're not changing the rules of chess.

Ellie: 13:42

So what are the rules that Einstein was adhering to, that he wasn't breaking in coming up with the theory of general relativity?

David: 13:50

So this gets a little bit more complicated and maybe it highlights the limits of Kant's own understanding of genius, because I think a lot of people would say that Albert Einstein was a genius, but for Kant, science is about following rules and applying rules, you know, like the rules of the scientific method, which we can think about in terms of gathering data, coming up with a hypothesis, testing that hypothesis, and then disseminating the results. That is what Albert Einstein did in developing the theory of relativity. And so there is an expansion of scientific knowledge, but there is no revolution. But again, there are also first of science who believe that Kant is wrong in his claim that there is no genius in science.

Ellie: 14:35

Well, it sounds like what you're talking about, David, in articulating a distinction between expanding knowledge and inventing new rules is one way of understanding originality. So we might think of Einstein as original, but maybe we're not using it in the way that you are, or that Kant is, because Kant says that the genius produces not only something that goes beyond what we currently understand, but something that is actually unthinkable by the given rules.

David: 15:06

Yeah. That's exactly right. So if you position yourself, let's say in the 19th century, a lot of the art that is produced in the 20th century, so think about like the Dadaist ,movement would be unthinkable. It wouldn't even qualify as art by the standards of the 19th century. That kind of radicality is what Kant has in mind, and he thinks that that cannot happen in science. And Kant says that science can be learned, you know, you can be taught to be scientific, but you can not be taught to be a great artist because science ultimately does not require originality, only art does.

Ellie: 15:42

Well, and that strikes me as a much more compelling idea of the distinction between art and science, and a more compelling reason why we might disqualify scientists from being artists. One of the hallmarks of the scientific method is that it is replicable. So even if Einstein was the first to come up with the theory of general relativity, in order for that theory to hold water, other scientists need to be able to replicate it through their experiments and their calculations. You can also teach the theory of general relativity in the classroom, right? And so science does ultimately end up following a formula, whereas Kant says you can't teach genius. And I think this speaks to some of the debates about whether or not art school is a good place to foster artistic talent, because the idea is that art school would teach you techniques, but, at least according to Kant, it's never going to make you a genius.

David: 16:40

Yeah. Going to art school is basically like going to the University of Phoenix. It's a scam.

Ellie: 16:46

Okay. I wouldn't go that far, because he does say that the genius has to hone their skills, but you won't be able to become a genius by going to art school. You'll either arrive at art school as a genius, who's a diamond in the rough, or you'll arrive at art school as a rock who will never be a diamond.

David: 17:02

Yes exactly. But the point being is that if you don't have that diamond in you, you're just going to be rough.

Ellie: 17:07

Yes, exactly. And so it is like a waste of time, at least if you want to create what Kant calls beautiful art. And I think it's worthwhile here to think a little bit more about Kant's claim that genius is natural, or that it's something innate. And so one thing that I think is interesting about Kant's view of genius, whether or not you agree with it, is that he says the genius cannot say how they created the work of art. So if I ask a great artist how they created a work, they're not going to ever be able to give me a satisfying answer, right? It'll be like, "Oh, I painted this with oils or I sculpted this out of marble," but that's not telling me what's genius about the work. The genius can't describe their process, and so it's almost as if genius is an alter ego that takes you over. And this you can see in the root of the word, genius. Genius comes from the Latin genio, which means supernatural being or spirit in Latin. It's a translation of the Greek term daimon, which is related to the English word demon, actually, but it doesn't have a negative connotation the way demon does.

David: 18:11

Right, just a spirit that visits you, that comes to you from outside. And it has to do with the essential ineffability of artistic production

according to Kant: 18:21

the fact that we do not know if we're geniuses, so Ellie let's just include ourselves in this description for the time being. Um, if I'm a genius, I simply don't know where these ideas that are flowing out of me or coming from, you know, like the stereotype of the tortured artist who is getting crushed by the weight of their own originality. And so, in many ways, that the notion of the genie is important here because Kant thinks that in order for you to produce art, you basically have to like rub a lamp and you don't know how, but it just comes out. Um, the philosopher, Tom Leddy writes about Kahn's theory of genius, and talks about it in terms of being inspired. And he points out that Kant is really following Plato who also had a similar interpretation of the muses, these supernatural forces, these supra-individual agents that visit you from outside and give you inspiration. And we don't know who they are. We don't know how they work. All we know is that when we're touched by them, we produce.

Ellie: 19:25

Yeah. And you can see how this ideal is in tension with the sort of ideal of hard working grit, because if you need to wait in order for the muses to overtake you, then a lot of what you're doing as an artist is actually waiting, right? Your hard work is not necessarily paying off. And so I think you're absolutely right, David, that this is related to the myth of the tortured artist or the person who gets a kind of hint of inspiration at a party and has to run into the other room and jot things down on a napkin. I also think that this means that I'm almost certainly not a genius. And I definitely wasn't when I was in high school, because if you think you're a genius, then you're probably not.

David: 20:06

Yes, chances are. And I mean, it's also connected to the way in which a lot of artists will talk about their own art when they want other people to think that they have it, you know, if you ask them, "Why do you want to do art?" They will say, "Because it would be impossible for me not to,"

there is this necessity: 20:22

when the muses visit, you answer.

Ellie: 20:26

We end up with a picture of an artist who is inspired by some transcendental force, it's something outside of them. And then they channel this force toward the creation of something new. The artist is considered a vessel for creation, rather than the mastermind of it.

David: 20:44

That's exactly right. So the origin is always transcendental and the mouthpiece is empirical, the mouthpiece being the artist. And you know, Ellie, so far we've been primarily talking about the way in which geniuses create art. We've been focusing on the creative side of this equation, but there are some philosophers who apply the concept of genius also in connection to reception, to the way in which we receive art, perceive art, or contemplate art. And one of them is Arthur Schopenhauer.

Ellie: 21:17

Thank God. So you're saying that even though I don't create great art, there still might be hope for me in being a genius.

David: 21:23

Yeah, I think this was Schopenhauer's own hope about himself.

Ellie: 21:43

Arthur Schopenhauer is a 19th century German philosopher who is usually considered one of philosophy's most famous pessimists. Dude basically thought that life was suffering, everything is horrible, and we live in the worst of all possible worlds.

David: 21:58

And there is no getting out, ultimately, for the part. Um, and Schopenhauer is the figure that writes about genius from this receptive standpoint. For him, genius really is about our relationship to art that we have not ourselves produced.

Ellie: 22:17

So maybe he's a little bit optimistic in this one small area? Let's talk about Schopenhauer's theory of genius.

David: 22:24

Yeah. To understand Schopenhauer's theory of genius, we actually have to say something about his metaphysics, about how he understood reality. And essentially, the theory is contained in the title of his most famous book, from 1818, entitled The World as Will and Representation. It's actually quite wonderful. And it was the favorite book of, uh, Oliver Sacks, I don't know if you knew that.

Ellie: 22:51

Oh, I didn't.

David: 22:52

In this book, Schopenhauer makes the argument that the world is simply composed of two things. There is the will, which is a metaphysical principle of desire, of movement, of

action: 23:03

that which gets things going.

Ellie: 23:06

Basically a blind impulse to survive.

David: 23:08

And then there are what he calls representations, sometimes also translated as ideas, which are these transcendental units that we can think about, and that when we think about them, they help us step out of the element of the will.

Ellie: 23:26

Yeah, because basically, for Schopenhauer, the world is this roiling brew of chaos, which he calls will, but humans, in order to understand, reflect, and even survive in it, overlay that with categories of understanding. We seek to make things make sense, and in doing so we create a veil of illusion. Schopenhauer here is directly influenced by Buddhist and Hindu metaphysics, which both claim that human understanding places a veil over that way things actually are. We separate things out into different categories, into different beings, when ultimately there is just this undifferentiated mass of stuff. If you're a Hindu. If you're a Buddhist, you actually think there's ultimately nothing, but Schopenhauer takes a little bit more of a Hindu line here.

David: 24:16

Yeah. And so he has a positive metaphysics about what is, as he puts it, behind the veil of Maya. Below the level of understanding, outside of the realm of human perception, there is this reality, according to him, which is the will, which again, it's just this, like, as you said, Ellie, this brewing principle of motion that draws things out of themselves. And it's not just humans that suffer from the will, everything in the world is constantly moved by the will. The will manifests itself in animals when they get hungry, when they get thirsty. He'll say even plants, when a flower grows, that movement is the will. And sometimes he goes all the way and he says even gravity, this attraction, is the will. Now, in the case of humans, thee will typically manifest itself in the form of wanting, in the form of desiring. And according to Schopenhauer, the point of philosophy is to help us quiet the will.

Ellie: 25:14

Yeah. He says that the will primarily manifests in the sexual impulse among humans. And you can see here that, because the will is connected to desire, for Schopenhauer, it always refers to a lack. Ultimately, it refers to suffering. As we said, he's not a particularly cheery dude. We're constantly striving to become something that we are not already, or we're constantly striving to find a pleasure that we don't have. And so we're caught on this merry-go-round, what a Buddhist would call the Wheel of Samsara, where we are driven by desire. Once our desire is satisfied, we want again, and we're constantly stuck in this painful cycle.

David: 25:54

Yes. And this is exactly where the pessimism of Schopenhauer in metaphysics comes in because according to him, the will is relentless. It never stops. It can never stop. And so the most we can hope for is to attain peace and quiet from the will, for fleeting moments that will never last precisely because of this recursive nature of the will, where as soon as you satisfy the will, it only wants more.

Ellie: 26:21

So he doesn't buy the Hindu and Buddhist ideal that there is a way out of suffering. He just takes the part that says that life involves suffering or, to put it in a Buddhist way, life is suffering and he's like, yeah yeah, that's pretty much it. Nirvana is, at most, just a couple moments over the course of your life.

David: 26:38

Yeah. And this is where his theory of genius is developed. Because according to Schopenhauer, the only way in which we can quiet the will is through artistic contemplation. Why? Because when I look at certain paintings, especially great Dutch paintings, which he really liked, like a Vermeer, example. Yeah, like he- he loved the still lifes of Vermeer for obvious reasons, because of the stillness in the painting, right, this- this moment of repose. Um, and he says, when you look at great art, you no longer look at what is represented in it as a reflection of reality. So for example, if I'm looking at a still life with apples, I'm not looking at the apples as apples, because if I did, then I would get hungry and guess what? That's the will. And desire them. Um, and also when I look at a nude, I'm not looking at it sexually because if I did, then I would get sucked into this wheel of desire. And so there is a specific way of contemplating art, according to Schopenhauer, that lifts us out of the realm of willing and into the realm of pure ideation, where I simply look at the painting as a manifestation of a Platonic idea that is eternal, that is pure, that is objective. And when I lose myself in this moment of contemplation, for a moment, I quiet the will.

Ellie: 28:02

Yeah. And I do think this is relatively well accepted among philosophers of art, this idea that when you create an artwork, what you're doing, even if it's a representational artwork, is something other than creating a simple imitation of the thing itself, right. And so when you see Robert Rauschenberg's famous bed, which literally is made up of a pillow and sheets and also paint and a bunch of other things, you're not wanting to get into that bed. You're actually not even recognizing that as a real bed. You're saying the status of that bed is something other than real or fake. It just doesn't fit into that binary. And I think this connects back to Kant's theory of genius, because one aspect of the genius that Kant finds so compelling is precisely their ability to take representations of things, for instance, you know, we might think about van Gogh's painting of shoes, and transform them into something that goes beyond a mere representation of shoes.

David: 29:01

Yeah. And Schopenhauer is writing under the influence of Immanuel Kant and one of the things that he takes from Kant in developing his theory of artistic contemplation is the Kantian notion of harmony. So according to Schopenhauer, when we truly reach these moments of contemplation, all of our subjective faculties are brought into a kind of harmonious relationship that is what enables that moment of perfect stillness, but the problem for Schopenhauer, and again, this is why he's ultimately a pessimistic philosopher, is that he thinks we can never inhabit that moment for a long time because the will will return.

Ellie: 29:40

Well, how do I get it for even a short time though? It sounds pretty sweet.

David: 29:44

Well, sadly there aren't a lot of techniques or tips that Schopenhauer gives us for learning how to contemplate art in a way that will liberate us from the oppressive force of the will, because for Schopenhauer, only geniuses can contemplate art in the right way.

Ellie: 30:01

And does he also think that genius is an innate talent?

David: 30:04

He says that if you look at all of humanity, there are some people who are born with a certain predisposition, naturally, innately, toward ideation. So they're more intellectual.

Ellie: 30:17

Representation, more than the will.

David: 30:20

Yes. And there are other people who are just born with a disposition where they're just going to get crushed by the will, and they will never be able to lift themselves above mire of desire that is the will. And so according to him, it's kind of a lottery system where if nature gave you the right dispositions to really enter that ideal space, that space of platonic pure ideas, then you can quiet the will for a moment.

Ellie: 30:47

Okay. So I guess I'm not only not a creative genius, but I'm probably not a genius when it comes to receiving art either.

David: 30:55

Yeah, I guess you can't control your desire, Ellie.

Ellie: 30:59

No, well, there is, another reason why I wouldn't be considered a genius according to either Kant or Schopenhauer, and that's the fact that I'm a woman.

David: 31:08

Yeah. Little detail I guess we almost skipped over that, but yes, for both of these thinkers, as a matter of principle, women cannot be geniuses. So I guess it's not really a lottery. It's a very selective lottery.

Ellie: 31:23

According to Kant, women can't be geniuses because the genius obeys a sort of inner duty. And he claimed that women lacked such discipline on their emotions. If they had it at all, they derived it from their husbands or fathers, but it was unlikely, if not impossible, for women themselves to have it to the point of being a genius.

David: 31:43

Yeah, I love that he's like genius can never be taught, but maybe women can get some from their husbands.

Ellie: 31:50

Exactly. And in this, Kant was interestingly responding to a debate about whether women can be geniuses by reversing an argument that Jean-Jacques Rousseau had made. Rousseau said that women couldn't be geniuses because they weren't passionate enough. And then Kant reversed things and says, "Oh, actually it's that women are too passionate."

David: 32:08

Yeah. If there's one thing that you can always trust male philosophers to do, it is tell you why women can't do something on the basis of A and not A.

Ellie: 32:27

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David: 32:45

So Ellie, it seems clear from what we've said about Rousseau and Kant and Schopenhauer that the concept of genius is not neutral. It is laden at the very least with misogyny, and, you know, I assume people of color are also out of the picture.

Ellie: 33:01

I mean for Kant, definitely, given his anthropology, which is extraordinarily colonialist. I would guess for Schopenhauer too, even though he's deeply influenced by Asian philosophy.

David: 33:11

He's like, "I borrowed all of this from Indians, but they're not geniuses, only I am. I made this."

Ellie: 33:18

Well, very interestingly, there's a lot in philosophy of race about how the status of India in particular has been open, because a lot of Europeans have wanted to appropriate Indian cultural achievements and say that, "Oh, Indians are actually white and they've been darkened by the sun, but others are intrinsically brown." This is literally a view that gets articulated in the 17th century.

David: 33:41

This is a view that I've heard recently. So about two years ago, there were a group of brown Peruvians who were convinced that they were descendants of Aryans, and that they simply moved to the tropics, which kind of toasted their skin tone a little bit. And so they all decided to go and join a Neo Nazi protest in Germany. And said, "Hey, you know, we're brothers, we're just a little Brown, sorry about that, it's the sun." And then the Neo Nazis kicked their ass because they trying to infiltrate. And in Spanish they got a really funny nickname which is Morenazis, which is a combination of moreno, which means Brown skin, and Nazi. So Morenazis. Um, but so in connection, back to the- so-

Ellie: 34:35

So we can see that the concept genius is exclusionary. It explicitly excludes women, at least in the philosophers who are typically associated with it, including Kant and Schopenhauer. But it also is implicitly exclusionary because it tends to be associated primarily with white people, especially white able-bodied men.

David: 34:51

Well, and I want us to talk more in particular about gender, because in the 1970s, the feminist art critic, Linda Nochlin, published a highly influential article about the concept of genius entitled "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" And in this article, she offers a devastating critique of the concept of genius and how it has been historically mobilized to exclude women. Nochlin begins her analysis by racing this titular question. She says, "Why have there been no great women artists?" And she says there are three ways we can think about this question. We can refute it. We can say no, there really have been great women artists. We can look for those cases. We can look for our Georgia O'Keeffes. We can look for our Rosa Bonheurs.

Ellie: 35:40

Frida Kahlo. Kara Walker.

David: 35:43

Yes, exactly. And so you just start giving counter examples. She says, that's not interesting to me. Now a second way in which one can answer that question is to say, "Well, there have been, but they all have a very unique feminine style," and Nochlin says, well, that's obviously bullshit. So I'm not even going to bother with that, um-

Ellie: 36:03

Feminism had a moment.

David: 36:05

Yes. Yeah, she says essentialism is not my cup of tea, so let's not even waste any ink on it, which I definitely agree with. Now the third thing that we could do, and this is the approach that Nochlin ultimately adopts, she says we could talk about the conditions of artistic production and the way in which they exclude women from artistic greatness. And if we look at those conditions, institutionally, historically, sociologically, we realize that the conditions of artistic production that exclude women are rooted in the myth of the genius. So she interprets this concept as mythological and as being almost single-handedly responsible for women's exclusion from the arts.

Ellie: 36:48

So you're saying that it's not simply that philosophers had this idea of genius and said, "Oh, and by the way, women can't be geniuses," but rather that the very concept of genius has sexism baked into it.

David: 37:01

Exactly. And one of the arguments that she makes is that we tend to talk about genius as something that we discover, right? Like, "Oh, there is this guy who is an artist. Obviously he had the It factor from a very early age." So it was already there. And the It factor caused their greatness. But she says the problem here is that this gets things backwards because we construct the concept of genius retroactively. So we find somebody that we already think is great. And then we go hunting into their past for evidence that they were a genius, and it's in that retroactive constitution that you see the ideology at work. So people will say Michelangelo had drawings as a little kid. You can already greatness. She says, yeah, what kid doesn't draw? So why don't we do that for women?

Ellie: 37:50

Yeah. And Michelangelo is an interesting example there because he's actually creating prior to the concept of genius. So when Michelangelo is creating sculptures and paintings and architecture in the Renaissance, the concept of genius and the lone artist had not yet been invented. It would take another 200 in order for that to get off the ground. Michelangelo was working in a workshop where he was an apprentice. Oftentimes in works that he created that have his name on it, there are all kinds of other laborers who are working with him. And so the concept of the artist that exists prior to the Romantic period of the 18th century is really the idea of an artist as skilled laborer. And so it didn't matter actually that much who somebody was. And yet, you know, now, with our idea of genius and the mythology around it, there've been all these books written about how Michelangelo was a genius all of that. And so this idea of genius is not eternal. It's actually relatively recent.

David: 38:49

And I think a lot of people who work on this agree that it's actually around Kant's time in the 1700s, in the late 18th century, and to a large extent because of Kant's writings, that this notion really takes on the significance that it does, but that's precisely Nochlin's point, that we constitute geniuses in retrospect. They're not there to begin with. They are socially constructed.

Ellie: 39:14

And then of course the concept of genius provides a cover for excluding women from the actual institutions that are going to permit their art to be cultivated and seen. And so they're excluded from arts academies, and salons, and museums.

David: 39:29

That's exactly right. And this is where Nochlin's analysis, I think, is at it's best, because she says let's just use the 19th century as an example. In Europe, in the 19th century, there was a hierarchy of painting, where not all paintings had the same social or artistic value. So if you paint, for example, a still life, in the 19th century, people were like, hmm, that's like 200 years ago. This is kind of crappy art, even if well done. History painting was kinda high though. Yeah. So-

Ellie: 39:57

You paint Jesus, you're good.

David: 39:59

Well, yeah, a religious painting is higher, but the highest form of painting in the 19th century, Nochlin says, is the nude, because of ideas about human uniqueness and the divinity of the human body, et cetera. And so if you paint nudes well, then you can be recognized as a genius, but women, in the 19th century, were not allowed to paint nude models, because of Victorian norms around sexuality and women's place in the home. It's not until the very end of the 19th century that in France, women were allowed to enroll in the cole des Beaux-Arts, the school of fine arts.

Ellie: 40:40

And so if they're not even able to cultivate training, which Kant says is important, even if you are a genius, then of course, they're not going to be recognized as geniuses. I think too, in addition to the exclusion of women from academies, there's the simple fact of the hierarchy of the arts that you mentioned, David, because historically, feminine coded arts have not been considered fine arts. And so when Kant describes the genius, he's talking about somebody who is able to create beautiful art, and specifically fine art. Things like the visual arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, et cetera. What is excluded from this tends to be feminine coded arts, such as basket-weaving or quilt-making. You can obviously see here that there's a sort of colonialist narrative where the arts and crafts of so many different societies the world over would not count as fine art, they would be considered something like decor.

David: 41:38

And to this we can add what Nochlin calls the fringe requirements of being an artist. To be an artist, it's not just to produce art. It's also to travel a bunch so that you start getting recognized. It's having money not to work so that you have time to produce. It's attending political functions and all those fringe requirements are simply not accessible to women, you know. What woman in the 19th century would just have a ton of money, no expectation of getting married, access to political functions where they could promote themselves? It's just out of the question. And so that which we perceive as natural is, in fact, a mirage created by a set of sociological conditions on the ground.

Ellie: 42:26

Yeah, there's a similar point in Cynthia Freeland's book But Is It Art? where she says that genius gets mobilized as a justification for women's absence from the art world. So there's this idea that there just aren't any women geniuses. I mean, we wish there were, but there just aren't and if they were, they would be part of the canon. So there's a vicious cycle, whereby women are excluded from being part of the canon, but then their absence from the canon gets used as a justification for their exclusion.

David: 42:56

Yeah, you can not find what you think is unfindable.

Ellie: 43:01

Exactly. This type of exclusion is visible in all sorts of different dimensions, not just in the art world. One thing that comes to mind for me here is research that shows that women and BIPOC are less likely to major in fields in college that are typically associated with brilliance or genius.

David: 43:22

Which ones are those specifically? I don't know if they specified.

Ellie: 43:25

Yeah, so some of the major ones that stand out are physics and computer science, where fewer than 20% of all PhDs are women, and also economics and philosophy are fields where fewer than 35% of all PhDs are women. And this is in contrast, for instance, with art history and psychology, where more than 70% of PhDs are women.

David: 43:49

Is the argument that in these disciplines, because the concept of genius predominates, whether that be on the surface or below the surface, BIPOC and women are just like, "This seems like a creepy space."

Ellie: 44:02

Yeah. It activates negative stereotypes that are exclusionary to them. So like the myth of Albert Einstein, perhaps, comes back to haunt us here, as a physicist, right. Or the myth of the computer scientist hacker, like the Mark Zuckerberg type person, right. And certainly in philosophy, philosophy is generally known as the major in the humanities that has the fewest number of women professors. And I think there there's really a sense of like philosophy is not only an aggressive and logic oriented subject, which are traditionally male coded, but it also relies on a certain out of the box, big picture thinking that you've just either have an aptitude for or don't.

David: 44:41

And it's interesting here how the material and the ideal interact with one another, because interestingly, anthropology used to be like that, in the 19th century. It used to be a male dominated discipline. And in the 20th century, when a few women anthropologists climb their way to the top of the discipline, their mere presence really changed the culture around anthropology and made a lot of other women think, "Oh, I can see myself reflected in this discipline." And then the discourse about what it is to be an anthropologist started to change.

Ellie: 45:14

Yes. I talked with a senior woman professor about this type of phenomenon though and she had an extremely depressing take, which was basically that as disciplines get more and more women, their reputation sometimes tends to plummet, because they no longer appear as disciplines where genius is required.

David: 45:32

No, yes, that does not surprise me. And I recently came across an article written by a professor and a graduate student in the psychology department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, in which they show that even at the level of student evaluations, you see this gender discrepancy. They looked at the ways in which students talk about professors on that awful website ratemyprofessor.com, and they found a very, very clear pattern that is also reflected in student evaluations, which is that students will use the terms 'brilliant' and 'genius' almost exclusively in connection to male professors. And typically only in disciplines where women and people of color are underrepresented. So in disciplines where women and- and people are represented that term just magically comes up less. And in those disciplines that are still stuck in this myth of the white man genius, that term keeps coming up again and again, and it's not just the professors, it's the students, which indicates getting passed on.

Ellie: 46:39

Given this, and given the fact that a lot of what we know about innate talent is bunk, we'll leave our listeners to wonder, should the concept of genius continue to be used, or is it something to start dismantling?

David: 46:57

Well, for my part, I really liked the way Tim Wu put this in an article from 2008 for the New York Times entitled "In Praise of Mediocrity," where he says that we should just move away from internalized notions of excellence and learn to embrace our mediocrity.

Ellie: 47:14

All right. And with that, see you next time. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

David: 47:29

You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice at dearoverthink@gmail.com.

Ellie: 47:37

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.

David: 47:50

Thanks so much for joining us today.