Darrin M. McMahon - Divine Fury: A History of Genius

MORE ADVANCE PRAISE FOR DIVINE FURY

As Darrin McMahon shows, the genius is the god among menproviding one of the last connections to the transcendent that our common secular culture retains, and setting up a struggle between our desire for exceptional beings and our leveling egalitarianism. In its absorbing and remarkable way, Divine Fury educates and entertains, vindicating the importance of grand history told over the long term.SAMUEL MOYN, Columbia University, author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History

It is rare to find an historian who writes in a style both so sure-footed and so light, and with such joy in the telling of a tale. In his engaging new book Darrin McMahon takes us on an intellectual adventure, tracing the transformation of the idea of genius as it shed its sacred garments to become the common property of our own democratic age. Ranging with ease across historyfrom the poets of Romanticism to the tyrants of the twentieth-century, from Einstein to the IQ Test, and from Benjamin Franklin to the wiz-kid inventors of Silicon ValleyMcMahon invites us to consider a central paradox of our time: If anyone can be a genius, then perhaps no one is.PETER E. GORDON, Amabel B. James Professor of History, Harvard University, and author of Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos

DIVINE FURY

DIVINE FURY

A HISTORY of GENIUS

DARRIN M. MCMAHON

BASIC BOOKS

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

New York

Copyright 2013 by Darrin M. McMahon

Published by Basic Books,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail .

Designed by Cynthia Young

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McMahon, Darrin M.

Divine fury : a history of genius / Darrin M. McMahon.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-465-06991-0 (e-book)

1. Gifted personsHistory. 2. Gifted personsBiography. 3. Intellectual lifeHistory. I. Title.

BF416.A1M35 2013

153.9809dc23

2013016418

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Julien and Madeleine, who have given me gifts, born and made. May I offer them many in return.

THE GENIUS OF HUMANITY is the right point of view of history. The qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and pass away.... Once you saw phoenixes: they are gone; the world is not therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sacred emblems turn out to be common pottery; but the sense of the pictures is sacred, and you may still read them transferred to the walls of the world.... Once they were angels of knowledge and their figures touched the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, culture and limits; and they yielded their place to other geniuses.

EMERSON, Uses of Great Men, 1850

AMONG MODERN CIVILIZED beings a reverence for genius has become a substitute for the lost dogmatic religions of the past.

WILHELM LANGE-EICHBAUM, The Problem of Genius, 1931

NOW THE WORD genius, though in some sense extravagant, nonetheless has a noble, harmonious, and humanely healthy character and ring.... And yet it cannot be, nor has it ever been denied that the demonic and irrational have a disquieting share in that radiant sphere, that there is always a faint, sinister connection between it and the nether world, and for that very reason those reassuring epithets I sought to attribute to geniusnoble, humanely healthy, and harmoniousdo not quite fit, not even when... it is a matter of a pure and authentic genius, bestowed or perhaps inflicted by God....

THOMAS MANN, Doctor Faustus, 1947

CONTENTS

GENIUS. SAY THE WORD OUT LOUD. Even today, more than 2,000 years after its first recorded use by the Roman author Plautus, it continues to resonate with power and allure. The power to create. The power to divine the secrets of the universe. The power to destroy. With its hints of madness and eccentricity, sexual prowess and protean possibility, genius remains a mysterious force, bestowing on those who would assume it superhuman abilities and godlike powers. Genius, conferring privileged access to the hidden workings of the world. Genius, binding us still to the last vestiges of the divine.

Such lofty claims may seem excessive in an age when football coaches and rock stars are frequently described as geniuses. The luster of the wordonce reserved for a pantheon of eminence, the truly highest of the highhas no doubt faded over time, the result of inflated claims and general overuse. The title of a BBC television documentary on the life of the Nobel Prizewinning physicist Richard Feynman sums up the situation: No Ordinary Genius. There was a time when such a title would have been redundant. That time is no more.

Genius: we are obsessed with the word, with the idea, and with the people on whom it is bestowed. We might say that we are obsessed with ourselves, for seemingly all can be geniuses now, or at least learn to think like a genius, as the cover of a recent Scientific American Mind proclaims, if only we discover our genius within. No shortage of titles promises to help us do just that, while a thriving industry of educational products tempts well-meaning parents with the prospect of raising Baby Mozarts and Baby Einsteins, liberally dispensing advice on how to cultivate the gifted. Flipping through the pages of such ephemera, the reader may find it difficult to detect the aura of anything sacred. And yet that aura is still there, barely detectable, however faintly it glows.

What exactly do we see in these images? What do we see in genius? On one level, the answer is straightforward. For Einsteins mass-produced image is like that of any other icon of modern celebrity or fame. Whereas a silkscreen of Marilyn signifies tragic beauty in a flash, and the silhouette of Che Guevara conveys romantic revolution, the image of Einstein bespeaks brilliance in the blink of an eye. It triggers other associations, too. If the core of Einsteins genius was creative intelligence, we also associate him with a certain playful eccentricity, the carefree manner of a child, as a leading psychologist describes it, allegedly a common characteristic of truly gifted minds. There is Einsteins absentmindednessforgetting to eat while working on a complex problem, or to put his socks on before his shoesand his famous slovenliness of manner and dress. There are his diversionsplaying Mozart on the violin, sailing in his little boats, or chasing after women who were not his wives. There are his emotional difficulties with loved ones and family, his introspection, his capacity for long and sustained toil, his stubbornness, his rebelliousness, his mystical, intuitive approach to problem solving. But finally, and most revealingly where genius is concerned, there is Einsteins role as a protector and saint (a label he resisted, but came to accept), the possessor of ultimate knowledge and seeker of transcendent truths, who warned the free world of the apocalyptic potential of nuclear fission and then helped to harness its destructive force. Or so the legend goes. A 1946 story in