First, let us examine critically
those ideas about genius that are taken for common sense,
but in fact, they're false.
There is a popular idea about genius that it is a unique potential,
unique makings, individual talents that are realized with luck.
Dictionaries often express this idea with
the following formula: genius is the utmost form of creative potential realization.
Genius indeed has this sense,
but is it inherent and specific to genius?
On the one hand,
we could probably say that great artists reach the utmost form of their
individual or even pan-human creative potential realization.
However if we admit that genius is defined by creative achievements,
manifestations and realization, how shall we think of their lives?
Apart from all the acknowledged works,
these artists and authors did other activities which were not genius at all.
They spoke many words and performed many deeds.
These deeds can be regarded critically.
And nobody has ever appreciated them as genius or as
the utmost form of human potential realization.
The same concerns the way in which we think of genius works of art.
Do we reach the apogee of
our creative potential realization when we are looking at a picture by a genius?
It is hardly true.
Besides, many times we pass by genius and pay no attention when we meet it,
going on our routine work.
It is worth supposing that if we had an opportunity to talk with genius authors,
they would tell us that they were only going to reach
the utmost form of their creative potential realization,
because our creative potential not only realizes,
but also arises on meeting genius.
When we meet genius,
we activate our own potential,
we've renovated ourselves and we reach fundamentals.
It is obvious that we should take the idea of genius as a form of
realization of creativity and other potentials,
because this definition is,
at least, not precise.
Another common mis-belief about
genius is that the senses of genius and talent are often confused.
This definition often sounds like genius is an extremity of talent.
There is a common misunderstanding
that genius and talent have a kind of quantitative difference.
In fact, talent is a characteristic of individual ability.
Talent is given to a human being and to humanity and it is a gift to use,
to keep and to hand over.
A talented person is a slave of his talent.
Often those people who are talented in one field,
are not so talented and able in other fields and they need care.
Talent and genius are characteristics of different dimensions.
They may be geniuses given with no special talents.
Ordinary people can be geniuses.
For example, Africans move in a genius way.
They move in such a way initially and there is no individual talent in it.
It is a mistake to put genius and talent in a row.
It is a hypothesis,
but we have forgotten that it is a hypothesis.
The third sense of commonest beliefs about genius
is connected with the inevitable mystery of genius.
In some dictionaries we can find the following definition.
It is a vague term to define the ideas about the utmost forms of creativity.
In other words, genius is a characteristic of what has already happened.
It is not a freestanding phenomenon which has its own stability and sense.
In these definitions and ideas, genius is defined,
not as a reality,
but as a kind of understanding on a scale of creativity.
If we take a life of something virtual and imaginary as a form of its products only,
then we can agree that genius is a rough name for something inconceivable,
mysterious and even unreal.
However, we invite to doubt objectively.
In other words, we think that life is primary and its products are relative to life.
They are secondary. Whatever we may say about the manifestations of life,
they are relatively valuable, relatively clear,
relatively ours and relatively exist.
Therefore genius is quite a precise term and a quite real and identifiable phenomenon.
What is living, fulfilled genius?
It is very different.
But, first of all, genius is a miracle.
It is a prior wholeness,
a blank sheet, strangeness, flawless simplicity.
How does a genius view the world?
For a genius, many things around and inside the world are a miracle,
even in their daily life, in routine.
We can find it examining the life stories of acknowledged geniuses.
The initiative to renovate life is specific for genius people.
Life changes near a genius,
a work of a genius,
an idea of a genius.
Genius is like a ray of light,
like the rising sun to waken;
it delights and it bewitches and it hastens the fundamental.
An inherent feature of true genius is nearness to fundamentals.
Unfortunately, in modern psychology,
fundamentals and expectations are often roughly combined.
We consider this fundamentally wrong.
Genius, miracles and initiative hasten us to fundamentals;
expectations draw us to targets and means.
Not genius, but mediocrity hastens us to expectation.
In fact, it is not so bad.
Another expectation of genius is its inherence to life, its liveness.
We cannot examine genius as though it is inherent in creatures or essences.
Genius manifests itself through them,
but it is inherent to life.
We can say that plants and animals,
nature and works of art are genius,
but they are genius in another way; not like a man.
They are not able to create speech.
They do not live in a language, in a word.
With their genius they grow,
they breed and develop,
but they do not create senses.
What is a human being in the true sense, a human creativity.
It is life renovating from nothing,
creating something from nothing.
All of us can feel and see it.
If a person lives in a genius way, he initiates activities.
phenomena, ideas, deeds and conditions.
They might seem rootless,
but they are free, true and fundamental.
Thinkers often speak about love as an example.
True love is not determined,
it is not needed,
it is not profitable,
it is not forced.
Is often not because,
but in spite of; it comes from nothing.
Sometimes we love such creatures which others can look at only with
disgust and sometimes they can't look at them at all.
One more important feature of genius is its certitude; genius is doubtless.
It doesn't mean that it is guaranteed.
It means that genius and doubts cannot be combined.
Genius is radical.
Either it is, or it is not.
Doubts suppose probability, expectation and some possibility.
Genius is always felt, practiced,
experienced like the absence of doubts.
Let us sum up the critical analysis of the ideas about genius.
Genius is prior, the beginning of wholeness.
As a tree grows from a small seed,
a life grows from a small idea, or a small choice.
Even small genius is fully genius.
There is genius but one might not experience it.
In other words there is genius in general,
but there may be no genius in a situation.
One may not fulfill or experience it.
We all are free and one can neglect his life and his genius.
Nature neglects life in the same way a plant produces many seeds,
fish lay millions of eggs,
but very few of them survive.
Hundreds of thousands of embryos become feed for others.
Many adult people, immersed in daily life,
neglect their children's genius.
As years ago their parents neglected their own genius.
Genius exists, but it may not happen.
Genius is not guaranteed.
Genius is contradictory and counter-intuitive.
At the same time,
it is simple, unique and mysterious.
On the one hand, genius is widespread in our life.
On the other hand, it may seem as if there is no genius at all;
genius can be exhausted.
Genius is unique and total, multi-dimensional and simple.
One can open it, but cannot have it opened.
Genius always stays inconceivable.
Genius renovates all parts of life.
There is the genius of an author and the genius of a spectator in it.
Goethe gave a wonderful definition.
He said that genius is an exact fantasy.
These categories seem to be incompatible;
can we combine exactness and fantasy?
Exactness is something definite,
but a fantasy has no boundaries.
But genius really exists.
It is, in full measure, exact and fantastic
Олег Лукьянов (Oleg Lukyanov)Заведующий кафедрой психологии личности
Анастасия Стайпек (Anastasia Stipek)Старший лаборант кафедры психологии личности
