| The "I" Problem and Genius. |
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The "I" Problem and Genius 1
. . . There has been no great man who, at least some time in the course of his
life, and generally earlier in proportion to his greatness, has not had a
moment in which he was absolutely convinced of the possession of an ego in the
highest sense. . . .
The great man may become conscious of his "I" first through the love of a
woman, for the great man loves more intensely than the ordinary man; or it may
be from the contrast given by a sense of guilt or the knowledge of having
failed; these, too, the great man feels more intensely than smaller-minded
people. It may lead him to a sense of unity with the all, to the seeing of all
things in God, or, and this is more likely, it may reveal to him the frightful
dualism of nature and spirit in the universe, and produce in him the need, the
craving, for a solution of it, for the secret inner wonder. But always it
leads the great man to the beginning of a presentation of the world for
himself and by himself, without the help of the thought of others.
This intuitive vision of the world is not a great synthesis elaborated at his
writing-table in his library from all the books that have been written; it is
something that has been experienced, and as a whole it is clear and
intelligible, although details may still be obscure and contradictory. The
excitation of the ego is the only source of this intuitive vision of the world
as a whole in the case of the artist as in that of the philosopher. And,
however different they may be, if they are really intuitive visions of the
cosmos, they have this in common, something that comes only from the
excitation of the ego, the faith that every great man possesses, the
conviction of his possession of an "I" or soul, which is solitary in the
universe, which faces the universe and comprehends it.
From the time of this first excitation of his ego, the great man, in spite of
lapses due to the most terrible feeling, the feeling of mortality, will live
in and by his soul.
And it is for this reason, as well as from the sense of his creative powers,
that the great man has so intense a self- consciousness. Nothing can be more
unintelligent than to talk of the modesty of great men, of their inability to
recognise what is within them. There is no great man who does not well know
how far he differs from others (except during these periodical fits of
depression to which I have already alluded). . . .
The conception genius concludes universality. If there were an absolute genius
(a convenient fiction) there would be nothing to which he could not have a
vivid, intimate, and complete relation. Genius, as I have already shown, would
have universal comprehension, and through its perfect memory would be
independent of time. To comprehend anything one must have within one something
similar. A man notices, understands, and comprehends only those things with
which he has some kinship. The genius is the man with the most intense, most
vivid, most conscious, most continuous, and most individual ego. The ego is
the central point, the unit of comprehension, the synthesis of all
manifoldness.
The ego of the genius accordingly is simply itself universal comprehension,
the centre of infinite space; the great man contains the whole universe within
himself; genius is the living microcosm. He is not an intricate mosaic, a
chemical combination of an infinite number of elements; the argument in chap.
iv. as to his relation to other men and things must not be taken in that
sense; he is everything. In him and through him all psychical manifestations
cohere and are real experiences, not an elaborate piece-work, a whole put
together from parts in the fashion of science. For the genius the ego is the
all, lives as the all; the genius sees nature and all existences as whole; the
relations of things flash on him intuitively; he has not to build bridges of
stones between them.
And so the genius cannot be an empirical psychologist slowly collecting details and
linking them by associations; he cannot be a physicist, envisaging the world as a
compound of atoms and molecules.
It is absolutely from his vision of the whole, in which the genius always
lives, that he gets his sense of the parts. He values everything within him or
without him by the standard of this vision, a vision that for him is no
function of time, but a part of eternity.
And so the man of genius is the profound man, and profound only in proportion to his
genius.
That is why his views are more valuable than those of all others. He constructs from
everything his ego that holds the universe, whilst others never reach a full
consciousness of this inner self, and so, for him, all things have
significance, all things are symbolical.
For him breathing is something more than the coming and going of gases through the
walls of the capillaries; the blue of the sky is more than the partial polarisation of
diffused and reflected light; snakes are not merely reptiles that have lost limbs. If it
were possible for one single man to have achieved all the scientific
discoveries that have ever been made, if everything that has been done by the
following:
Archimedes and Lagrange, Johannes Muller and Karl Ernst von Baer,
Newton and Laplace, Konrad Sprengel and Cuvier, Thucydides and Niebuhr,
Friedrich August Wolf and Franz Bopp, and by many more famous men of science,
could have been achieved by one man in the short span of human life, he would
still not be entitled to the denomination of genius, for none of these have
pierced the depths.
The scientist takes phenomena for what they obviously are;the great man or genius for
what they signify. Sea and mountain, light and darkness, spring and autumn, cypress
and palm, dove and swan are symbols to him, he not only thinks that there is, but he
recognises in them something deeper. The ride of the Valkyrie is not produced by
atmospheric pressure and the magic fire is not the outcome of a process of oxidation.
And all this is possible for him because the outer world is as full and
strongly connected as the inner in him, the external world in fact seems to be
only a special aspect of his inner life; the universe and the ego have become
one in him, and he is not obliged to set his experience together piece by
piece according to rule.
The greatest poly-historian, on the contrary, does nothing but add branch to branch and
yet creates no completed structure.
That is another reason why the great scientist is lower that the great artist, the
great philosopher. The infinity of the universe is responded to in the genius
by a true sense of infinity in his own breast; he holds chaos and cosmos, all
details and all totality, all plurality, and all singularity in himself.
A man may be called a genius when he lives in conscious connection with the
whole universe. It is only then that the genius becomes the really divine
spark in mankind. . . .
All mankind have some of the quality of genius, and no man has it entirely.
Genius is a condition to which one man draws close whilst another is further
away, which is attained by some in early days, but with others only at the end
of life.
The man to whom we have accorded the possession of genius, is only he who has
begun to see, and to open the eyes of others. That they can see with their own
eyes proves that they were only standing before the door.
Even the ordinary man, even as such, can stand in an indirect relationship to
everything: his idea of the "whole" is only a glimpse, he does not succeed in
identifying himself with it. But he is not without the possibility of
following this identification in another, and so attaining a composite image.
Through some vision of the world he can bind himself to the universal, and by
diligent cultivation he can make each detail a part of himself. Nothing is
quite strange to him, and in all a band of sympathy exists between him and the
things of the world. . . .
Man is the only creature, he is the creature in Nature, that has in himself a
relation to every thing.
He to whom this relationship brings understanding and the most complete
consciousness, not to many things or to few things, but to all things, the man
who of his own individuality has thought out everything, is called a genius.
He in whom the possibility of this is present, in whom an interest in
everything could be aroused, yet who only, of his own accord, concerns himself
with a few, we call merely a man. . . .
The genius is the complete man; the manhood that is latent in all men is in
him fully developed.
Man himself is the All, and so unlike a mere part, dependent on other parts;
he is not assigned a definite place in a system of natural laws, but he
himself is the meaning of the law and is therefore free, just as the world
whole being itself, the All does not condition itself but is unconditioned.
The man of genius is he who forgets nothing because he does not forget
himself, and because forgetting, being a functional subjection to time, is
neither free nor ethical. He is not brought forward on the wave of a
historical movement as its child, to be swallowed up by the next wave, because
all, all the past and all the future is contained in his inward vision.
He it is whose consciousness of immortality is most strong because the fear of death
has no terror for him. He it is who lives in the most sympathetic relation to
symbols and values because he weighs and interprets by these all that is
within him and all that is outside him.
He is the freest and the wisest and the most moral of men, and for these reasons he
suffers most of all from what is still unconscious, what is chaos, what is fatality within
him.
How does the morality of great men reveal itself in their relations to other
men? This, according to the popular view, is the only form which morality can
assume, apart from contraventions of the penal code. And certainly in this
respect, great men have displayed the most dubious qualities. Have they not
laid themselves open to accusations of base ingratitude, extreme harshness,
and much worse faults?
It is certainly true that the greater an artist or philosopher may be, the
more ruthless he will be in keeping faith with himself, in this very way often
disappointing the expectations of those with whom he comes in contact in every
day life; these cannot follow his higher flights and so try to bind the eagle
to earth (Goethe and Lavater) and in this way many great men have been branded
as immoral. . . .
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