Genius-an illusion or a reality?

Genius is fundamentally an eighteenth century concept, though it has had a good long run through the centuries since. The genius was, and to some extent continues to be, the Romantic hero, the loner, the eccentric, the apotheosis of the individual. The further our society gets from individual agency, the less the individual seems to have real power to change things, the more we idealize the genius, who is by this definition the opposite of the committee or the collaborative enterprise. Indeed, some of the resistance to the idea that Shakespeare wrote his plays in collaboration with other playwrights and even actors in his company comes from our residual, occasionally desperate, need to retain this ideal notion of the individual genius. We prefer the myth: It was Watson and Crick who discovered DNA, not a whole laboratory of investigators. Edison invented the electric light bulb and the phonograph, never mind that he worked with an extensive team of technicians, mechanics and scientists.

The pursuit of genius is the pursuit of an illusion. As illusions go, it's among mankind's happier ones, the idea that an individual might have an exceptional and intrinsic talent for art, music, science, mathematics, or something else beneficial to civilization and culture. There is no doubt that such individuals have lived among us throughout history, and have bequeathed to us the legacy of their art and their ideas, but do they constitute an actual class called geniuses? And if so, how can we tell the real ones from the wannabes, the genuine articles from the poseurs?

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