GENIUS AND WISDOM

Is genius a wise man? Apparently, not necessarily, although possible. Had wisdom been an entirely rational quality, we would definitely have denied it to genius, who is an altogether irrational being, living by passion and intuition. The great Russian poet Pushkin can hardly be called a rational man, but his genius possessed a profound wisdom, expressed mostly intuitively, but superbly and in infinite abundance. The same can be said of Lord Byron, an impossibly conflicted man, yet an incredibly deep thinker. Such examples are many, and they very well prove the point that, paraphrasing Pushkin’s Mozart and Saglieri,--- genius and wisdom are two things not incompatible.

Now, can a genius be totally lacking in wisdom? This is not to equate wisdom with being practical or street smart, where geniuses are famously known to be deficient. In the movie Amadeus, Mozart is depicted as an exceptionally unwise man, but he was certainly one who was in possession of a treasure trove of wisdom, all channeled by him through the medium of music. No one who has listened to his Don Giovanni would be so undiscerning as to miss the great wisdom of that opera, undoubtedly due to the music, rather than to Da Ponte’s libretto.

A quickly baked conclusion may lead us to assert that genius is always in possession of wisdom, even when he is a one-dimensional prodigy with a hypertrophied ability in one narrow area at the expense of all others. Yet such a conclusion will be premature and plain wrong, as we have numerous other examples of a genius totally devoid of wisdom. Bobby Fischer was a genius of chess, but, even in his field, his brilliance can’t be misidentified as wisdom. Grigori Perelman is a mathematical genius, but his discoveries have been due to a special type of “monovision,” which normal people do not possess, but which has nothing to do with what we normally, and probably correctly, understand as wisdom. I am willing to go even further to suggest that all purely scientific geniuses are instilled with a special scientific vision, which does not qualify as wisdom. The same goes for the majority of genius artists, whose aesthetic genius does not qualify as wisdom either.

The so-called “renaissance men” make an obvious exception, when their genius is multifaceted, and a part of those facets does qualify as wisdom.

As the reader may have noticed, music composers, in my opinion, qualify, together with writers and poets, as men of wisdom. In this, I stand with Schopenhauer, but I go even further, seeing “Pure Will” as virtually indistinguishable from wisdom.