Skip to main content

Churches of Universal Law: The Genius Narrative


According to Kant the concept of genius has only validity in the artistic realm, not in the scientific. We can reach the immaculate intellectual heights of Saint Einstein of Princeton [he uses the example of another father of the Church of Geniuses (Saint Newton), although it works for our purposes] by simply reasoning orderly and hard enough, but we could never reach the heights of the artistic geniuses, for they are nature’s voice transmitting a transcendental message.

Today we have extended the adjective not only to scientists, but also to race horses, as Robert Musil noticed in his wonderful book. Life is intelligence (adaptation and overcoming  of problems) as much in the bacteria as in our more complex symbolic creations. The narrative of the genius is no more that the modern myth to justify priestly beliefs of social stratification, old schemes in new disguises.

In order to maintain the ideal of arête (excellence) (we are symbolic creatures and need a continuous process of symbolic superation), we do not need the Church of Geniuses, or any other concept of the mythical plane of the universal law. In fact, the superstitious idea of the genius justifies all sorts of moral abuses, like those we see in the markets of art or those performed as well by the scientific experts from its omnipotent institutions. What we call human knowledge and human stupidity, the genius and the moron, go hand in hand, there is no need to sanctify any of them, and we usually do it with both.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please write here your comments

Popular posts from this blog

Limen et Continuum

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibni...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rhapsodies of Anima Mundi: Fear of Death

In the nascent dawn of consciousness, when the human spirit still danced in rhythmic harmony with the grand, elemental pulse of nature, the enigma of cessation—that profound silence we name death—arose as the most formidable of shadows. Yet, it was not then perceived as an absolute, terminal end in the stark, isolated sense we often conceive today. For those early societies, intimately imbricated in the vast and primordial canvas of the Anima Mundi, death was seamlessly woven into the very ur-tapestry of existence as a continuity, a fluid dissolution into the great soul of the world, or a joyous return to a collective paradise, utterly devoid of the strict, solitary individuation that modernity has, unwittingly, imposed upon us. This is not merely the clinical apprehension of biological cessation, but rather a primordial panic before the void, a visceral anguish in the face of the "I's" dissolution and the potential loss of all that imbues life with meaning. Confronted...
Post a Comment
Read more

Shamans and the development of Social Masks

  The growing dissociation of new social persons (social masks) from a single primitive mask that brings them together occurs due to the specialization processes that require increasingly complex economic actions. From the mask of the shaman, compatible with the masks of man or woman, but not with the child mask, unfold the social masks of the founding hero, the priest (priestess), the poet, or depositary of narrative memory, the doctor, the meteorology controller, and even the holy king. The shamanic powers are either the result of a search or of a spontaneous happening within a human lineage, which from the point of view of the professionalism of the economic action of shamanism is irrelevant, since it is the work of a specialist for communication with the Anima Mundi. In fact, the lineage transmission of social persons is not exclusive to shamanic professional practice. The shaman is not an individual person any more than the social person of the old man can be. I...
Post a Comment
Read more