In Our Time - Inspiration and Genius

Episode Date: June 15, 2000

Melvyn Bragg explores genius and inspiration. “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him”. So said Jonathon Swift, many people’s choice for a genius himself. But what does that word really mean? Are geniuses born or made? And what are the circumstances necessary for the great leaps of consciousness that inspire the development of science and art? Did Einstein’s brain arrive like that - markedly different from the expected formation - or did it become like that through thought? If genius does not exist, why are we so keen to invent it? Was Mozart programmed or pre-programmed and was Newton or anyone else solely responsible for inventing anything?With Arthur I. Miller, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Department of Science & Technology, University College London; Michael Howe, Professor of Psychology, Exeter University; Dr Juliet Mitchell, psychoanalyst and lecturer at Cambridge University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, when a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. So said Jonathan Swift, many people's choice for a genius himself.

But what does that word really mean? Our genius is born or made, and what are the circumstances necessary for the great leaps of consciousness that inspire the developments of science and art? Is it the old 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, or something the other way around? With me to discuss the quality of genius and the nature of inspiration is Arthur I. Miller, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London, an author of Insights of InSides of Genius. Also with us is Juliet Mitchell, psychoanalysts, an author of Mad Men and Medeusers. Howe, Professor of Psychology at Exeter University, and author of Genius explained. Arthur Miller, Arben Einstein said of his discovery of relativity,

there's no logical path to these laws, but only intuition, supported by the sympathetic understanding of experience. What do you think he meant by intuition there? Is that another word, as it were, for genius? Well, intuition is a much-used, much misused term, I should say. By intuition, one means, and Einstein indeed discussed this point, that intuition is the sum total of past experiences. It seems as if great discoveries burst forth from his head just like that and an a high experience. But that's not the case.

It's the case of a great deal of thought, a great deal of work that went into his thought beforehand, a great deal of conscious work. But a lot of people do a great deal of conscious work. A lot of people do a great deal of conscious thought, but they don't discover what Einstein discovered. That's right. You can work, as a physicist, you can work seven days a week, 24 hours a day and still not produce works like Einstein did. Similarly for artists, similarly for musicians, thinking of Picasso and Mozart. In sports, the cases are manifold. You can play football seven days a week, but not be a Pele.

There is something that is inborn in these people. There's no doubt about it, just as there can be physical freaks, like the elephant man, for example. There's no reason why you. you should consider it to be amoral or unethical or whatever for there to be mental freaks. It is a fact that no matter what race or creed you are, we're not all born equal mentally. When Einstein said that intuition is not logical,

does he mean more that it's counter to common sense? Well, the term common sense is also often misused and misunderstood. By common sense, one means the common sense of heavier objects, fall faster than light ones, example, and indeed they do. But it took Galileo, for example, after several thousand years from Aristotle to abstract to worlds in which there are vacuums and which all objects fall with the same acceleration regardless of how much they weigh. And our common sense is then

redefined by means of Galileo and Newtonian science. It's redefined again through discoveries of Einstein and relativity that space and time are relative. And then redefined again with discoveries in quantum theory that atomic entities can be wave and particles simultaneously, something that's unimaginable at first counterintuitive and later on becomes intuitive. Science is a way of continually redefining the notion of intuitivity. Michael Howe, where do you think these intuitions come from that Professor Miller has been discussing? I think they come from all kinds of places, any kind of experience. I think what sometimes happened is that ideas, as it were, pop into someone's

mind and they seem, as it were, to come out of the blue from nowhere. But as Arthur's said, they never come except in people who are tremendously well prepared, who've been mulling over these things for a long, long time. I think I disagree with Arthur in saying that the fact that genius is a special necessarily means they were born with something special. Certainly they are very different. But I think to some extent that's possible that one can, out of a result of all one's experiences, end up being remarkably different from anyone. else, but to assume that that means that must have been there from the beginning is possibly wrong. Why do you demur at the idea that people can have uniqueness in their minds when they

have uniqueness in their fingerprints? Oh, they certainly can have uniqueness in their minds, but not all that uniqueness in a sense has to be a starting point. Yes, people are born different, but I don't think that means they have to be born different in ways that in any sense sort of guarantees or provides a blueprint that somehow at the time of birth, you can select he will be a genius, she won't be a genius, and so on and so forth. I think what happens after birth is tremendously complicated and tremendously unpredictable, and I rather doubt we'll ever be in the state of affairs where you can look at someone's pattern of genetic materials and say, yes, there's the genius in the future and there's the non-genius.

But if we are unique, if each person is unique, and if a lot of people get near the ideas, as we see quite clearly in science, but don't actually click on, isn't it the genetic uniqueness? that might make that infinitesimal difference, which means that you get or you don't get. Is that not a component, is all I'm asking? I think it's the range of things that are possible, but I would say not necessarily true. I think one can account for these differences in alternative ways.

I don't think, for example, you can draw any clear dividing line between, say, geniuses and non-genesis. I mean, if you're trying to rank the world's greatest soccer players, there isn't some point at which you can say, yes, these are the really exceptional genius ones, and these are the ordinary ones. There's more of a gratation.

And I think... Yeah, but they can say Peel is a genius and you're not. Yes, you can, but... In soccer. But if you rank everyone, where do you put Beckham? Where do you put someone else? I don't think they fall into sort of natural... No, but that's why science is quite a good map

because people do arrive at things in science. Juliet Mitchell, where do you stand... We seem to be getting towards an intuition versus experience, almost the old thing, perspiration and inspiration argument. Can you give us your... resume of your position on that? Well, I would agree with Arthur that intuition is accumulated experience. But as he was talking, I was thinking about it's had a slightly interesting history in the last 30 years.

About 30 years ago, it wasn't the good word it is now. It was rather applied to women, not men, you know, or women are intuitive, they're really good with children, etc., because they've got... And then if you've pressed it, perhaps, it's because they've got experience, but really it was something to do with a feminine soul or feminine character. It's become a good term. relatively recently, used to be opposed to intellect, which men had, as it were. Now it seemed to be part of the scientific enterprise, part of the creative dimension,

the imaginative dimension, in particular of science, I think, and of genius. So I'm interested in that shift because certainly it's the adaptation or the adoption, perhaps I should say, of intuition for genius, has not gone along with the adoption of finding an awful lot of women geniuses. Of course there are some, but it's remained predominantly a, term used of, you say it's ethnically diverse, it's not really very ethnically diverse, nor is it very gender diverse, it's still slightly the monopoly of a white Western population. I think that we have a historically specific idea of a genius, which does come from the last

two to three hundred years, from your quotation of Swift is about sort of on the cusp of deciding a genius is to do with the individual. Before that, I think that we can look back retrospectively, and of course see Galileo and St. Augustine or whoever it might be, as a genius, but I think the concept was slightly different before that, even the term was different. I mean, genius in Shakespeare's time meant much more the particular quality of something, like the genius of the place, or his genius was rebuked as Mark Antonis was by Caesar. You know, there's something special about you, which wasn't exactly the same quality of imaginative persistence beyond what has been commonsensical, to see something anew.

I think genius is seeing something anew. And being the only person to do it at the time. at the time, I mean, I just happened to return on the program on Humboldt last night, and I was fascinated how he was eclipsed by Darwin, but in fact had seen something very new, which really has led to the sort of ecological studies we do now, but it was about plant geography, etc. But so genius can get eclipsed by another genius that comes later

and becomes the dominant paradigm. So, I mean, there are many hidden geniuses, I suspect. Just to round this up. Do you think that this can be? be spotted in early childhood? Well, we have cases and counter cases. Einstein, for example, was a total cipher when he was in the patent office. He was a middle-level civil servant struggling through a very difficult marriage,

living in cramped quarters in Bern, Switzerland. And suddenly, only in his late 20s did he become accepted as a genius. And he sat, as we recall, he sat in the patent office from 1902 to 19. 909, four years past special relativity. Looking at Mozart, on the other hand, Mozart was there's no doubt about it. I mean, Professor Howe, I must say this, that I totally disagree with you, that Mozart, you have to at least say he was a prodigy to have performed, to have composed the symphonies he did in 1764 and 1765 when he was 8 and 9 years old,

which had new forms of chromatic variations, of changes of mood within sets. That was something totally new. done by an eight and nine-year-old child? Well, Mozart certainly was a prodigy, but I think you could really make a case that Einstein was a prodig. He didn't do the kinds of things that were on display in the way that Mozart did. There wasn't anything

that the outside world could see, but if you look at what Einstein was reading, I believe he was reading Kant when he was 12, and that kind of thing, he probably was very remarkable indeed. But then on the other hand, you can easily point to young people who appear to be totally unremarkable until well into adolescence

like Darwin, for example. Darwin seemed to be a very ordinary child. He very gradually got interested in natural history. He came a little bit more systematic, a little bit more deliberate about it. And somewhere around the age of 2021, one or two people started thinking of Darwin as actually being quite bright,

although his family didn't have that perception until very late on. I don't think there are any specific defining qualities of genius qualities of the person. One can talk about qualities of what they produce their achievement. we can say they're more original, they're more creative, they're more clever than whatever. And I think when we call people genius,

as I say about what we're really doing, we're not actually describing the person on the basis of anything we know about their measurable qualities. We are acknowledging, we are in a sense, in a sense almost rewarding or providing an accolade because we see this is a person who has done something. We think it is remarkable, it is creative,

it is original or whatever, and we then find us, ourselves calling that person a genius. What's your psychological take on the idea of the correlation between a childhood and genius from the way you come in it, Juliet Mitchell? Well, I think I want to say it's because we conceive of people of having childhoods, that we also conceive of individuals being geniuses. In other words, it's not what type of childhood do you have so much

as the fact that we are so concerned with nurturing the child that we can then... As a species, you know? As a particular Western group, in a sense, in a time in history. If you think about, say, the Middle Ages, you think about people really being apprentices. And even in some sense, is on that cuss between apprenticeship in the 18th century and the individual childhood. I mean, you're learning something taught by the person who is the master of builder or the master craftsman of whatever it might be.

It's when we get childhood being so development, mentally important, I think that we get allied with that, the growth of this individual concept of genius. I mean, genius has to involve achievement. It can't just be prodigy. I mean, prodigy is something that's stopped short of genius. Genius has to be achievement. Now, under sort of cultures of apprenticeship, or you might take Chinese science or something like that is much more apprenticeship model, Chinese art, more particularly, in fact, you won't get so much the individual genius as a group of people who produce extraordinary work or a line of people who produce extraordinary work, like Chinese art. artists at certain period and things.

But in the West in the last 400 years, we've had this terrific emphasis on the child and the individual child. And therefore we tend to think, well, what particular childhood has produced this person who has become a genius and achieved something? And I think it's just childhood itself. We can't really say that it's a particular way in which somebody was brought up or not brought up

or particular hardships or particular gifts, strengths that they were given in their childhood. It's the fact that we give, so much attention to childhood that I think has led to this concept and indeed to the sense of creation almost of the individual genius rather than the line of people who are incredibly accomplished. Can we talk now about inspiration in a way? And dreams do have played a part in that.

Well, it has been recorded. Coleridge is European Dream with Couple-A-Carran and the other week on in our time we're discussing the periodic table at Mendeleev's dream about the periodic table. What relationship do you bring between those? Dreaming as I see it, as psychoanalyst see it, is really only another form of thinking. It's another way we think.

It's a way that's not accessible to conscious thinking. It's an unconscious form of thought where in a sense we sort of churn over what we've been thinking in the day or last month or even last year, but represent it to ourselves somehow in a different form. And because it's presented in a different form, when we then come to look at it and think about what we've dream, about, we see something else in a different pattern, in a different shape. So dreams really give us a different way of looking at the same world. They're a different way of thinking the same thoughts, but it is only a way of thinking, an unusual way of thinking.

That's exactly what the genius needs, as it were, is that unusual way of thinking. So dreaming is extremely important for our geniuses, so to speak, because it's there that they can see there's another pattern to whatever it is they're looking at. There's another way of thinking about it. It's an alternative mode. Yes, there is an interesting model of thought of problem solving, which is actually rooted in point of air A conscious thought, unconscious thought, illumination, hopefully that is, and then verification. And part of unconscious thought is dreaming. It's being, it's preparing the mind by hard work on a problem.

And then somehow or another things come together. They're in parallel yet interacting lines of thought and very much in William James sense of streams of thought occur. One has the great thought of two, Einstein's two great thought experiments, for example, thought experiments by Boer and Heisenberg. The genius is somebody who is able to bring together fields that are apparently disparate. And somehow or another, through a great deal of preparation, of course, the thought crystallizes out of that. Can I just that, I mean, the ideas of sort of Daniel Dennett, the philosopher, sort of have a big bearing, of course, on what you're saying.

And he has the idea of what one is aware of or conscious of at a time as being like a rather narrow beam of light. But one's mind or one's brain is doing a lot of work at any one time. But what one can be conscious of, in a sense, is only a small sample of it. And sometimes there will be, in a sense, a shift in the direction of the beam so that we suddenly sort of become aware of something else that our minds have been working on. And the impression to us is like an idea coming out of nowhere or possibly even coming out of a dream.

That's not because our minds haven't been doing it, but because we are shifting consciousness in a way that is not totally under our control. And some people, I think, are sort of rather fluent at doing that. Their minds will go from one thing to another, and they have this illusion or this impression that somehow this idea suddenly came to one. But it never happens, of course,

unless one person is very well prepared and has been thinking and mulling over a problem and so on and so forth. And whenever you get these stories of people having ideas that come to them in dreams or very sudden intuitions. They always tend to be people who have been working very hard and ruminating and thinking about things. The theory of evolution would never come to me, for example. Can I go, Professor Miller, to Emmanuel Kant?

Would you say that he, in some way defined or began to define the way we now think of genius? And if so, could you explain why? Well, I think he began, he defined certain methods which have led to great scientific discoveries. I don't think it's a definition of genius. is something that was far-reaching at any rate. The point I'm trying to make here is Const discussion of visual thinking.

There are two kinds of visual thinking. There is visual thinking using visual images that we've abstracted from phenomena that we've actually witnessed in the world in which we move. Those are called visualizations. And then there's another kind of visual imagery called visualizability, which is the readily graspable in the visualization. It's the intrinsic properties of objects that exist, whether we see, that is to say,

or make measurements on those objects or not. One of the good examples of what can give of this is if you sprinkle iron filings on a piece of paper and then hold it above a bar magnet, they will immediately snap into lines, what are called magnetic lines of force. That is a visualizability. That is a crude measure of,

the magnet, whether you make measurements on it or not, then what one does is to abstract from that visualizability to magnetic lines of force that permeate all of space, which is what Michael Faraday did, and that is a visualization. What happened in quantum physics is that this hierarchy, that this is a visualization being hired than a visualizability, had to be flipped around, because what you want to do in quantum physics is to the great breakthrough made by Bohr and Heisenberg, was to find the way to construct, to generate visual images of entities that are beyond your sense perceptions because they're both particle and wave at the same time. And that, I think, is the great contribution that Kant made. As Einstein put it, every scientist has his own convenient Kant. And that is the way that scientists interpreted Kant.

One of the reasons I'm less than happy with Kant's idea that geniuses are very separate, very special, almost a separate breed. not just special in what they can do, but sort of inherently special, is that I think this, in a sense, cuts us off sometimes from learning from geniuses. I do think there's a huge amount that we can learn from the experiences of geniuses and the insights in geniuses. And yes, geniuses are very different in what they achieve, but I think in the way they go about what they achieve,

they're not so very different. And there's an awful lot of what they do that has relevance for ordinary people. And the more we learn about how geniuses do what they do, the more we can learn to do things ourselves, which obviously aren't so wonderful as what they do, but nevertheless, maybe worthwhile. I think I want to sort of, not exactly take issue,

but to ask some questions about this visualization and visibility, because I think it does privilege seeing, and your work generally, privilege is seeing in a way that I'm not sure I quite agree with. I think I want to privilege perhaps something we haven't discussed yet, which is modes of identification with the object ones looking at. And I'm thinking, for example, of the description, that the scientist Barbara McClintock, the geneticist, gave of how she worked. Now, she did, as Arthur would say, she looked and she looked.

I mean, she looked down a microscope at her maize grains and maize cells and looked at the structure of those cells for, God knows how many years. I mean, but she looked and looked down a manuscript. But every so often, she would go outside the lab, sit on a piece of grass, close her eyes, and to me that's what she was doing with sort of words with some motion recollected in tranquility. she was having a time from which her intense, active, excited looking down the microscope had to be sort of absorbed. And during that process of absorption of assimilation as she sat with her eyes closed,

she got in among her own, sort of paraphrase of her own description, she got in among the maze cells to see the genetic patterns, and sort of became one and thought, well, what would I do if I would hatch that germ cell in that maze, which what way would I go? And it's this ability, I think, to have a very, particular controlled, I'm not using it in a sloppy sense, but a controlled form of identification with the object that you're looking at. That seems to me to be absolutely crucial ability and to break boundaries, which again takes us back to inspiration and dreams, that what you do in

that is you break your human boundaries and become identified with something other than yourself. Would you like to respond to that? Yes, the point I'm making with respect to Kantian notions of visual imagery is the great importance of visual imagery is the great importance of visual imagery and scientific discovery, particularly in the German cultural milieu, in which most of the great discoveries were made in the 20th century, well, the first third of the 20th century, let's say. It jumps right out of the scientific papers, the German terms, unshawing and unshawikait leap right out. People are worried about how to represent nature visually. Now, you're quite right in what you said about imagining what it would be like to

be in various situations. And indeed, one of Einstein's great thought experiments, in fact, the thought experiment with which he begins the relativity paper, are the experiences of two observers, one writing on a wire loop and the other writing on a magnet. They're in relative motion. And he discusses how they interpret the process of how an electrical current is generated in the wire loop. And Einstein, the very first sentence in the relativity paper, Einstein knows that contemporaneous electromagnetic theory, leads to asymmetries that do not occur in nature. It's an aesthetic judgment that he's making. And he wants to relate the experiences of these two observers and show a way that one can get rid of this particular asymmetry,

which is a redundancy in explanation. And let me just make a short comment that geniuses are able, in art and science, are able to make great advances, by discovering new aesthetics. Picasso did it with Cubism, Einstein did it, and relativity. They discover new forms of aesthetics and show that there are, so to speak, laws of nature behind them or new ways to see, in quote, see appearances, reality behind appearances. Can I go to the last lap of this program to talk about a commonly held view

that genius is akin to madness? and you've written, Juliet Mitchell, about the great anxiety in your view that precedes creativity and you've written about Freud's paper on Dostoevsky in that direction. But can you just briefly tell us about the relationship you see between anxiety, stroke into, perhaps one might use the word madness, and singular creativity that we're beginning to call genius? Yes, I think it does have to do with this question of boundaries. I mean, we see the world in bounded terms. We have to, in order to go on.

And genius is going to cross and change those boundaries. We can call it as a else. It's just on a new aesthetic that results from it because you're making new shapes, new boundaries. But that also is what happens in madness. You go through previously conceived boundaries, and it's very frightening. Madness is very, very frightening until you're right in it

and no longer frightened because that's what you are, so to speak, and you're just mad. But the edge of breaking through a boundary is one in which you feel extreme anxiety. and I think that any creative person from just creativity right the way through to genius I think there's a lot of creativity in everybody as it were but at those moments before somebody is about to do some sort of creative act of some sort and it can be anyone doing this.

There's usually a high degree of anxiety which has to be got through if the creativity is to come out the other side of it and that's because of breaking of boundaries. Sorry, yeah, but how is this particularly, to stick to our last here, How is this particularly distinguished in the case of genius? Because you've generalised it, and I quite agree with everyone, some do-d-d-d-dom. But we're talking about genius here. So what is the specific nature of it in respect of this conversation?

Perhaps the ability to tolerate feeling absolutely awful for longer periods of time. Well, lots of people tolerate that. Well, I think, yes, okay, I don't think it's, yes, that's quite true. I think it's perhaps then to use that in a different way, to use that anxiety so that it actually does, again, allow you to see a new pattern, that you're in that anxiety,

rather as in dreams, you see a new way of thinking because your anxiety in itself is like a type of real anxiety, if you've ever had absolute real anxiety, it is like feeling mad, and to actually see that in that you see things differently. And I think that's what the genius can then pick up on.

One of the things that happens in terms of intense anxieties that I've had, and I think that I've read about, is that actually you see things more narrowly, You often, your vision becomes tunnel vision and there's a withdrawal and a concentration rather than an expansion and elaboration, but that might be particular. And I'm certain I don't know my genes, I might as well,

but I think that's, I still haven't quite got to the point there. But Michael Howe, what about you? I think in doing creative things, people tend to move far from what is safe and secure, they go out on a limb, they do things which are very solitary, and also often the fact that they're doing things with remarkable intensity.

Quite a number of geniuses, Bertrand Russell is one, who said, I was working so hard and so intensely at something that I literally made myself ill. And there's a nice description of Isaac Newton by a contemporary who says, when he was working, he studied so hard that were it not for the fact that occasionally he'd have to give himself a rest to attend to the sort of practical aspects of his experiments, if it wasn't for that, he would have sort of killed himself by study.

And I think that sheer intensity and tension combined with being very much on one's own, away from anything safe and secure, I think there are circumstances in that which are obviously circumstances not dissimilar to ones in which people have all kinds of mental difficulties. There's also this interesting concept of flow which the psychologist Chick-Saint-Mihadi puts forward

and what he's essentially saying is that one becomes in a state where one is lost in the problem and one is sort of totally involved in it to the extent that the usual self-awareness, ego states and that kind of seem to disappear. And that, of course, in some ways, is rewarding and does seem to be necessary and seems to be a big element of what's going on when a person really, as it were, gets going in their creative activities.

Do you think that this abnegation of the self finally is a condition, or do you think that's just one condition in one sort of person and it might not apply on the other? From historical case studies it seems to be important to fall back into oneself for the creative act to actually occur. You're by yourself, you're intolerably alone, as because of put it. Well, thank you very much. Thanks very much to Professor Miller and to Juliet Mitchell and to Professor Howl. And thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

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