In conversation with Joseph Agassi
Have you ever thought of yourself as a genius? Then chances are you thought you were a young genius at that. But why? The question catches in the unpleasant grooves between scholarship, success and glamour. It is an “attractive” question though writes Joseph Agassi, and “I deem only attractive questions worthwhile”; but this doesn’t save it from difficulty and neglect. Just as with the big questions in science, attractive questions in philosophy struggle under their own weight: vague, logically ambiguous, and reliant upon too much background knowledge which is not yet available. But don’t let that stop us, boldness matters, and Agassi is bold. So we’ll ask and answer it anyway: “Are all geniuses’ infant prodigies?”
History is a problem here, because not only do we begin to lose our way with the shortened question, what is a genius? but when it comes to the people who we most commonly think fit the category – “Newton, Einstein, Masaccio, Leonardo, Keats, and Schubert” – we know very little about their actual childhoods; much less still about how the people around them judged their youthful intelligence. But we can make a harder distinction about when it all ends; if, by your late teens, no one has commented – loudly and publicly – on your prodigious talent, then you have lost the right to the title forever. So let’s be Popperians about this then, and change the question once more to help us out. Negatively phrased inquiries tend to offer clearer answers than positive ones, so: “Can genius show up in individuals well past early adult life?”
Ask around performing artists, scholars, media professionals, scientists, entrepreneurs, company executives, politicians, mathematicians, and musicians – as Agassi has done over his life – and you will find “one indisputable fact”… the very question “troubles them greatly”. But not in the way you might think. After all, there is a rich vein of evidence supporting the rise and late discovery of mature geniuses. Here is Agassi’s list: “Moses, Muhammad, and Sigmund Freud; Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Rousseau; Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Homer Lane; Ben Franklin, Michael Faraday, and Max Planck; Georg Cantor, Bertrand Russell, Kurt Gödel, and Abraham Robinson.”
By almost any metric these people are geniuses. And yet none of their school-aged peers or teachers or friends or family had anything exceptional to say about them until much, much later in life. This certainly does add some weight to our revised hypothesis, but also opens up a challenge of a kind. Is this late blooming less a matter of emerging genius, and more that of poor judges and missed opportunities? Perhaps Van Gogh The Late-Genius, was also Van Gogh The Child-Prodigy, yet without the access to paint, to canvases, to encouragement, to guidance, to motivation, or to knowledgeable-enough eyes. And yet something about this doesn’t sit well with our worldly expectations. Take Einstein for example, and now imagine him as a young student scribbling away in his technical college. To make this work, you now also have to imagine that none of his teachers, at any point in his education, noticed even the slightest spark of something special about him.
Part of the problem here is clearly a matter of recognition – the poor and limited ways we are tuned-in to the abilities of the people around us. If the people who are expected to first notice, then announce, and then cultivate, and then anoint us with the title of genius, are bad at their jobs, then what else is there… other than a childhood of misunderstanding and neglect. But why should this bother us so much? The neglect of one’s talent can often be the freedom it needs to grow, unnoticed and so unbound by social expectations. Why does the question cause so much angst and so many late, worried-filled nights for the young adults that Agassi talks to? People who are: “highly concerned with this matter and in an obviously painful manner.”
Genius casts a dark shadow. The youth today – as in every day – are both “highly ambitious and highly frustrated”. They want to achieve what the people before them achieved: the wealth, the comfort, the status, the happiness, the meaning, the purpose, the career, the prospects, the accomplishments, the recognition… the genius. Listen closely enough, and you can hear under their breaths the light whisper of neurotic desire: “I will not be satisfied with my output, I will not be satisfied with my life, unless I both achieve ingenious results and am recognized for them.”
The rest of us are stuck living lives of mild-chloroform, intolerable, unacceptable, small. All except for one unpleasant little group of adults, people whose role in this issue is disproportionate to who they are, but not to who they think they are. They are the one group in all of this that Agassi has open contempt for, the people who have had their genius-like moments, have exhausted them, and yet can’t stomach the courage to get out of the way for fear of being overtaken:
Those senior members of our cultural and intellectual elite. (I am rather poor at expressing my pity for them.) For, as I watch the ambitious young professionals press themselves hard toward the precipice, I view their older colleagues, their senior advisers, as those who have already fallen off the cliff, who do not dare move a limb for fear of discovering that their bones are broken or even that their bodies are paralysed. Fear of paralysis, it is well known, is quite paralysing.
These people are the gatekeepers to this world, and to a talent that they largely never held; with the few who did now bearing the scars of being corrupted by the experience. For Agassi, they are “phony” in their attitude and intellect. Creatures who are afraid of their own honest advice, career counselors who abuse their positions in order to shy away the young from following in their footsteps; the fewer competitors the better. But even then they have something in common with the next flowering generation of prodigies. An opinion about themselves: if you are not in the Genius Club – and recognised as such – by your late teens or early twenties, then you will never be!
And this is what the whole confusion might be about. The vague answer to our vague question. The “myth of the young genius” as Agassi likes to call it, is not really a question about genius at all, not about intelligence or success or ability or work ethic or knowledge or talent, but about the mud and grime of human life. It is a plea for the ambitious amongst us to just stop, to drop what we are doing and accept the ordinary undertow of existence: “frustration and futility”.
The Myth is a cautionary bedtime story, a folktale, a taboo, that reads like this: before you dare to plan for great achievement, before you start the gears of energy and sweat, just remember you are already, most likely, almost certainly, too late. That PhD you are writing, that novel or that poem, that note you are trying to catch on your violin, cello or flute, that pose, that manoeuvre, that brushstroke, that idea, that revision, that criticism, that theory, that scene, that very inkling of a thought, is doomed to failure because you are not already a raging success… a recognised genius.
So the myth of the young genius might be better called the myth of the magnanimous senior professional. The myth of an older generation that is happy to see the rise of the next – of mature professionals leaving their self-pity and career aspirations at the door of truth and progress. Ordinarily these people would not matter. Gatekeeping can only go so far, hold back the young barbarians for so long, until success begins to speak for itself and the whole game comes to an end. But all this talk of genius and its recognition matters now, because those senior professionals have managed to infect their junior colleagues with this nonsense, pre-emptively talking them out of aspiring to great deeds, with a fear of being too late to the game.
Yet the question of young geniuses troubles the old as much as it does the young. And for this they deserve some sympathy with our disdain. They too were raised on The Myth, and had the same hard – and sudden – judgment pushed onto their lives: early prodigy or a long life of mediocrity. This is what gatekeeping and mythmaking is for, it perpetuates what has come before and, worse, it does our thinking for us. Those senior professionals are likely as unaware of the harm they are doing now, as they were aware of the harm once done to them. But why does the question trouble them then? To be once labeled a young genius – as many of these people have – is to have an unpleasant thought nag at you through your aging life: is that the best I’ll ever be?
Those who have never been lucky enough to feel the embrace of being a recognised-genius, have another unconscious reason for keeping The Myth alive. Despite all that they are and have achieved, they have endured the stigma of not being in that select club, and so the frustrations of their life tend to feel like the unavoidable pitfalls of destiny. They begin to look upon their problems in a non-Popperian light: they resent them rather than loving them. Dug for so long into self-loathing and frustration, the thought that it was a grand mistake – all avoidable – can feel less like relief than a compound error. One more mistake in a life of mistakes. It is just easier – and less psychologically confronting – to accept what has happened and to wish the same failure upon the next generation; their soon-to-be-failure making yours more tolerable.
So perhaps it is a good thing that these geriatric gatekeepers are so bad at their jobs. You might expect people who push The Myth to at least be relatively good at recognising talent when they see it, to ensure that no actual young geniuses are left out in the cold, with their bright futures snuffed-out by the disappointment of rejection. Or, failing that – to run the Popperian line a little further – you might expect, or hope, that they look upon their errors as falsifications: indications that something might be wrong with the underlying theory. Yet the phenomenon of the unrecognised genius is so common that it has slipped into cliché, an irony-rich trope which cradles one hard fact to its chest: if genius is a childhood development then, at the very least, we are all very poor at identifying it in those early stages.
Here the pseudoscientific mind is earning its dues, blinded to the self-fulfilling nature of The Myth. The error runs like this: the late development of certain geniuses does not mean that they were not extraordinary youths, but rather that they were! Sadly there were not enough adult geniuses around them at the time to notice (it takes a genius to recognise a genius). And for the infant prodigies that go on to fulfill all that expectation and promise? Well, the fact they became geniuses proves that they must have always been, even if the label is only applied retrospectively. Dig hard enough into the photo albums and family stories of adult geniuses, and you will always find some small spark of talent or precociousness; just enough to satisfy uncritical minds and keep The Myth alive.
Ask these people what genius looks like, and they say things like: I know it when I see it. Ask instead what does genius not look like, and you get no answer at all.
The problem of genius is the problem of all knowledge, of life… of us! There can never be a theory of genius, any more than there can be a theory of human beings. We can always talk about who has been seen to be a genius in the past, and even try our hand at saying what combination of talent and success should constitute the title today, but tomorrow this will always be wrong! We human beings are creative, it’s what makes us what we are, as well as what makes us completely unpredictable. And one of the few things which is uncontroversially true about geniuses, is that they are highly creative, and so highly unpredictable.
Any theory about what a human being is, can only ever be based on today’s best knowledge. What we all do though – for every problem or hassle or difficulty or limitation or failure – is create new knowledge to improve things about the world (and about ourselves). Our ancestors, though genetically identical to us in every way, were living dramatically different – unrecognisable – lives for one reason only: their knowledge was poles apart from ours. Dream-up any theory of genius that you like, any category for which the next one ought to fit, and that human problem hits back at you.
The next genius will disrupt what we currently know, including what we currently know about geniuses themselves. If the next great talent in some field follows the current trends of the field, we may appreciate their ability, their dedication, their work, but – as they simply repeat someone else’s breakthrough or follow someone else’s formula – we can never call them geniuses. The only real way we have of judging these prodigies, these masterminds, these virtuosos of our time, is by the single criterion of extreme creativity. Something not just different or difficult to understand, but something as otherworldly and strange and incomprehensible (at first) as magic. The prerequisite of all things genius is that it not be immediately – nor easily – appreciated.
This is why people struggle so much when it comes to recognising the geniuses in their midst. It is also why our education systems struggle so painfully when it comes to teaching creativity, or cultivating it, or even tolerating its existence and expression. So much of what we talk about when it comes to these questions, according to Agassi, is a surreptitious way of discouraging people away from “productive careers” and into “unproductive” ones. And from the beginning there is a practical type of apology for this: “Infant prodigies will not be detected in a social milieu which has no use for their talents”. But the problem of education runs deeper…
Any degree of talent or ability is a matter of knowledge, and so it is also – to some degree – socially determined. Here Agassi has an observation, a personal anecdote of sorts. Asking around his colleagues and friends to see if “they could remember the teachers who made a difference to them”, more often than not Agassi received the same answer: “It often turned out that it was a single teacher who had showed critical appreciation and who, quite by accident, had even helped his or her more active charges to decide the direction of their mental development.” The problem became a matter of rarity, “from the age of 6 to 26, there were only two or three seminal people who really affected them”.
Infant prodigies face the same career decisions as the rest of us, the same hassles, the same anxiety, the same limitations of chance and circumstance. Einstein dreamed of being a mathematician rather than a physicist, but based on the state of the two fields in continental Europe during his day, if he wanted to work on something grand or comprehensive (which he did) it would have to be physics. The French chemist responsible for discoveries in pasteurization, microbial fermentation, and vaccination, Louis Pasteur, always regretted his career choice of chemistry over biology. And if Max Planck had his way and had pushed back upon the guiding arms of social pressure, he would have been a musician rather than the Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist that he was.
To have your career charted-out for you in some way – large or small – is inevitable. Even if that charting is nothing more than the cold, hard press of job insecurity. So why does the world of standardised education make such a mess of the talent, the creativity, the soon-to-be-geniuses that we hand to it? It’s a question that comes with another myth, a romantic one about the need for geniuses to walk their own paths, find their talent on their own, away from comfort and corrupting voices, “to wander in the desert and agonize”.
It is true that Planck was “embittered” about his genius, a prisoner of his own career. But the Einsteins of our world run across this theory, peaceful, happy, content with themselves and with their second-choice jobs. Then Agassi talks about the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and the more stereotypical image we tend to hold of the extremely talented amongst us – anguished, depressive, and unhappy because they pursued what they wanted, because they lived the career they wanted, and because they succeeded. We instinctively think that genius causes hardship, rather than hardship causing genius.
The pain of being an infant prodigy is obvious enough: they standout. And though the burden of their talent might be tormenting enough, it is likely nothing compared to the problem of being noticed for who they are: the one amongst the many. Child psychologists fill textbooks with the longing to feel normal that they see in their patients; and so perhaps what we owe those infant prodigies are cold eyes. Instead of recognising their talents at all, we might help their wellbeing – as well as the development of those talents – by simply downplaying the extraordinary things they do.
The development of young geniuses is nobody’s business but theirs. Any instinct to try to help these people along, should be quickly shaken to silence by the obvious truth that we don’t know how to. We might get it right and help in some way, but we might also get it wrong and cause damage; more importantly we wouldn’t know where to start, nor how to judge our success or failure. So choosing to – at a minimum – take away any unnecessary pressure, is likely to be a good thing. As Agassi comments in wistful tones “we know that quite a few very brilliant individuals suffered from pressure so much that as adults they were resolved not to use the special skills and talents they had developed under that pressure.”
Anyone willing to say that genius-level talent needs our firm hand on its shoulder, guiding and prodding it towards its potential, needs to also admit in the next breath that they have no evidence for that. And anyone who feels it is true regardless, ought to be very cautious of how close that attitude is to real world tyranny. The myth of the young genius is certainly a myth, but so are all our motherly worries about “warm feelings” and appropriate “encouragement”. The acquisition of skills and knowledge and talent are all their own reward, valuable in their own right, and intuitively desirable. So long as we are not actively discouraging these things – through clumsy schooling, tyrannical parenting, or jealous gatekeeping – then genius, whatever it turns out to be, will take care of itself.
*** The Popperian Podcast #19 – Joseph Agassi – ‘Rules of the Game’ The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #19 – Joseph Agassi – ‘Rules of the Game’ (libsyn.com)