Adam asked:

What do we mean when we call someone a genius?

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As far as I know, the first use of that term was by Kant. He used it to refer to someone who, because
of a profound connection with reality, was able to create new rules for constructing and understanding
what Kant termed "aesthetic ideas". This connection to reality, to the noumenon, was unknowable,
and the noumenon remained unknowable. The reason for this was that it enabled some few people to
have, occasionally, free will, inasmuch as they were through that temporary connection able to free
themselves from the causal patterns or laws, to put it roughly, of the knowable world. Now this is a
summary of the motivation of Kant's Critique of Judgment,and for a 25 words or less statement I
think it's pretty good. For a statement of the C of J, it's lousy.

Anyway, that's where the term started, as far as I know. It was, I believe, taken up by Goethe to refer
to outstanding artists. And it took off from there. Today it means nothing. It's just a word someone
uses about someone else when they admire them. So, in answer to your question, I have no idea
what "we" mean... because the term really has no clear meaning any more. Different people mean
different things by it. Does that help?

Steven Ravett Brown

The word itself has a long history of changing meanings: and in the early years of its usage it was
often a simple synonym for cleverness. However, it was then mostly used in the form "X has a genius
for...", meaning that X has a talent.

But in the inception of the German branch of the romantic movement, the usage of the term
underwent a subtle shift. The presiding "genius" of that movement, Herder, used it in such
expressions as, for example, "the genius of the language", where he is not referring to a person, but
to the language itself as a kind of river that flows through the population and impregnates the people
speaking that languages with its spirit.Herder was especially vocal in defending a then popular theory
that the authentic poetry of a nation arises spontaneously and anonymously, long before individuals
make it their business to "cultivate" language poetically. You can see here the connection between
the original French meaning of genius (spirit), which Herder directly imported, and the connotation of
authenticity. Both of these eventually converged in the extension of the notion to individuals.

In that definition, then, a genius was a person imbued with the authentic spirit of poetry (or 'poesie'
which is the term they preferred to distinguish the authentic from the manufactured). The author of the
Nibelungen Poemwas such a genius, and it was rather a recommendation that he remained
unknown. Similarly with the Edda poems of Norse mythology, the Beowulf etc. Incidentally you will
find in these adumbrations the kernel of the later doubt that Homer was just a collator of old legends!
Now Herder is almost unknown in the English-speaking world, but if you've read Goethe's Werther,
then you might remember the almost hysterical ravings over Ossian and Fingal, which Goethe (on
Herder's say-so) classed as "authentic" Scottish folk poesie (they didn't know it was a put-up job by
one Macpherson, a second rate versifier!). Roughly at the same time he (Goethe) wrote an eulogy on
Erich Steinbach, the architect of the Strassburg cathedral; and again the same notion of "genius"
prevailed here, in that the master builder was an intuitively authentic embodiment of the gothic spirit.

The whole notion acquired the momentum of a cult in very short order (that time is still referred to as
the Era of the Genius-Cult in literary history); even the old fogey from Konigsberg [Kant, Ed.] felt
obliged, in his aesthetic treatise, to offer a sort of "definition" of genius along roughly those lines; and
later his avid pupil Schiller worked out a comprehensive aesthetic (Uber naive und sentimentalische
Dichtung) which made the distinction between the "authentic" and the "cultured" poet a cornerstone of
poetic theory that remains to this day pretty much in force in German philosophy. One suspects that
the overwhelming esteem accorded to Goethe owes not a little to Schiller's advocacy of him as such
a (perhaps the only modern) specimen of an "authentic" genius. Thus the die was cast; henceforth
the term "genius" became affixed to individuals of a particular creative potency.

It would not be long afterwards, that the imprecise and indeed indefinable notion of "authenticity"
came tacitly under fire; and more and more of the creative types of the "sentimental" variety found
themselves called "genius", even though according to the standard set by Schiller it was an
inadmissible licence. Then, as the result of a natural attrition of exaggeration, to which especially the
late stages of romanticism were prone, the value of the term genius became debased by over-usage;
essentially it has become again what it used to be, a synonym for cleverness. Yet because
enthusiasm for things romantic — novels, music, poetry etc — has never quite died down, the term
itself is carried over and retains in these specialised contexts some of its old force of meaning.

So ultimately the answer to your question is: if used today in an everyday context, it probably means
nothing other than "X is clever" or also "X is pretty stupid, but for some queer reason he's got a knack
for stringing up pretty words; guess he must be a poet." But the old custom, as I said, has not died out
altogether, and so it is still occasionally used to mean "X is really an exceptionally inventive/ creative
personality".

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney