History of Genius | Hacker News Reader

History of Genius

nybooks.com

20 pointsohaikbai6 comments

"The fallible human mind participates in the beauty of an infallible abstract realm that, in the view of many mathematicians, exists independently of the mental and physical worlds." Kurt Gödel

Gödel++

"To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.", Marcel Duchamp, http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/23/the-creati...

an aesthetic osmosis ! "The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not [aware] of." this i am not so sure... Duchamp's art coefficient = gap, good or bad, So is it possible art coefficient=0 but asthetic scale = ∞, or art coefficient= random and asthetic scale = 0 or ∞ depending on which view you take of Shannon's theory

This article keeps using the word http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy in some sense I don't understand. Can anyone explain it?

About the romantic idea of genius: let's celebrate such people without mysticism. I'm glad I've gotten to meet some of my favorite thinkers and find out they don't shoot laser beams out of their eyes.

I too do not find the reference to theodicy entirely transparent, but here's my interpretation, at least.

The origin of the idea of genius is supposed to be a means of filling in a gap left by the loss of cultural belief in God and angels and so forth; that provides the theological connection. So, it seems to me it's saying that the belief in genius justifies the existence of evil because our genius-'gods' are in fact still basically human. Specifically calling it "theodicy of the human mind" feels like it's suggesting something more, but, to quote the article a bit more, it's not the traditional theodicy that tries to justify the ways of god to suffering humanity, but rather one that permits us to see ourselves, in however attenuated a sense, as the point of it all.

So, yeah. Genius == theodicy because "God is really just us" or something like that. It's a pretty big stretch from the normal meaning of the word, but that's the best I can make of it.

That does make tenuous sense of it, thanks.

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