Divine fury : a history of genius

361 Pages·2013·7.46 MB·English

by  McMahon

MORE ADVANCE PRAISE FOR DIVINE FURY
“As Darrin McMahon shows, the genius is the god among men—
providing one of the last connections to the transcendent that
our common secular culture retains, and setting up a struggle be-
tween our desire for exceptional beings and our leveling egalitari-
anism. In its absorbing and remarkable way, Divine Fury educates
and entertains, vindicating the importance of grand history told
over the long term.” —Samuel Moyn, Columbia University, au-
thor of Th e Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
“It is rare to fi nd an historian who writes in a style both so
sure-footed and so light, and with such joy in the telling of
a tale. In his engaging new book Darrin McMahon takes us
on an intellectual adventure, tracing the transformation of
the idea of genius as it shed its sacred garments to become
the common property of our own democratic age. Ranging
with ease across history—from the poets of Romanticism to
the tyrants of the twentieth-century, from Einstein to the ‘IQ
Test,’ and from Benjamin Franklin to the ‘wiz-kid’ inventors
of Silicon Valley—McMahon invites us to consider a central
paradox of our time: If anyone can be a genius, then perhaps
no one is.” —Peter E. Gordon, Amabel B. James Professor of
History, Harvard University, and author of Continental Divide:
Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos

DIVINE FURY

DIVINE FURY
A HISTORY of GENIUS

DARRIN M. MCMAHON
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
New York
Copyright © 2013 by Darrin M. McMahon
Published by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be
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Designed by Cynthia Young
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McMahon, Darrin M.
Divine fury : a history of genius / Darrin M. McMahon.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-465-00325-9 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-465-06991-0 (e-book)
1.Gifted persons—History. 2. Gifted persons—Biography. 3. Intellectual life—
History. I. Title.
BF416.A1M35 2013
153.9'809—dc23
2013016418
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Julien and Madeleine,
who have given me gifts, born and made.
May I off er them many in return.

The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history.
Th e qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more,
now less, and pass away. . . . Once you saw phoenixes: they are
gone; the world is not therefore disenchanted. Th e vessels on
which you read sacred emblems turn out to be common pottery;
but the sense of the pictures is sacred, and you may still read
them transferred to the walls of the world. . . . Once they were
angels of knowledge and their fi gures touched the sky. Th en we
drew near, saw their means, culture and limits; and they yielded
their place to other geniuses.
—Emerson, Uses of Great Men, 1850
Among modern civilized beings a reverence for genius has
become a substitute for the lost dogmatic religions of the past.
—Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum, Th e Problem of Genius, 1931
Now the word “genius,” though in some sense extravagant,
nonetheless has a noble, harmonious, and humanely healthy
character and ring. . . . And yet it cannot be, nor has it ever
been denied that the demonic and irrational have a disquieting
share in that radiant sphere, that there is always a faint, sinister
connection between it and the nether world, and for that very
reason those reassuring epithets I sought to attribute to genius—
“noble,” “humanely healthy,” and “harmonious”—do not quite
fi t, not even when . . . it is a matter of a pure and authentic
genius, bestowed or perhaps infl icted by God. . . .
—Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, 1947