What is Genius?

Genius consists in the capacity for knowing the Ideas of such things by being one with the Idea.

This makes the idea no longer an individual, but the pure subject of knowledge.

This capacity is independent of the principle of sufficient reason.

This is different from knowing the relations of individual things.

Genius exists in all men in some degree.

If we had no genius in us, the we would be incapable of enjoying or producing works of art.

Art would not be beautiful or sublime.

Thus all men have this power of knowing the Ideas in things, and consequently of transcending their personality for the moment.

The genius only has this kind of knowledge in a far higher degree and more continuously than others.

Through genius he communicates to others the Idea he has grasped.

This Idea remains unchanged so that æsthetic pleasure is one and the same whether it is called forth by a work of art or directly by the contemplation of nature and life.

The work of art is only a means of facilitating the knowledge in which this pleasure consists.

That the Idea comes to us more easily from the work of art than directly from nature and the real world, arises from the fact that the artist, who knew only the Idea, no longer the actual, has reproduced in his work the pure Idea, has abstracted it from the actual, omitting all disturbing accidents. The artist lets us see the world through his eyes.

That he has these eyes, that he knows the inner nature of things apart from all their relations, is the gift of genius, is inborn; but that he is able to lend us this gift, to let us see with his eyes, is acquired, and is the technical side of art.

Therefore, after the account which I have given in the preceding pages of the inner nature of æsthetical knowledge in its most general outlines, the following more exact philosophical treatment of the beautiful and the sublime will explain them both, in nature and in art, without separating them further. First of all [253] we shall consider what takes place in a man when he is affected by the beautiful and the sublime; whether he derives this emotion directly from nature, from life, or partakes of it only through the medium of art, does not make any essential, but merely an external, difference.