Who were the Genuises of Mankind?

[Anonymous No.16845918]

I read some of Schopenhauer & Kant on this subject, and I think men like Wagner, Goethe and Jean Paul clearly had the mark of genius. Curious to hear what historical figures /lit/ considers to have been genuises.

[Anonymous No.16845926]

Aristotle and Leibniz were ok. Everyone else was/is retarded.

[Anonymous No.16845948]

[Anonymous No.16845953]

>>16845918
Textbook definition is Goethe. I'm pretty certain Schopenhauer was basing his definition on him.

[Anonymous No.16845970]

>>16845918
Socrates, Alexander, Cicero, Plotinus, Hannibal, Cao Cao, Jesus of Nazareth, The Apostle Paul, Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides, Ben Franklin, Jane Austen, Hannah Arendt, Confucius, Napoleon, Bismarck, Spinoza, Leibniz, Goethe, Kant, John Stuart Mill, Mozart, Beethoven, Einstein.

[Anonymous No.16846024]

>>16845953
Is being an accomplished polymath like goethe greater genius than a person like leibniz or oppenheimer who is laser focused on one aspect of knowledge?

[Anonymous No.16846050]

>>16846024
Leibmiz was a hyperpolymath. I think he is more deserving of the term "genius" than someone like Oppenheimer or Maxwell. Both of those physicsts were crazy smart tho.

[Anonymous No.16846065]

>>16845953
Who else do you think would qualify as a genius in the Schopenhauerian sense?

[Anonymous No.16846082]

>>16846050
His great genius was pretty clearly in 1. addressing metaphysics and maybe 2. being a legalist courtier. This isnt to say he didnt have other competencies, but genius rises above competency.

[Anonymous No.16846088]

>>16845918
>I read some of Schopenhauer & Kant on this subject, and I think men like Wagner, Goethe and Jean Paul clearly had the mark of genius.

yes, of course, atheists always idolize the bourgeois larping as the greeks and their self glorification of their mental circuses. I bet you think those ''thinkers'' are deep and insightful. Protip: the only insight you get from them is that the mental masturbation of the careerist intellectuals post the presocratics is just mental masturbation...
Atheists hate to hear this

[Anonymous No.16846112]

Lao Tzu
Socrates
Diogenes
Jesus
Guatama Buddha
Nagarjuna
Bodhidharma
Hui Neng
Huang Po
Meister Eckhart
Hakuin
Kierkegaard
Nietzsche
Weininger
Kevin Solway

[Anonymous No.16846134]

>>16846088
Protip: they weren't atheists and exoteric religion is fake and gay.

[Anonymous No.16846143]

>>16845970
Socrates but no Plato?

[Anonymous No.16846168]

>>16846088
cringe attempt at bait

[Anonymous No.16846187]

>>16846143
this was a concern but the list is not inclusive, and i cant tell how much plato is being original or just transmitting the ideas of the master.

[Anonymous No.16846198]

Socrates
Jesus
Pascal
Weil
me
that's it

[Anonymous No.16846218]

>>16846198
Simone Weil was insane, not a genius.

Change my mind

[Anonymous No.16846224]

Has anyone here read Carlyle's lectures on Hero-Worship? I think his six archetypes of Divinity, Prophet, Poet, Priest, Man of Letters, and King are more apt for the detection of great men. It's also very cool that Christ more or less fits all six of these, so he was the greatest man.

[Anonymous No.16846260]

>>16845918
NEECHEE

[Anonymous No.16846267]

>>16846224
I think Schopenhauer's definition of genius and those things are very different things. In Jung's framework, the former is a highly developed intuition, the latter are archetypes that a man might embody.

[Anonymous No.16846338]

Me

[Anonymous No.16846352]

Philip Mainlander

[Anonymous No.16846409]

Euler
Godel

[Anonymous No.16846454]

What are the best biographies of polymath/genius people?

[Anonymous No.16846466]

>>16845948
HYPERBASED AND CYBER(MCPBUH)PILLED

[Anonymous No.16846488]

>>16846454
There's several for the people mentioned here: Diogenes Laertius, Proclus and Olympidorus all wrote works dedicated to the life of Plato. There's also Guhrauer's biography of Leibniz if you're interested in that, and who knows, maybe you'll get to rescue one of his colleagues from obscurity and shill them here.

[Anonymous No.16846513]

Why give a shit

[Anonymous No.16846566]

>>16846513
Why anything?

[Anonymous No.16846594]

what i think makes goethe a genius is not his novels, poems or studies but his letters and travel diary. he observes people like no one else.

[Anonymous No.16846709]

>>16846594
Yeah, his powers of observation are especially prominent in his *Reflections and Maxims*. Here's the link to a translation of it if you want to read it: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/33670/33670-h/33670-h.htm

[Anonymous No.16846727]

>>16846218
>Change my mind
I'm a genius and you're not. I know better.

[Anonymous No.16846739]

>>16846727
sounds insane

[Anonymous No.16846766]

>>16845918
Socrates, Shakespeare and Beethoven.

[Anonymous No.16846781]

>>16846739
They said the same thing about Socrates. Your grandchildren will learn about me.

[Anonymous No.16846802]

>>16846065
Mozart. Pretty much anyone childish-eccentric, not mature enough to look on his own material behalf and capable of perceiving the platonic idea of an object through a single objectivisation of said idea.

In Schopenhauer's terminology 'genius' can only be applied to artist's since it is the consequence of an excedent of intelligence which allows that person to temporarily free himself from Will and create masterpiece. It is pretty tied of his idea of what art is.

For Schopenhauer outstanding scientists had this great intelligence but were not able to free themselves from Will due to lack of imagination, a weak temperament or not having enough excedent of intelligence.

[Anonymous No.16846803]

Newton and Einstein

[Anonymous No.16847119]

>>16846082
math?

[Anonymous No.16847311]

>>16845918
Heraclitus
Isaiah
Jesus
Louis IX
Francis of Assisi
Enrico Dandolo
Johann Georg Hamann
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Roger Penrose

Struggling to come up with more. I don't consider artists geniuses. Don't consider generals taking over lands ripe for the taking geniuses. Don't consider master compilers of knowledge geniuses. Don't consider scientists whose science did not have bigger than scientific implications geniuses.

[Anonymous No.16847379]

Riemann

[Anonymous No.16847464]

What about Gauss

[Anonymous No.16847702]

>>16847311
Weren't Louis XI and Enrico Dandolo both great *men of action*? Why not include someone like Charlemagne or Napoleon as well?

[Anonymous No.16847874]

>>16845970
>Hannah Arendt
why

[Anonymous No.16848093]

>>16846802
>allows that person to temporarily free himself from Will and create masterpiece

i thought the Muses guided man to create Masterpieces through the Will

[Anonymous No.16849168]

Most influential:
Jesus
Napoleon
Wagner

Greatest genius, hard to say:
Aristotle
Descartes?
Leibniz??
Galileo
Kant
John von Neumann?
Tom Brady
Carlsen?

[Anonymous No.16849185]

Zoroaster was technically more influential than Jesus, Muhammad, and Moses, you pseuds.

[Anonymous No.16849230]

>>16848093

If I remember correctly he said that the artist portrays the abstract idea of whatever he wants to do in his work. There's a long chapter in The World as [...] vol. 1 where he talks about many disciplines and his vision on them.

This can only be achieved through liberating the intellect from Will, since Will tends to relate with whatever one thinks of in terms of desire or rejection. So in order to full grasp the (platonic) idea of whatever he is thinking about, the artist turn into a 'subject of knowledge' and frees himself from Will in order to give birth to the piece of art.

In his words, the 'genius' is somene who is more proclive to achieving this avolitive state easier. This has to do with being uncommonly intelligent, since this capacity to grasp the (platonic) idea is intrinsecally cerebral.

This extra predominance of intelligence aka. creativity over Will tends to make geniuses childish and carefree (he mentions Goethe, Mozart).

[Anonymous No.16849270]

>>16845918
Genius is the measure of liberation from self.
>>16849230
What this guy said, only I'd replace will with intellect. The cunning intellect is conditional, and the locus of grasping and rejecting. Will is primary. Man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills (Schopenhauer). 'Willing as one wills' is an intellectual exercise in futility, a rejection of things as they are.

[Anonymous No.16849320]

name a memorable goethe or jean paul scene.
for supreme geniuses of imagination their cosmos remained rather abstract and sparse.

[Anonymous No.16849331]

>>16849270
>only I'd replace will with intellect

I'm not sure to have undesrtood correctly. If what you mean is that desire and rejection belong to intellect and that it is Will that overcomes it to make art
->
check out Ch.19 of The World as [...] vol. 2. Long chapter where he tries to prove intellect is no more than a tool for Will. Then Ch.27 (on the artistic impulse) and then Ch.31 (on geniuses).

[Anonymous No.16849405]

>>16849331
>where he tries to prove intellect is no more than a tool for Will
By that token, will is primary. Will cannot be modulated, intellect is always changing on the basis of cause and condition. Take a child at play for example: they do not intellectualize their pursuits, it is spontaneous manifestation of will. It's only when we begin to ignore will at the behest of intellect (knowledge of good and evil) that we fall out of grace.
>"When hungry, eat your rice; when tired, close your eyes. Fools may laugh at me, but wise men will know what I mean."
- Linji Yixuan

[Anonymous No.16849409]

>>16847874
gotta painfully try to include a woman in there

[Anonymous No.16849449]

>>16849405

To me it seems quite more evident that children are an obvious example of the primacy of will and passion over intellect and meditation.

However, in the chapters mentioned in >>16849331 Schopenhauer uses children as an example of the primacy of intellectual interest for their surrounding since every thing they encounter is most likely new.

This period of primacy of intellect over personal desire lasts until puberty where the genital area is activated and Will starts to take progressive control of their actions until they finally become grown men.

Sticking to the Schopenhauerian approach this is the canon. I, as well, however disagree. If any anon can cite some other passage where this is clarified, it would be of great help.

[Anonymous No.16849511]

>>16849449
Terms are bound to get slippery as they have no intrinsic reality of their own. It's the old 'the menu is not the food' cliche. It might sound anathema but I usually try to derive the spirit of the text, letting it sink into my bones and my guts. That could be my zen proclivity, where 'getting caught in the weeds' is an impediment to natural function.
>This period of primacy of intellect over personal desire lasts until puberty where the genital area is activated and Will starts to take progressive control of their actions until they finally become grown men.
I can only speak from my own experience here, but my behavior throughout elementary school was spontaneous and filled with joy. It wasn't until puberty in junior high that I began to become anxious, self conscious, and depressed. At this point, I began to wield intellect as a sword to defend myself from the intangible forms of suffering (comparing myself to others, general feeling of inadequacy).
To me, the trajectory is bliss-->suffering-->return to bliss. Most never return, taking intellectual imprisonment as the state of affairs. Those that don't return feel 'stuck' at the age where intellect takes hold (teenagers), whereas the genius returns to childhood (only with the intellectual faculties of an adult, taking its rightfully subservient role to will).

[Anonymous No.16849541]

>>16849511
This isn't to say that young children can't be brutal in their own way, but it's a uniquely honest form of brutality--calling things as they are. It's only natural to be liked and disliked by others, but it's not until adolescence that the reasoning shifts from the will (based in honesty) to one of artifice (based in projection and social-climbing attitudes)

[Anonymous No.16849589]

>>16849511
>>16849541
One last addendum--childhood geniuses like Mozart likely have enlightened parents or live as hermits. It is very rare for will to remain untainted and uncorrupted by social conditioning.

[Anonymous No.16849604]

Beethoven, Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner ... come on, no one is gonna mention Bach?

[Anonymous No.16849633]

>>16849604
You need to actually play instruments yourself to appreciate the genius of Bach & Schoenberg.
Which is something no one on /lit/ does

[Anonymous No.16849639]

>>16849230
i haven´t read Schoppie yet but does he have an opinion on the greek muses? what does he think of them?

[Anonymous No.16849680]

>>16849633
You don’t even need to play any instruments, although it certainly does help. You just need to sit down and pay attention to the music, something that shockingly few people do. I don’t mean as background, but listening with your complete and undivided attention.

[Anonymous No.16849694]

>>16846224
i dont think great man and genius are the same thing

[Anonymous No.16849698]

>>16849633
>You need to write a book to appreciate the genius of any author ever

[Anonymous No.16849711]

>>16845918
Kant, Goethe, Leibniz, Wagner. Non-germans can’t compete

[Anonymous No.16849734]

>>16849698
it's true tho
imagine thinking some 50 y/o with a beer belly eating chips in front of his tv can properly criticise professional athletes on the screen

[Anonymous No.16849743]

>>16849694
Yeah, I agree. I just think that Carlyle's classification allows one to more easily identify historical figures who fit in one of the categories. For example, Alfred the Great would go into the "King" category and Addison into "Man of Letters."

[Anonymous No.16849749]

>>16849734
... they’re sitting there enjoying watching the sport. Are you criticizing the technical side of editing every time you watch a movie?

[Anonymous No.16849763]

>>16849711
>Non-germans can’t compete

[Anonymous No.16849775]

>>16849763
Ancient greeks wuz nordic

[Anonymous No.16849779]

>>16849633
>>16849680
/mu/ noob here. I received little education in music and even the meagre amount I learnt has been forgotten (sheet notation, violin-playing). What primers would you suggest for someone who is looking to understand the greats of music more deeply? I planned to start from the very bottom and found a book called "Primer in Music" on archive.org, it seems to explain all the basics of music in less than a hundred pages. Link: https://archive.org/details/cu31924021801075/

[Anonymous No.16849786]

>>16846082
Nigga Leibniz was a lawyer and independently invented calculus and a fucking calculating machine when he decided to try his luck at math

[Anonymous No.16849800]

> great man theory
oy vey

[Anonymous No.16849812]

Gauss, so I've heard.

[Anonymous No.16849815]

>>16849779
I recommend Swafford’s vintage guide to classical music. Readable, gives specific works to check out in a table, introduces the essentials of Western classical forms.

Listen to the Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach. You’ll recognize the first prelude. Then listen to the fugues, and pay attention to just one voice at a time. They won’t make sense at first, might sound like this incomprehensible wall of sound. But listen again, and again, and they’ll blossom.

[Anonymous No.16849832]

>>16846488
>Guhrauer's biography of Leibniz
It really hasn't been translated, eh? Shame.

[Anonymous No.16849833]

>>16849815
I checked the Amazon blurb, seems very patrician desu. Thank you.

[Anonymous No.16849941]

>>16847702
Because Charlemagne and Napoleon walked into a park, a big land with all the resources and manpower you want clamoring for a victor that will make the most use of its enormous capacities. Enrico Dandolo was an old blind man named head of a lagoon and displayed ingenuity dealing shrewdly with other often larger interests in manners that were way ahead of the time and also fucked up Byzantine Empire in the process. Louis IX was based as fuck for taking the Christian ethos (however he might have understood it) radically seriously despite being a king.

[Anonymous No.16849960]

>>16846143
Plato not Pitagoras?

[Anonymous No.16849969]

>>16849941
shonckingly based

[Anonymous No.16849974]

>>16849960
Pythagoras but not Orpheus?

[Anonymous No.16849977]

Goethe

[Anonymous No.16850008]

>>16849974
Orpheus but not Morpheus?

[Anonymous No.16850014]

>>16850008
Shut up retard

[Anonymous No.16850031]

>>16850014
ok

[Anonymous No.16850041]

>>16849969
Only plebs don't think that Dandolo is a greater ruler than Napoleon. Dandolo is literally IQ 160-tier he would probably destroy the British Empire if he was head of France. People constantly confuse potential of nations with skill of rulers.

[Anonymous No.16850103]

>>16850041
>Only plebs don't think that Dandolo is a greater ruler than Napoleon

then why he didn´t unified Italy?

[Anonymous No.16850113]

>>16845918
Genius recognizes genius however it manifests itself. Imagine if geniuses spent their time ranking other geniuses lmao

[Anonymous No.16850130]

Sheikh Guénon (PBUH)
Barone Evola
The author of my diary desu

[Anonymous No.16850136]

>>16850103
because he was a Venetian not an Italian you brainlet

[Anonymous No.16850281]

>>16850113
>Imagine if geniuses spent their time ranking other geniuses lmao
You don't have to imagine it, we're doing just that on this thread.

[Anonymous No.16850305]

>88 posts
>Isaac Newton mentioned only once
Lads, Newton was literally the most intelligent person to ever live. I highly recommend reading a biography, his life was weird and interesting. He was kind of an asshole too.

[Anonymous No.16850334]

>>16846218
Maybe he meant André

[Anonymous No.16850396]

>>16850130
Why is this board so based and redpilled?

[Anonymous No.16850800]

wagner looked like a somali lol

[Anonymous No.16851096]

>>16845918
Utterly underrated. Shunned by faggots, but based as can be. Nikola Tesla.

[Anonymous No.16851153]

>>16845948
Retroactively refuted by Plotinus

[Anonymous No.16851162]

>>16845948
>>16846466
Hyperbased
>>16851153
Neocringe

[Anonymous No.16851274]

>>16845918
Aristotle
Archimedes
Plato
Heraclitus
Socrates
Pythagoras
Aristoxenus
Paul
Aquinas
Augustine
Shakespeare
Dante
Homer
Goethe
Lady Murasaki
The Four Classic Chinese novelists
Confucius
Spinoza
Lao Tzu
Chikamatsu Monzaemon
Dickens
Joyce
The Yahwist writers, collective writers of I Samuel, the Court Historian, and the Deuteronomist(s)
Bach
Mozart
Hayden
Gluck
Beethoven
Wagner
Euclid
Bernoulli
Newton
Einstein
Heisenberg
Gauss
Euler
Godel
Leonardo
Michelangelo
Rembrandt
Eisenstein

[Anonymous No.16851334]

>>16845918
Nigger Jim

[Anonymous No.16851560]

>>16845948
>>16846466
>>16851162
Kill yourself stupid faggot.

[Anonymous No.16851565]

>>16851274
>Lady Murasaki
>Dickens

[Anonymous No.16851573]

>>16849185
t. hipster faggot

[Anonymous No.16851585]

>>16851573
The Gathas are largely the unaltered words of Zoroaster, moron. It has far more wisdom than the Koran, Bible, and OT combined.

[Anonymous No.16852479]

>>16849639

I do not remember him talking about muses in his main works. Its definitely possible that somethings going past my radar.

What I recall of his works about the creative act is purely a consequence of the artist being liberated from self-consciousness and becoming an objective subject of knowledge. No need for any muses there.

>>16849511

Children's curiosity may be seen as an objectivisiation of Will, which would consequently step over the intellect; or the other way around: the children's primacy of intellect over Will objectivising as a eternal sate of desiring knowledge objectively.

I personally think this part of his work is ambiguous and self-contradictory.

[Anonymous No.16852502]

>>16845918
Wagner was mediocre as fuck, people know him for only one meme song and that’s it

[Anonymous No.16852509]

>>16845970
Midwit

[Anonymous No.16852546]

>>16849633
Lol I love Bach, I'm a fucking wagie and listen to him at work. You just have to listen a few times.

[Anonymous No.16852556]

>>16846024
As someone else already said: Leibniz was a hyperpolymath: mathematician, engineer, physicist, theologist, philosopher, proto-sociologist, economist. I don't think you can find someone who wrote meaningfully on as many fields as Leibniz.

[Anonymous No.16852566]

>>16849604
This. Swap Wagner with Bach, because the former is just boring to listen to

[Anonymous No.16852571]

>>16849749
Yes. Hypocrites should be quiet if skilled people are playing. Fat slobs are in no position to criticize professional athletes

[Anonymous No.16852598]

>>16850305
He bought?

[Anonymous No.16852610]

>>16851585
Our oldest manuscripts of the Gathas do not extebd beyond the 13th century lmao

[Anonymous No.16852742]

>>16852598
He lost the today equivalent of millions of dollars but still died filthy rich.

[Anonymous No.16852980]

>Not a single architect mentioned

Cmon.. Its the best art form there is. Atleast mention someone groundbreaking like Imhotep or Gaudi

[Anonymous No.16853005]

>>16849786
Leibniz calculus paper is a mathematical embarrassment. Thank god for Newton.

[Anonymous No.16853024]

>>16852980
why don't you name one, anon?

[Anonymous No.16853565]

>>16845918
Aristotle and Bach come to mind immediatly.

[Anonymous No.16853568]

>>16852980
>Imhotep
pfffffffhahahahahahah you got filtered hard

[Anonymous No.16853577]

Jean Paul was mentally retarded and can’t even begin to compete with Nietzsche.

[Anonymous No.16853620]

>>16849604
Bach was a demigod, not a mere genius.

[Anonymous No.16854099]

Philosophers (Platon, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant)
Musicians (Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart, Haydn)
Poets (Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe)
Painters (Michelangelo, Raphael, Rembrandt)
Scientists (Newton, Leibniz, Gauss, Archimedes, Clark Maxwell)
Religious figures (Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad)

[Anonymous No.16854574]

>>16845918
Vaush
Contrapoints
Hbomberguy

[Anonymous No.16854688]

tolstoy

[Anonymous No.16854832]

>>16845926
Choco Leibniz?

[Anonymous No.16855027]

>>16852610
Actually, they were orally transmitted and maintaining since ~800 to 1000 BCE and then recorded during Sassanian empire around 300-400 CE, and they have a lot of parallels with the relief writings of Xerxes and Darius, dumbass.
Also, the Gathas' message is honestly not complex.

[Anonymous No.16855042]

>>16852610
Actually, they were orally transmitted since ~800 to 1000 BCE and then recorded during Sassanian empire around 300-400 CE, and they have a lot of parallels with the relief writings of Xerxes and Darius, dumbass. The Old Avestan of the Gathas indicates an older origin compared to the Younger Avestan in the rest of the Zend-Avesta.
Also, the Gathas' message is honestly not complex.

[Anonymous No.16855098]

>>16855042
That doesn't refute anything I've said.

[Anonymous No.16855171]

>>16855098
Yes, it does. First off, it was recorded during Sassanian era as sources says. Secondly, it was based on oral transmission and conforms with Achaemenid and Sassanian reliefs of various kings. Thirdly, the Old Avestan is very ancient and different from Young Avestan. Fourth, it is written in a kind of first-person perspective based on Zoroaster's perception, which is important especially given it is Old Avestan.
Therefore, we can infer it came from Zarathustra.
Stop derailing this thread, Spiritual Semite.

[Anonymous No.16855178]

>>16846224
>. It's also very cool that Christ more or less fits all six of these, so he was the greatest man.
Man of letters, poet, never wrote or made poetry.... sure buddy.

[Anonymous No.16855854]

>>16855171
In order to refute my original claim you'd have to prove its contradictory. For starters, how did you determine the dates of the composition of the Gathas to be around 1000 BC?

[Anonymous No.16855880]

>>16855178
Christ made ample use of metaphor and allegory, two fundamental characteristics of poetry. The man of letters part is harder to justify, but it can be upheld if we take knowledge of the Scripture to be "letters."

[Anonymous No.16855890]

>>16855854
The Old Avestan of the Gathas is closely related to the Vedic languages, and it is drastically different from the Younger Avestan present in the rest of the Zend-Avesta. Most of the disputes are in regards to Zarathustra's exact date of bith, ranging from 1500 to 800 BCE, and the majority of scholars, such as Anders Hultgard and Richard Foltz, would agree Zarathustra either orated or wrote the Gathas somewhere in Eastern Greater Iran called "Khorasan" or "Turan". The Sassanian Zoroastrian mobed migrated from Khorasan, like Sogdia and Bactria, which historically was the hub of Zoroastrianism. Technically speaking, the original Zoroastrians were not Persians, but Persians did adopt it.
You can email Richard Foltz for more evidence.

[Anonymous No.16857182]

>>16854574
kill yourself

[Anonymous No.16857184]

>>16845918
Ted Kascinsky

[Anonymous No.16857211]

>>16846168
He's right

[Anonymous No.16857969]

>>16845918

Nobody has posted the correct answer yet: Hegel

[Anonymous No.16859428]

>>16845970
Einstein was a fraud, his works were stolen.
Google it.

[Anonymous No.16860179]

>>16849698
Wrong analogy. Playing an instrument doesn't mean you compose music, and it's equal to reading a book not writing one in this case