The "corrupt" condition of the genius occurs in small modern communities (an obsessive theme in Kierkegaard's Journal), that is to say, in a socius which is not in the habit of meeting the out-of-the-ordinary, except in the form of power and in the more de-graded form of the event. In these conditions the out-of-the-ordinary which is hardest to bear, and is thus repressed, is the gen-ius, as he lacks both the immunity enjoyed by power and the air of normality which tradition has conferred on it.
Where there exists a tradition of the genius, as there was in Goethe's Germany, or in some of the Greek cities—"Other peoples have had saints or sages; the Greeks had geniuses," said Nietzsche— the genius becomes himself the "normal out-of-the-ordinary," who is needed by his contemporaries as the mediator between them-selves and a superior order. To have the "culture of the genius" means being able to recognize with joy one who is intangibly superior to you, accepting his appearance as an occasion to be raised above yourself, not discontented that someone else has got there first, but rejoicing that, together with him, you may get there too.
When this culture of the genius exists, when the genius lives not in martyrdom but in jubilation, like a domesticated god, his contemporaries experience a peaceful self-transcendence. What then can be more elevating, in this strict sense, than to be present in the train of Empedocles or at the dinner imagined by Mann in his Lotte in Weimar, where Goethe talks of the being of a mineral?
Marquez has an extraordinary story in which a winged angel (the symbol of the out-of-the-ordinary) falls, during a storm, into a peasant's yard. At first it is adored by the whole village, before becoming an object of curiosity (with the owner of the orchard charging an entry fee), and ending up, void of all content, among the hens in the yard, where in the peasant's mind it belongs on ornithological grounds.
THE PÄLTINIS DIARY
A Paideic Model in Humanist Culture
GABRIEL LIICEANU
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