Translated from french by Grok

The meaning of a question lies in the method used to answer it. Tell me how you search, and I’ll tell you what you’re searching for. I’ve already said it: where one cannot search, one also cannot pose a question, which means: where there is no logical method for finding, the question cannot have meaning either (Ludwig Wittgenstein). In our desire to reach knowledge, we are compelled to push to the extreme frontiers of logical method in order to study thought itself in what is most precious about it: the necessity of creation and discovery. The human mind is a modular set of specialized cognitive capacities: this is one of the most fruitful theses of contemporary cognitive psychology (Pierre Jacob). In line with this thesis, we will endeavor to highlight certain characteristics of genius (cf. definition 2.21 in our article M-classification) in the domains of creation and discovery as specialized cognitive capacities. Of course, these domains are not the exclusive province of intelligence, but certain characteristics of superior intelligence are fundamental (cf. definition 2.33 in our article M-classification). There are things that intelligence alone is capable of seeking, but which it will never find by itself. These things, instinct alone would find; but it will never seek them (Henri Bergson). The explanation for this phenomenon is doubtless connectionist in nature. But as far as genius is concerned, instinct transforms into vision and thus manages to enrich and nourish cerebral activity—and therefore simply life itself. This is revealed particularly in language, hence the importance of the latter. Even the nativists themselves, led by Noam Chomsky, admit that language is built from a fixed innate core that provides the framework of logical operations necessary for language acquisition, but that afterward the environment intervenes to complete the process. We can note here the importance of assimilating the external world through thought. One can certainly raise the question of the nature of this fixed core: should we consider it, in K. Lorenz’s expression, as a set of working hypotheses that the subject has at its disposal to incorporate and structure sensory data? Or, on the contrary, as an intrinsic competence specifying the grammars accessible to the human child, as Chomsky believes? Nativism thus inevitably leads to the notion of repertoire, to use the term employed by ethologists—that is, to the notion of predetermination of performances actually accessible to individuals of a species among the multitude of possible performances (Marc Jeannerod). For us, it is indeed a matter of considering the fixed core as an intrinsic competence. And it is within the framework of the notion of repertoire that we wish to establish certain characteristics of creativity. Both Chomsky’s program of generative grammar and the pragmatic current stemming from Grice’s work imply that one must enter the minds of speakers and interlocutors: without appealing to certain cognitive capacities of subjects—combinatorial in the first case, inferential in the second—one cannot account, these new currents assert, for the nature and properties of language and verbal communication (Jean-Pierre Dupuy). And how better to do so than by studying the work of creators? Studies of the intelligence quotients of famous individuals considered geniuses, at least by their contemporaries, confirm our idea of the supremacy of philosophers in the field of very high intelligence quotients. The study conducted on 300 famous geniuses showed that for philosophers the average IQ was on the order of 170. This is very close to 176, which corresponds to the fundamental value of the sufficient definition of genius (cf. our article M-classification). Moreover, among the cases cited, all those we have used in this article are above this value and rank among the top in the study’s ranking. Perhaps men of genius are the only true men. In all the history of the race there have been only a few thousand real men. And the rest of us—what are we? Teachable animals. Without the help of the real man, we should have found out almost nothing at all. Almost all the ideas with which we are familiar could never have occurred to minds like ours. Plant the seeds there and they will grow; but our minds could never spontaneously have generated them (Aldous Huxley). In a more general framework, we find the apex in terms of intelligence quotient in the following categories: arts, letters, and sciences, respectively in the following fields: music, philosophy, and mathematics. Nature knows no boundaries, and thus the growing specialization, professionalization, and isolation of scientific disciplines today constitute the main obstacles to the progress of knowledge (Jean-Pierre Dupuy). Yet when we seek the psychological conditions for the progress of science, we soon arrive at the conviction that the problem of scientific knowledge must be posed in terms of obstacles. And it is not a matter of considering external obstacles such as the complexity and fleetingness of phenomena, nor of blaming the weakness of the senses and the human mind: it is in the very act of knowing, intimately, that slownesses and disturbances appear, by a kind of functional necessity. It is there that we will show causes of stagnation and even regression; it is there that we will detect causes of inertia that we will call epistemological obstacles (Gaston Bachelard). Thus in the progress of science, the role of pure thought is essential, and this independently of material contingencies. As if the creative individual lived within himself, as a singularity in a locally self-sufficient framework. Everything therefore takes place in the world created by the cerebral cortex, where intellectual freedom is total. One of these domains of total freedom and at the same time of extreme solitude is mathematics. Perhaps I can compare my experience of doing mathematics to entering a private mansion plunged in darkness. You enter the first room and you are in the dark, the complete dark. You grope around, bumping into the furniture. Little by little, you learn the location of each piece. In the end, some six months later, you find the light switch and turn it on. Everything lights up at once and you can see exactly where you are. You then enter the second room, also in the dark… (Andrew Wiles). However, this approach has a broader scope than mathematics, and this scope touches the entirety of intellectual research. In scientific research as elsewhere, there are many technicians, but few creators—those truly capable of innovating, of breaking new ground. It is all too easy, and tempting, to judge a problem interesting because three-quarters of one’s colleagues are working on it. Whereas truly deep and difficult problems promise little easy success and do not attract the professionals of publication. Poincaré distinguished between problems that arise and problems that one poses. It was precisely Poincaré who was to critique classical determinism and thus open the modern era. He was to direct his destructive analysis not at peripheral regions, but at the most formidable bastion of the Newtonian edifice: celestial mechanics (Ivar Ekeland). Thus Poincaré’s very character corresponds perfectly to our framework. His philosophico-mathematical thought is rapid and clear, and his approach particularly intelligent. Endowed with formidable intuition, his method uses the generic particular case or fundamental cases and extrapolates, often purely from a theoretical point of view, to the general case. Intuitive and synthetic, his writing is a first draft that follows the natural path of thought without hiding it at all behind a dogmatic mask. Moreover, testimonies from his entourage suggest the feeling of a necessity to write urgently in order to complete and realize before undertaking a new project. Finally, in Poincaré we find the thirst for pure knowledge, and in this he represents a particularly pertinent cognitive case. In the sciences and in mathematics we find what we have in mind when we speak of language as a symbolism used in exact calculation. Our ordinary use of language respects this norm of exactness only in rare cases. But then, why do we constantly compare, when we philosophize, our use of words with a use that follows exact rules? The answer is that the puzzles we try to eliminate always arise from that attitude toward language (Ludwig Wittgenstein). To know is to produce a model of the phenomenon and to perform regulated manipulations on it. All knowledge is reproduction, representation, repetition, simulation. This, as we have seen, characterizes the scientific, rational mode of knowledge. The cognitive sciences make this mode the unique mode of all knowledge (Jean-Pierre Dupuy). It therefore seems that the creative aspect of a personality is something intrinsic and thus in a certain way independent of conscious will. For we can do what we want, but we cannot will what we want (Schopenhauer). The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a voice, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism these overpowering necessity to create, create, create—so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or building or something of meaning, his breath is cutoff from him. He must create, he must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating (Pearl Buck). We find something terrible in this quote, like a kind of stripping bare. Objective criteria of intelligence are not at all disturbing, but when it comes to sentences that touch the intellectual entity through creativity, how can one not be shaken by the relevance of the statement: for the external world provides an explanation of the intrinsic. The greater the sensitivity, the greater the martyrdom—a great martyrdom (Leonardo da Vinci). And without doubt this sensitivity becomes extreme when combined with memory. I have more memories than if I had lived a thousand years (Charles Baudelaire). We do not fight for a definitive victory in an indefinite future. The greatest possible victory is to continue to be and to have been. No defeat can take away from us the success of having existed for a certain time in a universe that seems indifferent to us. There is no defeatism here, rather a tragic sense in relation to a world in which necessity takes the form of the inevitable disappearance of all differentiation. The affirmation of our own nature and the effort to build an enclave of organization against nature’s tendency to submerge everything in encroaching disorder—this is our insolence before the gods, and before the iron necessity they impose on us. The tragedy is here, but so is the glory (Norbert Wiener). So in the end, what are we? We are beings who know, and who know too much. This leaves us with such a burden that once again, we have the choice: to laugh or to cry; no other animal knows how to laugh or cry (Ray Bradbury). Or perhaps, as Marguerite Long would say, we are craftsmen of a day that never ends. But no, we work today as if tomorrow were not to exist.

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