Genius, Notion of

Thinking outside the Box

If Alexander Pope in his An Essay on Criticism (1732) aligned genius with talent and limited it to one discipline at a time when he ventured “One science only will one genius fit: / So vast is art, so narrow human wit,” Ferdinand de Saussure would claim around 1900 that invention requires thinking outside the box when he ventured that one must think daringly to be inventive (pour inventor il faut penser à côté). The phrase suggests that calculative thinking—the kind associated with talent for a specific task and a single discipline—prevents creative thinking and inhibits ingenious transdisciplinary insight because it forecloses openness to the unexpected. Journalist and novelist Arthur Koestler adapted the phrase as the title of his chapter on the limits of logic, “Thinking Aside,” in his The Act of Creation (pp. 145–177). In it, he explores the “forerunners” of Sigmund Freud's thinking on the role of the unconscious in directing our conscious awareness, naming specifically Socrates, Johannes Kepler, Paracelsus, René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, William James, and Max Planck. The intermingling of philosophers, poets, and scientists across cultures and the ages underscores the fact that genius is a universal phenomenon and is not synonymous with talent. Thinking outside the box is common to successful scientists and artists alike. Creativity and genius are intimately interrelated.

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