The Genius of Kinship: The Phenomenon of Human Kinship and the Global Diversity of Kinship Terminologies
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The Genius of Kinship: The Phenomenon of Human Kinship and the G ...

Chapter 2:  Philosophy, Psychology, and Physiology
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to emerge is that of seeing similarities. For example, that “we see it in children, in whom nature is more integral and less corrupted by convictions and prejudices, that the first faculty to emerge is that of seeing similarities. For example, they call all men fathers and all women mothers… [T]he sharp men (arguti) are the ones who are able to find a likeness or ratio between things very different and far removed from one another, see the way in which they are cognate, or who leap over the obvious and recall from distant places the connections appropriate for the things under discussion. This is the type of mother wit that is called acumen. Hence wit is essential to invention because, in general, to find new things requires both the work and the activity of wit alone. (Vico, 1988, p. 102)

Everywhere here, references to kinship abound. Vico divided history into three periods—Divine, Heroic, and Human that are strikingly similar to L. H. Morgan's periodization of human history into Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization (earlier, Hunting, Pastoral, and Civilized states). Interestingly, Vico called “divine” what L. H. Morgan would later call “savage.” The divine epoch is characterized by the immediate contact between humans and gods, when the method of communication was silent and gestural. The divine period produced a series of ontological constants, or universals that humanity has carried through the heroic age into the current age of equality and rationality (see Makolkin, 1995). It is this pool of archetypical images that is uniquely accessible to a genius.

In 1719, in Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting (Réflexions Critiques sur la Poésie et sur la la Peinture), Abbé Du Bos explained genius as a natural ability of some lucky individuals, stemming from the organization of their brain, internal organs and the quality of their blood. These physical characteristics, in turn, arise from the climate and geography in which an individual is born. The abbot was dissatisfied with his own rational analysis, and opted for retaining the ancient mystical interpretations of genius by adding furor poeticus, the irrational poetic enthusiasm, to the bundle of features that engender a genius (Jaffe, 1980, pp. 583–584). Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771), in contrast, attributed the existence of geniuses to pure chance.