The Genius of Kinship: The Phenomenon of Human Kinship and the G ...

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) added anthropological precision to Kant's philosophical formulation and declared that “every child is to a certain degree a genius, and every genius is to a certain degree a child.” A child is endowed with original naïve simplicity, which he explains as mental powers accumulated earlier than the social needs for their application. An anthropologist will instantly recognize similarity between this explanation of a genius and L. H. Morgan's theory of kin terminological lag: Kin terminologies can be used as a means of historical reconstruction because they survive longer than the social conditions that produced them. Morganian kin terms were a trace of the Schopehauerian genius.

The aforementioned aphorism can serve as a decent summary of Schopenhauer's grand philosophical schema expounded on in The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) (1819). The world is controlled by human desires attached to a multitude of objects, propagating through imitation. A system of relations in which an individual object is embedded is not taken into account. A genius is an individual born with an ability to resist the pressure of the Will. He possesses a pristine intellect that allows him to grasp the ideas behind things, to transform himself into a knowing idea, and represent the world through the pure and original works of art. This liberating intellect takes root in the earliest perceptions of the world, and survives through the constant monitoring and revisiting of the images. Thinking in pictures precedes thinking in concepts. According to Schopenhauer, and this is another implication of his identification of the genius with the child, every individual is endowed with a genius. The culmination of Schopenhauer's elaboration of the phenomenon of genius is his assertion that genius is “simply the most complete objectivity, i.e., the objective tendency of the mind, as opposed to the subjective which is directed to one's own self—in other words, to the will” (Schopenhauer, 2004, p. 109). Schopenhauer compares genius to “a ray of sun,” an image which harkens back to Plato's interpretation of the eye as congenial with the sun () through the medium of light (Medawar, 1982).