The Modern Mind: The Impact of Culture on Human Exerience.
Liah Greenfeld
"...A genius is a mind coordinated with culture to anunusually high degree. This close coordination between the symbolic process on the individual level and the symbolic process on the collective level is expressed in the complete individualization of certain parts of culture, their appropriation as the thinking self and full integration with other, necessarily individualized, mental processes. As a result, it is characterized by an unusually powerful symbolic imagination, capable of leaping huge distances over particular “logical“ chains. An unusually powerful intelligence alone, or imagination which is not symbolic, is not enough. Moreover, the unusually powerful symbolic imagination in genius is powered by formal symbolic systems."
"...While it is evidently culture which creates identity and will in the mind, it is the thinking self of the individual mind that generates culture."
"...The definitive characteristic of genius, undoubtedly, is a characteristic of the mind not of the brain. It is having the vast resources of a certain sphere of culture at the mind’s command, at one’s willed recall—that is, the perfect integration of the thinking self with the structures of identity and will."
"...A very developed and active thinking system, often combined with acute intelligence, may lead to madness as well as to genius, and, if we remember how much more abnormal (that is rare) the condition of genius is from that of madness, is rather more likely to lead to the latter. In this case it must change its function too. Instead of being the “I of self-consciousness,” it must become the eye of unwilled self-consciousness, culture not individualized observing the mind and experienced as an alien presence within the self. "
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