Geniuses – Unifiers of the Worlds

Congregative (from Latin congregatio – unification) theory of genius asserts that the essence of genius is manifested in its willingness and ability to unite different layers and spheres of reality, to connect and bring together worlds, to productively combine different disciplinary matrices in science, directions, forms and genres in art, to unite and combine meaningful spaces, distant matrices of meanings, ideas and associations.

According to this theory, a genius is a person capable of seeing and creating the deepest, universal and essential connections of objects, as well as forming new, unusual connections between meaningful spaces, images, and concepts.
In this case, genius is characterized by the ability to combine, an unusual association of various phenomena, their sides, seemingly distant, leading to non-trivial artistic or scientific thinking, to discoveries in science, technology, art, etc.
If universal geniuses first see, grasp wholes, and then detail and fill them in, drawing out components and connections, unifying geniuses build the whole from within, from below, linking, uniting and fusing the parts.
They unite spaces, lands, and peoples, synthesize and mix directions, genres and styles, and integrate and link different scientific paradigms, subject areas, disciplines, theories and methods.
At the same time, not all unions lead to genius accomplishments, but only those that form balanced wholes of related, internally coordinated components, lead to the creation of qualitatively new, to the formation of new worlds and to the increment of being.

1. Geniuses uniting lands and cultures

Geniuses unifiers project in their activities all the content richness of such a fundamental essence as interaction and therefore are mainly practitioners and incarnators. Interaction is explicated and embodied in real life in the form of an active exchange of vertical managerial actions and influences and is the basis of objectification, materialization, productive practical and managerial-creative activity.
Among the geniuses of unificationists stand: Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, who were not only the creators of great empires but also the unifiers of cultures and peoples, Qin Shi Huang – the unifier and the first emperor of ancient China, Akbar the Great the collector and unifier of India, Otto Bismarck the unifier of German lands, Charlemagne the Great the unifier of European countries, cultures and peoples, Oda Nobunaga, the outstanding samurai who unified Japan and Abraham Lincoln the 16th President of the USA, the unifier of northern and southern territories and the whole American people.

2. Geniuses uniting styles, genres
and expressive means in art

The idea of synthesis of art, productive unification of its various types, reviving the syncretism of primitive art and the synthetic nature of ancient mysteries, was first realized in the Baroque style and its outstanding representative Gian Bernini, who combined architecture, painting and sculpture in his work. For geniuses of this type, we can single out Claudio Monteverdi, who created opera by combining, adding musical dramaturgy and vocal music, visual art and choreography.
Subsequently, through the efforts of E. T. A. Hoffmann and especially R. Wagner, a musical drama was born in which instrumental and symphonic music dominated the flow of poetry, sculpture, and painting. A real drama, wrote R. Wagner, must necessarily be musical because only music is capable of depicting human experience in all its intimate depth. integral aspect of his own musical dramas was an emphasis on the natural union of symphonic and singing.
A significant contribution to the implementation of the idea of synthesis of arts was made by the creator of color and light music A.N. Scriabin, who united colour and sound, and later on
boldly included in his work not only the change of colors but also complex spatial and graphic light projections and plastic forms.
At the same time, it should be taken into account that the synthesis of arts is realized not simply by combining separate types of creativity, but through the realization and affirmation of some originally existing organic whole.
Thus, L. Timoshenko wrote: “Like Wagner, Scriabin wanted to express in art the cosmic scale of the World and was looking for an artistic form that would reflect the fullness and diversity of the Cosmos in the synthesis of arts”. The notion of synthesis is revealed by correlating the process of interaction with a unified whole and even some semantic centre and higher beginning.
In the dialectical connection “interaction – whole”, the first pole expresses the mechanism itself, the process of building the whole from within. The notion of “synthesis of arts” emphasizes the creation of a qualitatively new integrity, in which individual arts, without intermingling with each other, expand, deepen and strengthen the resultant artistic image. In modern music, among the stars who boldly combined in their work different styles and genres can be distinguished Elton John, who skillfully combined the melody of pop music, energetic orchestrations and gospel style, Shania Twain, who managed to combine classic country, pop, hard rock and video-oriented image, Jean Michel Jarre, who combined electronic music with grandiose light shows, James Carter – a jazz genius who combined the opposite currents of neo-traditionalism and avant-garde, as well as music and life itself. The most important component of the success of such representatives of Latin American “magic realism” as Julio Cortázar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, was the art of merging history and myth, fact and fiction, epic traditions and bold modernist innovations in their work. Many representatives of modernism and postmodernism were characterized by the simultaneous application, unification and bold, bizarre, mixing of different discourses, genres, methods, styles and techniques and the continuous renewal of artistic forms. At the same time, in modernism and especially in postmodernism, with its presumption of acentrism and chaotic and fragmented vision of the world, it is more about a random association, and mixing of styles, rather than about the synthesis of art.
The principle of stylistic permutation, which allows combining in one work different forms of representation, and collage, which is a way of organizing the whole by means of mechanical connection of heterogeneous parts, can be singled out separately.
Thus, the work of abstract art representatives V. Kandinsky and K. Malevich was based on the desire to create extraordinary combinations of colors and geometric shapes, the adherent of synthetic cubism Juan Gris, on the depiction of real objects by superimposing a set of intersecting planes and figures, representatives of surrealism Salvador Dali, Max Ernst and Rene Magritte, on the combination of the principles of realism and modernism, combining dream and reality.
One of the essential features and basic principles of postmodernism is eclecticism, and the most productive techniques are quotation, museum collection and collage. If collage was a private technique in modernism, in postmodernism it appears as an expression of postmodernist vision and a universal principle of organizing cultural space. Collage manifests itself in the form of combinations, constellations – eclectic and random combinations of heterogeneous elements and bricolage, which is a “combination of art with non-art” (L. Steinberg).
These principles and techniques were asserted and actively used in his work by M. Foucault, who synthesized history, sociology and psychology, J. Derrida, who combined phenomenology and linguistics, J. Lacan, who combined linguistics and psychoanalysis, and Julia Kristeva,, in turn, combined semiotics and psychoanalysis. These principles and techniques of postmodernism were embodied not only in the works of philosophers but also in the works of representatives of artistic creativity: writers U. Eco, J. Fowles, artists Sandro Chia, Francesca Clemente, Mimmo Paladino and film director R. W. Fassbinder.

3. Unifier geniuses in science

The result of the work of a unifying genius in science is interdisciplinary synthesis, the emergence of new meta-theories, integrated concepts of reality, new paradigms, universal methods and complex matrices of meanings. A genius unifier is able to overcome the limits of a separate scientific discipline, to see the object of research from a new point of view, to rethink it in a new way and through the synthesis of research positions, to create new sciences.
We can identify a number of genius scientists, whose fruitful work in the field of interdisciplinary research led to the birth of new scientific disciplines. Among them is M. Lomonosov, the creator of physical chemistry, Karl Neuberg, the founder of biochemistry, K.E. Tsiolkovsky, the founder of modern cosmonautics and rocket dynamics, A.N. Chizhevsky, the founder of space biology and heliobiology, aero-ionization, electro-hemodynamics, H. Haken, the founder of synergetics, Israel Brechman – creator of valeology, V.I. Vernadsky, founder of biogeochemistry, Norbert Wiener – founder of cybernetics, Leslie A. White founder of  “culturology” – cultural studies.
Geniuses discover new, deep and unexpected connections between things and events, thus generating new properties and meanings.
Their creativity is based on such universal mechanisms as connectivization, which is the search, discovery and creation of new connections, increasing their diversity, richness and quality, combining – a free combination of different elements of consciousness, analogizing – the search for similarity, likeness, correspondences, equality of relations between objects, implementation of forced connections and free linking of everything with everything, transference – transfer of properties, relations, structures and meanings from one object to another, leading to a qualitative change of the object’s properties, relations, structures and meanings.
At the same time, genius is distinguished by the ability to connect the incommunicable, to unite distant, different, unrelated phenomena.   “Nature wrote P. S. Laplace, laughs at the difficulties of integration”. He noted, that discoveries consist in the convergence of ideas that are connectable by nature, but until now were isolated from each other.  M. Michalko continues this thought: “The essence of creative thinking is a complex blending of elements of two or more different subjects, all of which involve guesswork rather than certainty”.
The activity of geniuses of this type leads to the discovery of new generalized forces and determinations, new universal laws uniting different spheres of reality.
Thus, A. Schopenhauer believed that the essence of genius is the ability to see the general in the particular and the incessant study of facts, the sense of the truly important.
Archimedes discovered a universal law of nature, having managed to connect the single fact of his own immersion in the bathtub with the problem posed to him, to connect two private cases and generalize them to a universal pattern.
Twenty-year-old Galileo, observing the movement of the chandelier on a 49-meter pendant in the Cathedral of Pisa and, noting the time on the pulse beat on his hand, discovered the isochronism of the oscillations of the pendulum, Newton, observing the simple fall of an apple from a tree branch, saw in this particular case of deeper and more general relationships and created the theory of universal gravitation, Mayer, noticing that at the equator venous blood becomes bright scarlet and enriched with oxygen, made the assumption that the functions of the body are in direct dependence on external conditions and discovered the law of conservation and transformation of energy.

In turn, Alfred Wegener noticed the similarity of the outline of the two shores of the Atlantic Ocean, east and west, and created the theory of continental drift, which became the first theory of the Earth in world science.
According to A. Koestler, creativity is based on the universal process and mechanism of bisociation, which is a simultaneous connection of two, usually incompatible contexts, the coupling of initially unrelated and incompatible matrices of thought or meanings, the connection of two distant, dissimilar ideas belonging to different fields of knowledge or experience. In this case, the unification of these matrices of meanings can take three different forms: a) collision, leading to the emergence of a comic idea, poignancy; b) fusion, as a result of which the highest scientific synthesis is realized, a scientific idea, discovery, invention is born; c) opposition, causing the emergence of an artistic image.
А. Koestler argued that the basis of scientific discovery is a specific type of bisociation, manifested in the mutual coupling of two previously unrelated matrices of thought. The author gives three examples from the history of science, which from different points of view confirm this idea.
Thus, Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press was based on the combination of the principle of the wine press and the technology of font creation by casting absolutely identical letters.
In turn,  Kepler discovered his laws through the synthesis of astronomy and physics, and Darwin’s theory of evolution was created by combining two firmly established matrices of thought – the evolutionary doctrine, which has its origins in antiquity, and the ideas of “natural selection” and “struggle for existence”, derived from the theory of Malthus.