Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Man of Genius
Honesty, love of truth, and objectivity are therefore identical. Everyone who has a personal interest in a matter is, from the very outset, exposed to the suspicion of stating the case to his own advantage, and the stronger this personal interest is, the stronger will also be the tendency to look at the matter in a biassed, subjective way. The moment personal interest, subjectivity, and self-seeking enter the field, truth is put to ?ight.
And just as self-seeking, subjectivity, and falsehood are kith and kin, so love, which is the antithesis of self seeking, and objectivity, which is the pure, single-eyed interest in the thing itself, are akin to truth. If self seeking makes one blind, and incapable of recognising truth, if the self-seeking man is at the same time the narrow-minded man, then on the other hand love makes a man clairvoyant, intuitive, a diviner of hidden things. The man who has an interest merely in the thing itself, who is impersonal, disinterested, loving, is the man whom truth rushes to meet of its own accord; the man who is impartial and just, who observes objectively, will thus at the same time be the man of genius; for we must agree with Schopenhauer, that genius is Simply the completest objectivity, and with Goethe, that the first and last thing that is demanded of genius is love of truth.
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