Everyday Philosophy: The myth of the lone genius

New European

08-04-2025

To date he has published an impressive number of maths textbooks and become an internationally respected scholar, famous for his work on set theory and functional analysis. But Bourbaki doesn't exist and never has done. He's a fictional professor invented by a group of French mathematicians who published under this pseudonym. Their successors are still going strong. Or rather, Bourbaki is.
Nicolas Bourbaki was a Greek mathematician who later made a living playing cards in Parisian cafes. By the 1950s he had an office with his name on the door at the elite École Normale Supérieure.
They named their avatar Bourbaki in honour of a prank by a student at the École Normale Supérieure some years earlier. He had appeared in disguise in a lecture theatre and written some complex symbols on the board, which he had labelled 'Theorem of Bourbaki' and asked the students to provide a proof for it.
What he'd written was nonsense, a soup of mathematical signs. This was a spoof of the complex and very abstract mathematics then in vogue.
I learned about Bourbaki from a recent talk by Snezana Lawrence, author of the just-published A Little History of Mathematics. What a great story. Apparently, members of the Bourbaki collective are obliged to retire at 50, so today none of the original members are still active – but there's continuity in their successors' mission to give clear expositions of the latest mathematical developments and to keep French mathematics on the international map. In an important sense, Bourbaki is still Bourbaki.
More recently, a group of Italian artists and writers have used the pseudonym Luther Blissett (a moniker borrowed from a Watford FC footballer) to hide, to some degree, who they are and produce group works as if from a single source. Notably, four of them wrote the bestselling novel Q (first published in Italian in 1999) under this nom de plume.
In the UK, Nicci French is the pseudonym used by the husband-and-wife thriller-writing partnership of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. Many of Nicci French's readers have no idea that books such as Blue Monday and Killing Me Softly were jointly authored.
When we see something that's well-crafted it's very tempting to assume that it was designed by one person. But that tendency can lead us astray.
It was from this pattern of thinking that André Bazin's auteur theory emerged in cinema studies in the 1940s. Great films, Bazin suggested, were the products of the shaping intellect of a brilliant director. Actors, cinematographers, runners, all make their contribution, but the director is a kind of God who creates the film ex nihilo and can rightly take the applause for the result since he or she (ideally) has ultimate responsibility for everything in the final cut.
The same kind of thinking is behind a traditional argument for the existence of a unique all-powerful God, the so-called Argument from Design. Consider a natural phenomenon such as the human eye: it seems to have been put together by a being of great intelligence who wanted to create an organ for sight (for this argument to work you need to ignore some conspicuous design flaws, such as the eye's tendency to develop myopia).
Presumably the designer of the human eye was God – who else would have been capable of it? This argument is meant to demonstrate the existence of a unique God with remarkable powers.
Before 1859, when Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species, that still had some plausibility as an explanation for the cause of apparent design. But as long ago as the mid-18th century, David Hume had made the point that even if you were to accept that reasoning, you couldn't be sure from it that a single all-powerful God existed.
Wise people proportion their beliefs to the evidence available. For Hume, it was clear that many great human creations are the product of teams of people working together. It's just as likely, then, that the human eye, and every other apparently designed aspect of reality, were the work of a team of lesser gods, Hume thought, as that they were created by a single supreme being with a master plan. Apparent design doesn't prove monotheism.
The moral of this is that when you encounter something impressive, don't assume it is the work of one genius. A team of lesser mortals (or deities) working together, or even the impersonal effects of natural selection, can produce amazing results – often more amazing than could have been achieved by acting alone.