The Polymath by Peter Burke
There are at least three crises of knowledge since the end of the Dark Ages, says Peter Burke. All three crises (Burke uses the word ‘crisis’ in a relative precise sense, as the critical moment that leads to a change of structur), have been concerned with the problem of information overload, an explosion of knowledge which came with a downside, an increase of what is now known as ‘information anxiety’. The first crisis, in the middle of the seventeen century, is related with the invention of the printing press and the subsequent exponential increase in the number of books available for readers.
In the mid-nineteen century, a series of technical innovations, including the steam-powered rotary press, revolutionised the printing industry, allowing the mass production of newspapers and journals. In the meantime, the discovery of new worlds of knowledge resulting from the 19th century voyages of discovery, helped to shape humanity’s scientific understanding of the natural world and led universities to divide into new departments. This led to the second crisis of knowledge and launched the era of specialisation and with it the idea that specialisation is the key to progress to productivity and to creativity.
The third one, which is related with the digital revolution, is happening today and it’s too early to predict what its long-term consequences will be.
The Polymath, which covers the period from the Renaissance to our time, is not a biography of polymaths, nor a gallery of individual portraits, however fascinating as they may have been. it is rather an examination of the different types of polymaths, as well as an examination of the social climates “that are favourable or unfavourable to polymathic endeavours.”
In the seventeen century, when the word polymath was first used, it was still possible for scholars to contribute to a number of different fields. The Dutchman Herman Boerhaave, a polymath himself, described these few intellectual giants as the ‘monsters of erudition’. Today, we remember most of these individuals for only a small proportion of their achievements. Isaac Newton was not only a mathematician and a natural philosopher, he also studied alchemy and chronology. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is known as a philosopher but he also studied law and theology. He contributed to history and his interests expanded to astronomy, botany, geology and medicine.
A few women of the 17th century also managed to overcome the obstacles placed in their way and became wide-ranging scholars. Cristina of Sweden was well read in the classics and philosophy and spoke several languages. Elena Corner from Venice took a doctorate in medicine and studied classical literature, languages, mathematics and theology. The Mexican Juana Ramirez, known as Sister Juana after she entered a convent, was described by contemporaries as the ‘Phoenix of Erudition in all sciences’. She studied law, literature, philosophy, including natural philosophy, and music theory. She refused offers of marriage and entered a convent in order to be free to study.
Despite their remarkable achievements, the polymaths of the seventeen century had their weaknesses. A number of polymaths, writes Burke, “have been suffering from what we might call the ‘Leonardo Syndrome;." Leonardo was notorious for beginning many projects but bringing few to completion. The Scottish philosopher and historian Gilbert Burnet wrote to Leibniz that “Very often those who deal in many things are slight and superficial in them all”.
In the 19th century, the drop in the price of printing made books widely available and led to the proliferation of newspapers and journals. “It will soon be the employment of a lifetime merely to learn books’ names. Many a man of passable information at the present day reads scarcely anything but reviews, and before long, a man of erudition will be little better than a mere walking catalogue, “wrote in the early 19th century the American short-story writer, biographer, essayist, historian and diplomat, Washington Irving.
The response to this explosion of knowledge was to specialise. The French term spécialité came into use in the 1830s, and later the polymath Auguste Comte coined the term spécialisation, which has adopted into English by another polymath, John Stuart Mill. The institutionalisation of specialisation in universities, especially from the mid- 19th century onwards, “may be regarded as a kind of defence mechanism, building dykes to contain the deluge of information,” writes Burke. Unfortunately, the side effect of this was to raise walls which kept scholars in one discipline from communicating with scholars in another one. Scientists, specialists in the study of nature, were separating themselves from the specialists in the study of the humanities.
Auguste Comte had both positive and negative feeling towards specialisation. “He believed,” writes Peter Burke “that the price of specialisation was an inability to see what he called ‘the spirit of the whole’, but also that specialisation was necessary to progress and that a group would emerge which would specialise in generalities…… Compte was right in all three accounts.”
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the collective production of knowledge was already being compared to the mass production of goods in factories. Teamwork in the laboratory had become so important, that became known as ‘big science’. It also brought many new discoveries that have been beneficial to humanity. We see that right now with the Covid-19 epidemic. Covid-19 vaccine teams brought together decades of experience in vaccine research and were able to identify and share the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus and develop vaccines in less than a year.
But still with all this explosion of specialisation and fragmentation it was not difficult to find individuals in the nineteenth, and in the early twentieth centuries whose interests and knowledge ranged widely across the disciplines and were able to make original discoveries in a number of disciplines. Thomas Young, one of the last men who knew everything, was trained in medicine but he also contributed to optics, acoustics and languages and made progress in deciphering hieroglyphics. Alexander von Humboldt, a remarkable man and a true monster of learning, made contributions to geography, geology, botany, zoology, anatomy and astronomy. There were also a few individuals who were not polymaths in the strongest sense, like Leibniz or Young, but they contributed to a few fields, like Karl Marx who contributed to the fields of economics, sociology and history and Sigmund Freud who worked in marine biology, anatomy and physiology before he moved to psychoanalysis. But as specialisation was becoming the norm, wide-ranging knowledge and achievements began to provoke suspicion. On Thomas Young’s death, the President of the Royal Society praised Young’s work with the warning that the Society, “rather recommends the concentration of research within the limits of some defined portion of science, than the endeavour to embrace the whole.”
Approaching the mid-twentieth century, one might have thought that the institutionalised division of knowledge would mark the extinction of the polymath. It didn’t happen. But polymaths, says Peter Burke, became a new kind of specialist, a kind of generalist who specializes in connecting different part of the fragmented world of learning. And from this time onwards, polymaths could also be subdivided in four different types.
a) The passive polymath, someone who knows many things but does not contribute to knowledge. A good example is Aldous Huxley, whose articles ranged over a wide variety of topics–art, music, literature, politics, sociology, philosophy, psychology and so on.
b) the clustered polymath, someone who masters a few linked disciplines. Linus Pauling, for example, was a polymath who ‘ranged over several problems at once’ and made original contributions to physics, chemistry, and biology.
c) the serial polymath is an interesting type. Burke presents him as a nomad who migrate from one discipline to another and uses as an example the Italian Vilfredo Pareto, who began his career as a civil engineer but he later became interesting in economics to the extent that he become professor of political economy at Lausanne in 1893, and then he moved into political and social sciences. What is interesting with the serial polymaths is that because they use their multidisciplinary knowledge they acquired, very often they are able to notice connections between different subjects, as did Pareto with his idea of equilibrium.
d) Finally, the cultural critic. Susan Sontag is a characteristic example of a cultural critic polymath. The range of her interests was truly astonishing, as it was the brilliance of her thinking. She was primarily an essayist, but she also published novels, and she was a film-maker and play-writer. Her essays concentrated on arts and humanities, literature, theatre, dance, photography and film, philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology and history.
And we are now coming to our era, the digital era. The amount of the accessible information is vast and, once again, the problem of information overload became more widely recognised and experienced, creating the conditions for information anxiety. While there are still readers, we are mostly becoming skilled at skim-reading at the expense of slower reading. Indeed, skim reading has become so popular that one can find on the internet many techniques that teach you how to Improve your comprehension reading skills by skimming and scanning a text. In the meantime, the increased specialisation has made the gap between the cultures of knowledge even wider, making the communication between different kind of scientists more difficult. Can polymaths exist in a world that promotes the scanning of information and encourages hyper- specialisation?
It is still possible to find a few individuals who have continued to resist specialisation with some success. The American scientist Jared Diamond, for example, began his career as a physiologist, moved to ornithology and later to ecology and anthropology, while he has a lifelong interest in languages. He is most known for his essays and books in world history. But The social niche in which polymaths flourished in the past does not exist anymore. Could the digital revolution produce its own polymaths? I certainly hope so.