Here are some more modern interpretations of Heraclitus.
Philosophy professor Herbert Granger stressed the concept of
polymaths getting much of their learning from books, i.e., “secondhand
learning.”
Professor Carl Huffman emphasized Heraclitus’s scorn for the
polymath and for those who do not investigate things for themselves. To
Heraclitus, polymathy came from practicing historie,
which was ancient Greek for inquiry (i.e., asking others). Thus, Huffman
translated polymathy as “a bunch of things learnt from others” in an attempt to
show Heraclitus’s “sarcastic reference” to the lack of a unified understanding
of the world that the histor (i.e.,
the inquirer) gets from practicing polymathy.
And professor Marek Węcowski went in a different direction
entirely, classifying polymathy as a “general disposition of mind or a certain
way of thinking.”
The modern commentators thus diverge greatly. What is the modern
lay person to make of all this? After all, Heraclitus wasn’t writing scholarly
papers; he was speaking to the ordinary Greek. His words are important and
should still have meaning for us. It is unfortunate that we have to wade
through a bunch of academic articles just to understand them today.
This is why at least some context is important. Heraclitus
accused four specific people of polymathy, and we have seen that they had a
pretty broad set of accomplishments.
So, in order to avoid getting bogged down in too much
detail, we’ll have to go with context over definition to figure out Heraclitus.
As far as we are concerned, when Heraclitus talked about polymathy, he meant
people who knew an awful lot of stuff and/or people who had mastered multiple
disciplines. This certainly wouldn’t cut it in the scholarly world, but we’re
just lay people trying to understand another lay person from 2500 years ago.
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