Polymathy in the media

At the Billy the Kid Outlaw Film Festival in Hico, Texas, there is either an exhibit or a sponsor titled "The Art of Polymathy Freelance Photography by 'Cash.'"

I was unable to figure out precisely what that was, but it seems interesting.

I wonder what the art of polymathy actually is.

Polymathy as an early College Bowl

As we know, the word polymathy came from ancient Greek, and the ancient Greeks had a lot of thoughts about polymathy. Believe it or not, that they even held competitions in polymathy!

Polymathy appears in a second century BCE inscription from the Ionian city of Teos (which is in modern Turkey), which listed the winners in student competitions for, among other sports and subjects, polymathía.

I guess that this was the predecessor of the College Bowl.

Is the polymath an interesting person?

Yesterday, I asked the question, “Is the polymath a more interesting person?”

I don’t think that there’s any empirical evidence on this subject (I haven’t found any), but the unscientific way of thinking about it to ask yourself this question, "Would you like to hang out with a polymath?"

And the unscientific answer is, apparently, yes, the average person would like to know a polymath. Or at least the average person thinks that the other average people would like to know a polymath. Have you ever counted the number of polymaths (and Renaissance men and women) (yes, I know, we still have to define the Renaissance person) in personal ads, wedding announcements, blogs, and obituaries?

Believe me, there are a lot of them.

Writer Thomas McCarthy noted, perhaps a bit sarcastically, that those whose marriages are reported in the Sunday New York Times are set apart from the rest of us by “their dazzling polymathy.”  One groom “plays the trumpet, does magic tricks...follows the art world closely...he sings, he dances, he's a computer whiz.”

In 1994, a review of a biography of the late pharmacy professor William Procter, Jr., in the scholarly Journal of American History gushed, “If not a polymath, Procter was at least a Renaissance man in the field of pharmacy.”

And these are just two references picked at random.

Look for yourself. There’s a lot out there.

Does being a polymath really make you more interesting? I don’t know, but it certainly seems like people think so. As we come to a definition of polymath and start looking at actual polymaths, maybe we’ll start thinking about whether they are actually good and interesting people, as opposed to just smart and talented people.

Polymathy at the Royal Institution of Great Britain

Let’s get back to talking about definitions of polymathy. In the modern era, some good definitions come from a 2007 presentation at the Royal Institution of Great Britain with the fascinating title of “What happened to the polymaths?” The Royal Institution is one of the leading science museums in Great Britain and certainly one of the oldest, having been founded in 1799.

At this presentation, Oliver Morton, who was then the Chief News and Features editor at Nature, proposed a rigorous definition of the polymath as “someone who makes contributions to four widely conceived as distinct areas of science and culture” at a “professional level.” This is a pretty serious definition.

John Whitfield, who is the author of a biography of the British polymath D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, argued that a polymath was one who made “a contribution to more than one field that would stand on its own.” This seems like a much looser definition in that it only requires expertise in two fields as opposed to four fields, but it still is pretty strict because it requires a contribution to the field. That means that the person has to be a world class expert who is doing cutting edge stuff in the field. This would knock out anyone who is undeniably an expert in the field, but who has not added to the sum total of knowledge in the field.

Finally, Andrew Robinson, who is the author of a biography of another British polymath, Thomas Young, thought that a polymath had to have broad learning and curiosity that led to something original. This is a more general definition, but it still knocks out the person who just knows a lot about something, but who has not advanced the field.

Are these good definitions? What about the plain old scholar who knows a lot about something, but who is not a cutting edge thinker in the field? More on that later.

The difficulties in defining the polymath

Matthew Parris, the host of the BBC Radio 4 show Great Lives, addressed the difficulty in defining the polymath in his introduction to a show in 2010 about the purported polymath Buckminster Fuller.

He said, “There are people whose great glory and whose besetting defect is that you can’t sum them up. They were too many things. They did too much. They refused to be confined within one discipline. Such men and women trail across their contemporaries’ skies like comets, dazzling their era. Their obituaries gasp at how they straddled art, science, dog breeding, music, cross country skiing, or whatever, are extraordinary. But to be good at something else too can be fatal.”

These are indeed some of the problems that we will face in getting to a definition of the real polymath.

the early Greeks on polymathy, part 2

And some more thoughts about polymathy from the ancient Greeks.

From Isocrates, a great teacher of rhetoric and one of Plato’s competitors, “If you love knowledge (i.e., be a philosopher), you will be a master of knowledge (i.e., a polymath) (To Demonicus, 18).

But Isocrates saw both sides of the issue, saying, “Likely conjecture about useful things is far preferable to exact knowledge of the useless, and that to be a little superior in important things is of greater worth than to be pre-eminent in petty things that are without value for living.” (Helen, 5).

Aristippus, the founder of the Cyrenaic school of philosophy, was not necessarily a fan. When someone gave him airs for his wide learning (i.e., his polymathy), he said: “As those who eat most and take the most exercise are not better in health than those who restrict themselves to what they require, so too it is not wide reading but useful reading that tends to excellence.” (quoted in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book II, Chapter 8, line 71).

Anaxarchus, another early philosopher, said, “Much learning (polymathy) can help much, but also can greatly harm him who has it. It helps the clever man, but harms him who readily utters every word in any company.” (fragment 1).

And I had written that the famed playwright Menander had one of his characters say, “Nothing is sweeter than knowing everything.” (The Arbitrants, fragment 2, 850 K).

But Timon of  Phlius, a poet and Skeptic philosopher, positively disparaged it, saying, “Nothing can be more useless than polymathy.” (from Deipnosophists, 610b).

And Callimachus, a librarian at the great Library of Alexandria and a renowned poet in his right, said, “Much knowledge is a bad thing when someone does not control his tongue.” (Aetia, fragment 75.8-10).