the non-polymath as barbarian?

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. The present age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and the pair of them would have no single topic in common but the weather or the war (if there happened to be a war in progress, which is usual in this barbaric age).

Robert Graves, The White Goddess, Chapter 13

The economist as polymath

You may remember that I posted a week or ago a kind of crazy quote from the Greek writer Lucian, who wrote that even that a pantomime must be polymathic, which, to Lucian, meant that a pantomime needed to have knowledge of culture; music, rhythm, and meter; natural and moral philosophy; rhetoric; painting and sculpting; and ancient myths and history.

Well, that wasn't just an old way of thinking. It turns out that some great thinkers thought that way even into the twentieth century.

The famous economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that the "master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man’s nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard."

The master economist must thus be a polymath!

Why polymathy? Because polymaths make connections that others don't.

The 18th century author of the first modern encyclopedia, Ephraim Chambers, thought that polymathy itself “sought the connections between subjects,” writing, “Where numbers of things are thrown precariously together, we sometimes discover relations among them, which we should never have thought of looking for.” 

That is the essence of the value of polymathy. The polymath can make these connections and discover the relationships between completely different ideas and concepts not by reading about them, but because they are thrown precariously together in his or her mind.

the pantomine as polymath in ancient Greece

As I wrote yesterday, the ancient Greeks thought so much of polymathy that they had competitions in it. Here is another example of how far some of them pushed the polymathy idea.

The great second century playwright Lucian specifically wrote in one of his plays, De Saltatione (The Dance), that even that a pantomime must be polymathic. Lucian’s idea of polymathy for a pantomime included knowledge of culture; music, rhythm, and meter; natural and moral philosophy; rhetoric; painting and sculpting; and ancient myths and history. That seems like an awful amount of knowledge for a mere pantomime to have, but a possible explanation for this is that, in Roman times, which is when Lucian lived, the concept of pantomime did not mean miming, as it does now. Rather, it meant a production, usually based upon myth or legend, for a solo male dancer.

That explanation of pantomine does help somewhat, but Lucian's idea still seems like a little much for a plain old dancer to know.

the virtues of polymathy

The polymath scholar and environmentalist George Perkins Marsh was, in the eyes of his biographer David Lowenthal, fond of the notion that “facts are virtues in themselves, and that the knowledge of a great many of them is conducive to happiness."

misc. thoughts on polymathy

As always, some are for it, and some are against it.

To want to know more than is sufficient is a form of intemperance. BUT 

It is better to know useless things than to know nothing.

Seneca, letter 88

I guess that Seneca couldn't make up his mind on the subject.

All men should be educated in all things in all ways.

John Amos Comenius, The Pampaedia

Mediocre men often have the most acquired knowledge.

Claude Bernard, Experimental Medicine, Chapter 2.

It is my definite opinion that only the man who has investigated all the branches of knowledge has the right to be called learned.

St. Thomas More, letter to Martin Dorp, October 21, 1515, in Elizabeth Frances Rogers, St. Thomas More: Selected Letters