Eighteenth century encyclopedias on polymathy

The first three great encyclopedias of the western world were all written in the eighteenth century and all had something biting to say about polymathy.

The first was the Cyclopedia, published in 1728 by Ephraim Chambers. The British Chambers defined polymathy as “the knowledge of many Arts and Sciences; or an Acquaintance with a great Number of different Subjects.” That sounds reasonable, but he then criticized polymathy as “frequently little more than a confused Heap of useless Knowledge occasionally detail’d, either pertinently or impertinently, for Parade.”

The next encyclopedia was the German Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschafften und Künste (Great Complete Encyclopedia of all Sciences and Arts), printed between 1732 and 1754, and published by Johann Heinrich Zedler. This encyclopedia stuck to criticism, saying, “Polymathy is something one should not occupy oneself with. Therefore one will realize that the greatest polymaths did not do such a great service to the world, simply because they are polymaths and therefore occupied with trifles.”

And finally, the groundbreaking Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert, which appeared between 1751 and 1772, copied Chambers, writing, “Polymathy is often nothing but a confused mass of useless knowledge which one lets out ready-witted and out of place to put on a show.”

These guys sure didn’t like polymathy, but they had really great title pages.

17th century German definitions of polymathy

In thinking about possible definitions of polymathy, we’re going to jump quite a bit ahead to the seventeenth century. There was an obscure German intellectual named Ioannes Wower or Wowern, who defined polymathy in his 1603 De polymathia tractatio (Treatise on Polymathy) as “knowledge of diverse things, drawing on every kind of discipline and ranging very widely.”

You know that Wower is obscure when Wikipedia doesn't have an article on him. So here is a little information on him from Deutsche Biographie, an information portal sponsored by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.

Wower's definition is pretty broad, but a slightly later, far more renowned German, Daniel Georg Morhof, went even further. He defined polymathy in his 1688 Polyhistor as “the extent and actual state of all living knowledge.”

Could it get any broader than that? Those early Germans really liked setting the bar high!

and yet more on Wikipedia

A few days ago, I mentioned this article, Miller, J. C., & Murray, H. B. (2010). Wikipedia in court: When and how citing Wikipedia and other consensus websites is appropriate. St. John’s Law Review, 84(2), 633–656. It is an article by two lawyers about how Wikipedia was used by lawyers and judges (at least as of 2010). But their conclusion is relevant to anyone writing papers and otherwise looking up information, "Understanding when and how to cite Wikipedia is important because misuse can undermine confidence in the author."

It is absolutely worth a read. It is available here.

Heraclitus again, and Rain Man (yes, the movie)

One thing that you should know about Heraclitus is that he was not completely opposed to polymathy. Remember that he was really focused on not just whether you knew things, but whether you had wisdom. Wisdom was a really big thing in those days.

So modern scholars now believe that Heraclitus was merely arguing that polymathy alone will not bring understanding.

Also, Heraclitus explicitly vacillated on polymathy, as he also said, “Men who love wisdom [philosophos, the origin of the word philosophy]  must be good inquirers into many things indeed.”  The best reconciliation of these ostensibly opposing arguments is that Heraclitus felt that the seeker of wisdom and understanding must know how to separate important facts from unimportant facts, which the pure polymath did not. Thus, it seems that the pure polymath, to Heraclitus, was just someone who went around acquiring facts without ever trying to analyze them. That was bad in those days, and it probably isn’t so good today.

As an example of that, think of Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man. He sure knew a lot of things, but he was unable to analyze them even in the slightest.

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).