The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility

by Waqas Ahmed

  Jao blames ‘Westernisation’ for the recent demise of polymathy in Chinese culture.

  Polymathy declined only during the last thirty years with a dramatic increase of Western influence on Chinese culture. This includes the domination of graduates from the West who have claimed themselves as specialists. However, as their basic knowledge of traditional Chinese culture is relatively narrow and insufficient, very often they simply can’t be real specialists in the fields they claim to be their own.

  Curiosity, hybridity and unity are what chiefly characterise Jao’s polymathy. ‘To me, all different fields are actually connected because they are related to the various activities of the human mind. The polymathic mind is actually a very innocent and concentrated mind, which is curious and brave in pursuing various cultures and topics of knowledge, and seeks to be creative in arts and sciences.

  Jao believes that the scale of some academic research projects dwarfs the multitalentedness of one individual: ‘allowing more academic research freedom in workplaces like universities and research institutes would help foster polymathy. For example, supporting more personalised small research projects in the humanities instead of paying most of the attention to largely funded big and group projects.’ The Jao Tsung I Petite Ecole of the University of Hong Kong was recently established to support a polymathic approach. Jao sadly passed away before the publication of this book. He will go down in history as one of the greatest polymaths to be alive in the twenty-first century.

  Benjamin Dunlap

  Benjamin Dunlap has been recognised by TED as a ‘true polymath’ and one of ‘Fifty Remarkable People’ in the world. Although he is not as well-known as some of the others on that list (which includes the likes of Bill Clinton and Richard Branson) this certainly does not make him any less impressive. A first-rate academic, Dunlap was educated at Oxford and Harvard Universities and became professor of humanities at Wofford College. His expertise ranges from intellectual history to studies of India, Thailand and Japan.

  He is also an expert on art, film and literature, a writer (novels, poetry, libretti), a former ballet dancer and a television and film producer. While academics often focus on their own research Dunlap made teaching a priority. He has been honoured with numerous awards for this contribution. He is a frequent moderator at the Aspen Institute.

  Ever since a child, Dunlap has always had polymathic tendencies. ‘Though I seem to have been born with one foot on the accelerator, it took me some time to locate the brakes — and I’m convinced that, had I been a child today, I would have been sedated into a stupor. My drugs of choice have always been caffeine or chocolate.’ Now at 80 years old, and still with a world-class sense of humour, Dunlap has no plans to specialise as he gets older. ‘I would like to think that death involves further diversification, though I fear it’s a very narrow form of specialization.’

  Dunlap was born with an insatiable curiosity, a love for learning. ‘I love learning, but, quite honestly, the emphasis for me should fall on the love — which is to say, my intellectual impulse is essentially driven by emotion. Or, as William Blake said, ‘Energy is eternal delight.’ And it’s energy that propels my curiosity, emotional energy of a sort.’

  Dunlap is former President of Wofford College, one of America’s great liberal arts colleges. His educational philosophy is that in an increasingly specialised and complex world it is a diverse education that allows people to make important connections between various fields. ‘As the logistical complexity of our society increases, especially in combination with a tendency to specialise ever more narrowly at ever younger ages, there is an obvious need for and value to syncretic habits of mind. In fact, the art of making connections may be an indispensable survival trait for our species. This is why I believe so ardently in a broad-based liberal arts education at every level of study.’

  He refers to the (primarily American) college or university curriculum ‘aimed at imparting general knowledge and developing general intellectual capacities, in contrast to a professional, vocational, or technical curriculum.’

  Connecting the dots is a feature of Dunlap’s thinking; one largely inspired by polymaths from history. ‘I get absorbed by the arcane, the unexpected far-fetched connections, more or less like Sir Thomas Browne, whose mind I think has influenced mine. . . . Ancient Greece obsesses me too, and my favourite Greek thinker (other than Homer) is Heraclitus. To some, that admission will say a lot — the unity of opposites, right? You never know how things fit together, but discovering clues is a constant joy.’

  For Dunlap, polymathy is essentially a kind of ‘portfolio of specialisations’ — a movement from one intense activity to another. ‘Being totally engaged in a single task is like being in love. The obvious hazard is that one might become so addicted to peak emotions that the essential fallow periods are omitted.’ This is the ‘trap’ of lifelong specialisation that people fall into if they get too deeply engrossed. He insists that in between each intense involvement, there ought to be a downtime or ‘fallow period,’ albeit minimal. This downtime, according to Dunlap, is the period of hybridity, of making connections (albeit subconsciously). ‘Fallow periods are not mere downtime — they are like the mysterious germination of a seed which, though unseen, is anything but inert.’

  Dunlap recognises that encountering and overcoming cynicism is, and has always been, one of the biggest challenges faced by polymaths, particularly in specialised societies.

  There’s a tendency to dismiss even true polymaths as shallow, perhaps because people are readier to applaud one’s excellence in a single field than in many. But, in truth, paragons of versatility like William Morris performed consistently at a very high level in a great variety of fields. Typically, critics chose to seize on his lesser accomplishments as a way of diminishing their regard for all the rest. That is to say, some seemed reflexively to assume that a breadth of involvement must invariably signal superficiality, though from Aristotle and Rousseau to Jefferson and Tesla there have been individuals who were extraordinarily gifted in virtually all they undertook.

  Hamlet Isakhanli

  Much like Dunlap, Hamlet Isakhanli is a polymathic educationalist. Coming from the Caucasus Republic of Azerbaijan, he is an example of a first-rate scholar who, because so little of his work has been translated into English, is lesser known to the Western world. But he is, in fact, a widely respected intellectual who has published over 300 works in subjects as wide ranging as mathematics, philosophy and history of science, language, poetry and literature.

  He has contributed to various branches of mathematics — his Multiparameter Spectral Theory developed during the Soviet period earned him great acclaim, and he has since published papers and delivered lectures globally. His poetry has been set to music, providing a rich seam of material for performers. Isakhanli has translated the work of English, French and Russian poets and produced major works on translation theory, linguistics and lexicography. He is also one of the most respected and widely read intellectual historians in the region, and has also written books on the history of philosophy, science and culture comparing Eastern and Western perspectives.

  Isakhanli also made a profound contribution to scholarship and to society in the field of education. He was a prominent activist during the Soviet period, and has written extensively about the history, theory and philosophy of education. In an effort to reform the education system following the fall of the Soviet Union, he established the Khazar University — now the most prestigious private university in the region. His lectures on science, philosophy and culture are regularly broadcast on public television.

  For Isakhanli, polymathy is ‘an extraordinary intellectual and personal quality, which can mature even without an expressed need for it.’ He believes that depth does not have to be sacrificed for breadth:

  Sometimes a neighbouring field, or even a distant one, can consciously or subconsciously distract you from the main field that you love, in which you are a professional
or to which you are currently devoting most of your attention. During the course of the distraction you may realize that this “other” field becomes your main work and focus; something that you had considered just a side interest or hobby has swept you up in its embrace, you’ve been seduced by it, you live with its love, and even if you haven’t completely forgotten all your past lovers (genuine love is never forgotten!), your attention towards them is decreased. To use another illustration, if you have not one but several lovers, when you grow tired of one of them, you can go to another one; you are always with a lover and always busy, but it feels like you are resting as well (please interpret this as a metaphor, not as a moral statement). If you continue this type of pattern all your life, good for you! You will see and accomplish many things.

  Isakhanli believes that to qualify as a true polymath, one must convert one’s knowledge into some form of demonstrably creative output. ‘To know and to produce are not the same,’ he says. ‘The knowledge of a polymath does not remain passive or sit in one place. It walks, talks, makes waves, creates practical results, turns into deeds.’ The nature and longevity of Isakhanli’s curiosity, like with Hossein Nasr, serves as a valuable engine in driving his polymathic accomplishments. ‘My childhood nature of wanting to know everything — my hunger to learn, the way I would get excited as I learned and would always search out the answers to questions like “then what?” and “how?” — never left me when I grew up and grew older.’

  Isakhanli thrives on working at the intersection of different fields. It is hybridity that excites him. ‘I delight in thinking broadly about issues such as the interconnections among natural sciences and their interactions with humanities, for example, the history and philosophy of science, or the history of ideas.’ This went hand-in-hand with his ability to think creatively across many disciplines. ‘I delighted in out-of-the-box thinking in general.’

  Isakhanli’s polymathy is in large part the pursuit of the deepest connections.

  It is true that there is a certain rhythm, measure, proportion and harmony in poetry and art, like a certain calculation (arithmetic) or a kind of form (geometry). However, this similarity is not actually a connection; it is a superficial similarity. The true similarity between the two is in the nature of mathematics and poetry, in the mathematician’s mind-set and in his/her dream world. A mathematician is quite different from the outsider’s and media-created stereotype of a cold, callous person, a slave of abstract logic; in reality his/her thought processes are very colourful and poetic. A mathematician is in search of truth and beauty within certain logical frames, and his dream world, fantasies and sense of harmony and aesthetics play an important role in that search. It is thought that logical frames and the search for truth relate more to science, and beauty, dreams and fantasy relate more to art and poetry; in reality, these two paradigms are in complete organic unity.

  Raymond Tallis

  British intellectual Raymond Tallis — physician, neuroscientist, poet, novelist, philosopher and cultural critic — was listed by the Economist’s Intelligent Life Magazine as one of the top living polymaths. After having initially studied animal physiology, he qualified as a medical doctor at Oxford University and eventually became one the country’s leading geriatric physicians. In spite of having spent his career as a practising physician, Tallis is primarily an intellectual polymath. He has written 23 books on topics ranging from the philosophy of mind, philosophical anthropology and artificial intelligence, to literary theory, the nature of art and cultural criticism. Together with over 200 articles in leading publications, his writings offer a critique of current predominant intellectual trends and an alternative understanding of human consciousness, the nature of language and more generally of what it is to be a human being. He has also published fiction and three volumes of poetry.

  Tallis is uniquely positioned to comment on polymathy from the philosophical, cultural and scientific perspectives, but also from the standpoint of a living polymath. His own experience shows clearly that each field profoundly informs the other. ‘My sense of what it is to be a human being as an embodied subject has been completely dominated by my experience as a doctor. If I am a philosopher, it is because I am overwhelmingly aware of ourselves as bodies. . . . And then my fiction in many ways was informed by my experiences as a doctor.’

  Tallis suggests the notion of a polymath possessing encyclopaedic knowledge is just an illusion. ‘You can only have the appearance of being a polymath,’ he says. He recognises that the average person in the West living to 75 has approximately 8,000 hours of reading time, allowing them to read around 20–30 great writers at most. He suggests that there are at least 50 types of literature worldwide, each with a number of subdisciplines reflecting the effort of numerous writers. He concludes that even those considered to be ‘well-read’ have actually only picked up the odd grain of sand: ‘Even those of us that are supposed to be polymaths actually have knowledge only of a small subset.’ He admits: ‘For example within medicine you can easily bamboozle me with gastroenterology because my area of expertise is stroke and epilepsy.’

  For Tallis, an open-minded curiosity is the key to polymathy. ‘One has to respect one’s own curiosity. To say that I shouldn’t be interested in this because it isn’t my field is a self-denying ordinance that is intellectually suicidal.’ His advice for budding polymaths is clear: ‘Why restrict your curiosity, for God’s sake? Don’t just look that way; explore what’s behind you and sideways. Learn the best of what’s been taught and said in every area.’

  Tallis recognises that it is not easy to do this in a highly specialised society, but suggests that there are ways around it. ‘You can specialise in your work time and then you can play afterwards. With limited time, you make choices, I guess. I used to get up for two hours in the morning and write from 5 to 7 — I did that while I was a medic — it was the only time I could do it.’ Tallis’ nonchalant attitude towards sleep must have helped in creating more playtime. ‘Sleep after 90 minutes is just repetition. We physicians have no idea what sleep does.’ He reminds us that after 50 years of research William Dement, the ‘father of sleep medicine’ (incidentally also a jazz musician), concluded that the ‘only function sleep actually has is to satisfy the desire for sleep.’

  Daniel Levitin

  Daniel Levitin is an interdisciplinary scholar and communicator. At Stanford University, he taught in the departments of computer science, psychology, anthropology, computer music and history of science. And now he is professor of psychology, behavioural neuroscience and music at McGill University (Montreal, Quebec) and dean of arts and humanities at the Minerva Schools at KGI. He spends his time juggling between writing neuroscience papers, producing music and inventing devices. He is also the bestselling author of This is Your Brain on Music and The Organized Mind.

  Levitin has always been interested in various subjects, but faces the kind of social and educational ostracism experienced by most polymaths in the age of specialisation. ‘I didn’t feel it was accepted until I got to graduate school, and my mentors told me it was okay. But my peer group thought it was odd and probably still do.’ This mentality, Levitin contends, can be explained at least in part by the fact that academics feel compelled to specialise as they perceive specialisation to be a more efficient and productive way of getting scientific results.

  Science these days, at least the part I’m in, seems to be all-consuming — people do it to the exclusion of other things and they’re working 80-hour weeks. So they see the time I spend producing records, writing and performing music, writing books and so on as a scandalous time away from my ‘real’ job.

  But as we have seen, this mentality is a result of a particular outdated workplace ideology derived from industrial production on the one hand and Cartesian deduction on the other. As Levitin himself confirms, efficiency and productivity are actually attained by different people in different ways. ‘From a psychological standpoint,’ he says ‘people have different
styles of being and different styles of working. There is a wide range of human experience; we’re all crafted differently from one another. And for some people that kind of engagement with different parts of the world is necessary for them to do anything productively. This simply would not be as productive if they were to exclusively specialise in one thing.’ Levitin himself is certainly that type of person:

  If ever I had a job where I had to just focus on one thing, I don’t think I’d be very good at it no matter what it was, I’m just not built that way. . . . I don’t feel I would get more done if I doubled down and if I gave up the other things, because I don’t think I’d be functioning well — I wouldn’t be alert, be happy, be focused. Let’s take writing — I love writing, but there’s a limit. Most days I couldn’t spend more than 2–3 hours writing, if I’m lucky 5.

  And that’s from someone who’s had three consecutive books on the New York Times bestseller list. So specialisation does not correlate with ‘productivity’ or genius. As Levitin highlights: ‘Bobby McFerrin is monomathic and the likes of Sting and Bob Geldof more polymathic — it doesn’t make one of them more musically productive than the other.’ So the idea swarming around that polymaths are not productive is a myth. ‘Some monomaths will strive for perfection in one thing and therefore stick with it. In the domains that I work achieving that extra 10 percent often takes nine times as much time as getting to the first 90 percent — its really time consuming.’

  In any case, elevating ‘productivity’ and ‘efficiency’ as the higher goals of humanity is almost an outdated narrative. The world now is interested in big answers to the big challenges of tomorrow. And here too — as it has been stated time and time again throughout this book by the world’s leading thinkers — polymaths hold the key. Levitin echoes some of the earlier comments about the indispensability of polymaths to our future: