The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility

by Waqas Ahmed

  A lifelong note-taker, the entire collection of Leonardo’s notes forms an exceedingly wide-ranging — albeit seemingly sporadic — thesis containing investigations into philosophy, optics, geometric perspective, anatomy and aviation. Only some of his notebooks have survived, but according to Martin Kemp, the world’s foremost authority on Leonardo, they would have constituted around 50 books of academic length — a complete body of universal knowledge uniquely presented in striking visual form.

  He underwent anatomical studies with the professor of anatomy at the University of Pavia and mathematical studies with mathematician Fra Luca Pacioli. He made hydraulic and geological studies of the valleys in Lombardi and of Lake Iseo and devised his own flying machine and conducted experiments in human flight. Ultimately, excelling as a painter, sculptor, musician, stage and costume designer, inventor, anatomist, aviator, engineer, military strategist and cartographer, Leonardo was the archetypical polymath. Kemp calculated that if he was asked to ‘assemble a Leonardo’ today, he’d need 13 different professionals!

  Patrons such as Sforza and Borgia were happy to allow Leonardo to explore and create in any of the fields that he felt he could contribute to. Their aim was simply to glorify and protect their reign, and if one multitalented individual could help multifariously toward that aim, he would be encouraged. Such polymathy was certainly widespread in Renaissance Europe, and allowed Leibniz to thrive at the House of Hanover and Copernicus to make contributions to the court of Warmia. Around the world, whether in the form of the Persian hakeem, West African griots, the Chinese junzi, or the Mayan itz’at, the tradition of the multipurpose, polymathic courtier existed in most eras of premodern history.

  While scholarship was historically supported by royal patronage at the respective courts, other bodies such as religious institutions, ‘mystery schools,’ secular academic universities and amateur societies played a major role in supporting the polymath at different points in history. Particularly during the early Middle Ages (often referred to as the ‘Golden Age of God’) we saw many theologians — Christian priests, Jewish rabbis, Hindu and Buddhist punditas and Muslim ’alims — become the most widely learned individuals of their time; the likes of Bede, Albertus Magnus, Konrad of Megenberg, Psellos and Bar Hebraeus being clear examples in the Christian world, and Abhinavagupta, Chavundarya, Sankardeva, Dikshita and Zanabazar in the East. As Islamic civilisation was particularly well developed during this time, Muslim theologians demonstrated an intellectual versatility beyond any other group. The likes of al-Ghazali, al-Razi and al-Tusi were scholars of religion as much as they were physicians, poets and philosophers. The polymathic culture was so embedded in the Islamic world that even Christian and Jewish polymaths such as Maimonides, Hunayn ibn Ishaq and Abraham ibn Ezra thrived under it.

  Laymen

  It does not take a qualified historian or a ‘conspiracist’ to conclude that power, wealth, influence and therefore knowledge (whether esoteric or exoteric) have always been confined to a select few in practically every society known to man. And it was these custodians of knowledge who, because of their exclusive access to an abundance of intellectual resources as well as a great degree of professional flexibility, often had the greatest propensity to explore their various talents and interests. The majority of recorded polymaths in history have thus come from — or at least eventually joined — the elite class of their time. In other words, scholars and artists have generally only risen to prominence if they were allowed to by their ruling princes. Politicians, economists, writers, artists, lawyers and soldiers were permitted to excel only if their work accorded with and promoted the status quo. So throughout history, it was principally with the blessing and patronage of kings, emperors, caliphs, dictators and, indeed, governments that multiple talented individuals have been granted the licence to flourish in their entirety.

  Although overwhelmingly the case, this, however, is not entirely true. In an era dominated by the ‘great man’ historical narrative, one is compelled to dig into ‘people’s’ histories to investigate the extent of learnedness and polymathy among the masses. The craving for intellectual development does not correlate with social or financial standing — it is a universal human trait. Aside from the obviously countless unsung ‘practical generalists’ (see above) who must have existed in every culture throughout human history (especially in traditional societies), we must also acknowledge that intellectual erudition or ‘encyclopaedic generalism’ was always prevalent among many of the working class. This ought not to be surprising; being deprived of knowledge, lay people crave and pursue it most eagerly. Some are conditioned by propaganda, excessive work hours and vacuous distractions but most are underestimated in terms of the sheer impressiveness of their erudition. Indications of this are littered throughout the literature, if one but only looks.

  American writer Henry Theroux famously recalled coming across a farmer in rural America who had a Greek version of Homer’s Iliad in his back pocket while ploughing the field. In China, Fung Ta-tsung, a writer from the Sung period noted that ‘every peasant, artisan and merchant teaches their son how to read books.’ He further recorded that ‘even herdsmen and wives who bring food to their husbands at work in the fields can recite the poems of the men of ancient times.’

  Jonathan Rose revealed in his seminal work, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, that the desire for and pursuit of intellectual freedom was not exclusively a ‘bourgeois’ concept, and that the British working class or ‘the masses’ were much more well read about a wide variety of subjects than they are traditionally given credit for. He provided various examples, ranging from how artisans published theological and literary works following the sixteenth-century Reformation to how an autodidactic (self-learning) culture developed among weavers in eighteenth-century Scotland. The now celebrated painter, poet, political activist and religious commentator William Blake, for example, was one of the few from this artisan tradition who came later to be recognised as a polymath. Many polymaths from the past have been lost in the pages of history, simply because they were not considered worthy of recognition or ‘in alignment’ by those who commission histories.

  Women

  What about women? Why isn’t there a popular female version of the ‘Renaissance man’? Unfortunately, the monopolisation of knowledge through history is as true with gender as it is with class. A long history of chauvinism has resulted in outrageously few recorded female polymaths vis-à-vis their male counterparts. It is men who repeatedly show up as ‘polymaths’ and ‘Renaissance men’ in our records. One of the reasons for this is that while many female polymaths did exist they were omitted from the records or simply overlooked by those (overwhelmingly men) who wrote and recorded history. This is because most (though certainly not all) societies in human history have been largely male-dominated.

  While it is true that historians are principally responsible for ignoring (or simply concealing) the polymathic achievements of women over the years, the unfortunate reality remains that very few female polymaths actually did exist in the public sphere. This has less to do with their ability or propensity to polymathise (in fact the opposite was probably the case) and more to do with cultural norms and the barriers imposed on them by the restrictive societies of their time.

  With some exceptions such as the Kemetic royalty, bluestockings of Enlightenment Europe, the Al-Muhaddithat of early Islam and courtesans of Tang China, women were seldom included in intellectual and professional circles prior to the modern age. While the male courtier, for example, was traditionally respected as well mannered, multitalented, widely educated and cultured, his female counterpart, the courtesan — while in many cases being equally cultured and multitalented — was automatically (and often inaccurately) associated with sexual promiscuity. The Japanese geisha, many of whom were artistic polymaths, are examples of this gender bias.

  Modern Hollywood suffers from a similar phenomenon. The versatility of men is welcomed, whereas
women are too often branded according to sex appeal. Hedy Lamarr, for example, one of the most popular Hollywood film actresses in the 1940s, was also a talented inventor. She devised a frequency-hopping system to prevent torpedoes from being jammed, which is still used today in Bluetooth devices. Academy Award winner Natalie Portman was also a mathematics prodigy. There are several such examples.

  Going back to the grassroots, women have traditionally lived a domestic life through much of human history and so contributions to society, scholarship and culture in multiple fields — let alone one — became less possible for them. Cultural critic and feminist scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explained this:

  The prospect of polymathy has not been available to women, because women funnily enough have been defined as private persons. Even I, who had a relatively liberal upbringing in a highly educated and cultured family in India, believed that women did not have academic personalities. The ones that achieved in one field became, to quote Derrida, ‘honorary males.’ Even if she does go on to become polymathic, she’s then detested by other women because of ideological issues and so on. It’s a very sad thing.

  Even in domestic life, the female’s ability to be polymathic has nonetheless been adequately demonstrated, juggling between various tasks such as child rearing, food preparation, educating, entertaining, farming and processing. In traditional South Asian culture, for example, ghargrasti (literally translating as ‘house management’) is essentially a multifaceted role in its own right that requires effective switching between various cognitive aptitudes, strands of knowledge and emotional and intellectual attributes. These may have included cooking and cleaning, handling household finances, raising and educating children, skilfully managing social relationships, being steadfast in caring for the family, entertaining guests appropriately and maintaining one’s own appearance among many other tasks. Indeed, various studies have now come to show that women are in fact better multitaskers and adjustors than men. ‘The ability and practice of epistemological shifting [needed by the polymath] does exist among women,’ says Spivak, ‘but it has not been allowed to enter the public sphere.’

  Women prior to the modern period, particularly in Europe, were marginalised from most forms of social, professional and intellectual life. The Enlightenment itself was ludicrously male dominated. It was, however, acknowledged by British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead that uneducated, well-travelled women during this period were actually often more cultured, wiser and better-informed than their husbands, as male education after the Industrial Revolution was merely the installation of inert (disconnected, useless) ideas designed to prepare them for a particular job rather than to understand the world.

  Many female polymaths lived in the shadow of their husbands or lovers. This was particularly true during the French Enlightenment, when the wives and lovers of many intellectuals often served as their salon hostesses, translators or researchers, but who in many cases made notable contributions in their own right. Marie Lavoisier, wife of French nobleman and chemist Antoine Lavoisier, was a linguist, chemist and artist who translated her husband’s books as well as illustrated them. She also travelled with him as his researcher and ran salons where she would entertain other prominent figures such as Benjamin Franklin. But she was too female to be acknowledged as a polymath.

  Émilie du Châtelet was the lover of Voltaire, who once said of her that she is ‘a great man whose only fault was being a woman.’ She was a mathematician, physicist and translator who also wrote a critical analysis of the Bible, developed a system of financial derivatives to pay off her debts, wrote a variety of discourses on philosophy and linguistics and became an activist in support of female education. Yet she’s still known primarily as ‘Voltaire’s lover.’

  Although there are numerous examples of acknowledged and acclaimed female scholars, artists and leaders from around the world, very few have been known publically to have accomplishments in multiple domains. Examples such as Ban Zhao, Lubna of Corboba, Hildegard von Bingen, Anna Maria von Schurman, Maria Agnesi and Florence Nightingale — whom we’ll explore in the following chapter — are rare. Even as women began to enter the public sphere professionally in the modern era, they had to work twice as hard as men, and specialisation and single-field focus was seen as the way to go about proving themselves worthy.

  The idea of the ‘bluestocking’ (or the ‘learned lady’) in Europe only came to being in the late eighteenth century. Women’s academic institutions only sprung up worldwide in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Seven Sisters colleges in the United States, Girton and Bedford colleges in the U.K., Tsuda College in Japan, and Lahore College for Women in India became among the first established, as were new co-ed universities such as the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. And so, unfortunately, we’ll find a disproportionate focus on male polymaths in much of this book, even if the notion is equally applicable (and indeed pertinent) across genders.

  The ‘Other’

  Like women and the laymen, polymaths from societies other than Anglo-European have been neglected or omitted from the pages of history. Even the best of historians have always been prone to certain cultural and political biases — whether deliberate or unintentional — meaning that their versions of ‘world history’ are restricted to a very one-dimensional perspective. The reality is that most history texts were either directly commissioned by the ruling authorities of the time or were indirectly influenced by the prevailing doctrine.

  Over the past 400 years, for example, most historical references to non-Western events, people, culture and thought have come from what Edward Said famously referred to as the ‘Orientialist’ perspective — that is, either cherry-picked, downplayed, or consisting of derogatory stereotypes and inaccurate generalisations about the ‘Other.’ Said referred to numerous examples from Western literature to demonstrate this tendency, which came about due to the development of a peculiar superiority cult.

  The notion of ‘Western civilisation’ — as the inheritor of Greek thought, Roman law and Anglo-Saxon adventurism — was propagated as the ‘central force for progress’ following the Renaissance and then taught and studied by the elite in Europe as ‘the classics’ since the Enlightenment. All other (often grander) civilisations such as the Indian, Islamic, Babylonian, Chinese, Egyptian and Mayan were thus degraded and generalised, collectively falling into the ‘Oriental’ category, while Native Indian, Pacific Island, African and Aboriginal societies fell into the category of ‘savages.’ The Western ‘historical method’ — like its sibling the ‘scientific method’ — thus assumed superiority vis-à-vis all other forms and methods of retelling history by indigenous historians worldwide. As a result, very few Western historians genuinely and proportionately integrated various cultures and histories into their own historical world narrative. This bias, of course, has not always been exclusive to the West — it is a feature, to one extent or another, of any dominant society or empire at each epoch in history. Every major empire had the hubris to consider itself the centre of the world.

  Ideas that originate outside the West and do not accord with the current paradigm are often derided as ‘pseudo-history,’ ‘pseudo-science’ or ‘philosophical mumbo-jumbo.’ And while some remarkable works from around the world have been brought to us, even the best translations often fall short of capturing the true essence and cultural nuances of these works. Efforts specifically made to ‘anglicise’ certain works only serve to reinforce the lack of understanding between cultures. Even the most ‘educated’ of people today are therefore often only educated in one of the myriad of perspectives that exist worldwide — they merely scratch the surface of knowledge.

  One only has to look at today’s popular science and history books (even the ‘bestsellers’) to realise how deeply entrenched this reality is. The most popular histories of Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean or Pacific Islands are still overwhelmingly written by Europeans or a
nglo-educated intellectual elites — the latter being those who, according to Frans Fanon, have been “culturally colonised.” For these reasons, most attempts at compiling a truly ‘world’ history — whether of ideas, people, or events — remains hopelessly inadequate and overwhelmingly Eurocentric in perspective.

  And this is why most polymaths highlighted in conventional recorded history tend to be white, male Anglo-European elites, as if they were the only ones capable of multitalented, encyclopaedic genius. It’s not just history — whenever modern ‘intellectuals’ refer to polymaths they almost always concentrate on Ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, or Victorian England. Is this excusable?

  Non-white polymaths were always in abundance. Let us just take the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when European colonial powers practically governed most of the world. How many Europeans know of Ecuadorian Eugenio Espejo, who was one of Latin America’s most learned indigenous people during its Spanish occupation and excelled as a lawyer, physician, journalist, theologian, economist, political satirist and educational reformer? Or Sol Plaatje, one of modern South Africa’s greatest black polymaths, who made contributions to language, literature, politics and journalism and had a profound and lasting impact on his country’s politics, culture and society. How about Indian physician José Gerson da Cunha, who wrote many papers and 20 books on various subjects, including history, numismatics, archaeology, linguistics and medicine? Certainly not Philippine activist Epifanio de Los Santos, who was an astoundingly versatile scholar and essayist, but also a talented musician and artist as well as renowned politician, lawyer and journalist.