The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility

by Waqas Ahmed

  Human life is facilitated (and arguably controlled) by certain group of entities: machines, organisations, accessories, people, natural and metaphysical laws, buildings, food and drugs. To be precise, we rely daily on various ‘facilitators’ — computers, gadgets, corporations, government bodies, handbags, clothes, doctors, vehicles and other objects of utility. We live in a world of inadvertent trust. This allegorical ‘trust contract’ has contributed greatly to the creation of a generally complacent and apathetic society worldwide.

  We trust security agencies to protect us from harm, vehicles to not break down in remote areas, corporations to be charging us the right prices for our goods, laptops and computers to continue working smoothly, prescribed drugs to ease our pain, people to behave in a civilised way on the streets, mobile phones to work in emergency situations, architects to design and build structures that will not collapse on us, surgeons to save our lives and so on. In ‘over-trusting,’ we become complacent and unknowingly disable our minds from essential day-to-day enquiry. In doing so, we not only restrict our innate tendency to learn more about more (an instinct most visible in children, but unfortunately and unnecessarily dissipating among adults), but in turn surrender our autonomy to people, machines and organisations, which thus end up controlling our lives. To polymathise, therefore, is to emancipate oneself from such overwhelming dependence and, in a sense, to pursue true freedom. Instead of trusting those unpredictable elements, one ought to (to quote Emerson) ‘Trust Thyself.’

  Polymaths have always minimised their reliance on standard education systems for practical and intellectual knowledge. They have come in the form of freethinkers or ‘freedoers.’ In fact, polymath and educationalist Hamlet Isakhanli highlighted ‘self-education, the lifelong desire to learn, a strong will and endurance’ as being the most important steps to becoming a polymath. It is not surprising then that most polymaths over history have been autodidacts. Polymaths such as Le Corbusier, Coward, Edison, Leibniz, Goethe, Franklin, Leonardo and Tagore were self-taught in almost everything they did.

  Autodidacts, ‘people who prefer to teach themselves or to pick up knowledge from nonteaching situations in one way or another’ recognise the limits of standard educational systems and autonomously pursue what they consider to be of interest and value to them. Whether it’s an Indian market trader learning and implementing sophisticated arithmetic for practical use or a French freethinker seeking knowledge as a rebellion against State, autodidacts realise and exercise their individuality as part of the struggle toward intellectual and social freedom. In doing so, they open up limitless possibilities for themselves, even if at first it seems as though they are swimming against the current.

  Many of the most erudite people today do not come from traditionally ‘intellectual’ circles — most do not even have basic education, let alone college degrees. Ironically, encyclopaedic knowledge today is more likely to be found in the tuk-tuk driver in Colombo, the small business owner in Liberia and shoemaker in Ulaanbaatar than a ‘highly educated professional’ in the modern West. Just put together a Wall Street derivatives trader or a professor of botany with a taxi driver from Erbil or a barber from Khartoum in a room to debate a range of topics and see the result. How on earth is that possible? It is the same reason why a young Mike Tyson, the street brawling ‘thug’ will be a better boxer than a wealthy public school kid who bought the best kit, hired the best trainer and learnt all the conventional techniques. Tyson had to fight for his shot, he is hungrier, boundless and intuitive whereas the ‘manufactured’ boxer is mechanistic, orthodox, spoilt and overly calculative. Those without educational and social privileges tend to develop a stronger curiosity and a kind of raw dedication, just as a black athlete in the early twentieth-century United States had to be 10 times better than his white counterpart in order to be selected for the team. Inferiority and oppression can in fact often serve as a powerful motivator, as we have seen from polymathic revolutionaries such as Paul Robeson, José Rizal and Che Guevara.

  Human Optimality

  Throughout his life, Leon Battista Alberti was concerned with becoming his optimal self. Known to us primarily as the fifteenth-century humanist philosopher, Alberti’s De iciarchia (‘On the Man of Excellence and Ruler of His Family’) became a central text in defining the bourgeoning worldview of the courtier polymath. His famous declaration ‘a man can do all things if he but wills them’ became the mantra for the humanist movement. And he certainly practiced what he preached.

  Alberti studied law at the prestigious University of Bologna and when graduating as a doctor of canon law, he was appointed secretary in the Papal Chancery in Rome, where he was commissioned to rewrite the traditional lives of the saints and martyrs.

  Following his interest in visual art, he consulted leading artists such as Donatello and Brunelleschi, and completed the seminal treatise, On Painting, which would for the first time introduce the theory of perspective in art. He was then appointed as the Pope’s architectural adviser and his Ten Books on Architecture became the bible of Renaissance architecture, winning him the title of the ‘Florentine Vitruvius.’ He also wrote a treatise on geography that set forth the rules for surveying and mapping a land area and a book on grammar that sought to demonstrate that the Tuscan vernacular was as suitable for literary use as was Latin. His work on cryptography contained the first known frequency table and the first polyalphabetic system of coding using the cipher wheel (also thought to be an Alberti invention).

  Polymaths like Alberti constantly strove to attain their optimal state of being. Optimality is the fullest realisation of one’s potential; it is different from pursuing an illusory ‘perfection.’ Maslow said that ‘what a man can be, he must be’ and that one only attains a state of self-actualisation when ‘one becomes everything that one is capable of becoming.’ It is an innate psychological disposition, and one that can be activated in the right circumstances. So even if we become highly accomplished in one field, we are not satisfied until we can accomplish all that is possible for us. With the knowledge that we are inherently multifaceted, striving to accomplish all that is possible naturally involves an exploration and a bringing to fruition of multiple talents and interests. This seems to be what inspired Paul Robeson, who learned from his father the idea of ‘maximum human fulfilment’ — that success in life is not to be measured in terms of money and personal advancement, but rather the goal must be the highest development of one’s own potential.

  There were places and periods in history where such a mind-set was common, such as Alberti’s Renaissance Italy. The period’s foremost historian Jacob Burckhardt said that it ‘first gave the highest development to individuality, and then led the individual to the most zealous and thorough study of himself in all forms and under all conditions.’ Here there seemed to have been a sudden shift in focus from God to man himself, aptly represented by the sudden increase of self-portraiture by the artist and autobiography by the writer. This in turn prompted an epoch of rigorous personal development: there was an obsession with the reading of biographies of ‘great men,’ a meticulous perfection of gentlemanly manners, an endless quest for worldly knowledge, and an ongoing cultivation of artistic and literary interests. Belief in human potential reached an idealistic level and optimality became the ultimate goal.

  Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, himself a polymath and one of the key instigators of Renaissance Humanism, said in his influential essay Oration on the Dignity of Man that ‘In him [man] are all things . . . so let him become all things, understand all things and in this way become a god.’ While some may consider this an overstatement, the essence of his message is that we all have an untapped potential that is itching to be realised, and that to pursue this optimality is to do justice to ourselves. And for this, he implies, we ought not to rely on anyone or anything. For the great psychologist Carl Rogers, human optimality came from closing the gap of incongruence — between what a person is and could potentially be. According to R
ogers, the ‘good life’ is lived by the ‘fully functioning person’: ‘This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one’s potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life.’

  Curiosity

  We keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

  — Walt Disney

  A Natural Trait

  There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge. We try every means that may lead us to it.

  — Michel de Montaigne

  Eleventh-century Persian prodigy Al-Biruni was a lifelong intellectual explorer. He had a broad-based education and excelled particularly in astronomy and mathematics, for which he mastered all of the known knowledge while still in his teens. As was the custom, he mastered theological discourse very early on. He became an adviser and ambassador at the court of Mahmud of Ghazni, where his first book on the chronography of religious festivals would cement his reputation as an avid mathematician and astronomer, as well as a skilled historian, anthropologist and theologian.

  But his foremost contribution to anthropology and philosophy came when he was taken into the court of Mahmud of Ghazni and brought into contact with the Indians captured during Mahmud’s conquests of the territory that is modern-day Pakistan. As well as writing on Indian customs, language and practice, Al Biruni was the first of the Muslim philosophers to genuinely entertain the religion of the Hindus, generally perceived as polytheistic infidels, and to merit Hinduism as a complex philosophical worldview worthy of serious investigation. This culminated in his 600-page masterpiece on Indian history, science, culture, philosophy, language and theology, simply titled The India.

  His next major work, the Qanun, was a significant development of Ptolemy’s Almagest and Biruni would go on to produce some 140 treatises on scientific subjects as varied as mineralogy, pharmacology, botany and medicine (translations as well as original contributions). What drove him throughout his life was an insatiable curiosity, which was broad in nature and led him down various paths of enquiry.

  Curiosity, which is an essential driver of a polymath like Al Biruni, is imbedded in our biology as well as our consciousness. There is an overwhelming consensus among sociologists that curiosity is one of the fundamental traits of the human condition — a natural disposition that exists in all humans regardless of class, race or gender. This is supported by evolutional biology, which has proved time and again that humans are genetically programmed to be curious. Primates, for example, will work longer and harder to discover what is on the other side of a trapdoor, more than they would even strive for food or sex. Indeed, zoologist Desmond Morris, a renowned scholar of human and animal behaviour (incidentally also a successful surrealist painter), concluded in his 1967 bestseller The Naked Ape that ‘all mammals have a strong exploratory urge,’ and that humans are the most inquisitive of them all:

  All young monkeys are inquisitive, but the intensity of their curiosity tends to fade as they become adults. With us [humans], the infantile inquisitiveness is strengthened and stretched out into our mature years. We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know enough to get by. Every question we answer leads to another question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species.

  According to behavioural scientist and professor of neuroeconomics, George Lowenstein, curiosity is simply an urge that arises from when we feel a gap ‘between what we know and what we want to know.’ This gap has emotional consequences: it feels like a mental itch, a mosquito bite on the brain. We seek out new knowledge because that’s how we scratch the itch. First, this is because the brain has a natural dislike for ambiguity or uncertainty; and curiosity is what is activated to dispel this. Second, inadequate optical (or for that matter, any) stimulation causes the brain to automatically search for a way out of boredom to achieve the ‘optimal balance of arousal states.’

  Our desire for abstract information, which is essentially the cause of curiosity, begins as a dopaminergic craving, rooted in the same primal pathway ‘that also responds to sex, drugs and rock and roll.’ It is no wonder that Aristotle proclaimed that ‘all men by nature desire knowledge’ and Leonardo concluded that ‘learning never exhausts the mind.’ Charles van Doren in his History of Knowledge underscored the power and timelessness of this human attribute:

  The desire to know, when you realize you do not know, is universal and probably irresistible. It was the original temptation of mankind, and no man or woman, and especially no child, can overcome it for long. But it is a desire, as Shakespeare said, that grows by what it is fed on. It is impossible to slake the thirst for knowledge. And the more intelligent you are the more this is so.

  Martin Kemp, leading expert on Leonardo Da Vinci, confirms that curiosity is the hallmark of a polymath:

  The mind of Leonardo is a mind that is entirely curious like a child — why does that happen, what am I looking at, how can I understand it, and if you combine that sort of child-like curiosity with enormous intellectual power, you get something very potent.

  The Islamic approach to knowledge is exemplary. Muhammad was known to have encouraged people to ‘seek knowledge, from the cradle to the grave’ and to ‘pursue knowledge wherever you may find it,’ stating that ‘seeking knowledge is a duty upon every Muslim’ and in fact ‘for him who embarks on the path of seeking knowledge, Allah will ease for him the way to paradise.’ He is also said to have declared that ‘the ink of a scholar is holier than the blood of a martyr’ and ‘one hour of thinking is equivalent to seventy years of worship’ and that ‘one learned man gives more trouble to the devil than a thousand ignorant worshipers.’ Muhammad was referring to both worldly (ulm akliya) and religious (ulm nakliya) knowledge; one did not suffice without the other.

  The link between intelligence and curiosity is important, but it can be argued that curiosity is probably the prime driver of accomplishment. Indeed, it was Einstein who famously proclaimed: ‘I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.’ As well as being a natural human tendency, curiosity or put otherwise ‘the thirst for knowledge’ has been encouraged through various cultures, religions and philosophies for millennia.

  But like intelligence and creativity, curiosity can take one of two routes in the mind. The first is one of depth, whereby the individual probes deeper and deeper into a particular subject, typical of the specialist who is itching to take a linear route to the top of the pyramid. The second, which is of boundless breadth — and where the pyramid does not even exist — is the route of a polymath. The polymath is broadly curious; man-made disciplinary boundaries cannot shackle his mind to one particular field. He pursues a line of enquiry, like an investigative journalist or a detective, and maintains an open mind whether that question requires for him to learn biomimicry or plumbing, astrophysics or masonry. As Montaigne said, ‘let the man who is in search of knowledge fish for it where it lies.’

  Asking questions about multiple (related and seemingly unrelated) phenomena is the hallmark of a curious mind, Paul Robeson from a young age had developed ‘a love for learning, a ceaseless quest for truth in all its fullness.’ Indeed the child is the ultimate enquirer, the pre-polymath, and although adults do not lose the curiosity that seems to be a primordial human trait, their curiosity deteriorates in quality and type. They become more preoccupied with the how than the why; more concerned with the information rather than the understanding of it.

  Critical thinkers such as polymathic philosophers continue the child’s legacy in a more sophisticated and systemised manner — as do ‘eccentric’ artists, hobbyists and ‘trivia buffs’ in a similarly playful manner — whereas most other adults are preoccupied with specific practicalities of everyday life. Adults think that they know what they need to know and as such become increasingly closed-minded
. They lose their sense of wonder.

  This tendency has been cemented in the psyche over the years through the development of myths, parables and proverbs that warn of the perils of curiosity. The Pandora’s Box parable and the idea that ‘curiosity killed the cat’ illustrate the pejorative way in which curiosity has been seen in society. This culture has its roots in institutional elitism and the concealment of knowledge from the masses, its legacy being a mind that is conditioned to ‘mind its own business.’

  Sources of Knowledge

  Knowledge is according to the mode of the knower.

  — Aristotle

  The truly curious polymath is cognisant of the fact that ‘knowledge’ in the way that humans understand it can come from a multitude of fundamental sources, many of which overlap. These are primary pools and faculties from which we draw insight and understanding — not to be confused with sources of information.

  An important source that has been both widely acknowledged and respected throughout history is human testimony. Whether coming orally in the form of African folk tales, Arabian poetry, social dialogue, television, modern university lectures and TED Talks, or passed down through the written tradition of ancient tablets, printed treatises and modern-day computer screens, the passing of knowledge from the one who has it to others who do not is perhaps one of the greatest processes of knowledge transfer, acquisition and accumulation that man has ever known.

  Testimonial knowledge (or information) is based largely on trust but to some extent also on intuition and rationality so as to understand, discern and contextualise it. In this way, human rationality in itself — with or without very little testimonial knowledge — can become an important source of knowledge. This form of knowledge acquisition is perhaps best demonstrated by philosophers, who use their powers of reasoning to pose various questions on existence, nature and morality and in doing so unlock their minds to a series of new possibilities and conclusions. Genuinely original thinkers such as Buddha, Socrates and Confucius were excellent examples of philosophers who relied less on testimonial knowledge than on rational or intuitive knowledge.