The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility

by Waqas Ahmed

  Although holism is an ancient philosophy with its roots in Hindu cosmology, it has been an essential aspect of Western thought for centuries (Kant, Spinoza, Hegel and Nietzsche were heavily influenced by it). In fact ‘holism’ as a philosophical term was coined by none other than one of the twentieth century’s eminent polymaths, Jan Smuts, who in his book Holism and Evolution (1927) called for the unity of all things and knowledge. It alludes to what scientists, artists and philosophers have long considered to be a ‘vanishing point’ — a geometric notion with philosophical implications, where all of our particular areas of enquiry, knowledge and understanding eventually converge.

  This insistence on the inseparability of various seemingly disparate domains is still shared by many of today’s polymaths, whether scientific or artistic. ‘I see everything as connected, and I am motivated to look for connections largely because nothing makes sense to me in isolation,’ says philosopher and polymath, Roger Scruton. ‘Many scientists acknowledge this. Not only can you not understand biology without seeing it in terms of the laws of physics, the laws of physics must themselves be understood in terms of their application in biology.’

  When asked about which from acting, poetry, music and painting was his favourite, artistic polymath Viggo Mortensen replied: ‘I don’t really separate them; they are all the same thing.’ Another artistic polymath Billy Childish feels similarly: ‘I don’t identify myself as a writer or painter or musician, but as someone on the path to realisation. For me it’s a spiritual life path.’ Creativity to such individuals also comes naturally. David Stewart, the musician often described as a modern ‘Renaissance man,’ said, ‘People talk about thinking outside the box? Well, for me, I never even saw a box.’

  Context

  Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.

  — Nagarjuna, Buddhist philosopher (150–250)

  Intimately related to unity is context. Context is the consideration of a particular object or phenomena in relation to the bigger picture that surrounds it, with a view to better understanding the original object. In order to grasp the context, one needs to investigate and consider a multitude of (closely and distantly) related phenomena — allowing for a 360°, multidimensional analysis. The importance of this approach, a hallmark of the polymath, was advocated by Hegel and then emphasised by Dewey who maintained that neglect of context was the gravest mistake philosophers make. But this mistake is certainly not confined to philosophers. Polymath Rabindranath Tagore provides the analogy of schoolchildren making sense of a sentence:

  Children, when they begin to learn each separate letter of the alphabet, find no pleasure in it, because they miss the real purpose of the lesson; in fact, while letters claim our attention only in themselves and as isolated things, they fatigue us. They become a source of joy to us only when they combine into words and sentences and convey an idea.

  The perils of contextual ignorance can be demonstrated endlessly in every sphere of life. Countless quotes from books, speeches and religious texts, for example, have been clumsily (or sometimes cunningly) extracted and used out of context, leading to grave misunderstandings that have often had disastrous consequences. Consider the meaninglessness (or ‘misleadingness’) of a single verse if taken out of a great sonnet; or of one chapter out of a great novel or of one equation from its whole theory; or of one note from a symphony; or of one square inch of a large painting. ‘Nothing is what it is except in the context in which it is situated,’ says Iain McGilchrist, ‘Take it out and it changes its nature.’ This tendency to isolate objects from their environment is what philosopher Edgar Morin referred to as ‘blind intelligence.’

  Some Darwinists claim that the human brain necessarily developed a specialising, focused tendency because this aided survival during the process of natural selection. But this assumption needs rethinking. True survival requires a real understanding not just of the threat or opportunity at hand, but of all surrounding and related threats and opportunities too. That is, for survival, the right hemisphere of the brain is equally important to survival as the left. Treating each threat in isolation from the bigger picture would often have been suicidal.

  Polymaths understand that to survive is to understand and to understand truly requires a contextual, holistic assessment of any given subject or situation. It also requires utmost attention, and the right hemisphere of the brain — which is responsible for contextual and holistic thinking — according to cognitive scientists, controls four-fifths of overall attention. McGilchrist gives the example of animals in the wild: they must stay focused on food when they are eating, but they must also simultaneously stay vigilant about their surroundings — the left hemisphere of their brain is responsible for the narrow focus on the food and the right is responsible for a broader form of attention (looking out for predators and mates, for example).

  So for survival, both intense focus and contextual thinking is needed in equal measure. Indeed our current obsession with the particular rather than the general, with facts rather than overall rules is, according to statistician and philosopher Nassim Nicolas Taleb, one of main reasons why we remain unprepared for ‘Black Swans’ (improbable yet inevitable extreme events such as market crashes and terrorist attacks).

  Systems Thinking

  Love all things equally: the universe is One.

  — Hui Ssu

  Diversifying your knowledge is one thing. Unifying it, performing a masterful synthesis to bring about a vision of the whole is another. Nicolas Copernicus, whose heliocentric revolution was born out of a process of universal learning, grew frustrated at the method of the emerging ‘specialist’ astronomers of his day:

  With them it is as though an artist were to gather the hands, feet, head, and other members for his images from diverse models, each part excellently drawn, but not related to a single body, and since they in no way match each other, the result would be a monster rather than man.

  Since the Renaissance, Western thinkers largely adopted the reductionist approach to science and philosophy, pioneered primarily by the French philosopher René Descartes. The Cartesian way saw the world in terms of individual foundations, certain building blocks which could be best understood through reductionist analysis. For 300 years this approach had gone a long way in investigating and explaining various natural phenomena.

  But by the beginning of the twentieth century a group of scientists realised that knowledge in the sciences was becoming increasingly fragmented, causing people to lose sight of the inherent connections between, and unity of, all natural phenomena. This breed of scientific thinkers sought to revert to the traditional, pre-Enlightenment mode of holistic thought, which they developed into a scientific framework termed Systems Thinking (developed by Soviet polymath Alexander Bogdanov and popularised by Austrian-American biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy). This new scientific paradigm inspired a new ecological movement (whose thinking was described as ‘deep ecology’), of which James Lovelock’s groundbreaking Gaia Theory of the Earth is the most popular manifestation. Indeed it was one of the pioneers of the ecological movement in the United States, Barry Commoner, who insisted that ‘everything is connected to everything else.’

  Systems Thinking, according to one of the movement’s foremost living proponents Fritjof Capra, refers essentially to ‘connectedness, relationships and context.’ Its premise is that the nature of the whole is always different from the mere sum of its parts and that relationships between objects are primary and objects themselves secondary (as objects are themselves nothing but networks, embedded in larger networks). So knowledge is not a ‘building’ but instead a ‘network,’ according to systems thinkers.

  Capra contributed to Systems Thinking by importing elements of Eastern philosophy to better understand modern Western science, namely through his 1975 bestseller The Tao of Physics. His study into the thinking of Leonardo da Vinci — whom he unveiled as the original systems thinker — con
firmed its link with polymathy. Today, the practical value of Systems Thinking has been recognised in many fields and its principles have been applied and adopted by leaders and managers in business and government as well as within many intellectual disciplines including economics, ecology, philosophy and more.

  Whole Brain Thinking

  These are the principles for the development of a complete mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. . . . Realize that everything connects to everything else.

  — Leonardo da Vinci

  The idea of ‘holistic thinking’ never fails to raise eyebrows among many modern materialist scientists who are quick to pejoratively associate it with the ‘philosophical mumbo jumbo’ of New Age spiritualism. But ironically it is modern neuroscience that provides the best explanation for this mode of thought. It is by understanding the role of the brain’s right hemisphere vis-à-vis its counterpart, the left, that the importance of holistic, contextual thinking can be fully appreciated. The disposition of the right hemisphere is ‘to see things as a whole and in all their complex interdependence’ while that of the left hemisphere is ‘to look narrowly and in isolation.’ The ‘left provides the knowledge about the parts while the right provides the wisdom of the whole’ psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says.

  Moreover, according to numerous neuropsychological studies, the right hemisphere is shown to be responsible for all types of attention (vigilance, alertness, sustained attention, and divided attention) except from ‘focused attention’ which is the realm of the left hemisphere. This implies that the right is responsible for “broad, global and flexible attention’ whereas the left dominates in terms of ‘local, narrowly focused attention.’ McGilchrist has argued (in his masterpiece The Master and his Emissary) that our abilities to think holistically varied during various points in Western history, and were at their highest during periods that we considered to be the most creative and intellectually productive (that is, Classical Greece, Renaissance Europe and the Enlightenment).

  In the 1950s, the celebrated British thinker Isaiah Berlin published an analysis of Leo Tolstoy’s intellectual framework. In doing so, he divided the great thinkers of history into two general types, the foxes and the hedgehogs, and examined which of the two Tolstoy fitted into. The hedgehog, he explained, ‘relates everything to a single central vision, a system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of what he understands, thinks and feels.’ It is a system that is ‘a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance.’

  The fox, on the other hand, ‘pursues many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle. Their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects.’ In summary, the hedgehog ‘knows one big thing’ whereas the fox ‘knows many little things.’ But it is Berlin’s conclusion that is important. He found that Tolstoy did not fit clearly into either category; he was neither a generalist nor a specialist. He was in fact both.

  The lesson is that the propensity to specialise and to polymathise are both, to some extent, inherent in all of us; and the best of the polymaths demonstrate the ability to do both simultaneously. They tend not to see universality and particularity as a dichotomy, but instead as complimentary outlooks that work together synchronistically like Yin-Yang, to reveal reality in its clearest form. It is a mentality necessary for the method of enquiry set out above: a two-step process that first requires a ‘diverse immersion’ and is then followed by the ‘joining of the dots’ to understand the whole. So both logical reasoning (which fosters specialisation) and holistic intuition (the mark of the generalist) are equally important in the process.

  This is why the right and left hemispheres of the brain both add equal value to human thought (although according to McGilchrist the former is the Master and the latter its Emissary) and it is when they work together that polymathic potential is optimally realised. The best painters understood the need to focus intricately on the detail as well as to take intermittent steps back to visualise the whole picture and ensure proportionality. For a writer it is just as important to focus ardently on each section, chapter and paragraph to ensure that it carries its own, as it is to ensure continuity, connectivity and unity of the work as a whole.

  To adapt a beautiful analogy given by the great Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, while multiple strings on a lute may be separate, each equally important with their own note and each requiring meticulous fine tuning, it is only when they quiver together in complete harmony that beautiful music is released to our ears. It was a principle recognised by artists and scientists alike. Henri Poincaré, known as ‘the last universalist’ for his mastery of all mathematical fields, said:

  It is the harmony of the diverse parts, their symmetry, their happy balance; in a word it is all that introduces order, all that gives unity, that permits us to see clearly and to comprehend at once both the ensemble and the details.

  Neuropsychologist and Nobel laureate Roger Wolcott Sperry confirms that it is ‘when the brain is whole, the unified consciousness of the left and right hemispheres adds up to more than the individual properties of the separate hemispheres.’ Sperry’s description shows that in the brain of the true polymath, the right and left hemispheres are put to equal use in complementary fashion in order to release the creative breakthroughs that they have long been famous for.

  McGilchrist believes that this balance was best attained in Western history during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, which correlates with the period when polymathy in the West was at its peak. He suggests that the cultures of the Greeks, Romans and Renaissance were ‘ones where there is a fruitful balance between the “takes” of the two hemispheres . . . it is seen that to understand one aspect of the world we need to understand as many others as possible, since the thrust of the right hemisphere is to see things as connected, rather than compartmentalised.’

  Today, we are entering a new paradigm of complexity that requires a shift in thought from the disproportionate focus on the left (which we have been experiencing for centuries) to a complete mind, which uses both hemispheres synergetically and synchronistically. Importantly, we need an education system, a professional environment and a prevailing culture that effectively fosters this.

  Genuine Specialists

  With them it is as though an artist were to gather the hands, feet, head, and other members for his images from diverse models, each part excellently drawn, but not related to a single body, and since they in no way match each other, the result would be a monster rather than man.

  — Nicolaus Copernicus

  It is too often assumed that when geniuses get into the ‘zone’ they become tunnel-visioned, blocking out all peripheral distraction to focus on a very specific task. The truth is that this ‘zone’ is actually the point at which the genius finds absolute unity and harmony in every aspect — central or peripheral — even remotely connected to the task at hand, whether it be a pitcher in a baseball game, a writer on his laptop or a musician on her violin. It is what Adler describes as learning multiple skills in order to form one overarching habit: ‘At the beginning the learner pays attention to himself and his skill in the separate act, when the acts have lost their separateness in the skill of the whole performance the learner can at last pay attention to the goal which the technique he has acquired enables him to do.’ He was referring to the art of reading, but this is applicable to any ‘specialist’ task. It is an optimal state of mind that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as ‘flow’ — now explained by neuroscientists as the feeling of complete unity experienced by a slowing down of the conscious mind (transient hypofrontality) vis-à-vis the unconscious mind.

  While this ‘flow state’ is largely associated with high performing, elite practitioners and thinkers in di
fferent fields, it is also experienced in moments of day-to-day life by everyone. Driving a car, for example, is seen as one act, but in reality it is a multitude of tasks that require multiple cognitive abilities which at the point of turning the ignition all come together in total harmony. This subconscious, instinctive unity felt by the driver is analogous to the unity felt by the polymath who sees driving as ‘life at large’ and ‘fields’ as its many facets (mirror, gearstick, clutch, brake, accelerator, steering wheel).

  So although polymaths may indeed segment different aspects of this world for practical and organisational purposes, it is done so while appreciating that all segments are tightly connected and ultimately form the whole. They see the whole as greater than the sum of its parts. It may seem like an obvious notion when brought to attention, but in an extremely compartmentalised world, it is too easily lost sight of and seldom contemplated.

  Overall, those that warn of spreading too thin ignore the fact that diversity can actually enhance overall knowledge and intelligence vis-à-vis specialisation, which constricts the extent to which one can progress — both as a whole, and also within any given discipline. To the superficial thinker, the parts of the whole will always be the sum of its parts. To the polymath, diverse parts, when synthesised, unleash a creative outcome that would inevitably increase the size and substance of the whole. Creativity guru Dave Trott based his bestseller One Plus One Equals Three on this concept.