The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility

by Waqas Ahmed

  Chomsky explains why certain polymaths were supported by the establishment in the past. ‘There’s no objection to polymaths,’ he says, ‘as long as they are obedient to the prevailing doctrine.’ The reason why patrons (monarchs, universities) have given a platform to polymaths over history, in the form of a position at court or a professorship at an academic institution, is that they did not disturb the status quo, and in fact usually helped cement it through their work. ‘As long as they conform pretty much to the needs of the dominant ideological system, [the polymath] is not only tolerated, but encouraged. If on the other hand they go beyond it, it’s quite different, then it’s ‘keep to your last, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ This may be why the likes of Leonardo — hired hands with no evidence of contrary opinions — were allowed to thrive by their employers.

  Chomsky insists that polymathy has an important value in society today and that the polymathic mindset should be readily adopted for personal and societal advancement. ‘I think it’s extremely important for people not to be restricted to a very narrow craft or concern — whether its carpentry or quantum physics. People should be involved in matters of concern to others and to society. They should both benefit from and contribute to other intellectual and cultural achievements.’ And again he reiterates ‘actually that was considered pretty normal not long ago.’

  Chomsky says curiosity, open-mindedness and critical thinking are the timeless attributes necessary for a polymathic mindset. Polymathy is ‘nothing more than an open, enquiring mind . . . simple virtues: honesty, open-mindedness, integrity, hard work . . . pursue your interests, be open-minded enough to question dogma, but serious enough to pay attention to the arguments. That’s always been true, still is. Now it’s called interdisciplinary, two centuries ago it would just be called being a cultured person.’

  F. Story Musgrave

  F. Story Musgrave began his career as a soldier in the U.S. Special Forces, where he also served as a mechanical engineer and aviator. He flew 17,700 hours in 160 different types of civilian and military aircraft and made more than 800 parachute free-falls — over one hundred of these as part of a study of human aerodynamics. During this time he also trained as a clinical surgeon and practiced as a physiologist.

  Musgrave then became a NASA astronaut. Over a 30-year career, he flew on six spaceflights, completed the first shuttle spacewalk on Challenger’s first flight, piloted an astronomy probe and conducted two classified Department of Defence missions. He was the lead spacewalker on the Hubble Telescope repair mission and on his last flight, operated an electronic chip manufacturing satellite on Columbia.

  Retirement gave him the chance to branch out further. Today he runs a palm farm and sculpture company alongside working as a landscape architect. He is concept artist with Walt Disney Imagineering, an innovator with Applied Minds and a professor of design at the Art Centre College of Design in California. An avid hobbyist, he has played chess and wrestled at competitive levels, produced numerous paintings and sketches and written many poems.

  He holds seven degrees in mathematics, computer science, chemistry, medicine, physiology, literature and psychology and holds 20 honorary doctorates. ‘I’ve never really been referred to as a polymath, but I am often referred to as a Renaissance man,’ he admits. He was in fact ranked as the world’s number one ‘Modern Renaissance Man’ by the popular lifestyle web portal AskMen.com — a list that included the likes of Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Miller and Nathan Myhrvold.

  Musgrave’s colourful life comes as a result of a certain mindset. For him, curiosity drives everything:

  Curiosity is a pure emotion, a pure energy; it is done for the sake of itself without an agenda, without anticipated rewards, just to be alive and to be engaged with the cosmos. It is a path with unexpected forks in the road leading to imagined but unknown destinations. The rewards are not sought but they are found.

  Curiosity and imagination, he insists, go hand in hand for the polymath:

  Curiosity and the imagination are inseparable companions on the journey. Imagination is forever at work; no perceived part of the present or future life is a void. If there is a real nothing or an unknown, the imagination will create a conscious fictional experience of the alternative possibilities. And along the path of exploration as the real evidence is accumulated the imagination will update its vision of the possibilities and lead the curiosity into new avenues.

  As the notion of the polymath is introduced to him as being someone that excels in multiple unrelated fields, he politely interrupts with a rhetorical question: ‘But are they unrelated?’ Everything is connected, he implies. Creativity and versatility has been evident throughout his life, but what seems to have shaped his polymathy was the holistic world view. With a mesmerising spiritual essence, Musgrave spoke of the unity of the cosmos and insists on the connection of all things within it: ‘Nothing is unrelated. There is no distinction between different disciplines or aspects of life. We must understand that we are from one cosmos and that everything is connected.’ Certainly, being an astronaut who fixed the Hubble Telescope, he is well placed to speak of the cosmos. ‘Looking down on the Earth from space, you reflect and realise the big picture,’ he says. With such a vision, it becomes apparent that there are (at least conceptual) connections between everything.

  After retiring as an astronaut, Musgrave has been involved in seemingly unlikely projects like Olympic skating and Disney theme parks. But he insists ‘There are transferable skills between disciplines. For example, there are clear parallels between dealing with farm machinery and designing Disney rides; and between Olympic skating and spacewalking.’

  He believes polymathy is especially important today given the dominance of a hyperspecialised culture. ‘People like to place people in boxes and categorise them — there is a need to break out of these boxes.’ That’s what he did. ‘You couldn’t hold me, I refused to be held.’ He sees the new technology centred economy as an opportunity for aspiring polymaths and people with multiple interests and skills. ‘There are actually more polymaths today than there ever have been due to globalization, we just never really call them polymaths.’

  He says business executives, now more than ever, must be able to command a range of skills and marshal an abundance of knowledge accumulated across many areas. That’s true even if you have a ‘playing field’ (in the form of a position or profession) from which to launch a career. ‘The military, for example, was a playing field for me to explore my interests in physiology, engineering, aviation and parachuting.’ He believes that corporate leaders today have to use their ‘playing fields’ to enhance their polymathic skills.

  Musgrave’s eagerness to embrace new experiences created unexpected but welcomed opportunities for him. ‘Give it to me, baby. I’m an amphibian. I’m a hybrid. Give me anything’ was his attitude. ‘You take stuff with you. Whatever you’ve mastered, you take it with you. You leverage your past; you leverage every skill you’ve ever had into your future.’ So when he was offered the job at NASA, he knew it would be polymathic heaven, his ‘playing field’: ‘This job will utilise everything you’ve ever done in your life,’ he thought. His skills as a mechanical engineer, pilot, soldier and physician would all be on tap as an astronaut — something he never dreamt of. ‘That right there, that’s polymathy.’ His advice to everyone is simple: ‘get on the playing field and get ready, because life is unexpected; you don’t know what it’s gonna do.’

  Seyyed Hossein Nasr

  Hailed by Huston Smith as ‘one of the most important thinkers of our times,’ Seyyed Hossein Nasr is one of the few living scholars who genuinely follows the polymathic tradition of early Islamic scholarship during its Golden Age. As such, he is a classic case of a holistic, many-sided philosopher. Considered a mathematical genius from an early age, he went on to study geology and physics at MIT, from where he obtained a doctorate in the history of science. He published his first book at 25 and by 30 became a full prof
essor at Harvard. His quest to understand the ‘why’ rather than the ‘how’ then drew him into the world of philosophy and mysticism.

  After becoming an expert in many of the world’s religions, he was soon recognised as the world’s leading authority on the ‘perennial philosophy’ and became the only Muslim to be included in the Library of Living Philosophers. As an Islamic scholar, he has written books on the Quran, Islamic cosmology and Islamic law. As an art historian, he has published books on the art of the East.

  Nasr is a polyglot who speaks and writes in English, French, Persian, Arabic, Spanish and German and a published poet in both English and Farsi. He is now professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University. His book Science and Civilization in Islam is a masterful synthesis of Islamic cosmology, philosophy, theology, history, alchemy, physics, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and mysticism and his History of Islamic Philosophy is the most comprehensive and wide-ranging work of its kind.

  For Nasr, clearly endowed with an exceptional general intelligence, the motivation to polymathise was twofold: curiosity and unity. ‘My thirst for knowledge was never sated by just limiting myself to one particular field,’ he said. ‘I always had a love for knowledge for its own sake — not to get rich, to get famous, not even to serve the poor. It has always excited me, I wanted to know, ever since I was a child — it was in my nature. This is how God created me.’ Curiosity tends to dissipate as we move into adulthood. Not so for Nasr. ‘That thirst which caused me to search continued to be there. It has not sated me — so it was not as though I learnt French so I don’t need to learn another language. It is a continuous source of energy for me to seek.’

  Imagination, intelligence and versatility equipped Nasr to be able to satisfy his curiosity and thereby explore and contribute to many different fields of knowledge. But ultimately, it was his quest for unity that made him a true polymath. ‘I am by nature a philosopher, and could not just have a series of disparate forms of knowledge in my mind as if it were a chest of drawers with socks in one, underwear in the other and so on.’

  In the Islamic spiritual and intellectual traditions he found his framework for synthesising various disciplines. ‘I spent a lot of time trying to find a worldview in which all of these things could fit. Then I came back to Islamic thought and I discovered there this full expression of the philosophy of Tawheed (Oneness or Unity), through which I could integrate all of my knowledge in a way that would allow me not to be duplicitous and dishonest with myself.’ He argues that modern philosophy generally fails to comprehend a global, interconnected world:

  All the schools of modern philosophy, rationalistic or anti-rationalistic, are unified in one thing: they cannot provide a global vision for all forms of knowledge. Anglo-Saxon philosophy — positivist and analytical as it is — has reduced philosophy to a game of logic and cannot have a vision which would incorporate all the different disciplines that the polymath is supposed to hold within themselves in an integrated way. I don’t believe any of the philosophies existing in the Western world from the Renaissance on have the capability of doing this. Reductionism is so strong in the Western mind that to see the interdependence of various disciplines is very difficult philosophically.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  ‘Everyone has things that fascinate them and that drive them to follow certain pathways in life,’ says Douglas Hofstadter. ‘I am no exception, and in fact I think that much of my life’s story can be gotten across very effectively by recounting it as a series of such fascinations or passions. I have usually called them ‘my binges’ or ‘my jags,’ although there are other evocative words for the same notion, including ‘obsession,’ ‘orgy,’ ‘spree,’ ‘mania’ and ‘craze.’

  Hofstadter’s ‘obsessions’ have allowed him to make substantial contributions to fields as diverse as mathematics, physics, visual art, music, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, typeface design, poetry and literary translation. In cognitive science he has written on sexist language, self-referential sentences, random sentence generation and invented novel alphabets. He has analysed the process of analogy generation, particularly the computational modelling of the human cognitive process of making analogies in small domains, one of which is called the ‘copycat domain’ (analogies restricted to letters of the alphabet). It’s a subject he returns to in almost all his books.

  He has given the mathematical world the ‘Hofstadter Butterfly’ — a mathematical object describing the theorised behaviour of electrons in a magnetic field — integer sequences and triangle geometry. In music he has added a substantial number of piano pieces to the classical repertoire. As a visual artist he made an interesting contribution to calligraphy in the form of ‘ambigrams,’ ‘whirly art’ and gridfonts.

  Being a talented linguist (he has studied multiple languages) with a flair for literature, he has translated Pushkin’s great novel Eugene Onegin as well as the sixteenth-century poem ‘Ma Mignonne.’ His bestselling book Gödel, Escher, Bach — a startling fusion of ideas relating to art, music and mathematics — is considered by many to be one of the best books of polymathic synthesis written in modern times.

  In the spirit of humility, Hofstadter revealed a time when he met biologist, philosopher of science and professor at Harvard University, E.O. Wilson. Over breakfast, he (Wilson) turned to his other friend and made a bold statement about intellectual polymathy:

  Let me tell you, Hofstadter is an intellectual. He is a real intellectual. At Harvard, where I’ve worked for several decades, there are no intellectuals. None at all. Sure, at Harvard there are plenty of world-class specialists who know their tiny disciplines inside-out, but those folks know nothing else whatsoever. They are boring and narrow people, not people who think. We want people who think!

  For Hofstadter, a sense of wonder and a response to beauty are critical. ‘I come across something and I find an extraordinary sense of beauty that I just can’t get enough of it — I want it more and more. It’s not a deliberate thing. One thing leads to another. There’s no planning involved — it’s all motivated by the pursuit of beauty.’ Such beauty, as far as he’s concerned, can be found in a mathematical sequence, a musical composition, the sound of a language or the rhythm of poetry.

  Because he is exceptionally versatile and clearly has multiple, distinct cognitive abilities — including linguistic, musical and mathematical — Hofstadter is able to convert his fascinations into some form of impressive creative output. ‘I was born with some talent, which together with my love of beauty allowed me to create things in different disciplines.’ But he accepts that there are indispensable connections between the fields he operates in: ‘There are always some connections. For example the passion with poetry has been interconnected with my love of languages in general.’

  Hofstadter believes polymaths are incredibly important to intellectual activity: ‘People who are the world’s topmost experts in only one tiny field are not very wise in general, while people who engage themselves seriously with a number of diverse fields are often capable of deeper overviews of important and complex situations.’

  But he understands why most people these days want to become hyper-specialists:

  People want to have a kind of uniqueness and the way this seems to be most readily available to most people is to specialise. It sort of gives them a special niche; in which they become well known, leaders in their field no matter how narrow and boring it is and that means their identity and self-esteem depends upon that narrowness. . . . It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle — people become narrower and narrower to gain self-esteem; and they become narrow in order to rise higher and higher in their specialty until they reach the highest point in this really narrow area.

  Whilst Hofstadter is reluctant to accept that polymathy can be taught per se, he suggests that it can be encouraged by exposing students to works by polymaths: ‘If you can show people that they can explore different disciplines (for example through my book, Gödel, Escher,
Bach) maybe they can be inspired.’

  Jao Tsung-I

  Following the tradition of the bunjin (Chinese scholar-artists), 100-year-old Jao Tsung-I (also known as Rao Zongyi) was (at the time of the completion of this book), undeniably one of the most distinguished Chinese polymaths alive. Largely an autodidact, he has contributed to almost every aspect of Sinology, with scholarly breakthroughs in both the arts and humanities. In addition to being an acclaimed poet, calligrapher and musician, he has taught history, philology, the Chinese language, literature and fine arts at various prestigious institutions such as the University of Hong Kong, the National University of Singapore, Yale University and Academia Sinica, Taiwan.

  His scholarly contributions — with a phenomenal output of over 80 books and 900 articles — have been in fields as disparate as paleography, Dunhuang studies, archaeology, epigraphy, historiography, etymology, history of music, history of religion, Chuci, bibliography and the study of local gazettes. His artistic output is equally impressive — he has published over 20 collections of poetry and lyrics and exhibited his visual artwork (which includes painting and calligraphy) throughout East Asia. He is also a polyglot and expert on medieval Sanskrit.

  Jao is inspired by an ancient Chinese philosophical principle which takes a polymathic approach to scholarship. ‘ “Tong Ren” (通人) is a cultural or philosophical concept that relates to “polymathy” in the history of Chinese culture’ This concept was first articulated by first-century bc scholar Shi-Ma Qian, the Father of Chinese historical studies, in his great work, Shi Ji. Jao says “A person would be described as a “tong ren” when he becomes very learned. He or she is commonly regarded as one who can understand all sorts of changes in history and is able to research all sorts of topics in sciences and humanities.’