I went to the University of Sussex for the Founding Historians lecture, this year given by Professor Peter Burke of Emmanuel, introduced by the head of the new school of History, Art History and Philosophy whose name, I'm sorry to say, I did not catch. Chief among Professor Burke's numerous and wide-ranging publications is Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, now in its third edition.
Professor Burke invoked the early days of Sussex, what he called the 'magic moment' of being in a small, new, flexible university. The polymath, which he defined in strict academic terms, that is someone who masters many intellectual or academic disciplines, is endangered, though not extinct. He distinguished between the active polymath who makes an original contribution in more than one discipline, and the passive polymath, who knows about more then one discipline. Particularly in the past 150 years, as intellectual specialisation and the institutionalisation of disciplines have developed, polymathy have shrunk.
As he discovered at the University Library, there have been three books published in recent years on individual polymaths, each proclaiming its subject to be 'the last man who knew everything'; one, by Leonard Warren on Joseph Leidy, a nineteenth century US scientist, one, by Andrew Robinson on Thomas Young (1773-1829), a fellow of Emmanuel in whose honour the college has a Thomas Young Society, and one edited by Paula Findlen on the earliest candidate, Athanasius Kircher, the seventeenth century German Jesuit.
New disciplines are often hospitable to polymaths, for example anthropology, which drew on geography, zoology, medicine and geology. After the Renaissance, the rise of scientific experiment, of knowledge from outside Europe and the development of the printing press led to an information explosion which contemporaries described variously as a forest, an ocean or a flood.
Professor Burke cited a number of polymaths or polyhistors of this period, among them Robert Burton, Francis Bacon, Leibniz and Richard Baxter. It is at this point that the ideal starts to become elusive in the occident, and curiously, at exactly the same time in China, in 1644, at the transition from the Ming to Ching dynasties in 1644, there was a comparable shift among the mandarin class to specialisation.
In the Enlightenment, Vico, Buffon and Lermontov, and the members of the Lunar Society in Birmingham can be cited as examples. He did not consider Diderot and the Encyclopaedists to be proper polymaths, for theirs was a collaborative exercise, with 140 contributors. 'Universal knowledge', they held, 'was no longer within human reach'. The 1805 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica said that, 'no man...can reasonably expect to be a walking encyclopaedia'.
Thomas Young was medically trained, but also mastered life assurance, physics, especially optics and acoustics, and hieroglyphics. Francis Dalton, Herbert Spencer and William Henry Fox-Talbot also contributed to many disciplines. Examples of the passive polymath included Coleridge, Mary Somerville, Charles Darwin and George Eliot.
Mention of Goethe allowed a passing reference to the Faustian element of the polymath; von Humboldt was described by contemporaries as the new Leibniz.
At this point there is some evidence of a growing hostility to polymaths: Young had to publish much of his work himself, and Coleridge was satirised by Thomas Love Peacock. Around the same time the term dilettante assumed a pejorative meaning and expert, expertise, scientist and specialist came into use to describe the new specialists. In universities departments and institutes started to appear, as academic tribes and territories came into being.
Snow and Leavis's two cultures debate was prefigured, though in politer terms, in the debates between Thomas Huxley and Matthew Arnold on the places of science and literature in education. Linked to Macaulay's civil service reforms, the idea of the all-rounder emerged, translated from the sports field to the intellectual world. The new breed of civil servants took pride in the epithet mandarin.
As for the twentieth century, the polymath began to be diluted, general knowledge becoming a matter for quiz shows. Professor Burke gave a typology of the twentieth century polymath:
- The passive polymath, who, though reading widely, makes their contribution in one field: for example Aldous Huxley, Ernest Gombrich or George Steiner
- The limited polymath, active in distinct fields: e.g. Max Weber, who lamented the end of specialism, Bernadetto Croce, described as the last man of the Renaissance, Jose Oretega y Gasset, Gilberto Frere and Michel Foucault
- The serial polymath, whose interests shift in the course of an academic life: e.g. Patrick Geddes, Joseph Needham and Juliet Mitchell
- Most remarkable of all, the proper polymaths, those who make a simultaneous contribution to many fields, such as Lewis Mumford, and Jared Diamond
Polymaths are still necessary, both for synthesis and for analysis. It takes a polymath to mind the gap, and governments and universities need to control the habitat in which the species can survive. One way is to encourage intellectual flexibly, through institute for advanced study, and to offer students the possibility of interdisciplinary work. Aby Warburg, the founder of the Warburg Institute, was able to cross disciplinary frontiers, but was able to do so because the support given by his brother the banker. Who will fund the 21st century institutes where polymaths can flourish?
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