https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-polymath-peter-burke-review-costica-bradatan/
************************ The fox and the hedgehog ************************ --------------------------- Polymathy’s past and future --------------------------- By costica bradatan ( https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-polymath-peter-burke-review-costica-bradatan/ ) Diagram of a proposed flying machine by Leonardo da Vinci, from Disegni di Leonardo da Vinco, prints by Carlo Giuseppe Gerli, 1789 © Toronto Public Library Special Collections October 2, 2020 Read this issue ( https://www.the-tls.co.uk/issues/current-issue-2-2/ ) In this review -------------- THE POLYMATH A cultural history from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag 352pp. Yale University Press. $30; £20. Peter Burke Buy ( https://shop.the-tls.co.uk/the-polymath-9780300250022.html?utm_source=tls&utm_medium=mainsite&utm_campaign=review ) In one of the oldest texts available in the Western philosophical canon, a fragment from Heraclitus ( c.535– c.475 BC), we read that “much learning ( polymathiē ) does not teach understanding”. The sheer amount of knowledge one possesses about the world, however wide it may be, is no guarantee that one has grasped what the world is, or how it works. Heraclitus was therefore suspicious of polymaths. He considered Pythagoras, for instance, a charlatan and, since Pythagoras was a magnificent polymath, Heraclitus thought him to be not an ordinary impostor but “the prince of impostors”. Many intricacies of the pre-Socratic world remain obscure to us, but this debate we certainly understand. For we, too, tend to dismiss generalists as frauds, and polymathy as charlatanism. Carlo Ginzburg didn’t mince his words: “Foucault is a charlatan”. Isaiah Berlin was slightly nicer, but only slightly, when he quipped of Derrida: “I think he may be a genuine charlatan, though a clever man”. To be a respectable scholar today is to specialize in a well-defined, rather narrow subfield, and to stay away from generalist pronouncements. Someone once observed about Leo Strauss that his knowledge was so extraordinary, and covered so many fields, that his colleagues considered him incompetent. Indeed, a reputation for encyclopedism can ruin one’s career. The credo of today’s academic orthodoxy was formulated more than a century ago by Max Weber: “Limitation to specialized work, with a renunciation of the Faustian universality of man which it involves, is a condition of any valuable work in the modern world”. Ironically, Weber was a compulsively Faustian man himself, shuttling between history, law, sociology, philosophy and political theory, among other fields. That we recognize ourselves in an ancient dispute pitting specialized knowledge against polymathy is no accident. As Peter Burke shows persuasively in The Polymath , the debate has always been part of the West’s self-representation, recurring and amplifying over the centuries, “always the same in essence yet always different in emphases and circumstances”. Whenever we oppose experts to amateurs, theory to practice, pure to applied knowledge, detail to the big picture, we partake in an argument that started in archaic Greece. Burke uses Isaiah Berlin ( https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/isaiah-berlin-against-dogma/ ) ’s distinction between “the fox”, who “knows many things”, and the “hedgehog”, who “knows one great thing”, to emphasize what it is fundamentally at stake. What has kept the debate alive is that, just as the West has typically valued rigour and expertise, it has at the same time been awed by an ideal of universal knowledge. Heraclitus may have poked fun at the polymath Pythagoras, but his fellow Greeks revered a muse called Polymatheia. A good education in antiquity was enkyklios paideia (which gave us our “encyclopedia”), an ambitious project that demanded the student go through the whole circle of knowledge. Much of our own “liberal arts” education runs along similar lines. People during the Renaissance may have occasionally smiled at Leonardo da Vinci’s unrealistic projects, but they admired him all the same. They could not help recognizing in him the embodiment of an ideal that was only too dear to them, just as it is to us. Dr Faustus was meant to be a dark, repellant figure (“Doctor Fausto, that great sodomite and nigromancer”, noted the deputy Bürgermeister of Nuremberg, in 1532, as he denied the scholar entry to the city), yet he has become one of our paradigmatic heroes. When, about a hundred years ago, Oswald Spengler needed a name to describe what modern Western civilization was essentially about, he came up with the term “Faustian”. We have been calling polymaths names (“amateurs” and “frauds” and worse), and yet we’ve never wanted to be without them. Polymathy has played such an important part in the West’s intellectual and cultural history that Burke can only afford to cover the past six centuries. He works with a list of 500 polymaths, ranging from Filippo Brunelleschi and Nicholas of Cusa to Umberto Eco ( https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/umberto-eco-texts-sign-systems-risks-interpretation/ ) , Oliver Sacks, Susan Sontag ( https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/susan-sontag-life-benjamin-moser/ ) and Tzvetan Todorov. In the first part of the book, Burke discusses his polymaths chronologically, grouping them under a specific zeitgeist (“The Age of the ‘Renaissance Man’, 1400–1600”; “The Age of ‘Monsters of Erudition’, 1600–1700”; “The Age of the ‘Man of Letters’, 1700–1850”; “The Age of Territoriality, 1850–2000”). What Burke seeks to provide here, however, is more than a collection of individual portraits of polymaths, picturesque, inspiring or influential as they may have been. One of the book’s major ambitions is to describe “some intellectual and social trends and so to answer general questions about forms of social organization and climates of opinion that are favorable or unfavorable to polymathic endeavors”. In an important sense, polymathy is boundlessness in action; it is part of the polymath’s job description to disregard disciplinary boundaries and conventions, labels and classifications. There is something rebellious and anti-establishment at the core of any polymathic project. That is why polymathy, as a cultural and historical phenomenon, is difficult to systematize and to study with any degree of thoroughness. How is one to map out an insurrection against, say, the dominion of maps? That makes Burke’s efforts all the more remarkable. He proposes, for instance, several typologies of polymaths: active vs passive (depending on whether they produce knowledge or only absorb it), limited vs general (do they tend to work in related fields or roam freely?), simultaneous vs serial (do they pursue different kinds of knowledge at the same time or in succession?). A seemingly more consequential distinction is that between “centrifugal” polymaths, who gather knowledge without paying much attention to any possible connections, and the “centripetal” ones, who place whatever they absorb within a pre-existing system. “The first group rejoices in or suffers from omnivorous curiosity”, says Burke. “The second group is fascinated – some would say obsessed – with what one of them, Johann Heinrich Alsted, called ‘the beauty of order’.” Another helpful insight articulated by Burke has to do with what he calls the “Leonardo syndrome”. Fascinating as polymathy is, it can also be a curse, translating into an inability to finish anything, to pursue a project to its logical conclusion. Da Vinci, one of the greatest and yet most unusual of polymaths, a self-taught genius without a classical humanist education ( omo sanza lettere , he called himself), embodies the downside of polymathy like few others in Burke’s story. An enormous “dispersal of energy” is what strikes us in the many projects that da Vinci “abandoned or simply left unfinished”. For Burke, da Vinci’s is a cautionary tale: do not become dispersed in the pursuit of chimeras. Polymaths have also been charged with compulsively collecting knowledge – any knowledge – for the sake of the act itself. As if to prove the old truth that we become that which we study, there are many pages in Burke’s book, especially in its first, historical part, where one has the annoying impression that he is mindlessly collecting. Here’s an example, out of many possible: > > > > As one of his patrons put it in a moment of semi-exasperation, Leibniz was > a man of “insatiable curiosity”, a phrase that has been repeated more than > once by students of his work. He was described by one contemporary as > “deeply versed in all sciences”, and by another as “so comprehensive and > universal a genius”. … In a dictionary of scholars published in 1733, > Leibniz appeared a “famous polymath”, while a well-known > nineteenth-century German scientist … called him a scholar with “knowledge > of everything and of the whole”. > > And the piling up of quotations goes on and on until they lose meaning and force. The reader also comes across nagging repetitions that a more careful editorial eye would have spotted. Pavel Florensky is mentioned three times, and every time he is introduced as “Russia’s unknown da Vinci” or the “Russian Leonardo”. By the third occurrence you come to resent both da Vinci and the copyeditor. Such stylistic infelicities cast an embarrassing shadow on an otherwise impressive project. It takes a polymath to write about polymaths, and Burke proves to be one. Heraclitus may have been too quick in his dismissal of polymaths, Burke warns us. Understanding comes from many things, including much learning. This book not only teaches us something important about polymathy’s past; it does an excellent job of opening our eyes to polymathy’s future too. For it certainly has one. *Costica* *Bradatan* is a Professor of Humanities at Texas Tech University and an Honorary Research Professor of Philosophy at University of Queensland. He is the author, most recently, of Dying for Ideas: The dangerous lives of the philosophers , 2015 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#2163): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/2163 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/77263851/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
