In Defense of Polymathia: Recovering an Ancient Intellectual Practice

Cody Barnhart

In his posthumous work The Scholemaster (1570), the famous English scholar and tutor Roger Ascham recounts a tale about the famed orator Isocrates of Athens: “This Isocrates, I say, did cause to be written, at the entry of his school, in golden letters, this golden sentence, ἐὰν ᾖς φιλομαθής, ἔσει πολυμαθής,” which Ascham translates like so: “If thou lovest learning, thou shalt attain to much learning.”

While Ascham’s tale may be fanciful, the mental image of these gilded words on the walls of Isocrates’ school raises a fascinating question of ancient pedagogy: what was the value of being a polymath? Phrased another way, what were the stakes (if any) of “getting polymathy right” in antiquity? Walking through Isocrates’ gilded doorposts, we may find our point of entry for recovering an underappreciated theme of polymathy. And, if we are good listeners to the past, we may find that this ancient intellectual practice challenges our modern instincts.

Classical Figures and Polymathia

The history of polymathic inquiry has recently been surveyed by Peter Burke in his work The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag (Yale University Press, 2020). As he touches on there,πολυμαθία (polymathia), or “polymathy,” first emerges as a focal point in the writings of early Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who criticizes the concept in at least two fragments.^[1]See Fragment B40: πολυμαθίη νόον οὐ διδάσκει· Ἡσίοδον γὰρ ἂν ἐδίδαξε καὶ Πυθαγόρην, αὖτίς τε Ξενοφάνεά τε καὶ Ἑκαταῖον (“Polymathy does not teach intelligence; for it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and also Xenophanes and Hecataeus”); and Fragment 129: Πυθαγόρης Μνησάρχου ἱστορίην ἤσκησεν ἀνθρώπων μάλιστα πάντων καὶ ἐκλεξάμενος ταύτας τὰς συγγραφὰς ἐποιήσατο ἑαυτοῦ σοφίην, πολυμαθίην, κακοτεχνίην (“Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, practised inquiry more than all men and, having chosen these compositions, made a wisdom of his own: polymathy, bad technique.”). Burke understands these fragments to be part of a larger debate between Heraclitus and Empedocles, likening it through the comparison between the “fox” and the “hedgehog”: is it better to learn a lot of things like a fox, or to learn one great thing like a hedgehog?^[2]This dichotomy is made by Archilochus, and it was recently popularized in the twentieth century as the title to a famous essay by Isaiah Berlin. I’m not quite sure it has much to say about the term polymathy, despite its playful imagery.

Burke quickly moves from the word’s roots to later representations of the polymath – but it is worth pausing to consider that we may have moved too quickly beyond the ancient vision of polymathy. To reduce polymathia to one pole on the binary between encyclopaedism or specialization misses an important element of Heraclitus’ critiques – and, I would argue, ignores subsequent comments about polymathy in the ancient world.

Christopher Moore fairly describes Heraclitus’ understanding of polymathy as “the collation and reinterpretation of extensive research and learning, specifically what would generate social, cultural, or political authority, albeit of the misplaced sort.”^[3]Christopher Moore, Calling Philosophers Names: On the Origin of a Discipline (Princeton UP, NJ, 2019) 40. This leaves us with two core elements of Heraclitus’ critique: (1) the compilatory nature of polymathy, and (2) the use of this compiled learning as a source of authority. This reading more clearly highlights how Heraclitus is not merely concerned about how much or how deeply one learns, as the “fox and hedgehog” dichotomy presents it. Instead, Heraclitus is concerned with demonstrating that a compiled knowledge is a secondhand knowledge; being secondhand, it is thereby also a second-rate knowledge. For Heraclitus, polymathy is an unintelligent wisdom because it is defined by its bad technique of compilation and deceives the masses with a false sense of social authority.^[4]For two helpful discussions of Heraclitus see Herbert Granger, “Heraclitus’ quarrel with polymathy and historie,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 134 (2004) 235–61, and Keith Begley, “Heraclitus’ rebuke of polymathy: a core element in the reflectiveness of his thought,” History of Philosophy and Logical Analysis 23 (2020) 21–50.

This conclusion is challenged by Plato. In his Laws, Phaedrus, and Lovers, Plato is less critical of polymathy as a whole, inviting it as an appropriate way of mapping the world for the diligent student.^[5]It is worth noting that the authenticity of Rival Lovers as a genuinely Platonic work is challenged. This is seen perhaps most importantly in Laws 7, where the Athenian Stranger initially suggests that polymathy “presents a danger to children” (Laws 811b). Soon after this, however, he looks over the whole of their discourses in close array and sees that its arrangement has provided in itself a perfect anthology for the Lawkeeper to mimic when prescribing his curriculum for children. As Clinias and the Stranger have traversed poetry, prose, unwritten/verbal, and written/published discourses, they have actually compiled and culled a perfect curriculum – something only able to be understood once the disparate pieces are beheld in close array and as a whole.

This brings us back to Isocrates: “If you are a philomath, you will be a polymath” (To Demonicus 18). This gilded phrase, embraced by Ascham, is couched in the middle of a long letter directed at Demonicus, the surviving son of Isocrates’ friend. Being one who trains young men in virtue, Isocrates takes it upon himself to challenge the young Demonicus to pursue polymathy, for if he loves to learn, he will become polymathic in his vision of the world. This is seen, too, in his concluding statement: “For just as we see the bee settling on all the flowers, taking the best from each one, so also those who desire an education must leave nothing untasted but must collect advice from every source” (To Demonicus 51–2).^[6]Translation adapted from Isocrates, Isocrates I, trans. David C. Mirhady and Yun Lee Too (Univ. of Texas Press, Austin, TX, 2000) 30. The one who is well trained is the one who has tasted from every source, taking what is good from disparate sources and synthesizing it into one honeyed truth.

Placing these three writers in a single thread, polymathy becomes something bigger than a mere intellectual practice: it becomes an attitude or way of seeing the world. For Heraclitus, polymathy seems to have been classist, something that well-travelled elites lorded over commonfolk. This merited condemnation by suggesting that truth is not democratic. For Plato, a faithful teacher – one who is a good anthologist – was the most fruitful means to overcoming the potential weaknesses of polymathy while retaining its interdisciplinary strength. And, for Isocrates, polymathy was among the chiefest of the intellectual exercises: polymathy was understood as a posture that allows us to “learn easily what is discovered by others only with difficulty” (To Demonicus 18–19).

Despite these differing stances on the intellectual practice of polymathy, however, a common sentiment emerges when we compare the positions of all three. Ancient conversations about polymathy are noticeably in service of the larger social truth that virtuous learning invites what is distant and diverse to come together as one, not in an act of conformity but one of harmony.

This is why the term reemerges with popularity in the literary phenomenon Classicists have termed the Second Sophistic – particularly among the miscellanists, who sought to bring disparate scenes, statements, or segments within their work into one unified body of literature. The spirits of Plato’s Athenian Stranger and Plutarch’s symposiasts are kindred due to their shared polymathic vision for the world, which consolidates a myriad of topics in their intellectual field of gravity.

The Challenges of Polymathia Today

If we take seriously the voices of the Classical past, and if we take inventory of the academic and social climates of the 21^st century, we must concede how often we have failed our philosophical forebears in committing to a rightly guided, healthy polymathy. In the age of hyper-specialization, ideological siloing, and cut-throat vocational opportunities, the challenge is simple: the humanities could use a liberal dose of polymathy if they genuinely want to survive.

I wish to suggest that we would do well to appreciate the polymath’s inefficiency. The polymath takes us down winding turns through off-topic discussions and fills their volumes with needless verbosity – and we may better understand how to situate our own disciplines in the world if we develop an appetite for the tangential.

We would also do well to appreciate the polymath’s posture. Polymathia isn’t something that can be pursued or practised without changing the kind of person you are; it entails an open-handedness about the value of your own life experiences. It requires being a decent human, which is probably why its biggest advocates in the ancient world were working toward a moral end, shaping students into virtuous persons rather than robotic repositories of knowledge.

And therein lies the true challenge of becoming a polymath in the 21^st century.

To recover polymathia doesn’t entail picking one’s place on the spectrum from “fox” to “hedgehog”. Rather, becoming a polymath entails recovering a vision for humanity that is infrequently found within the grounds of the academy. It entails pursuing charity in public discourse. It entails letting go of the desire to master anything, forcing us to recognize how limited our own lived experiences are in the face of truth’s breadth. And, above all else, it entails recognizing that each one of us are only bees tasting from the sources of our lives, synthesizing what we learn into the greatest product we can muster: the nectar of a lasting knowledge that we may, in turn, pass on to friends, families, students, and colleagues.

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Cody Glen Barnhart is a PhD candidate in Divinity at the University of Aberdeen. His research examines how early Christian authors transformed Classical modes of inquiry into distinctively Christian forms of writing and pedagogy.