Polymaths and the Creation of the World
The world and everything in it is the result of polymathic thinking. And yet, the current age is not only ignorant of this, it has killed the polymath, in favor of the specialist—the so-called ‘expert’.
The Austrian satirist Karl Kraus once quipped, “I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.”
It’s only funny because of what it reveals to be one of the greatest truths about our world.
The most consequential term in Western language is also quite possibly the most forgotten, and thus the least understood. Polymaths — people described mundanely as “having learned much” — are in fact anything but ordinary.
There are other terms we now use freely to describe what is meant by a polymath: jack of all trades; renaissance man; genius; generalist; amateur. While we use these terms to imply very different things from one another, they all have polymathic origins in common, describing those given to serious experimentation and reflection, with minimal bias and maximal curiosity, without regard to the prevailing state of things. They describe, above all, people with a specific interest in the intersection of things — that is, how one…
