From Discourse Magazine, June 6:
Preserving the ‘unity of the intellect’ is essential to securing and expanding the possibilities of progress
The very phrase “Renaissance man” dates back, in one way or another, to the 15th century. It seems to have originated in connection with Leon Battista Alberti, an Italian architect and poet who wrote pathbreaking scholarship on cryptography as well as Europe’s first treatise on art theory. “A man can do all things if he will,” Alberti wrote, and his compatriots seem to have agreed. Foremost among these was Leonardo da Vinci, the archetypical “universal man” (uomo universale in Italian) whose mastery of art and science made him equally comfortable engineering bridges or painting the Mona Lisa.
But the basic principle of the Renaissance man was not the creation of Italian or even Western civilization. It harkened back to a principle that the 12th century Muslim scholar Averroes called “the unity of the intellect”: the idea that all comprehension is ultimately the same process, whether devoted to the arts, the sciences, or even an ordinary technical task like fixing a broken tool.
Of course, the Renaissance man did not vanish with the end of the Renaissance. Enlightenment polymaths such as Francis Bacon, Robert Hooke, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander von Humboldt were multifaceted talents equally at home in the sciences and the humanities. Even in modern times, figures such as Jacob Bronowski, Albert Schweitzer and Loren Eiseley devoted their energies to wide-ranging pursuits of art, science and philosophy.
Their dream was, in E.O. Wilson’s term, “consilience”: the convergence of multiple intellectual pursuits into a single model of the world, one that would give us the unprecedented ability to empower humanity and relieve its suffering. That consilience would make good on the promise of classical liberalism: that there are universal human values to which all people—regardless of their cultural or historical background—can appeal and aspire. Yet today, the dream of such shared principles is in disrepute, and the idea of a universal intellect making meaningful contributions to multiple intellectual endeavors seems increasingly improbable. Even while the academy trumpets its commitment to “multidisciplinary approaches,” intellectual specialization and cultural relativism have actually made it harder for anybody to add significantly to more than one area of scholarship.
The Knowledge Burden
Part of this is because of how much we’ve learned since Alberti’s and da Vinci’s time. In 2009, Northwestern University Professor Benjamin Jones attributed the eclipse of the uomo universale—or as we would say today, the uomo o donna universale—to the “knowledge burden,” that is, the difficulty of a student getting up to speed on any subject. Nowadays, it takes so long to master the basics that by the time any would-be scholar does so, he or she has lost the ability to think creatively. As a result, innovation today is more likely to come from teams of people than from any single genius with a brilliant idea....
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