This article is from WeChat official account:Neugeist (ID: Neugeist), author: Joseph Epstein (American writer), translator: Yanliang, reviewer: Yang Yinzhu, editor: Yang Yinzhu, original title: “From Da Vinci to Sontag, Will the knowledgeable be the tears of the times? “, the title picture comes from Visual China
Essemology is a subject of knowledge and how to obtain knowledge, but it is only for the knowledgeable person (polymath, a person with a wide range of knowledge) In terms of a topic, today’s epistemology has nothing to say. It also cannot tell people what standards they meet to be considered knowledgeable or even educated. Can a person who has never studied ancient Greek or Latin, or understands music, or Chinese history can claim to be a knowledgeable person? When it comes to education, given that today’s universities include far more than the status quo of research institutes and departments, no one can claim to be educated because of his university graduation. The question is, what is the difference between information and knowledge, and what is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. On this issue, epistemology is like a fertile and uncultivated land.
Peter Burke(Peter Burke) is a British cultural historian and the new book “The Knower”(The Polymath). He defined his research topic as “people who are interested in learning multiple subjects.” To be worthy of this title, one must show a considerable degree of proficiency in several disciplines, which is usually proved by his published works or inventions. The goal of a truly knowledgeable person is to become an encyclopedic character, keen to master the widest possible range of knowledge. Historically, the term “wiser” can also be replaced by other titles, including polyhiscient (polyhistor), Renaissance (Renaissance man), generalist (generalist), literati(man of letters), etc. The goal most knowledgeable people seek is often the self-evident but seldom achieved great wisdom (pansophia), or universal wisdom span class=”text-remarks” label=”Remarks”>(universal wisdom). The discussion of the difference between learning and wisdom is also one of the main lines of “The Boss”.
The subtitle of this book is “A Cultural History from Leonardo Da Vinci to Susan Sontag”, which implies that the knowledgeable person has no choice but to go downhill in the course of history. But in this process, the knowledge domain has greatly expanded its research breadth without considering the depth. The goal of universal knowledge (universal knowledge) has been seen as stupid and grandstanding for a long time. As early as the middle of the 18th century, the encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert still defined “well-known(polymathy)” as “usually just a bunch of Confusing and useless knowledge is just used for’performance’.”
– Marta Tranquilli-
Why would anyone want to be an erudite? Broad and endless curiosity is on the one hand, intellectual euphoria and vanity may be the other. The third and more important reason is the strong drive to discover the unity of all knowledge(if there is such a unity of knowledge).
Burke lists the qualities required to become an erudite: high concentration, strong memory, perceptual speed, imagination, energy, competitive spirit Wait. He also classified the knowledgeable scholars he studied into passive (passive) and concentrated (clustered) and continuous type (serial) to be divided into three dimensions*. The Greek poet Alkirokus’s dichotomy of hedgehogs and foxes-“foxes know many things, and hedgehogs know a great thing” is another theme that runs through Burke’s book. (Translator’s Note: Passive type refers to only acquiring knowledge without producing works; concentrated type refers to specializing in a series of related disciplines, such as humanities and natural sciences Science or social science; continuous type refers to people who continuously cross domains in different disciplines.)
Being able to write a book like “The Knowledgeable” is itself a manifestation of being a knowledgeable person. Burke selected hundreds of knowledgeable people from human history and wrote refined biographies for these extraordinary people. Ibn Carlton, Erasmus, Newton, Bacon, Leibniz, Vico, Montesquieu, Buffon, Renan, Germain de Sdell, von Humboldt brothers, Comte , George Eliot, Max Weber, William James, Patrick Geddes, Roman Jacobson, James Fraser, Needham, Lewis Mumford, and many other very talented Of people are listed in this book. Burke appreciates these people, but also understands their shortcomings.
At the end of the book, he listed 500 people he thought could be called knowledgeable people. But the closer the people he listed are to today’s era, the more controversial they are: David Lisman, Ronald Dworkin, Jacques Derrida, are these knowledgeable people? I don’t agree. Also, why did he ignore Robert Oppenheimer?
– Beth Walrond-
In the section on “Jewish Knowlers”, Peter Burke cited Tosdan Veblen’s article “The Intellectual Advantage of the Jews”, and he also pointed out that the Jews on his list until the 19th century It appeared frequently after the mid-term, and it started with the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala, a movement to introduce Western secular knowledge and culture to Jews) of. Among the Jewish erudites, the most famous Jews include Karl Marx, the author of “On the Jewish Question.” In Burke’s list of 500 people, “55 out of 250 people born after 1817 are Jewish.”
The prosperity of knowledge was mainly in the 17th century. Burke believes that during this period, “Europeans spent an extended period of free time. On the one hand, the traditional suspicion and suppression of curiosity gradually declined, and on the other hand, the division of intellectual labor. In the ascendant”. The new world has been opened up, and “new knowledge is constantly pouring in, teasing the curiosity of scholars, but not to engulf them.” Before the mid-nineteenth century, intelligent Jews still focused on the Talmud and other stricter Jewish classics. Bar Shem Tove, Werner Gaon and their followers care about things that they think are far more important than knowledge.
Then what I think is an intellectual freak appeared. I didn’t know most of them before I read this book.
William Jones(William Jones, 1746~1794) is said to understand less than 30 languages. Thomas Young(Thomas Young, 1773~1829) is considered the “last all-rounder”, he is a physicist who knows how to He has published articles on topics such as life insurance, acoustics, optics, etc. in Latin, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian and Turkish.
Benito Jerónimo Feijoo(Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, 1676~1764) is a person described as ” A Benedictine monk of “(a monster of learning), he has written “Theology, Philosophy, Language and Literature, History, Medicine, Natural history, alchemy, astrology, mathematics, geography, law, political economy, agriculture, literature, and hydrology. William Henry Fox Talbot(William Henry Fox Talbot, 1800~1877) is an outstanding mathematician whose interests cover optics , Chemistry, photography, astronomy, etymology, and the study of the reliability of translation, and beyond this he still has the energy to serve as a councillor for Chippenham, Wiltshire.
Otto Neurath(Otto Neurath, 1882~1945) is a philosopher of science, sociologist, political economy He is also the inventor of the international graphic font education system ISOTYPE, a visual language system. It is said that he reads two books a day. Just reading the stories of these people makes people feel mentally drained. These people and the other erudites depicted in the book dwarf Goethe’s (he is also a genius er).
According to Burke, the best knowledgeable people can “see the grand picture and point out the connections that the experts have overlooked.” Many erudites have been very interested in the issue of unification of knowledge for many years. Another knowledgeable person in Burke’s book, Jacob Bronowski (Jacob Bronowski, 1908~1974) wrote, “Everything I write, despite the vast differences, they are all approaching the same motif, that is the uniqueness of human beings, through their struggle (and talent)< /span> to understand the uniqueness produced by nature and its own processes”. So far, the knowledgeable people (understand nature) is better than the latter (understand yourself).< /p>
– Valerie Villaflor-
The specialization of intellectuals, especially the division of departments and majors in modern universities, is to exclude knowledgeable people. However, characters like Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, and Max Weber(the latter two are also the knowledgeable persons in Burke’s list)< /span> all expressed praise for professionalism. Smith believed that “the more each person is proficient in his own field, the more contributions will be added to the human understanding of the whole, and science will grow as a result.” A century later, Weber added, “Abandon Faustian-style knowledge unifies the goal and restricts work within the division of expertise is a necessary condition for any valuable work in the modern world”.
The knowledgeable person may also be criticized for being superficial and amateurish, especially criticism from experts, or even being accused of being a pure liar. In this regard, think of Isaiah Berlin’s description of George Steiner’s (also one of the knowledgeable persons on the list),” Very rare guy, a liar through and through.” Berlin also made similar comments on Jacques Derrida. But Berlin himself appeared on Burke’s list, and I doubt whether he will be happy when he finds himself on the list.
Burke refers to this problem as Leonardo’s syndrome, which means “Due to scattered interests, knowledgeable scholars are often writing books and doing research.When investigating and discovering, I can’t go on.” He added, “Many erudites fail to complete the work plan because of their distracted interest and energy.” Among these erudites, perhaps the greatest is Leonardo da Vinci, And because his interests were too broad, he inevitably left a lot of useful work unfinished. Burke wrote, “(designed by Da Vinci)< /span>The giant crossbow is actually not practical. His attempt to’turn a circle into a square’ (that is, to ask for π) also failed. The poor preservation of “The Last Supper” (it can be seen in a few years) is due to his failure in chemistry experiments Caused by. “
If a person has the slightest amount of intellectual conceit, it is difficult not to think about his place among the knowledgeable after he has read the book “The Knowledgeable”.
For a period of time when I was quite arrogant, I was called a Renaissance man and a literati, but I never felt that there was any motive worth mentioning behind that pushed me to become a knowledgeable person. It must be added that I have never felt any drive that made me an expert. Huh! I am such a boring person, just content to learn what I am interested in, or can get fun from reading and thinking.
Besides, because anyone who doesn’t have a serious interest in science can’t be called an erudite, I was disqualified from the beginning for lack of talent and interest-but I’m still grateful Everything that applied science has brought us. I am satisfied that I can only live in this universe, and leave the description of the universe to others, from the molecular level to the planetary level.
Even so, I am quite keen to pay attention to how often science itself makes mistakes, just like pseudoscience, and sometimes very serious mistakes. For example, in 1949, a Portuguese neuroscientist named Antonio Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for inventing the prefrontal lobectomy. And in the 75 years that Freud’s false doctrine has ruled, who can say how much damage it has caused to mankind? Regarding consciousness, the most basic and interesting functions of the brain, those new areas of brain science that have been hyped up have yet to tell us anything of value.
Samuel Johnson once said, “The sea of knowledge is too wide, and even the most active and diligent wise man cannot explore it.” This sentence has eased my curiosity, so that it has never driven me away from what I canAnd the field. I cannot dream in Javanese, write in Cyrillic, or make love according to the instructions of the Kamasutra, but I will not be dissatisfied with it. I have no interest in extracting iodine from seaweed or learning the language of dolphins.
Burke wrote that encyclopedias in the 17th century were written by a single author. The word “Encyclopedia(encyclopedia)” means the circle of knowledge( circle of knowledge)*, implies complete knowledge like a circle, or all accessible knowledge. Of course, afterwards, the encyclopedia was completed by many people.
I worked as an editor for Encyclopedia Britannica for several years, when it was reorganized and edited by Mortimer Adler.
Adler is not on Burke’s list, nor does he appear in the book “The Knowledgeable”, but he can be called a knowledgeable person. He has a very high IQ(I began to believe that IQ mainly measures a person’s abstract processing ability), which contrasts with his extreme lack common sense. (Adler wanted to hang a painting in his Lakeside Boulevard apartment, but he found that he didn’t have a hammer, so he went to nearby Dunhill. But it’s not sold there Hammer! So he bought a shower head made of gold, and then went back to the house and knocked the nail into the wall.)
I have attended many conferences. Adler was very wise and energetic in these conferences. He tried to divide all knowledge into nine categories(mainly In order to reduce the workload of the earlier editions of Encyclopedia Britannica). But it turns out that knowledge is not as malleable as it seems. (Translator’s Note: encyclopedia can be decomposed into en-cyclo-pedia, where cyclo corresponds to circle and pedia corresponds to knowledge.)
< /p>
– Marly Gallardo-
This seems to have become even more impossible in today’s called the digital age. The Internet is flooded with massive amounts of information, some of which are true, most of which are false; some are just prejudiced, and quite a few are malicious; most of them are mean rather than kind. In the digital age, Wikipedia has replaced “Encyclopedia Britannica” and Google Yellow Pages, and almost everyone with a mobile phone has a library in their pocket. Who else would want to try to unify all areas of knowledge?
Peter Burke is also aware of the obstacles that the digital age has created for knowledgeable people. The vast majority of people on Burke’s list were born before the advent of the Internet. He pointed out that many jobs that helped the knowledgeable people in the past have disappeared or are disappearing, such as librarians, bookstore owners and employees, museum curators, etc. But nowadays, universities that emphasize the division of knowledge and political correctness have failed to provide the free learning environment that erudites need.
On the contrary, the digital age provides a plethora of information. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Informed citizens are the best defense against tyranny.” But with so much freely disseminated information, isn’t it somehow shaping a new tyranny? One might think that the excess of information is also accompanied by a decrease in talents.
Edward Said, Susan Sontag, Stephen Jay Gould, these people are on Burke’s list, but are they really knowledgeable?
Said has published a book on Western colonialism with a strong political inclination, and has written some music reviews; Sontag has read philosophy, and has written books on photography and low culture from an academic perspective; ancient Elder wrote about popular science. How do these people compare with the early knowledgeable people like Leibniz, Mary Watley Montagu, and Bacon? Far as far away as possible.
However, the book “Educators” does not mention the apparent decline of erudites. At the end of the book, Burke still holds the wish for the revival of the knowledgeable. He quoted Leibniz, “One person who can connect everything is better than ten people.” The last sentence of the book is, “In an era of high professionalism, we need such people more than before.” But is it really so?
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/joseph-epstein/polymath-know-it-alls/
This article is from WeChat official account:Neugeist (ID: Neugeist), author: Joseph Epstein (American writer), translator: Yanliang, reviewer: Yang Yinzhu, editor: Yang Yinzhu