When I was growing up, I felt like I was only one who didn't know what was going on, everything was confusing, life seemed too complex to understand. Church elders pretended omniscience, and there were my teachers, and somewhere out in the real world was the U.S. President; they knew it all, and I wanted to also. As I matured, the word “wisdom” came to my attention, and it seemed to define what I was looking for, but where would I look for wisdom? The distinction between fiction and reality is tenuous to a child, the characters in books seemed wise: the Wizard of Oz, and Tarzan. Authors populated books with heroes who had an uncanny ability to grok their surroundings. On television too, characters were steadfast in their self-confidence. This misled me for years: only maturity brought the understanding that the creators of these characters had no more comprehension of wisdom than anyone else.
As I approached adulthood, wisdom still maintained a mystical place in my consciousness but pedestrian examples, like principals & judges, never satisfied my expectations. How does one get wisdom? The concept was inscrutable but eventually I deduced that wisdom was the result of knowledge & experience, the more the better. With that understanding came the search for wise people and how they became that way? I searched back into history: Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin. The former are known for conquering the World in fact, but the latter are known for conquering everything else: science, art, medicine & imagination, which seemed to be the direction I was looking for. They were called Renaissance Men (or woman, henceforth, “Renaissance Myn”) but upon closer examination, who were these people?
Isaac Newton
For example, the famous Sir Isaac Newton accused his friend, fellow Renaissance Myn John Locke, of having "endeavoured to embroil me with woemen," and the French philosopher, Voltaire, said that Newton "was never sensible to any passion, was not subject to the common frailties of mankind, nor had any commerce with women - a circumstance which was assured me by the physician and surgeon who attended him in his last moments." So, Newton was a virgin? The initial promise of wisdom was not looking so good.
Richard Feynman
And there were other stories: while researching quantum electrodynamics at CalTech, Renaissance Myn Richard Feynman used a strip bar as an office, making sketches and writing physics equations on the paper placemats, and he painted “Feynman diagrams,” a visual representation of his theories, on his van. Even then, he was apparently attractive to women, though the divorce complaint from one of his wives stated, “He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night.”
John von Neumann's 1954 Ferrari 500 Mondial
Renaissance Myn, John von Neumann, father of the digital computer, was a notoriously bad driver but he nonetheless enjoyed driving, frequently while reading a book, resulting in numerous arrests and accidents.
Statue of Leonardo in Amboise
Leonardo di Vinci was a pederast: Florentine court records show that Leonardo was charged with sodomy, and when he was Middle-aged he traveled with two young apprentices who stayed with him for the rest of his life.
Obviously, just a smattering of famous personages was not enough, the database would have to be larger, and an objective measure would have to be determined. Unsurprisingly, there is heated debate on what constitutes a Renaissance Myn, and who qualifies. My goal was to turn the subjective into the objective, and the secret of objectivity is good measurement, assigning values and adding for a score to distinguish the dilettante from the maestro. I took on the task with some trepidation, who am I to say who is or is not a Renaissance Myn? But after several years of accumulating potential candidate's names, plus Googling the words “polymath,” “Renaissance man” & “autodidact,” there were 100 candidates for Renaissance Mynhood. The first interesting facts are that of the 100, 4 were women, and 12 were Americans.
Next it was important to determine what would distinguish a Renaissance Myn? Breadth of knowledge certainly, and depth of knowledge actually. With some consideration, we can divide knowledge into its constituent pieces of a complete pie, the most obvious big slices being science, law, medicine & business. Popularly, a person achieving multiple recognitions among this grouping is called a polymath. Then using Wikipedia combined with my mild OCD, I cursorily researched each pretender to find their level of achievement in each area, and yes, there were 24 polymaths among the 100. (Their total personal score is listed after their name, out of a maximum possible 32.) The most famous are: Galileo (12), Buckminster Fuller (16), and Alexander Graham Bell (15).
It is the subjective things in life that are the most difficult to distinguish and quantify. Art immediately comes to mind because what is art? Certainly painting, music, sculpture, writing, or anything creative, but also performance such as dancing, singing & acting. Of course, philosophy is one of the ideals of Renaissance Myn, so it is definitely a piece of the pie, and we expect any aspiring Renaissance Myn to understand the differences in humanity, which is achieved by exposure to a wide variety of peoples and cultures through Travel. Lastly, sport, in particular athleticism, makes people stand out, and which has always been part of the Greek ideal, idolized by many in endless competition, but sport is only a subset of competition, there is also competition with goals and with things, such as hobbies & collecting. Historical precedence has termed people exhibiting combinations of these accomplishments as Humanists. Of the 17 Humanists among the 100, the most famous are: Theodore Roosevelt (19), David Hume (19), and Pythagoras (12).
Finally, how can we not assign a name for those people who are both Polymaths and Humanists? Luckily, history also provides that designation: Homo Universalis. A full quarter of the 100 Renaissance Myn candidates qualified as Homo Universalis, among them: Benjamin Franklin (25), Thomas Jefferson (23), Aristotle (21), Leonardo di Vinci (20), and Howard Hughes (18.5). Though some people might quibble, these people, plus others identified using this objective method, could reasonably be accepted as Renaissance Myn.
Modern Renaissance Myn?
Fascinating as historical figures may be, my original goal was to find wisdom today, for myself. It seems obvious that this same strategy could be used to identify & differentiate any nascent Renaissance Myn. Then, like any good science, we could test that hypothesis by scoring their accomplishments and comparing them to our theoretical ideal.
A Renaissance Myn of the past had the advantage that one person could know everything that could be known at the time. To be an expert in science was to learn what most Grade-schoolers of modern times are taught, and to invent was a bit of thought and creatively using instruments that could be crafted from household materials. But times get more complex, Thomas Young (1773–1829), an English scientist & physician, was called "The Last Man Who Knew Everything." As knowledge progressed, the ability to learn & discover new things became more difficult. One now needs to learn a great deal before anything new & original can be identified, and the instruments to pursue most knowledge are very rarefied. However, the advantage us moderns have is opportunity: advanced schooling is easily available, and technology makes all things possible to anyone with the ambition to attempt them. So, where a millennium ago the overlap of ability & opportunity to be a Renaissance Myn was fleetingly small, nowadays, more exceptional people can achieve the distinction.
Interestingly, since Renaissance Myn are invisible in our celebrity-obsessed society, most people assume that none exist, but that itself is also a testable hypothesis, especially with access to the Internet, we need only define the parameters and search. Polymaths can be objectively confirmed by the number of letters after their name: PhD, JD, MD, MBA, and their licenses to practice in those fields: PE, Bar, doctor, CPA. In fact, the trifecta of a science PhD, JD, and an MD, of which there are 19 people in the world that hold all three, certainly qualifies as a Polymath. And entertainment in the form of art, travel, and sport has never been so prevalent, and with so much free time to pursue. Many people are Humanists now or will be during their life just by doing the things they love. The only thing left is to compare modern people against known Renaissance Myn of the past and see if there is a strong correlation?
My own path to here:
Even in my first memories, knowledge for its own sake was exciting, and as I grew, collecting insects, and stamps, and looking at every page of a book was thrilling. Adults considered me a curiosity, and among nerds I was a hero. I can’t remember the day I learned what a Renaissance Myn was but I know that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up. The one and only time I interviewed for a promotion in the mundane workforce, I was asked to describe myself: I said I wanted to be a “Renaissance Man.” I quickly learned that kind of candor is not well received by the majority of the population, especially in a male-dominated competitive business environment, so from then on I kept such intentions to myself, even from my wife. In fact, a couple years after my erstwhile retirement, my wife encouraged me to seek new goals because I was becoming a nuisance around the house. One suggestion among a wide range of possibilities was Medical School which my wife thought was a bit over-the-top, but she was unsuspecting of my true intent, which was pursuit of Complete Homo Universalis with a score of 26.
But there is one question all aspiring Renaissance Myn want answered: who is the most impressive modern Renaissance Myn? Hint: He is a former astronaut.
For links to all the people mentioned, see http://www.martinhash.com/rmyn/Past%20R ... 20Myn.html
Martin Hash PhD, MD, JD, MBA, is an aspiring Renaissance Myn posting at MartinHash.com
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Martin Hash
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