The violin in Einstein’s hands, or the Conversation about the “Universal Man”
What is a “Universal Man”? How has the concept of Homo Universalis, the archetypal expression of which was Leonardo da Vinci, changed today in the era of the Digital Revolution? Who do we call “universal” these days? I want to answer that the Universal Man is the one who has mastered and comprehended all the heritage of human thought. But such a definition would be wrong. First of all, a Universal Man has mastered a wide range of interdisciplinary knowledge, erased the boundaries between different disciplines, and learned to see the world not as a collection of disparate fragments, but as something whole, as an Universum.
The Universal Man does not choose between humanitarian and natural-scientific knowledge; he synthesizes them: science and art, music and mathematics, philosophy and technology. It would seem that everything is clear so far. We can recall Niels Bohr, who combined his interest in quantum mechanics with philosophy and music, Albert Einstein, who loved to play the violin, Erwin Schrodinger, who wrote poetry and was interested in philosophy, Max Planck, who was concerned in music and philosophy, and other famous polymaths — from al-Farabi to Pavel Florensky.
However, the Universal Man has another, far from the obvious, property, namely the ability to see paradigms’ change. I always emphasize that I use the word “paradigm” without reference to Kuhn’s theory of paradigms and take its original meaning: from the Greek. παράδειγμα, “example, model, sample.” At the same time, I want to emphasize that we are talking about the ability to see paradigmatic models in the chain of historical events, in the metamorphoses of cultures and civilizations, in individuals’ destinies. This ability was given to such thinkers as Friedrich Schelling, Hans Sedlmayr, Oswald Spengler, Martin Heidegger, Aby Warburg, Friedrich Georg Junger, Julius Evola, Eugene Golovin, Giammaria Gonella, Mircea Eliade, Francis Yates, Carl Gustav Jung, Tadeusz Zieliński;, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, etc. And I am absolutely convinced that, for example, the history of culture should be studied not from a certain period but from attempts to understand its paradigmatic foundations. If you understand the very paradigm of, say, ancient Greek culture (i.e., the foundation of European civilization), you can easily trace all the historical, philosophical, cultural, religious metamorphoses from the beginning of European culture to its final stage. Without “grasping” the paradigmatic foundations of culture, all its study will be reduced to the accumulation of fragmentary information, and it does not matter how many books you read — two dozen or two hundred. You will be well informed, but you will not have access to knowledge.
So, the Universal Man can trace the change of paradigms. A paradigm shift always means a fundamental change that can be correlated with a “re-creation of the world.” Everything changes: the person’s ontological status, his view of life, death and the afterlife, time and space, the divine; his ideals change, values change, etc. The understanding of these changes dictates the division into historical periods. There is an ontological chasm between the man of Antiquity and the man of the Middle Ages. And those who naively believe that man is always the same, that we are the same today as we were hundreds of years ago, make an unforgivable mistake. When we talk about the “ancient Greek,” “medieval European,” “Renaissance man,” “Modern man,” “Postmodern individual,” we are talking about completely different and, I would dare to say more radically, opposed human types.
The ability that I attribute to the Universal Man develops through super-professional skills such as critical thinking and cognitive flexibility and cross-cultural competence, that is, understanding what a “history of mentalities” is. Despite everything, most of us still do not know other cultures; we suffer from cultural provincialism. Not only are we far from understanding the great diversity of non-Western cultures, but the worst part is that we do not even understand Western European culture well. We proclaim ourselves cosmopolitans and praise globalism, which has abolished all borders. However, due to some misunderstanding, we still do not know how to communicate with representatives of other cultures properly: Arab, Iranian, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, etc. If we don’t understand other cultures, if we don’t understand the paradigm shift within Western European culture, 1) how can we comprehend the radical changes (on a global scale!) caused by the digital revolution? 2) how will we understand where and why the post-humanistic trend and its accompanying post-human studies arose? 3) how will we understand Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, etc.? How can we interact with the Chinese, the Japanese, the Arabs, the Indians (whether it’s about business or creative projects) if we have the most superficial understanding of their philosophy and culture? We lack fundamental knowledge. We are too busy acquiring ephemeral skills that become obsolete faster than we think to apply them. We try to strengthen our worldview’s roof, but we completely forget that it does not exist without a solid foundation.
It is no secret that we have produced more information in the last few years than in humanity’s entire history. However, we are not equipped with the tools to separate the important from the secondary, the meaningful from the complete nonsense. We are drowning in an ocean of information and are quickly becoming victims of the ” information explosion.” And we don’t know how to handle this information; we don’t know how to structure it, let alone turn it into knowledge.
Another problem: we have lost the ability to perceive complex texts. We voluntarily switched from paper books to electronic ones. Myriads of pages pass before us, but the fact is that people are weaning themselves from reading them. Instead, they scan them. Scattered attention, fragmentary perception of information, searching for keywords, “surfing” rather than reading-this results from those who avoid paper books under various pretexts come. Gradually, they stop reading at all, simply losing the ability to read. They can no longer read Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, much less Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology. And then they not only stop understand complex sentences but also stop formulating them. Everything begins to shorten, to diminish: modern people increasingly prefer short videos (in education, even a trend has appeared — micro-courses), films with speedy editing. The term “Digital Brains” has already appeared. And I assure you that these brains are not capable of coping with the highest cognitive level tasks. However, this does not apply to Universal Personalities. They can both perceive complex texts and create them. With meta-abilities that are not subject to automation and cannot even be simulated by a computer, Universal Personalities can generate ideas with “explosive” potential. Frans Johansson calls it the “ Medici effect.”
Rankings of key skills and competencies, the so-called “skills and competencies of the future,” are published annually. Approaching them very critically, I can’t resist drawing up an alternative rating, where I decided to include those “tools” that, in my opinion, should be included in the arsenal of the Universal Man of the XXI century. And of course, their development is included in the program of my educational project Janus Academy.
1. Knowledge of a wide range of interdisciplinary knowledge.
2. Integrative thinking.
3. Cross-cultural competence.
4. Cognitive flexibility.
5. Critical thinking.
6. Good written and oral communication skills.
7. Possession of mnemonic techniques.
Over the past few years, I have met hundreds of people who have shown all the signs of polymaths, but in our highly specialized society, they have been forced to climb into the “ Procrustean bed.” They have a different nature, a different way of thinking. They could be actors, directors, producers, artists, composers, and at the same time — IT specialists, business people, or scientists. But society forces them to squeeze their huge potential into a narrow-necked vessel and do one thing at a time. They are doomed to feel the inferiority of being through no fault of their own.
It’s time to change that.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the “one-button specialist” was an unthinkable anomaly. And interdisciplinarity was not the exception, but the norm. I want to return this norm to us. So that no one else has to sacrifice music for mathematics, poetry for physics, philosophy for science. Let the violin remains in Einstein’s hands.
