Disclaimer: This essay was planned and written in collaboration with Gemini Pro 2.5.
To be a scholar you need to be a particular kind of person, to have a particular kind of mind, perhaps. If this is the case, then it is even truer of the polymath: they must have a mind that is different again to the typical scholar who specialises in only one field. The polymath is rare, and this is often understood as a natural feature of the human mind, a reflection of cognitive limits that make deep knowledge in one field the norm among scholars, and mastery of many an exception. I will not argue for such an understanding in this essay. Instead, I will argue that these modes of being are not cognitive givens but historically conditioned subjectivities made available by the prevailing conditions of knowledge. Adopting a genealogical approach in the manner of Michel Foucault, I will trace how the knowledge-producing subject has been shaped and re-shaped by its surrounding episteme, the unconscious framework that determines what can be thought and known in a particular era. Such an inquiry reveals a grand historical arc: from the integrated world of the Renaissance, through the discipline-based structure of modernity, and into our present moment, a profound transition catalysed by digital technology and artificial intelligence. This shift is actively reconfiguring the very meaning of intellectual work, dissolving the primacy of the specialist and giving rise to a new ideal which I will call the scholar-as-conductor.
Before the modern age of specialisation, the intellectual ideal was not the focused expert but the versatile mind. In the Renaissance, the Uomo universale or ‘Universal Man’ was not an anomaly but the highest expression of humanist aspiration, a figure admired for a breadth of skill across what we would now consider disparate fields. This ideal was embodied in figures like Leon Battista Alberti, whose contemporaries celebrated his prowess in architecture, painting, classical scholarship, and mathematics, seeing his capacity to excel in all as the fulfilment of human potential. Leonardo da Vinci, with his restless curiosity driving him from painting and anatomy to engineering and botany, was seen as a divine virtuoso. The modern label ‘polymath’, however, is an anachronistic projection onto this period. The polymath of modernity is ‘many-learned’ (poly - math), an exception to the specialists which surround them, whereas the Uomo universale was a singular, unified being who fulfilled the expectation for a great mind. The world of knowledge was more fluid, a single, integrated territory to be explored rather than a collection of walled gardens. This is not to romanticise the era; Leonardo’s boundless curiosity often frustrated his patrons, as commissions were abandoned for new intellectual pursuits. This tension reveals that even in an integrated episteme, a conflict existed between the drive for universal knowledge and the practical demands of a society that still required finished works.
This integrated landscape was fractured by the arrival of the printing press and the subsequent explosion in the availability of information. This technological rupture created an organisational crisis that the Enlightenment sought to resolve. The great French Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert stands as a monument to this effort, a systematic attempt to map, order and classify all human knowledge. This monumental act of organisation, while radically democratic in its impulse to make knowledge accessible, had the paradoxical effect of drawing the very borders that would define the modern, discipline-based university. This new structure of knowledge, in turn, required a new kind of subject. The specialist, an individual trained through a specific regimen of what Foucault termed disciplinary power, became the most efficient and authoritative producer of legitimate knowledge. The institutionalisation of knowledge within the university meant that to become, say, a historian or a physicist required submission to the unique rules, methods, and modes of verification of that discipline. It is no accident that the same term is used for the discipline-based structure of the university and the disciplinary power exercised within it; the former is the architectural plan of modern knowledge which requires the techniques of the latter—training, examination, and surveillance—to shape the individual into what Foucault calls a ‘docile body’ of expertise. The specialist is a disciplined subject, forged by the power structures of this new episteme. In this order, figures of extraordinary breadth like John von Neumann or Bertrand Russell became our paradigmatic polymaths, defined as remarkable precisely because they defied the dominant subjectivity. Their existence as exceptions proves the power of the rule, and their breadth was often enabled by their deep grounding in foundational ‘meta’ fields like mathematics and logic, which provided a formal, universal toolkit applicable across many domains.
Today, the discipline-based episteme is being destabilised by a new technological shift, ushering in what might be called an ‘automatic age’ of infinite, generable content. The internet and generative AI provide the technical means for unprecedented cross-disciplinary synthesis. A user can traverse centuries of scholarship in an afternoon, requesting syntheses of hitherto unexplored intersections of knowledge. And yet this potential for integration exists in a state of tension with our inherited intellectual habits. Digital life often leads to the creation of more intensely specialised and ideologically sealed silos because the modern subject has been conditioned by modernity to seek identity and security within a single field. This habit is now also amplified by the disciplinary force of engagement-driven algorithms that guide users into ever-narrowing corridors of confirmation. The potential for integration remains, but it exists as a path of active resistance against this default fragmentation.
This epistemic friction calls forth a new kind of intellectual subject, one who develops novel strategies for navigating this new environment: the scholar-as-conductor. The core function of this emerging figure is to act as a synthesiser and generator. Their work is not primarily critical or deconstructive, but constructive and pragmatic. They orchestrate disparate elements—vast datasets, computational models, theoretical texts, human experts, and AI tools—to produce a new, coherent, and useful knowledge, be it a solution to a complex problem, a novel scientific model, or even a philosophical work on the nature of scholarship. They do not create ex nihilo from a blank slate; rather, they operate as an explorer within a dense web of existing cultural and scientific material, prompting and guiding the outputs of autonomous systems. The core skill shifts from solitary creation to curation, synthesis, and provocation. The output of their work reflects this generative process; it might be a traditional paper, but it is just as likely to be an interactive dataset, a piece of software, or a multi-modal explanation of a complex system, often produced as the collaborative product of a human-machine ensemble. This emerging role of the scholar-as-conductor mirrors a shift I have identified elsewhere in the arts, where the artist is becoming less a solitary maker and more a ‘navigator’ of a dense web of cultural material.
The use of these powerful generative tools, however, introduces a profound challenge to traditional notions of intellectual authority. Because AI can produce sophisticated and plausible falsehoods, the credibility of the conductor cannot rest solely on the polish or persuasive power of the final output. This necessitates the development of new forms of rigour. Authority must shift from the product to the process. This new rigour is procedural and transparent; it requires the conductor to meticulously document their inquiry, making their interaction with AI systems auditable. It involves revealing the prompts used, the data sources consulted, and the methods employed to verify the machine’s output.
This constructive, tool-driven figure stands in sharp contrast to another beneficiary of the polymath lineage, a key intellectual figure of the late twentieth century, Richard Rorty’s pragmatic Philosopher (with a capital ‘P’). Rorty’s Philosopher acts as a cultural critic and conversational facilitator, using the tools of hermeneutics and irony to prevent any single vocabulary from achieving tyrannical dominance. Their aim is to keep the human conversation going. The conductor, while sharing a post-foundational sensibility, has a different aim and an expanded toolkit; they use computational instruments not just to interpret the world, but to build new, functional models of it.
However, I foresee an objection to the possibility or prevalence of the scholar-as-conductor, since it is one I have seen used to explain the rarity of the polymath in the age of modernity. This objection is one rooted in a seemingly immutable biological reality: what of the limited capacity of the human brain? Surely specialisation is just a necessary adaptation to the brain’s limited processing power. This critique correctly identifies a biological constraint, but misinterprets its significance. Cognitive Load Theory, a well-documented field of psychological research, posits that our working memory is indeed severely limited, and that learning is the process of overcoming this bottleneck to build complex schemas in our virtually limitless long-term memory (Sweller). The crucial insight, however, is that this biological constraint is not a destiny but a raw material upon which historical epistemes work. The modern, discipline-based curriculum can be understood as a masterful, if historically contingent, system for managing cognitive load. By breaking knowledge into sequenced, manageable parts, it minimised extraneous distractions and allowed the student to focus their limited cognitive resources on the intrinsic difficulty of the subject matter. The contemporary phenomenon of ‘cognitive overload’ stems directly from an epistemic mismatch: a subject trained in the ordered, low-load world of print is now immersed in the chaotic, high-load environment of the network. The conductor, then, can be understood as a subject who excels at managing this new cognitive environment. They develop sophisticated personal and technological strategies—using AI not as a crutch, but as a filter and a partner—to reduce extraneous load and maximise their capacity for germane load, the deep, energising work of making novel connections.
The journey from the Uomo universale, through the specialist, to the emerging scholar-as-conductor is a testament to the idea that the ways we think and produce knowledge are not fixed. They are subjectivities produced by the technological, social, and institutional forces of their time. The challenge of our era is to consciously cultivate the skills of this new subject: to resist the algorithmic pull towards fragmentation, to manage the new cognitive environment with intention, and to conduct the powerful new tools at our disposal with transparency and intellectual integrity. This essay itself, a composition woven from human dialogue and AI-assisted synthesis, stands as a small artefact of the very process it seeks to understand, a quiet rehearsal for a new way of making sense of the world.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995.
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Sweller, John. "Cognitive Load Theory." The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol. 55, 2011, pp. 37-76.