The greatest polymath you’ve never heard of
When you think of polymaths, who comes to mind? Leonardo? Nikola? Aristotle?
What if I told you the greatest polymath the world has ever known is a) not a man and b) still alive.
It all started with a Twitter scroll a few weeks back. An intriguing picture. A field of golden wheat in stark contrast with debris and grey concrete. The kind of poetic paradox that compelled me to click for more.
Paradox, it turns out, is exactly what Agnes Denes was going for. She planted a wheat field on the most expensive real estate in the world to call attention to humanity’s misplaced values. No slogans. No protest signs. Just the sheer power of her visual philosophy.
Because humans love labels, she’s most often described as a “conceptual artist”. But the more I read her work, the more I discovered the relentless student, teacher and translator of humanity’s many dimensions. From math to linguistics, from social science to poetry, few are the frontiers of knowledge that have resisted her radical curiosity.
Reading Agnes Denes felt like taking the red pill Neo decides to go for in the Matrix. It fundamentally rewired my interpretation of the world.
This is what she taught me.
“Generalist” is no longer a bad word
I’ve long suffered from “generalitis”, an acute condition caused by the failure to find a specialization to settle on. The first to diagnose it was a supervisor during my first internship. “You should pick a specialty” he offered as advice, “something concrete like Economics or Law”.
Agnes Denes didn’t share his enthusiasm about specialization. In “The Human Argument” she writes:
“Just seventy-five years ago Einstein could have understood all of physics. Today it is fragmented into hundreds of fields, with no one person capable of understanding them all. [...] Our hard-won scientific knowledge accumulates undigested in specializations, and so blocks meaningful communication between disciplines. Lacking overview and direction, human values tend to decline.”
Through her art, she integrated seemingly disconnected fields to open our eyes to the universality of knowledge. She coined the term “Eco-Logic” marrying the physical canvas of nature with the metaphysical palette of philosophy to illustrate the tension between human intelligence and environmental degradation.
Today, I no longer feel inadequate about being a generalist. On the contrary, Denes is helping me see the value of being an integrator. Looking for the hidden links between different fields of knowledge is what drew me to writing in the first place. My hope is that with every word I publish, I can get a little closer to that universal truth she spent her life uncovering.
The paradox of information
Forty years ago, a tweet referred exclusively to the sound of a baby bird. And yet Agnes Denes predicted that the growth of information would have consequences on our perception of reality.
“While the individual may experience freedom, he has little potential to interact or identify effectively with society as a whole” she wrote. “The information overload numbs his mind. Mesmerized, he gulps headlines and lives by the media, assuming that what he hears and reads is true, and the rest does not matter.”
This quote seems more relevant than ever today. We are living in a time when the tiniest of events is dissected and analyzed infinitely. The result, according to Denes, constituted one of the central paradoxes of human existence: ignorance in the midst of information overload.
I was trapped in that paradox, relentlessly consuming more news in an attempt to make sense of the world. It turns out, Marcus Aurelius offers much better insight into the present than all the news apps on my phone.
Denes spent years studying ancient Egyptian culture, learned the hieroglyphic alphabet and obsessively studied pyramids. She used ancient languages and ideas as a lens to raise questions about the future of humanity. She studied timeless wisdom to make sense of the present.
Writing is my attempt to fish out that wisdom. It’s my tiny raft to keep afloat in an ocean of information.
Blending disciplines is a cocktail for change
In an interview where she is asked about her project Time Capsule, Agnes explains: “My work, if you examine it carefully, is about dealing with problems humanity has and trying to find benign solutions.”
The use of the word “benign” seemed odd to me. A tumor is “benign” when it does not spread, when it is not dangerous. I Googled some more. Something is benign when it is “harmless” or “of a gentle disposition”. Adjectives that are not often used to qualify solutions to massive-scale problems like environmental degradation, gender inequality or extreme poverty.
And yet there lies the genius of Agnes Denes: The recognition that in order to take on humanity’s biggest problems, it is not enough to “find solutions”, you need to bring human consciousness along. You need to gently invite people into the problem and turn them into an agent of change. In Tree Mountain - A Living Time Capsule, she designed something that was at once a concrete solution to deforestation and a device to ignite a sense of responsibility in people beyond their own lifespan.
As a long-time Googler, I’m naturally enthusiastic about the power of technology to advance human progress. But I also learned that apps don’t change the world, human behavior does. Denes understood that a long time ago. Visual philosophy can be as powerful as a million lines of code.
Agnes Denes is 90 years old today. She remains surprisingly unknown beyond her environmental art. I’ll leave you with her Manifesto hoping she can continue to inspire the relentless pursuit of knowledge she dedicated her life to.
