Curious

In Kyle’s notes on John Quincy Adams, curiosity is the trait that marks Adams as a Polymath: he “was endlessly curious about how things worked, including things that didn’t turn a profit.” The book portrays him as someone who “seemed to know everything about everything,” reciting Homer in Greek and probing every science — a “relentless curiosity about how things work” that didn’t bend toward utility or profit.

Kyle explicitly ties this to Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci (Book) and Leonardo’s famous to-do list — “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker” — as the archetype of curiosity drilling into “random curiosities” for their own sake, which in Leonardo’s case led from the woodpecker’s tongue to a fascination with the muscles of the human tongue. The concept frames disinterested, non-instrumental curiosity (knowing for the sake of knowing) as the engine of the integrated, polymathic intellect Kyle admires in both figures.

Where this appears

• John Quincy Adams — Adams as “endlessly curious about how things worked, including things that didn’t turn a profit,” linked to Leonardo’s woodpecker’s-tongue curiosity and the polymath ideal