Looks like you can all relax. Everyone’s ‘pivoting’ these days, so why not Satan? 📷
Mark Luetke shows how he uses a Zettelkasten for creative work (‘zines!)
“The goal here is to create an apophenic mindset - one where the mind becomes open to the random connections between objects and ideas. Those connections are the spark we’re after. That spark is inspiration.”
Atomic notes - all in one place
From today there’s a new category in the navigation bar of Writing Slowly.
‘Atomic Notes’ now shows all posts about making notes.
How to make effective notes is a long-standing obsession of mine, but this new category was inspired by Bob Doto, who has his own fantastic resource page: All things Zettelkasten.
The Atomic Notes category is now highlighted on the site navigation bar.
And if you’d like to follow along with your favourite feed reader,there’s also a dedicated RSS feed (in addition to the more general whole-site feed).1
But if there’s a particular key-word you’re looking for here at Writing Slowly, you can use the built-in search.
And if you prefer completely random discovery, the site’s lucky dip feature has you covered.
Connect with me on micro.blog or on Mastodon. And on Reddit, I’m - you guessed it - @atomicnotes.
See also:
Assigning posts to a new category with micro.blog
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If you’re not sure what website feeds are, see IndieWeb: feed reader and how to use RSS feeds. ↩︎
A new post category in micro.blog, filtered to include existing posts
Micro.blog is a really useful and easy way to host a website. Even though it feels more like a cottage industry than a corporation there are way more features (and apps!) than I can probably use. It’s amazing how much Manton Reece, micro.blog’s creator, has achieved.
Under the hood the micro.blog platform is based on the Hugo static site generator, but there are a few differences. One such difference is post categories.
Here’s a new category being created.
It’s very easy to create a new category of posts, then you can use a filter to automatically add all new posts that include a selected key-word (or emoji, or even html element). By default only new posts are affected. But by running the filter you can also add all previous posts that meet the selected criteria. That’s what I wanted to do.
Once you have a new category, you can add a filter. This particular filter assigns to this new category only long posts with a particular word in the text.
When you run the filter, all existing posts that match will be added to the category. And future posts will be added automatically.
Also, each category gets its own RSS feed, which can be very useful.
This process was much easier than I expected!
More info from elsewhere:
How to overcome Fetzenwissen: the illusion of integrated thought
It’s too easy to produce fragmentary knowledge
One potential problem associated with making notes according to the Zettelkasten approach is Verknüpfungszwang: the compulsion to find connections. It may be true philosophically that everything’s connected, but in the end what matters is useful or meaningful connections. With your notes, then, you need to make worthwhile, not indiscriminate links.
Another potential problem is Fetzenwissen: fragmentary knowledge, along with the illusion that disjointed fragments can produce integrated thought.
Almost by definition, notes are brief, and I’m an enthusiast of making short, modular, atomic notes. Yes, this results in knowledge presented in fragments. And in their raw form these fragmentary notes are quite different from the kind of coherent prose and well-developed arguments readers usually expect. You can’t just jam together a set of notes and expect them to make an instant essay. So is this fragmentary knowledge really a problem for note-making? If so, how can determined note-makers overcome it?
Does the index box distort the facts?
Near the start of the Twentieth Century Karl Kraus, the Austrian1 writer and editor of the journal Die Fackel (The Torch), opposed the use of the Zettelkasten (English:index box) because he believed it produced inadequate thought, memory and writing.
He particularly disliked the way the technique created what he saw as the illusion of integrated thought out of nothing more than disjointed fragments.
Kraus was well-known for his acerbic aphorisms, and he had one specially for Zettelkasten users:
“Anyone who writes in order to display education must have memory; and then he is merely an ass. If he also uses the scientific disciplines or the card index (Zettelkasten), he is also a fraud” (Die Fackel, Heft 279-80 (1909)).
Kraus ridiculed his literary and political enemy Maximilian Harden, a rival journalist who was the editor of Die Zukunft (“The Future”), He claimed Harden either owned a Zettelkasten or just had a mind built like one. Either or both of these, Kraus claimed, had ruined Harden’s writing style. If Hardin did use a Zettelkasten, said Kraus, it really showed. And if he didn’t use one, then he must have internalised the constraints of the Zettelkasten. Either way, according to Kraus, the result was poor writing.
More generally, and rather snobbishly, Kraus lamented the kind of memory possessed by the “day clerk”, which he held to be a mish-mash of “names and sayings one has heard, of mis-heard judgments and badly-read reports, of concepts and histories without context, of facts seen distortedly, of fifty fashionable expressions, and of the additional feature of one’s own fragmentary knowledge (Fetzenwissen)” (Die Fackel, Heft 230-31 (July 15, 1907)).
To be sure, Kraus was making at least half a fair point. Such connectivity is indeed an illusion, in the sense that it is fabricated. But as with all illusions, the trick is to do it seamlessly well. From fragments you can build a greater whole, if you do it carefully enough. Knowledge is necessarily fragmentary, in the sense that everything big is made of smaller parts. But that is no reason to present it in a clumsy manner. Just because you start with fragments, that doesn’t mean you should end there.
Can you create coherent writing just from a pile of notes?
Despite the sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s apparent canonization as the patron saint of the Zettelkasten, I’m not convinced his writing always achieved the kind of coherence that Karl Kraus would have appreciated. Here is the writer Robert Minto, lamenting his own use of the Zettelkasten approach, which he found let him down when it came to actually writing a doctoral thesis. He turned to Luhmann’s writing to review how the master had done it:
“I decided to read one of Luhmann’s books to see what a zettelkasten-generated text ought to look like. To my horror, it turned out to be a chaotic mess that would never have passed muster under my own dissertation director. It read, in my opinion, like something written by a sentient library catalog, full of disordered and tangential insights, loosely related to one another — very interesting, but hardly a model for my own academic work.” – Robert Minto , Rank and File — Real Life
This reader is far from alone in finding Luhmann’s prose style off-putting. In a section entitled “Why he wrote such bad books”, a scholar of Luhmann’s work wrote that Luhmann’s texts were:
“extremely dry, unnecessarily convoluted, poorly structured, highly repetitive, overly long, and aesthetically unpleasing” – Moeller,The Radical Luhmann, 2012, p. 10.
Another example of the kind of digressive writing style of which Karl Kraus might have disapproved is that of the philosopher and historian Hans Blumenberg. According to one Blumenberg scholar:
“His writings can be disorienting in their digressiveness, at times seemingly impelled only by the desire to exhaustively transmit his enormously wide reading. The fragmented and anecdotal nature of some of his later books, composed of sometimes tenuous thematic groupings of short pieces (often originally published in the feuilleton pages of newspapers such as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) seems fitting for a thinker who is said to have prepared for writing by collecting quotations on index cards. These cards were then worked through one by one and marked as ‘used’ when they had been integrated into the finished text.” – Plagne, 2017:9. See also Nicholls, 2015.2
Perhaps you should keep your notes private
The opposite extreme of this kind of writing-as-bricolage is that of the German philosopher G.W.F Hegel, who went to great lengths to hide the sources from which he assembled his own work. Hegel’s approach to writing is an excellent example of what might be termed the distinction between frontstage and backstage in knowledge work. This is a concept developed by the sociologist Erving Goffmann, but its quite familiar. In the theatre, the audience only sees part of what the actors and stage crew are up to. In the restaurant too, there’s a lot happening behind the scenes that the diners never see. For many of us, the background work is often quite different from the finished work we show to the world. Unlike Luhmann and Blumenberg, whose often clumsy final prose style was apparently conditioned by the process of its assemblage, Hegel drafted and edited his work in such a way as to deliberately obscure his production methods. His own voluminous Zettelkasten, on which he utterly depended, was kept strictly backstage. He rarely even cited his sources.
I am arguing that this practice of editing fragments to make them appear seamlessly part of whole paragraphs, sections and chapters, is precisely what’s required of those who choose to work using initially fragmentary methods. It could be argued that a sophisticated thinker such as Niklas Luhmann probably had good reasons for his opaque prose style, quite other than literary ineptitude. Indeed, in The Radical Luhmann, Moeller suggests three such reasons; and Luhmann himself wrote a quite sceptical conference paper on whether academics should try to make themselves understood! However, for most writers and surely most readers, coherence remains a key literary virtue.
Make it flow
Hegel’s rigorous concealment of sources prompted Friedrich Kittler to suggest: “Hegel’s absolute Spirit is a hidden index box” “Hegels absoluter Geist ist ein versteckter Zettelkasten." – Friedrich Kittler, quoted in Krajewski, Kommunikation mit Papiermaschinen
To my mind Kittler’s criticism of Hegel makes a good, if rather arch joke, but it isn’t much of a criticism of Hegel’s writing style. Indeed, for completed writing to seem to the reader to be coherent, the index box should be hidden. This is the well-known skill of editing your writing to make it flow, and it’s hardly too much for readers to expect this of a writer.
True, there are a few writers who seem to have been more at home in their notes than in the finished work. Walter Benjamin, author of the unfinished Arcades Project was perhaps one of them. But fragmentary writing is rarely so influential as Benjamin’s.
My own aspiration is to produce coherent writing, but a glimpse backstage would reveal that this very article is cobbled together from four separate fragments, which I added directly to the whole by means of Transclusion. My conclusion from this little exercise is that you can create coherent writing just from a pile of notes. In fact, I’d go further and claim that this is a very helpful way of writing.
To create coherent writing, make coherent notes
Although final editing is always required, it may also be possible to craft the individual notes themselves in such a way that they really do lend themselves to seamless incorporation into a larger work. If you write disjointed, incoherent notes, you’re going to find it hard to use them to write a strong piece of finished writing. But conversely, if you write clear, concise and modular notes, densely linked, you’ll find it much easier to complete readable and persuasive work. Having said that, I would never censor myself by writing nothing, just because my idea isn’t concise enough. Writing itself is thinking, and there’s always a second draft!
Obviously, this is a skill that I’m still learning. The learning never ends. Writing useful notes is a skill you can always get better at. And I’m convinced this goal, of producing seamless writing from fragmentary origins, may well be achievable. It’s already quite enjoyable and that’s not a terrible thing.
See also:
From fragments you can build a greater whole
Aby Warburg and the search for interconnection
More on the Zettelkasten approach to writing notes
References
Krajewski, Markus. Kommunikation mit Papiermaschinen. Über Niklas Luhmanns Zettelkasten, in Hans-Christian von Herrmann, Wladimir Velminski (Editors) Maschinentheorien/Theoriemaschinen. Bern: Peter Lang. p.283-305
Kraus, Karl, Die Fackel. An online facsimile of Kraus’s journal, Die Fackel, can be found at AAC Fackel
Kuhn, Manfred. Critique of Zettelkästen Taking Note Now. 2007.
Moeller, Hans-Georg. 2012. The Radical Luhmann. New York: Columbia University Press.
Nicholls, Angus. Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Myth (New York: Routledge, 2015), 8.
Partington, Gill. “Friedrich Kittler’s” Aufschreibsystem”." Science Fiction Studies (2006): 53-67. PDF
Plagne, Francis Dominique 2017. “Hans Blumenberg’s anthropology of instrumental reason: culture, modernity, and self-preservation.” Thesis: School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne.
From fragments you can build a greater whole
Everything large and significant began as small and insignificant
This is my working philosophy of creativity and I’m trying to follow it through as best I can. Starting with simple parts is how you go about constructing complex systems.
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system”. — John Gall (1975) Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail, p. 71.
Bits and pieces put together to create a semblance of a whole, by Lawrence Weiner
Begin with fragments
In October 1837 the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson prompted the twenty-year-old Henry David Thoreau to start writing a journal. Thoreau took this advice very seriously. He finished up with 14 notebooks, 7,000 pages, and 2 million words. Small fragments can add up to an awful lot. From these bits and pieces he constructed pretty much all of his completed works. What began as jottings ended up as mature reflections.
He claimed his disconnected thoughts provoked others, so that “thought begat thought”. Thoreau wrote in his journal:
“To set down such choice experiences that my own writings may inspire me – and at least I may make wholes of parts.” - Thoreau, Henry David. 2009. The Journal, 1837-1861. Edited by Damion Searls. New York: New York Review Books.
The nest-eggs are what you start off with, without worrying how many you will finish with or what they might later hatch into.
From smaller parts build a greater whole
In a sense, the greater whole is an illusion. Really it’s nothing other than a collection of smaller pieces, joined together in such a way as to encourage the human tendency to see wholes even before it sees parts. As with the artwork of Lawrence Weiner, it’s all Bits and pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole.
These bits and pieces may seem insignificant. Perhaps you really are just another brick in the wall, as Pink Floyd once sang. But without bricks the wall is nothing. That’s pretty much all a wall is. Together the fragments add up to a greater whole, which may well be more than merely a semblance or an illusion. Sometimes the whole really matters. The author David Mitchell concludes his novel, Cloud Atlas with this reflection:
“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
A wall or an ocean is a large or even enormous reality, and without its many small components it would be nothing.
Join your work together
Image Source: TheJoinery_jp
To make a complete work you need to join the parts together with great care. Think of the work of the skilled joiner, who meticulously and ingeniously connects pieces of timber to make a sturdy and beautiful product - whether it be a piece of furniture or an architectural element such as a staircase or a ceiling vault.
Such an effect cannot be created without skill and effort. You can’t just nail two planks of wood together and hope for the best. In the same way you can’t place your notes side-by-side and expect to read a finished piece of writing.
To make your writing coherent you need to become a joiner.
Sönke Ahrens mentions this part of the writing process in his popular book on Taking Smart Notes. Sadly, his advice in this important area remains quite limited.
“Turn your notes into a rough draft. Don’t simply copy your notes into a manuscript. Translate them into something coherent and embed them into the context of your argument while you build your argument out of the notes at the same time. Detect holes in your argument, fill them or change your argument.” – 📚Ahrens, Sönke. 2017. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking: For Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace.
For those who can already write well, the point may be obvious, but for those of us for whom well-made prose doesn’t come easily, it needs to be stressed: the connecting together of thoughts and ideas is almost as important as the thoughts and ideas themselves. The writing must flow.
It is well worth reflecting on Thoreau’s writing practice.
“The thoughtfulness and quality of his journal writings enabled him to reuse entire passages from it in his lectures and published writings. In his early years, Thoreau would literally cut out pages or excerpts from the journal and paste them onto another page as he created his essays.” – Thoreau’s Writing - The Walden Woods Project
But he didn’t just cut and paste. His writing progressed through drafting and re-drafting, from the original raw field notes, to the journal, to his lectures, to essays, and from there to published books. Each of these shifts fine-tuned his writing until ultimately he had a very well-crafted outcome.
So even though Thoreau cut and pasted snippets of his work, joining small pieces together to make finished pieces of writing, this was very far from a lazy process. Walden, for example, was published after seven drafts, which took the author nine years to complete. I see Thoreau’s justly celebrated work as a prime example of the value of writing slowly.
Do it seamlessly well
If, like Thoreau, you put the bits and pieces together well enough, the readers won’t see the joins.
Or even better, as with the brick courses of the wall on which Weiner’s artwork is mounted, viewers do see the joins but this doesn’t detract in any way from the experience of the whole. You just need to avoid displaying what the German writer and editor Karl Kraus called fragmentary knowledge (Fetzenwissen) - the curse of the Zettelkasten, or card index.
It may be simple, but it’s not easy.
See also:
How to decide what to include in your notes
Before the days of computers, people used to collect all sorts of useful information in a commonplace book.
The ancient idea of commonplaces was that you’d have a set of subjects you were interested in. These were the loci - the places - where you’d put your findings. They were called loci communis - common places, in Latin, because it was assumed everyone knew what the right list of subjects was.
But in practice, everyone had their own set of categories and no one really agreed. It was personal.
Since the digital revolution, things have become trickier still. There’s no real storage limit so you could in principle make notes about everything you encounter. But no matter what software you use, your time on this earth is limited, so you need to narrow the field down somehow1.
But how, exactly?
You might consider just letting rip and collecting everything that interests you, as though you’re literally collecting everything.
Lion Kimbro tried to make a map of every thought he had.
As time passes, you’ll notice that you haven’t actually collected everything because that’s completely impossible. Even Thomas Edison, the prolific inventor, wasn’t interested in absolutely everything, although he tried hard to be. If you do a bit of a stock-take of your own notes, you’ll see that, really, you gravitate towards only a few subjects.
These are your very own ‘commonplaces’.
From then on you have two choices.
- If you’ve enjoyed it so far, you can just keep doing what you’ve been doing, collecting all the things. Why not?
- But if you like, you could start doing it more deliberately. For example, at the start of a new year, you could say to yourself: In 2023 I seem to have been interested in a,b, and c. Now in 2024 I want to explore more about b, drop a, and learn about d and e.
You could create an index, with a set of keywords, and add page number references to show what subject each entry is about, and how they relate. Or not. Of course, it’s your collection of notes and you can do whatever pleases you. That’s the point.
Bower birds collect everything, but with one crucial principle.
Where I live we have satin bower birds.
The male creates a bower out of twigs and strews the ground with the beautiful things he’s found. Apparently this impresses the females. The bower can contain practically anything, and it really is beautiful. Clothes pegs, pieces of broken pottery, plastic fragments, bread bag ties, lilli pilli fruit, Lego, electrical wiring, string - even drinking straws, as in the photo above. The male bower bird really does collect everything. But what every human notices immediately is that every single item, however unique, is blue.
I enjoy collecting stuff in my Zettelkasten, my collection of notes, but like the bower bird I have a simple filter. I always try to write: “this interests me because…” and if there’s nothing to say, there’s no point in collecting the item. It’s just not blue enough.
See also:
- How to be interested in everything
- Don’t you need to start with categories?
- It’s tempting to place your notes in fixed categories
- To build something big start with small fragments
- Thoughts are nest-eggs: Thoreau on writing
- This article is adapted from a comment on Reddit
Images:
Sacha Chua Book Summary CC-by-4.0.
Peter Ostergaard, Flickr, CC NC-by 2.0 Deed
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There are exceptions. A few people have tried to video their whole lives. And at least one person, Lion Kimbro, has tried to write down all their thoughts. But its not sustainable. ↩︎
Promethean shame among authors using AI tools:
“It starts to make you wonder, do I even have any talent if a computer can just mimic me?” The Verge
At last, writing slowly is back in fashion!
Cal Newport, author of the forthcoming book, 📚Slow Productivity, has finally latched on to the premise of this website: you can get a lot done by writing slowly.
Speeding up in pursuit of fleeting moments of hyper-visibility is not necessarily the path to impact. It’s in slowing down that the real magic happens.
I didn’t even know they could drive.
See also:
Thinking nothing of walking long distances
How far is too far to walk?
Author Charlie Stross observed that British people in the early nineteenth century, prior to train travel, walked a lot further than people today think of as reasonable.
I’ve noticed a couple of literary examples of this seemingly extreme walking behaviour, both of which took place in North Wales.
Headlong Hall
In chapter 7 of Thomas Love Peacock’s satirical novel, 📚Headlong Hall (1816), a group of the main characters takes a morning walk to admire the land drainage scheme around the newly industrial village of Tremadoc, and they walk halfway across Eryri to do so, traversing two valleys and two mountain passes. The main object of their interest is The Cob, a land reclamation project that was later to become a railway causeway. Having seen it, and having taken some refreshment in the village, they walk straight back again.
Image: The Moelwyn range, viewed from the Cob. Wikipedia CC sharealike 2.0
Wild Wales
You’d think the invention of the railways would have put people off walking such long distances, but apparently not so much. In his travel account, 📚Wild Wales (1862), George Borrow walks from Chester 18 miles to Llangollen, then walks another 11 miles to Wrexham just to fetch a book. Interestingly, he was writing after the railways had arrived. He was happy to put his wife and children on the train - but still walk the journey himself.
Real life
I would have believed these feats of everyday walking were improbable, except for the fact that when I was a child, a man in our village, Mr Large, walked every day to and from Chester, a round trip of 26 miles. He didn’t need to do it. He was in his eighties and well retired, and he could just have walked two miles to the bus stop. But apparently you don’t break the habits of a lifetime. Everyone in the village must have offered him a lift at one time or another, but he’d made it known that he preferred to walk. So having observed Mr Large regularly tramping the back lanes with determination, I already knew a long utility walk is more than possible.
These days, people rarely get out of their cars, convinced as they are that progress has been made. Walking is a problem, it seems, not a solution. And yet, on holiday, some people do long walks or even very long walks. For fun.
Oh brave new world that has such people in it!
Does the Zettelkasten have a top and a bottom?
What does it mean to write notes ‘from the bottom up’, instead of ‘from the top down’? It’s one of the biggest questions people have about getting started with making notes the Zettelkasten way. Don’t you need to start with categories? If not, how will you ever know where to look for stuff? Won’t it all end up in chaos?
Bob Doto answers this question very helpfully, with some clear examples, in What do we mean when we say bottom up?. I especially like this claim:
“The structure of the archive is emergent, building up from the ideas that have been incorporated. It is an anarchic distribution allowing ideas to retain their polysemantic qualities, making them highly connective.”
Which way is up?
My own preferred Zettelkasten metaphor is the rhizome, the mass of rooty material with no obvious centre or trunk and no definite top or bottom. Imagine a fungus as it spreads underground or in a rotten log. There’s no telling where it will pop up next.
It’s quite difficult to think with this image, though, because there’s plenty of conditioning to say everything around us is hierarchical, with a clear upside and downside. Families, schools, businesses, governments, nationalities, genders, races, footwear, even accents. Everyone always wants to know who’s up and who’s down. It’s nuts! As I write, the media is full of news about the Oscars - who’s been nominated, and why, and why not. The dominant organising image all around me isn’t the rhizome at all, it’s the tree.
Try seeing the trees and the forest too
But if you think about it for a moment it’s obvious there isn’t just one tree, one hierarchy with a single top tier. No, there are many. To stick with my example here, China and India have their own ‘versions’ of the Oscars with completely different winners and losers, and so does every country that makes movies (even Wales, population 3 million). Maybe I believe the Oscars are the most important movie prize-giving event of the year, but clearly not everyone does. You can ignore all the others if you like, but a tree only really makes sense in relation to the forest it’s an integral part of.
Hierarchy, heterarchy, homoarchy… am I just making these words up?
Real life is more like a forest than a single tree. It’s structured around multiple overlapping, competing hierarchical (as well as non-hierarchical) systems. Even those who have completely bought into the idea of hierarchy can acknowledge this much.
So we live in a heterarchical world, in which any item could potentially be part of more than one organising structure. The opposite of this isn’t hierarchy, as it happens, it’s homoarchy. That’s a little-used word to describe a situation where all the elements are fixed in their location within a fixed organisational structure.
The principle of organization a society embodies depends on the way its institutions are arranged with respect to one another. Two basic principles can be distinguished: heterarchy—the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked or can be ranked in different ways (as coined by Crumley), and its opposite, homoarchy,—a condition in society in which relationships in most contexts are ordered mainly according to one principal hierarchical relationship. Homoarchy and heterarchy represent the most universal “ideal” (generalized) principles and basic trajectories of socio-cultural organization. - Bondarenko, 2020.
The Zettelkasten enables us to visualise and manipulate the heterarchical reality we live in, by creating a variety of provisional structures. You want a tree? You want top down? Sure, go ahead, but you can also have a non-hierarchical bottom-up network at the same time and even using the same notes if you like. Networks absorb hierarchies. They subvert them without destroying them. How so? The secret is simply: links.
Get linking to get thinking
Bi-directional links, especially, subvert the homoarchy, because they make it harder to say for sure what comes first. If the second note links back to the first note, you could quite easily see the second note as coming first, if you really want to, especially if you actually began from the second note.
Every Page is Page One summed up a web design philosophy which pointed out that you can’t control where your readers arrive. Sure, you can construct a ‘landing page’, but that doesn’t mean they won’t enter your web site from another direction. If every page is page one, then every page also needs some kind of index, or table of contents, or at least some way into the rest of the material. This is quite normal on the Web, and I regard it as equally normal in my collection of notes.
I find it helpful to think of each note as being located both top-down and bottom-up at the same time. In Indra’s Net each point, however lowly, reflects every other point, however exulted - but that’s another story.
The key questions
Having written a note, I ask “what’s a part of this?” That’s the top-down question. What are the sub-components of this idea? Then I ask “what’s this a part of?” That’s the bottom-up question. What bigger concept is this note just a part of? But there are other, more rhizomatic questions. “What is this similar to or different from?” “What compliments or competes with this?” and so on.
My mantra is that of historian (and Zettelkasten supremo) Hans Blumenberg:
“Every note a thought that immediately makes sense as a thought, every thought a little theory.” “Jeder Zettel ein Gedanke, der sofort als nachdenkenswert einleuchtet, jeder Gedanke eine kleine Theorie.” (Ragutt and Zumhof 2016, 5)
Image: Hans Blumenberg’s Zettelkasten
In other words, each of my notes is as unitary, modular and clear as I can make it, so I can construct with it larger concepts (every note is a single thought).
At the same time, each note is highly generative. Each contains the seeds of a whole new set of notes, if I choose to take that route (each thought is a little theory).
This way, every note, at least implicitly, is at the top of a hierarchy yet to be dived into, and equally, at the bottom of a hierarchy yet to be climbed.
And if I want to subvert the structure completely, all I need to do is to make a different kind of link, just because I can.
What if I really just want a fixed structure?
It’s tempting to imagine that there really is a ‘top’ note, or a ‘top’ idea that all the other notes relate to. In some sense that might be true. For example, Niklas Luhmann’s celebrated Zettelkasten revolved entirely around his notes on “a theory of society, duration: 30 years, costs: none” (Luhmann 1997:11; quoted in Albert, 2016). But even if you do decide to write a note containing your lifetime’s single focus, within your collection of notes, it’s still just another note.
When you create a product - a book, an article, a blog post, a video etc. - you do fix the structure. A book has a clear table of contents. An academic article usually has a rigorous structure determined by the particular discipline or even the particular journal requirements. With these kinds of products a free-form structure is rare. So yes, you can and will have a fixed structure, when you eventually produce something creative from all of your note-making. But until then, you’ll benefit from letting the structure of your notes emerge and change as your thought progresses.
— Now read:
- A network of notes is a rhizome not a tree
- How to connect your notes to make them more effective
- Learning to make notes like Leonardo
- Thoughts are nest-eggs - Thoreau on writing
- Even the index is just another note
- Zettelkasten index
—
References
Albert, Mathias. “Luhmann and Systems Theory.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. 5 Aug. 2016; Accessed 29 Jan. 2024. oxfordre.com/politics/…
Bondarenko, D.M. (2020). Social Institutions and Basic Principles of Societal Organization. In: Bondarenko, D.M., Kowalewski, S.A., Small, D.B. (eds) The Evolution of Social Institutions. World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures. Springer, Cham. doi.org/10.1007/9…
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2004/1980). Rhizome. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Continuum, pp. 3-28.
Helbig, Daniela K. “Life without Toothache: Hans Blumenberg’s Zettelkasten and History of Science as Theoretical Attitude.” Journal of the History of Ideas 80, no. 1 (2019): 91-112. doi.org/10.1353/j…
Luhmann, N. (1997). Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (2 vols.). Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Published in translation as Theory of society (2 vols.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012–2013.
Ragutt, Frank, and Tim Zumhof, eds. 2016. Hans Blumenberg: Pädagogische Lektüren. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.
Can we understand consciousness yet?
Professor Mark Solms, Director of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, revives the Freudian view that consciousness is driven by basic physiological motivations such as hunger. Crucially, consciousness is not an evolutionary accident but is motivated. Motivated consciousnesses, he claims, provides evolutionary benefits.
Mark Solms. 2021. The Hidden Spring. A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. London: Profile Books. ISBN: 9781788167628
He claims the physical seat of consciousness is in the brain stem, not the cortex. He further claims that artificial consciousness is not in principle a hard philosophical problem. The artificial construction of a conscious being, that mirrors in some way the biophysical human consciousness, would ‘simply’ require an artificial brain stem of some sort.
I have been wondering what it would be like to have injuries so radical as to destroy the physiological consciousnesses, if such a thing exists, while retaining the ability to speak coherently and to respond to speech. Perhaps a person in this condition would be like the old computer simulation, Eliza, which emulated conversation in a rudimentary fashion by responding with open comments and questions, such as “tell me more”, and by mirroring its human conversation partner. The illusion of consciousness was easily dispelled. The words were there but there was no conscious subject directing them. However, since then language processing has become significantly more advanced and machine learning has progressed the ability of bots without consciousness to have what appears to be a conscious conversation. Yet still there’s a suspicion that there’s something missing.
One area of great advance is the ability of machine learning to take advantage of huge bodies of data, for example, a significant proportion of the text of all the books ever published, or literally billions of phone text messages, or billions of voice phone conversations. It’s possible to program with some sophistication interactions based on precedent: what is the usual kind of response to this kind of question? Unlike Eliza, the repertoire of speech doesn’t need to be predetermined and limited, it can be done on the fly in an open ended manner using AI techniques. But there’s still no experiencer there, and we (just about) recognise this lack. Even if we didn’t know it, and bots already passed among us incognito, they might still lack ‘consciousness’.
So, at what point does the artificial speaker become conscious? If the strictly biophysical view of consciousness is correct, the answer is never.
A chat bot will never “wake up” and recognise itself, because it lacks a brain stem, even an artificial one. Even if to an observer the chat-bot appears fully conscious, at least functionally, this will always be an illusion, because there is no felt experience of what it is like to be a chat bot, phenomenologically.
From the perspective of neo-Freudian neuropsychology, it is easy to see why Freud grew exasperated with Carl Jung. Quite apart from the notorious personality clashes, it seems Jung departed fundamentally from Freud’s desire to relate psychological processes to their physical determinants. For example, what possible biophysical process would be represented by the phrase “collective unconscious” (see Mills 2019)?
For Freud, the consciousness was strongly influenced by the unconscious, which was his term for the more basic drives of the body. For example, the Id was his term for the basic desire for food, for sex, to void, etcetera. This was unconscious because the conscious receives this information as demands from a location beyond itself, which it finds itself mediating.
He saw terms such as the Id, the Ego and the Superego as meta-psychological. He recognised what was not at the time known about the brain, such as the question of where exactly the Id is located, but he denied it was a metaphysical term. In other words, he claimed that the Id was located, physically, somewhere, yet to be discovered. His difficulty was he fully understood that his generation lacked the tools to discover where.
Note that meta-psychology is explicitly not metaphysical. Freud had no more interest in the metaphysical than other scientists of his time, or perhaps ours have done. His terminology was a stopgap measure meant to last only until the tools caught up with the programme.
The programme was always: to describe how the brain derives the mind.
Jung’s approach made a mockery of these aspirations. Surely no programme would ever locate the seat of the collective unconscious?
But perhaps this is a misunderstanding of the conflict between Freud and Jung. What if the distinction is actually between two conflicting views of the location of consciousness? For Freud, and for contemporary psychology, if consciousness is not located physically, either in the brain somewhere or in an artificial analogue of the brain, where could it possibly be located? Merely to ask the question seems to invite a chaos of metaphysical speculation. The proposals will be unfalsifiable, and therefore not scientific - “not even wrong”.
However, just as Mark Solms has proposed a re-evaluation of Freud’s project along biophysical lines, potentially acceptable in principle to materialists and empiricists (i.e. the entire psychological mainstream), perhaps it is possible for a re-evaluation of Jung’s programme along similar lines, but in a radically different direction.
If the brain is not the seat of the conscious, what possibly could be? This question reminds me of the argument in evolutionary biology about game theory. Prior to the development of game theory it was impossible to imagine what kind of mechanism could possibly direct evolution other than the biological. It seemed a non-question. Then along came John Maynard Smith’s application of game theory to ritualised conflict behaviour and altruism, and proved decisively that non-biological factors decisively shape evolutionary change.
What if Jung’s terms could be viewed as being just as meta-psychological as Freud’s, but with an entirely different substantive basis? Lacking the practical tools to investigate, Jung resorted to terms that mediated between the contemporary understanding of the way language (and culture more generally), not biology, constructs consciousness.
What else is “the collective unconscious”, if not an evocative meta-psychological term for the corpus of machine learning?
Perhaps consciousness is just a facility with a representative subset of the whole culture.
I’m wary of over-using the term ‘emergence’. I don’t want to speak of consciousness as an emergent property, not least because every sentence with that word in it still seems to make sense if you substitute the word ‘mysterious’. In other words, ‘emergence’ seems to do no explanatory work at all. It just defers the actual, eventual explanation. Even the so-called technical definitions seem to perform this trick and no more.
However, it’s still worth asking the question, when does consciousness arise? As far as I can understand Mark Solms, the answer is, when there’s a part of the brain that constructs it biophysically, and therefore, perhaps disturbingly, when there’s an analogue machine that reconstructs it, for example, computationally.
My scepticism responds: knowing exactly where consciousness happens is a great advance for sure, but this is still a long way from knowing how consciousness starts. The fundamental origin of consciousness still seems to be shrouded in mystery. And at this point you might as well say it’s an ‘emergent’ property of the brain stem.
For Solms, feeling is the key. Consciousness is the theatre in which discernment between conflicting drives plays out. Let’s say I’m really thirsty but also really tired. I could fetch myself a drink but I’m just too weary to do so. Instead, I fall asleep. What part of me is making these trade-offs between competing biological drives? On Solms’s account, this decision-making is precisely what conscousness is for. If all behaviour was automatic, there would be nothing for consciousness to do.
As Solms claims in a recent paper (2022) on animal sentience, there is a minimal key (functional) criterion for consciousness:
The organism must have the capacity to satisfy its multiple needs – by trial and error – in unpredicted situations (e.g., novel situations), using voluntary behaviour.
The phenomenological feeling of conscioussness, then, might be no more than the process of evaluating the success of such voluntary decision-making in the absence of a pre-determined ‘correct’ choice. He says:
It is difficult to imagine how such behaviour can occur except through subjective modulation of its success or failure within a phenotypic preference distribution. This modulation, it seems to me, just is feeling (from the viewpoint of the organism).
Then there’s the linguistic-cultural approach that I’ve fancifully been calling a kind of neo-Jungianism 1. When does consciousness emerge? The answer seems to be that the culture is conscious, and sufficient participation in its networks is enough for it to arise. If this sounds extremely unlikely (and it certainly does to me), consider two factors that might minimise the task in hand - first that most language is merely transactional and second that most awareness is not conscious.
As in the case of chat bots, much of what passes for consciousness is actually merely the use of transactional language, which is why Eliza was such a hit when it first came out. This transactional language could in principle be dispensed with, and bots could just talk to other bots. What then would be left? What part of linguistic interaction actually requires consciousness? Perhaps the answer is not much. Furthermore, even complex human consciousness spends much of the time on standby. Not only are we asleep for a third of our lives, but even when we’re awake we are often not fully conscious. So much of our lives is effectively automatic or semi automatic.
When we ask what is it like… the answer is often that it’s not really like anything.
The classic example is the feeling of having driven home from work, fully awake, presumably, of the traffic conditions, but with no recollection of the journey. It’s not merely that there’s no memory of the trip, it’s that, slightly disturbingly, there was no real felt experience of the trip to have a memory about. This is disturbing because of the suspicion that perhaps a lot of life is actually no more strongly experienced than this.
These observations don’t remove the task of explaining consciousness, but they do point to the possibility that the eventual explanation may be less dramatic than it might at first appear.
For the linguistic (neo-Jungian??) approach to consciousness the task then is to devise computational interactions sufficiently advanced as to cause integrated pattern recognition and manipulation to become genuinely self aware.
A great advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t matter at all if consciousness never results. Machine learning will still advance fruitfully.
For the biophysical (neo-Freudian) approach, the task is to describe the physical workings of self awareness in the brain stem so as to make its emulation possible in another, presumably computational, medium.
A great advantage of this approach is that even if the physical basis of consciousness is not demystified, neuropsychology will still understand more about the brain stem.
As far as I can see, both of these tasks are monumental, and one or both might fail. However, the way I’ve described them they seem to be converging on the idea that consciousness can in principle be abstracted from the mammalian brain and placed somewhere else, whether physical or virtual, whether derived from the individual brain, analogue or digital, or collective corpus, physical or virtual.
I noticed in the latter part of Professor Solms’s book a kind of impatience for a near future in which the mysteries of consciousness are resolved. I wonder if this is in part the restlessness of an older man who would rather not accept that he might die before seeing at least some of the major scientific breakthroughs that his life’s work has prepared for. Will we work out the nature of consciousness in the next few years, or will this puzzle remain, for a future generation to solve? I certainly hope we have answers soon!.
References:
Mills, J. (2019). The myth of the collective unconscious. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 55(1), 40-53.
Solms, Mark (2022) Truly minimal criteria for animal sentience. Animal Sentience 32(2) DOI: 10.51291/2377-7478.1711
Jules Verne could have told us AI is not a real person
-
To clarify, I’m claiming, with Solms, that Freud’s pursuit was meta-psychological, not metaphysical. In contrast, I’m going further than Solms and reading Jung against himself here. Jung seems to have taken a strongly metaphysical approach (Mills 2019), whereas, I’m suggesting his programme may nevertheless be treated as a non-metaphysical but meta-psychological enquiry into the relationship between consciousness and human culture, not the brain. Mark Solms took part in a discussion on the differences between Freud and Jung. ↩︎
Ross Ashby's other card index
During the Twentieth Century many thinkers used index cards to help them both think and write.
British cyberneticist Ross Ashby kept his notes in 25 journals (a total of 7,189 pages) for which he devised an extensive card index of more than 1,600 cards.
At first it looks as though Ashby used these notebooks to aid the development of his thought, and the card index merely catalogued the contents. But it turns out he used his card index not only to catalogue but also to develop the ideas for a book he was writing.
In a journal entry of 20 October 1943 he explained his decision to switch from an alphabetical key-word index to ‘an index depending on meaning’.
He describes his method as follows:
“20 Oct ‘43 - Having seen how well the index of p.1448 works, & how well everything drops into its natural place, I am no longer keeping the card index which I have kept almost since the beginning. The index was most useful in the days when I was just amassing scraps & when nothing fitted or joined on to anything else; but now that all the points form a closely knit & jointed structure, an index depending on meaning is more natural than one depending on the alphabet. So I have changed to a (card) index with the points of p.1448 in order. Thus it can grow, & be rearranged, on the basis of meaning. Summary: Reasons for changing the form of the index.” - Ross Ashby, Journal, Vol. 7
What was he up to? Thanks to Ashby’s meticulous note-taking, and the fact that it has all been saved and digitized, you can trace his working methods. It also helps that his handwriting is very clear!
- First Ashby made almost random notes in his notebooks, which he indexed alphabetically by key-word, using a card index. To aid referencing, he gave the notebooks a continuous page numbering across all 25 volumes.
- Next, in April 1943 and based on his notes, he created an outline for a book manuscript p.1234, then revised it six months later, on October 4th p.1447.
- Satisfied with the revised outline p.1497, he created a completely new card index (the ‘Other’ index), arranged by subject, based on the outline headings, rather than key-words. This new index is what he describes in his note of October 20th 1943, which is reproduced above.
- He deliberately kept this second index flexible, so that his notes could be re-arranged for as long as possible prior to the drafting of the actual manuscript.
This workflow is quite different from that of sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who unlike Ashby, didn’t use notebooks to any great extent. In fact it highlights a particularly striking aspect of Luhmann’s approach: for Luhmann the card index is its own contents; they are one and the same. Put another way, Luhmann’s Zettelkasten is largely self-indexing.
Ashby didn’t do this. Instead he followed the more standard card index system, elaborated, for example, by R.B. Byles, in 1911. In this system, originally designed for business, all documents are filed away, typically in order of receipt or creation, and then accessed by means of a separate card index, which provides the key to the entire collection. Ashby’s innovation was to adapt the card index system to refer to key-words in his notebooks, referenced by page number. Luhmann, certainly, also used key-words. His first Zettelkasten had “a keyword index with roughly 1,250 entries”, while his second, larger Zettelkasten had “a keyword index with 3,200 entries, as well as a short (and incomplete) index of persons containing 300 names” (Schmidt, 2016: 292).
However, due to Luhmann’s meticulous cross-referencing of individual cards, the key-word index isn’t strictly essential to connect the ideas in the Zettelkasten in a meaningful way; Luhmann’s cards link directly to other cards.
Fast-forward two generations and it seems that in the Internet age it is Luhmann’s method that has won out. The online version of Ross Ashby’s journal includes both the notebooks and the index as a single hyperlinked body of work. This represents a tremendous effort on the part of those who have painstakingly digitized the collection. Today, like Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, Ashby’s notebooks, at least in their Web-based incarnation, are finally self-indexing.
And there’s another sense in which Luhmann’s method won out. While Luhmann published scores of books, Ashby published plenty of academic articles, but only two full-length books. And neither of these books, as far as is evident, bear much relation to the manuscript outlines in his ‘other’ index. We can only speculate on whether Ashby might have produced more books had he used a system more like Luhmann’s.
Yet despite their differences, Ashby’s approach in creating his ‘other’ index is very consistent with Luhmann’s concern to keep the order of notes as flexible as possible for as long as possible.
References
The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive
Jill Ashby (2009) W. Ross Ashby: a biographical essay, International Journal of General Systems, 38:2, 103-110, DOI: 10.1080/03081070802643402 (This is the source of the photo, above, of Ashby at his desk).
Byles, R.B. 1911. The card index system; its principles, uses, operation, and component parts. London, Sir I. Pitman & Sons, Ltd.
F. Heylighen, C. Joslyn and V. Turchin (editors): Principia Cybernetica Web (Principia Cybernetica, Brussels), URL: cleamc11.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK….
Schmidt, J. (2016). Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: Thinking Tool, Communication Partner, Publication Machine. pdfs.semanticscholar.org/88f8/fa9d…)
*Read more *:
The Hashtags of a cyberneticist
Even the index is just another note
To illustrate that claim, here’s a dynamic index of my Zettelkasten articles
Soon we'll all be writing the books we want to read
To benefit from AI-assisted writing, look closely at how it’s transforming the readers.
Whenever new technologies appear, many changes in the economy happen on the consumer side, not the producer side.
As AI-assisted writing disrupts the writers, it will do so mainly by transforming the readers.
Reading Confessions of a viral AI writer in Wired magazine made me realise I had the future of AI-assisted writing the wrong way around. Vauhini Vara’s article shows how AI is already making a massive difference to our expectations of writing. She’s a journalist and author who has seen her working practices upended. But what about the readers? Sure: production is undergoing massive disruption.
But meanwhile the consumption of writing is on the cusp of a complete revolution.
In the old days you used to stand at the grocery store counter while the staff fetched all the groceries for you, and at the fuel station an attendant would fill up your vehicle’s tank on your behalf. Then new technology transferred these tasks from the seller to the buyer, and the buyer had no real say in the matter, so that by now it’s completely normal to walk down a grocery aisle filling the trolley yourself, or to operate the fuel hose on your own.
No one pays you to do this work that the employees used to insist on doing.
It’s the same for all kinds of office work. The managers do their own budgeting using spreadsheets, while the staff do all their own typing. No one expects to find a typing pool at work. In fact, few workers are even old enough to have seen one.
Move forward a few years and social media has completely adopted this labour-shifting approach.
All the work of social networks is done by the customer.
On YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, the users literally make their own entertainment.
The consumer is now the producer. And this is exactly how it’s going to be with AI-assisted writing.
In former times other people, professionals, wrote books for you. They were called ‘writers’ or ‘authors’, and they, in turn, called you a ‘reader’. But the new technology is shifting the workload to the consumers. We won’t really have a choice, no one will pay us, and eventually we’ll come to see it as completely normal.
“If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” — Toni Morrison
From now on the readers will use AI to write the books they want to read.
‘Professional writer’ will be a job like ‘bowser attendant’ - almost forgotten. Certainly the books still need to be written, just as the fuel tank still needs filling, but why not just let the reader write the books themselves? Who better to decide what they want?
Soon we’ll all be authors, each of us writing for a single reader - ourselves.
These categories, reader and writer, used to be obviously distinct. But AI will result in only one category. Maybe we’ll even need a new name for it.
But as every marketer and advertiser knows, people are completely out of touch with their own taste - they need someone to show them. Fashion, celebrity - consumerism is an ideology that requires followers.
The writers will have a new job: advising people on how best to describe their own desires.
A further, more tentative prediction: AI will also assist the general public to write computer programs. The programmer’s job will shift towards advising the public on what software they actually want to write.
Footnote: I’ll revisit this article in five years to see how accurate my crystal-ball-gazing really is!
Image source: How it was: life in the typing pool
See also:
Even the index is just another note
It’s tempting to place your notes in fixed categories
At some point in your note-making journey you’ll notice that quite a few people like to place their notes in fixed categories according to some scheme or other. The ancient method of commonplaces held that knowledge was naturally organised according to loci communis (common places). Ironically, no one from Aristotle onwards could ever agree on what the commonly-agreed categories were. Assigning your notes to categories is consistent with the ‘commonplace’ tradition, but that’s not what the prolific sociologist Niklas Luhmann did with his Zettelkasten, and furthermore it runs exactly counter to Luhmann’s claim in ‘Communicating with Slipboxes’, where he said:
“it is most important that we decide against the systematic ordering in accordance with topics and sub-topics and choose instead a firm fixed place (Stellordnung).”
But there’s no need to despair, there is a way through the impasse! After all, what exactly is a subject or category? The subject or category index itself, it turns out, is nothing other than just another note. Here’s a real-life example:
“i have this note that basically functions as an general index and entry point for my ZK: it has every index card plus a People index and every main card.” - u/Efficient_Earth_8773
When everything’s a note, even the categories are just notes
Why does this matter? If even the index is just a note, then you haven’t constrained yourself with pre-determined categories. Instead, you can have different and possibly contradictory index systems within a single Zettelkasten, and further, a note can belong not only to more than one category, but also to more than one categorization scheme. Luhmann says:
“If there are several possibilities, we can solve the problem as we wish and just record the connection by a link [or reference].”
When even the index is just a note, a reference to a ‘category’ takes no greater (or lesser) priority than any other kind of link. This is liberating. Where a piece of information ‘really’ belongs shouldn’t be determined in advance, but by means of the process itself.
The Dewey Decimal System pigeonholes all knowledge, like cells in a prison.
Some people want an index, like folders in a filing cabinet, or subject shelves in the library. Well they can have it: just write a note with the subjects listed and make them linkable. Some people don’t want this, and they can ignore it. I personally don’t understand why you’d want to set up a subject index that mimics Wikipedia or the Dewey Decimal system, or even the ‘common places’ of old. I’m neither an encyclopedist, a librarian, nor an archivist. What I’m trying to do is to create new work. I want to demonstrate my own irreducible subjectivity by documenting my own unique journey through the great forest of thought. My journey is subjective, because it’s my journey. I’m pioneering a particular route, and laying down breadcrumbs for others to follow should they so choose. It’s unique, not because it’s original but because the small catalogue of items that attract me is wholly original. As film-maker Jim Jarmusch said:
“Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.” (I stole that from Austin Kleon).
But that’s just me (and Luhmann).
Make just enough hierarchy to be useful
Having thought a bit about this I’m inspired now to sketch my own workflow, to see how it… flows. In general, I favour just enough data hierarchy to be viable - which really isn’t very much at all. I’m inspired by Ward Cunningham’s claim that the first wiki was ‘the simplest online database that could possibly work’. Come to think of it, this may be one of the disadvantages of the way the Zettelkasten process is presented: perhaps it comes across as more complex than it really needs to be. As the computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra lamented,
“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.” - On the nature of Computing Science (1984).
If you must have hierarchies like lists and trees, remember that they’re both just subsets of a network.
Source: I don’t know. If you do, please tell me ;)
See also:
- A network of notes is a rhizome not a tree.
- Manuel Lima on The power of networks (it’s a cool video!)
- Top image source: The Card System at the Office by J. Kaiser, 1908.
I’m late to the party but just needed to say: yes, the web is fantastic . I actually love it 😍
📷 Moonlight over the headland. This time of year in Sydney is pretty magical.
Three worthwhile modes of note-making (and one not-so-worthwhile)
I finished reading Alex Kerr’s Finding the Heart Sutra on New Year’s Eve, so it just scraped into my reading for 2023. And while reading I made notes by hand, as I’ve done before. Although there aren’t very many notes (just eleven, plus a literature note that acts as a mini-index), they’re high quality, since I found the book very interesting.
I don’t mean I’ve written objectively ‘good’ notes. Rather, I mean the notes are high quality for my purposes. Everyone who reads with a pen in hand is an active reader, so the notes one person makes will be different - perhaps completely different- from the notes another person makes. In any case, no two readers read a book the same way.
Reflecting on this it seems to me there are at least three fruitful ways, or modes, of making notes while reading, as follows: Free-form, directed, and purposeful note-making.
- Free-form note-making. In this mode, you start with no expectations and just make notes whenever something grabs you. This is great when you don’t yet know what you want to focus on. The risk is you try to read everything, only to discover it’s like drinking the ocean. Ars longa, vita brevis, so you’ll ultimately need to narrow down your field somehow.
- Directed note-making. In this mode, you already know, broadly, what interests you, for example, Richard Hamming’s 10-20 problems. So you make notes whenever something you read resonates with one of your predetermined interests. I used to think I was interested in everything, like Thomas Edison. But after writing notes on whatever took my fancy for a while, I observed that really, I kept revolving around a fairly limited set of concerns. So mostly these days I make directed notes, or else engage in the closely related purposeful note-making.
- Purposeful note-making. This mode is more focused still than directed note-making. Here you have a specific project in mind, such as a particular book or article you want to write, and so you make notes whenever your reading material chimes with what you want to write about. If there’s a risk to this kind of note-making, it’s that in your focused state, you’ll miss ideas that you might otherwise have found worth making notes about.
Each of these note-making modes has its place, but in this particular case I was reading Finding the Heart Sutra with a very specific project in mind. So the notes I made were also quite specific. I imagine that someone else would be surprised by the notes I made, since they don’t really reflect the contents of the book. For instance, my notes are definitely not a summary of the book’s contents. Nor do they even follow the main contours of the book’s themes. Instead, I was making connections while reading with the main concerns of my own project. Each of my notes stands in its own right and could potentially be used in a variety of different contexts, but collectively, they make sense in relation to my own preoccupations. They fit into my own Zettelkasten, and no one else’s.
“Most great people also have 10 to 20 problems they regard as basic and of great importance, and which they currently do not know how to solve. They keep them in their mind, hoping to get a clue as to how to solve them. When a clue does appear they generally drop other things and get to work immediately on the important problem. Therefore they tend to come in first, and the others who come in later are soon forgotten. I must warn you, however, that the importance of the result is not the measure of the importance of the problem. The three problems in physics—anti-gravity, teleportation, and time travel—are seldom worked on because we have so few clues as to how to start. A problem is important partly because there is a possible attack on it and not just because of its inherent importance.”
If you want to know more about how to read a book, you could do worse than read How to Read a Book, by Mortimer Adler. It’s not the last word on the subject, but it’s a good starting point.
And it’s a warning against a fourth mode of note-making that I don’t advise: encyclopedic note-making. This is where you read a book and try to write a summary that will work for everyone. First, it’s hard work, and secondly, it’s probably already been done. If you open the link above you’ll see that the Wikipedia entry for How to Read a Book already includes a summary of the book’s contents. There are circumstances where the careful and complete summary is worthwhile, but I suggest you only start this task with the end - your own end - in mind.
If you have thoughts about making notes while reading, I’d be very interested to hear about it.
See also:
A note on the craft of note-writing
Learning to make notes like Leonardo
It feels soothing that they still have these mechanical boards at a few rail stations in New South Wales. I’m guessing they use less electricity than the newer video screens, with a perfectly functional result. 📷
Finished reading: Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon 📚
I actually read this back in September 2023, having bought all three of his trilogy. I really like Austin Kleon’s approach to creative work and seek to emulate it. ‘Show your work’ is important.