Scott P Scheper, page 5
Luhmann’s Zettelkasten System Created a Deep Spider-Like Network That Was Hard to Disentangle Using a Typewriter
Even academics trained in reading dense prose have found themselves challenged by Luhmann’s writing style, stemming from the complex, multidisciplinary webs of thought Luhmann’s books dump onto the page. Luhmann proclaimed, in a seemingly proud manner, that “there’s no linearity, but a spider-web-like system that can be started anywhere.”58 Such a non-linear structure makes Luhmann’s work something that is “not reader-friendly,” according to one scholar.59 Luhmann asserts that the non-linear nature of his work is a feature, not a bug. It enables one to pick up one of his books and start reading anywhere–such as the beginning or end of the book. Yet this assumes some familiarity with Luhmann’s work. As Moeller points out, anyone can indeed begin reading anywhere, but they can’t start understanding anywhere.60 One can begin reading anywhere, assuming they’re already well-versed in Luhmann’s work. Becoming well-versed in Luhmann is hard to achieve if you start with Luhmann’s books, though it’s been said that his lectures were easier to comprehend.61
There’s no friendly initiation when you begin trying to read Luhmann’s work. You’re quickly confronted with unconventional, intimidating terminology. This terminology is packed with sudden, chaotic shifts between ideas.62 Want to know the best part about all this? Luhmann doesn’t even bother to explain the unconventional terminology he introduces. He leaves you to embark on a mental journey down the complex jungle of intellectual self-discovery. One thing is certain: you’d better be prepared to bring your own map.
Judging the books that contained such complex webs of ideas, one may be quick to blame Luhmann’s Zettelkasten; however, that’s jumping to conclusions too quickly. Luhmann’s environment certainly influenced the complex style Luhmann strived for in his texts, but there are a few other reasons Luhmann’s work is web-like: one is out of principle, and the other is that Luhmann perhaps enjoyed being a troll. Let’s cover such aspects now.
Luhmann Desired to Be Impenetrable for The Sake of Principle
Luhmann brings forth the idea that not everything ought to be easy to understand. He once posed the question: “Should everything that is said be equally forced under the rod of comprehensibility?… Comprehensibility without effort? Understandable without any preparation, without any time thinking and deciphering?”63 From this, Luhmann implied that one shouldn’t expect all knowledge to be in a format that could be spoon-fed to those who are not committed to the work involved in understanding advanced thought. Advanced knowledge is something that must be earned, in other words. It does one an injustice to make such knowledge so easily digestible; doing such a thing waters down the impact knowledge can have on one’s mind.
Perhaps this is just a cop-out by Luhmann. After all, it’s easier to offload the cognitive work involved in simplifying ideas. But maybe Luhmann does have a point. It would degrade some of the world’s magic if all knowledge were trivial to ingest. Perhaps Luhmann’s right in this respect.
Indeed, the more complex and impenetrable a subject is, the more attractive it can become for those with a thirst for knowledge. The difficulty of deciphering Luhmann stands as the very thing that initially attracted Johannes Schmidt (the scholar heading up the digitization of Luhmann’s literary estate). When Schmidt first came across Luhmann’s work, he did not understand a word of it.
In making his texts challenging to decipher, Luhmann essentially filtered out and disqualified those he could not care less about—that is, people who weren’t serious and committed to putting in the work required to engage with theoretical sociology.
For those serious about social theory, the complexity of Luhmann counter-intuitively seemed to serve as the key attraction. From there, his writing sucked people into The Matrix of Sociology, if you will.
In an interview with Johannes Schmidt conducted by a man who runs a podcast covering complex philosophical and social concepts, they both shared the same experience upon first encountering Luhmann: “When you first read Luhmann, on the one hand, you don’t understand at all, but on the other hand that makes you want to!”64
We could refer to this as the phenomenon of complexity attraction—referring to the event wherein complexity serves as an attraction mechanism for those passionate about a field.
Another example of complexity attraction is illustrated by the author of the book, The Radical Luhmann. He recounts a story in which an academic friend of his missed a talk by a guest lecturer in philosophy. When the friend asked another academic who attended the conference how it was, the person replied in all seriousness, “It was awesome—I did not understand a word!”65
Luhmann Desired to Be Impenetrable for The Sake of Being an Irreverent Troll
Luhmann’s character is described as an obscure, ironic, radical thinker.66 Perhaps today we’d consider him a bit of a troll. Luhmann has some trollish tendencies, covered later in the book. His theories were often quite paradoxical and, after long explanations, pointed back to themselves and the beginning of where they started. He was fascinated with self-referential systems wherein the beginning is the end, and the end is the beginning. His Zettelkasten system reflected such ideas, which is somewhat unsurprising.
In brief, one should not get caught up in the idea that the Zettelkasten will magically enable you to spit out a massive number of books or papers that are instant classics and perfect. It can undoubtedly produce excellent work; however, the sizable amount of work Luhmann produced largely also came from the fact that he only lightly edited his work. Furthermore, his work was tangled in a spider-like web. Some of this is due to his Zettelkasten, which is due to the aforementioned variables.
In my opinion, there’s a healthy balance for how to use a Zettelkasten system. It centers around the age-old balance of quality vs. quantity. The Antinet’s main benefit is its ability to develop thoughts thoroughly. It truly does help create profound ideas; however, you must also be prepared to take the time to edit your work and make it readable for your audience—if, that is, you wish to appeal to general readers. Instead of publishing seventy books, if Luhmann had instead focused on making, say, ten books (and thus had taken the additional time to make his ideas easier to digest) perhaps his theoretical work would be much more popular than it remains today.
Using an Antinet will enable you to develop and put all the crazy, otherworldly thoughts from your mind into a rumination system that allows it to grow. From there, their complexity will grow. You can certainly decide to forego simplifying your text for the general reader. Or, you can use such a system to enable you to offload the complexity that usually lives in your mind so that you can then create a more reader-friendly, more straightforward version for your audience. It’s entirely up to you.
It’s essential to keep all of this in mind when deciding whether you wish to build your own Antinet. When using an Antinet, your ideas and thoughts will indeed be developed to a greater degree than they otherwise would. Yet, it also means that the complexity and entanglements of your ideas will also grow, thus requiring much editing to make your work digestible.
In brief, Luhmann’s pedantic, and overly-complex writing style can be attributed to several things. Primarily it stems from the German academic climate of his day. It also stems from his carnivalesque and trollish nature. He purposely sought to be impenetrable by “stupid” critics. Yet, the Antinet itself isn’t to blame for Luhmann’s writing voice.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we find Umberto Eco, an Italian scholar who used his own Antinet-like system. Eco’s notecard system, like the Antinet, possessed web-like cross-references. However, Eco wrote in a way that both entertained and informed his readers at the same time.67 Just because one uses a web-like analog system doesn’t mean their writing style magically becomes arrogant.
Now, should you write in the trollishly pedantic academic style of Luhmann? Or, should you opt for the entertaining and informative style of Umberto Eco? My opinion is to follow the advice of Hemingway: write the truth. Write the truest sentence you can. Write with your 100% authentic voice. Your readers can smell it on you. People are more perceptive than you think. If writing like a trollish academic pleases you, and if it is you, then by all means write that way! Otherwise, err on the side of writing to communicate, instead of writing to confuse.
Assuming I haven’t scared you away at this point, let’s now move on to why one would opt for an Antinet in the first place. Let’s talk about where the Antinet shines.
Where the Antinet Truly Shines
The entire point of using an Antinet centers around producing unconventional, deeply evolved thoughts. Certain aspects of an Antinet ensure unconventional, deeply evolved thoughts emerge from the system, and these areas are where it shines in comparison to other knowledge systems.
Producing Genius-Level Work through Creative Insights and Unconventional Interactions
Let’s start from the end result of what an Antinet aims to produce, and then work backward from there.
An Antinet aims to produce genius-level work. Plain and simple.
To produce genius-level work, one must unlock creative insights that otherwise would remain disconnected in disparate fields. As a thinker, your goal centers not on hitting targets that others find difficult to hit, but to hit targets that others can’t even see. This comes about by unlocking creative insights.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb observes that the primary reason for America’s dominance in the global economy (with companies like Apple, Amazon, Nike, Google, Facebook, etc.) all stems from one key strength: creativity.68
The question then becomes: how does one unlock creative insights?
Unlocking creative insights stem from one thing: unconventional interactions. For something to be unconventional requires some degree of randomness and the paradoxical quality of being true, with the insight often inspiring a sense of awe and wonder. The requirement for interactions is comparison. That is, one must be able to relate and associate concepts. This primes similar ideas to be nested and neighbored around one another so that when an unconventional link is connected to a “neighborhood” in the Zettelkasten, it creates unexpected ideas that emerge from viewing it in context with its neighboring cards.
At the center of innovation rest two seemingly different concepts, from two seemingly different contexts, that interact to create something greater than either of those two concepts individually. This is a central idea of communication theory—a field Luhmann’s work was deeply rooted in and that he understood quite well. Innovation and breakthroughs in thinking happen when two different ideas, with different goals and perspectives, communicate and create new meaning.69 This is related to the concept of emergence in systems theory, in which new properties and behaviors emerge when individual parts interact in a broader whole.
Such phenomena appear to occur more profoundly within a system such as an Antinet. Unlike digital systems (which have the tendency of being flooded with too much information), an analog thinking system seems to generate fewer yet much more meaningful interactions, which, in turn, generate creative insights that are not replicable by the system’s digital cousins.
The Antinet Shines When One Desires to Develop a Long-Term Thesis or Series of Works in an Area (Such as a Thirty-Year Thesis)
The reason Luhmann created his Zettelkasten in the first place is two-fold.
First, Luhmann set out to create a system for retrieving things forgotten by memory. Yet after a certain point, as early as 1981, he discovered its true power—his Zettelkasten became a thinking tool and communication partner that emerged almost as if it were its own mind, a ghost in the box. More on this will be covered later. More pertinent right now, however, is the second reason Luhmann started his Antinet.
The second reason relates to his main objective: to embark upon a thirty-year-long quest to excavate a theory of everything as it relates to human society.
Authors like Robert Greene and Ryan Holiday have publicly shared their notecard systems, yet their systems are quite trivial compared to an Antinet. They’re organized by topic or book title. They were created primarily for writing one book, which are projects lasting one to several years. Their notebox systems were not architected for projects with a time span of three decades. A short-term project is more straightforward in scope than a thirty-year theory of everything. This likely explains why Greene’s and Holiday’s notebox systems don’t seem to restrict them. However, when you’re trying to categorize and prepare for a project that will last thirty years, you must embrace chaos. You cannot hope to have the categories you start out with be perfectly ordered and arranged by topic forever. You can’t expect to have the notebox adhere to the original set of organized sections over the long term. The thoughts and ideas must emerge as your research grows. Knowledge will emerge from the trees and branches of thought in unconventional places.
This raises some problems with category-based notebox systems, however. Each time you finish a book, the cards live only in the silo of that project. A great wall is seemingly hoisted around the project, preventing future work from smoothly referencing its parts. It’s forever walled off from the other future projects you embark upon. Its fruitful and potent ideas are blocked off from colliding with ideas related to any future work you create. As a result, you cannot experience the cumulative compounding miracle the Antinet seems innately built for.
The compounding miracle cannot be unleashed if you have to start over from scratch every time you start a new project, as evidence suggests Holiday does each time he starts a new book.70
Luhmann recognized this, which is one reason he architected his Antinet in such a way. “I started the index card file,” Luhmann explained, “because it was obvious to me I would have to plan for a lifetime not for a book.”71
In brief, the Antinet is best for long-term projects and also if you intend to leverage the miracle of compounding your ideas over a thirty-year-plus timeframe. That doesn’t mean you must commit to working on one project for thirty years; instead, it means you must commit to having your work compound and interact with itself over thirty years (this is made possible by way of the Antinet’s structure).
Other problems with categorical-based notebox systems will be outlined later on in the book.
The Antinet Shines in Revealing Structured Accidents
The Antinet enables users to slow down their minds and develop their thoughts. It also excels in stimulating one to think of associated ideas and then link to those ideas in the note. Some confuse this (the concept of linking) as the unique benefit of Luhmann’s system; however, this is not the case.
The practice of reading something and writing the idea immediately into a digital markdown file, and then linking that file to some other idea is not what is meant by unconventional interactions. For something to be an unconventional interaction, it must genuinely be unconventional. Nearly anyone can search their digital notes to find keywords related to the current idea they just wrote down and link that idea. The idea of simply linking your notes in this way is a misinterpretation that plagues countless numbers of people in the digital Zettelkasten world.
For instance, David Kadavy’s book about digital Zettelkästen outlines the advantage of the system, stating that you activate your mind’s “associative” machine when you think of a related concept in your mind, which “collides” with another related idea.72 While this is true to a degree, it largely misses the mark. Here’s why:
The point of the Antinet is its ability to serve as a thinking machine, as a knowledge development system, and as an extended memory. The system forces the user to think of the keyterm they would use to describe a concept. Only after this critical step do you look up the concept and go through your notes and compare and remind yourself of the things you’ve forgotten in the process. The magic of an Antinet does not center on one’s ability to think about what a new concept you’ve read relates to (as that’s a conventional interaction, not an unconventional interaction). Rather, as Luhmann puts it, its magic stems from “interactions that were never planned, never preconceived, or conceived” by your current way of thinking.73
The magic of innovation and of unlocking creativity stems from the possibility of (1) making relations using the term you’re currently thinking of, but more importantly (2) the analog nature of the system with its tree-structure (which you’ll learn about later in the book), ends up inducing structured accidents that are otherwise impossible to replicate.74
This is why it’s critical, in Luhmann’s words, that your “selection and comparisons are not identical with the schema of searching for them.”75 Why is this the case? Because simply searching for a keyword, digitally, robs the potential for innovation to occur not through seeing what you felt was related in that moment, but through the ingenious, unconventional discoveries you make along the way navigating to the nearby cards, and nearby branches of thought that have emerged and evolved around the cards you’re looking for. This tree-like structure, of which the Antinet is comprised, is what helps unlock truly unconventional interactions. The concept of the tree-like structure is something to be covered in detail later in this book.
I have since discontinued the podcast, yet I continue to publish a piece of content every day as part of a deliberate commitment. You can still listen to the podcast here: https://podcast.scottscheper.com/
According to Yuval Noah Harari, a bestselling author, and profoundly independent thinker, “We need to know ourselves better and we need to develop this mental flexibility. Not as a kind of hobby for the side. This is really the most important quality or skill to just survive the upheavals in the coming decades.” See Clay Skipper, “The Most Important Survival Skill for the Next 50 Years Isn’t What You Think,” GQ, September 30, 2018, https://www.gq.com/story/yuval-noah-harari-tech-future-survival.
