Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten Method "One Pager" (1968)
The internet is now rife with what I call “zettelkasten method one pagers” that describe what many people rightly (or very often wrongly) think that Niklas Luhmann’s zettelkasten method entails.
While doing some research about Luhmann’s numbering system’s antecedents, I recently came across a “one pager” (typescript) written by Luhmann himself in the form of some lecture notes from 1968 that folks may appreciate.
Luhmann, Niklas. 1968-01-13. “Ms. 2906: Technik des Zettelkastens.” Münster, Germany. Lecture Notes. Niklas Luhmann Archiv: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/manuskripte/manuskript/MS_2906_0001.
Seemingly everyone with a blog that ran across the idea of Zettelkasten in the last decade or so wrote up their own description of what it is. If you know of other blog posts about zettelkasten, let me know for my collection.
Of special note to those who are still under the misapprehension that Luhmann “invented the zettelkasten”, in the closing section of his 1968 notes he writes “In conclusion: from personal experience, others work differently” by which one understands that he’s aware of others who use similar systems and admits that they’re all idiosyncratic to their individual users. I would suspect that he gave this lecture while at Sozialforschungsstelle an der Universität Münster (Social Research Centre of the University of Münster) to students about how to arrange and do their own sociology research work.
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It means more likely that others don't use a Zettelkasten at all, and that there is a diversity of approaches aside from having a Zettelkasten. Similarity of others workflows to his is not implied.
I am a Zettler
Yeah, this is again a thing where Luhmann's way to be funny in German, as a writer, is hard to translate -- because when you read it in German, it sounds like a trivial tautology, and I believe that's the literary device used to be funny
If so, it would convey that, well of course, like a "duh" moment, of course others work differently. And it's not mandatory to use a Zettelkasten.
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
I found the humor to translate better when read in the document’s original format:
I’m curious to know what the practices of his colleagues may have been in comparison.
Meaning that nobody else really works as much, if it all.†
† Just kidding.
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