At what point does adapting a Zettelkasten stop being a Zettelkasten?
Hello Folks,
I’m still quite new here, so I’m genuinely curious about this. What Are We Actually Trying to Preserve in a Zettelkasten?
When we try to build a Zettelkasten today, are we trying to preserve Luhmann’s method, or are we trying to preserve what made his system so effective?
Those might not be exactly the same thing.
Luhmann had a physical box, sequential numbering, Folgezettel, links, and a very particular way of writing and developing notes.
The more I read about Zettelkasten, the more I notice that people seem to disagree about some of the details: Folgezettel, numbering, structure, digital tools, tags, links, etc.
And I find that disagreement interesting.
I’m wondering where people here draw the line.
If I keep the idea of writing small, focused notes, connecting them, developing ideas through those connections, and using the system to think rather than simply store information — but I change the structure to fit the way I work digitally...
Am I still doing Zettelkasten?
Or are some of the old constraints actually part of what makes the method work?
For example, is Folgezettel something we should try to preserve because it provides a particular cognitive benefit?
Or was it simply a very clever solution to the limitations of a paper-based system?
I don't have a strong opinion yet. I'm actually hoping the people who have been doing this for years can change my mind.
What is one part of Luhmann's system that you think is genuinely essential — and one part you think we can safely leave behind?
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Comments
For me (and I stress for me, since there is no shared definition of Zettelkasten and there cannot be one: no authority has ever produced such a definition...), a practice stops being a Zettelkasten when it begins to lose the three essential characteristics that, over time, I have come to believe a Zettelkasten should have.
I don't remember whether I came up with them myself, whether Sascha formulated them somewhere, or whether it's somewhere in between, but I have made these three points my own, and I consider them to be the essence of Zettelkasten:
So, essentially: if the connections and relations start to disappear, if the system stops enabling me to develop thoughts and knowledge, if over time it ceases to become the tool through which I continuously confront my accumulated reflections, then I no longer have a Zettelkasten.
There is, however, one very important caveat: if I stop having a Zettelkasten and the system continues to meet my needs, that's perfectly fine.
It may actually be better to have a system that can no longer be called a Zettelkasten but that I continue to use and that still works for me, rather than forcing it to function in a way that doesn't suit me, introducing friction that might eventually lead me to stop using it because I no longer feel at home with it.
How Luhmann did it remains, for me, just one of many possible ways of doing a Zettelkasten. At the same time, however, I think it is equally true that, for a system to be called a Zettelkasten, it must somehow reimplement some of the dynamics that Luhmann's system had in relation to the development of thought and knowledge.
The difference is in implementation details, rather than in the underlying principles.
In the practice, however, I don't think a system can "suddenly" cease to be a Zettelkasten.
It is probably more useful to think of these characteristics as existing along a continuum.
A system can be "more or less Zettelkasten-like": it can gradually lose some of the characteristics that make it a Zettelkasten, becoming something that is increasingly distant from the original idea, rather than crossing a clear line at which it suddenly stops being one.
In that sense, there may be systems that are "almost" Zettelkastens, or systems that remain Zettelkastens while gradually losing some of the dynamics that made them so in the first place.
For example, a progressive use of AI that increasingly replaces the author's own exercise of thinking with the automated generation of thought would progressively "de-Zettelkasten-ize" the system.
Likewise, if a system gradually accumulates so much complexity that the friction involved in adding new reflections and making new connections becomes too great, its dynamics can gradually "freeze". The network may still exist, but it is no longer actively developing. In other words, the Zettelkasten gradually shifts from being a living system to becoming an inert one.
@andang76 put it very well. I only have an anecdote.
I have practiced taking notes and reflecting on them using a collection of plugins for the Vim text editor, the main one being vim-zettel for about six years. I think it's Zettelkasten-like, but the only book I read on the topic was How To Take Smart Notes, so I don't know. Still, it works for me and I've published many posts thanks to it. I call it Zettelkasten in my mind because it reminds me of Luhmann and his remarkable corpus.
That's all to say, discussions on definitions are interesting, and it's good to have a well defined set of rules to follow when implementing a system, but at the end of the day the only thing that matters is whether it works for you.
I think the essential part of his personal technique was the "Folgezettel". (That's not Luhmann's term, but a term frequently used in this forum.)
Somewhat ironically, it's the Folgezettel that many people leave behind, myself included. ;-) (However, I do have a small section in my zettelkasten that implements Folgezettel structure with links in YAML frontmatter instead of Luhmann numbers. My notes live in Obsidian.)
For me the key feature of a "Zettelkasten" is collecting. That's the part you can't leave behind.
My favorite Zettelkasten tutorial was published 250 years ago by Johann Jacob Moser.1 It uses the word collectanea for the things collected in the wooden boxes.
In my opinion, many of the features that we love to debate are secondary to curating a collection of notes. Such a collection might be unordered (as in Eminem's box of song notes) or it can have some sophisticated system. The collection might serve different purposes.
Luhmann's ordering system was, well, unique. One reason, why so many people leave it behind, is that they are not Luhmann. :-) Their brains work differently. They have other interests. Fortunately plenty other systems have been tried out and documented. I'd guess that my digital system has more in common with Moser's century old technique than with Luhmann's.
Note: My argument is based on how the term "Zettelkasten" has been used in the German language for a long time.
https://archive.org/details/10554451bsb/ ;↩︎
This is a better version of the discussion I opened a few days ago, thanks for it.
They aren't. I don't think those are quite the best statements of the alternatives, though. His method was the way he worked with his system (in the way I use the word); the system was the collection of components he devised: notes, a container for them, a way to link them, a way to find them, and the way that cards that were near each other physically were likely to be near each other conceptually as well. One might include his index cards that contain entry points, structure cards, and so on but I think of them as auxiliary practices he needed because of the constraints imposed by his system being paper-based.
I don't think there is one thing. If you focus only on the linking you end up with a wiki-like system. That misses an important aspect, which is that notes that were physically close were usually conceptually close. So once you got an entry point, you were likely to find an apt note nearby. Or you could notice that you didn't have an apt note and decide to fill in the gap. Or the difference between a note and what you thought the area was about triggered new thoughts and led to a cascade of new notes.
So I consider that his system supported both the wiki-like aspect and the relatedness-by-propinquity aspect. I think both are important. If you only have the wiki part you are missing an seriously important component.
Exactly how he personally made use of these capabilities was his method.
I'm trying to discover and use what aspects of Luhmann's system cause it to be effective. I have no real interest in hanging on to the label of "Zettelkasten" for its own sake.
Try to complete my previous post.
For me, Folgezettel and other things like that is not "essential" to a Zettelkasten.
First of all, if I completely do without it, I don't break any of the properties I described in my previous post.
Second, I can choose not to use Folgezettel as an implementation detail, but if I can understand why it was introduced, the underlying principles behind its use, and the benefits it provides, I can look for another construct that implements the same dynamic and use that instead to achieve the same properties, if those properties are important to me. Which is exactly what I did :-)
The same reasoning I applied to Folgezettel can be applied to many of the implementation details used by Luhmann or other authors.
Folgezettel, putting an ID in note titles, writing notes atomically, adopting a bottom-up or top-down approach, "planning" the construction of the network or letting it emerge spontaneously over time, using paper or Obsidian, using an index or not, using folders, using only the "classic" note types or abandoning them and/or introducing other types, putting only "ideas" into the network or including other kinds of content, using categorization or not, and so on.
Every single choice brings certain properties with it, but none of these choices is a real requirement for achieving a network, developing thought, and being able to confront your past own thinking.
There have been other systems of connecting thinking, and Luhmann had a particular way of implementing it for himself. If history was reflected on differently, we might all be talking about the Ashby system and still have similar discussions.
From what I've read about how various scientists took their notes, they all had ways of connecting ideas, but they personalized it to themselves. That's really what the Luhmann system is, a personalization.
I would say that we are actually following these scientists examples by creating our own personal system, instead of trying to copy them exactly. It's not as important what name we give it.
Yes!
Yes!
Counter-argument: proximity in a digital hypertext systems could be determined by the number of links you have to follow in order to get someplace. It's up to the author to add links, so that conceptually close notes are just one click away. (And we have tools like tags and search that make proximity less relevant.)
The problem for us today is that his method is poorly documented. Even if we consume all available sources, we don't really know, what went on in his head. We can study the artefact (the actual zettelkasten) in great detail and still miss out on key elements of his method.
For example, what part of his work happened only in the manuscripts of the many articles and books? How exactly did he consult zettels while working on a manuskript? And most important of all: what happened only in his head?
This might be the wrong question.
Maybe we are missing what made his method so effective?
I think part of his success is that he designed his own method, a method that worked really well for him. He adapted elements from other methods that he found useful. He ignored stuff that didn't work for him. He added own inventions. He knew how to read. He used a particular writing style that trained his mind.1
So maybe the actual lesson is to do your own thing? :-)
Luhmann: Lesen lernen. 2000 https://web.archive.org/web/20241125104449/https://luhmann.surge.sh/learning-how-to-read ↩︎
No, that's not at all what I mean. I mean that there is a way to scan "nearby" cards to get an idea of their conceptual arena and/or their flow of argument. Luhmann could get this by riffling through a stack of cards. My system gets this by having an outline one can scan, and and by the particular way search results are presented.
It's hard to appreciate the value of this ability until you have experienced it. The value comes from being able to grasp the conceptual neighborhood immediately by seeing it, not by some abstract number or by counting the jumps from one individual node to another.
What is in play here is the matter of scale I discussed in another comment yesterday. A focus on details obscures grasping the bigger pattern. In this case, individual cards, and to some extent even individual links, are the fine-grained scale, but you need to back out to see the pattern. This is what scanning does. Structure cards are helpful but no replacement.
Luhmann had local structure, not global structure. Local sections of a card box were isomorphic to parts of an outline, and they generally (with exceptions) were related conceptually.
That is why I tried to understand the deeper underpinnings of his system: cognitive, library, and psychological science among them.
After all, every football player kicks and heads the ball differently but they are all playing "football". I'm playing "Zettelkasten".
The advantage of a feature-rich app like Obsidian is that I have a many options available to filter and display linked notes. For example: VirtFolder https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/3478/obsidian-plug-in
The advantage of capturing lots of structured data in my notes is that I can create a wide range of meaningful queries.
Of course the advantages come at a cost. Obsidian has a steep learning curve and customization takes time.