But here’s a fun little historical linguistic puzzle:
What was the first use of the word Zettelkasten in a predominantly English language setting?
In my own notes/research the first occurrence I’ve been able to identify in an English language setting is on Manfred Kuehn’s blog in Taking note: Luhmann’s Zettelkasten on 2007-12-16. He’d just started his blog earlier that month.
Has anyone seen an earlier usage? Can you find one? Can you beat this December 2007 date or something close by a different author?
Google’s nGram Viewer doesn’t indicate any instances of it from 1800-2019 in its English search, though does provide a graph for German with peaks in the 1850s, 1892 (just after Ernst Bernheim’s Lehrbuch der Historischen Methode in 1889), 1912, 1925, and again in 1991.
Twitter search from 2006-2007 finds nothing and there are only two results in German both mentioning Luhmann.
My best guess for earlier versions of the appearance zettelkasten in English might stem from the work/publications of S. D. Goitein or Gotthard Deutsch, but I’ve yet to see anything there.
For those who speak German, what might you posit as a motivating source for the rise of the word in the 1850s or any of the other later peaks?
JSTOR has at least a dozen articles/journal entries in English referencing “zettelkasten” (mostly disparagingly). I searched a while back, and the earliest I found then was from 1967. But, there were others from the 70s, 80s, 90s, etc.
This is the sort of search that AI would make a lot easier. Right now searching for the first use of a term in English isn’t the sort of thing Google does well.
It’s worth noting that ‘Zettel’, a collection of Wittgenstein’s remarks, was published in 1967 on English. See https://archive.org/details/zettel0000witt The title doesn’t use the full word ‘Zettelkasten’ but that’s the concept.
Just for fun I did a bit more searching and found https://ablinger.mur.at/zettelkasten.html which was created no earlier than July 22, 2000 (based on it being authored for Mozilla 4.74 but probably not much later. Individual entries are dated and there are many prior to 2007, eg. https://ablinger.mur.at/zettel_rhythmen-zeichnen.html
Chris, nice archeological work :). Kuehn’s text, which I had never read, is one the best descriptions of Zettelkasten to date. I particularly liked this sentence describing the structure of a Zettelkasten: “It is a network; it is not “arboretic.” Folks: Zettelkasten is a network and not a tree! Do not forget it!
I just listened to an interview with Andrea Wulf about her book on Alexander von Humboldt, “The Invention of Nature”.
She described Humboldt’s notebooks and I thought it sounded so “zettlekasten” and Luhmann-like. He was writing in the 1850s, so maybe there’s something in the “zeitgeist”?
Here’s a quote from the transcript:
“And then you have this extraordinary system of filing, which might sound boring, but bear with me. So his filing system, I think it’s basically a computer. It’s so clever. So here is, and then amazingly kept it like this. So in the archives in Berlin, you get out these boxes. He called them boxes box eight box, whatever box nine, box nine B.
And in that box, you have open envelopes which have also titles, so say a box is called Slavery. Then you have in that box, an envelope that is called Sugar because of course sugar has to do with slavery. Now in that envelope, but sugar, he will have something about the botany of the plants. He will have something about work conditions, all these kinds of different things. So he would get a letter from someone who worked at a slave plantation in the West Indies with botanical information.
So that goes into the envelope, sugar, botany or something like that. And then he would have someone write him something about the health effect it had on slaves or something. And then he has this kind of box slavery, and then he starts writing his books. And so he can just take out this box and he can use it, but he can file it like a page from a book. He has never problems with tearing our pages from books, put that in a newspaper articular letter, but then he does writing another essay or another book.
And suddenly it is about the botany of I’m making this up now, the botany of the west Indies. So you can just take the envelope out of the slavery box and he can put it into the box botany of the West Indies. So he has this vast archive of information, but he can resort it and refile it, according to the project he’s working on which is keywording basically in an analog way, which I think is so clever, which allows him to make these connections, which I think other people can’t do because they have a different filing system.”
https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/60-245LTFpl/transcript
In response to a post last week, Stephen Downes reminded me that Ludwig Wittgenstein had a zettelkasten practice. In particular there is a translated and published book Zettel from 1967 which contains 717 zettels from Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, or works left behind following his death in 1951. I’ve had a copy lying around for a bit, but finally spent some time with it. The book cleverly has a parallel text form with the German on one side of the page and the English on the facing page. I’ve also seen translations of the book in both Spanish and Italian for those who might prefer those.
While the individual entries themselves are as fascinating as dipping randomly into some of Henry David Thoreau’s journals or Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s Waste Books, the brief introductory material by the editors was immediately the most interesting to me.
In the book, the editors (one a student, the other his friend and colleague and both his literary executors) indicate that many of Wittgenstein’s zettels “were for the most part cut from extensive typescripts of his, other copies of which still exist.” Perhaps not knowing of the commonplace book or zettelkasten traditions, they may have dramatically mistaken the notes in his zettelkasten as having originated in his typescripts rather than them having originated as notes which then later made it into his typescripts! I’m left wondering what in particular about the originals may have made them think it was typescript to zettel?! They even indicate having gone so far as to edit some of the zettel using the typescripts to fill in missing material, so those reading them from the note stage forward may wish to take caution for these.
If it’s true that the two editors were unaware of his note taking habits, then it would seem obvious that Wittgenstein didn’t pass along his note taking methods to his students, given that Anscombe was close enough to have visited his deathbed and been named a literary executor. Given the mid-century timeframe, it’s likely that the card index note taking methods were already passing out of vogue at this time.
Some more digging into the actual original materials may be necessary here. Were these the only slips he left behind? Were there others? Did he dispose of his notes as works from them were published?
Based on the dating provided by Anscombe and von Wright, Wittgenstein’s slips dated from 1929 to 1948. Supposing that the notes preceded the typescripts and not the other way around as Anscombe and von Wright indicate, the majority of the notes were turned into written work (typescripts) which were dictated from 1945-1948.
Some of the manuscript notes in Wittgenstein’s zettelkasten were according to the editors “apparently written to add to the remarks on a particular matter preserved in the box”. So much like Niklas Luhmann’s wooden conversation partner, Wittgenstein was not only having conversations with the texts he was reading, he was creating a conversation between himself and his pre-existing notes thus extending his lines of thought within his zettelkasten.
However the form of these notes is structurally different from Luhmann’s. Peter Geach apparently made an arrangement of Wittgenstein’s slips which was broadly kept in the edited and published version Zettel. Fragments on the same topic were clipped together indicating that Wittgenstein’s method was most likely by “conversation”, subject, or possibly topical headings. However there were also a large number of slips “lying loose in the box.” Perhaps these were notes which he had yet to file or which some intervening archivist may have re-arranged? In any case this particular source doesn’t indicate the use of alphabetical dividers or other tabbed divisions.
In any case, Geach otherwise arranged all the materials as best as he could according to subject matter. As a result the printed book version isn’t necessarily the arrangement that Wittgenstein would have made, but the editors of the book felt that at least Geach’s arrangement made it an “instructive and readable compilation”. Many of the zettels are closely related and seem to form coherent ideas or streams of thought. Some remind me a bit of Twitter threads.
Ultimately I’m left wondering, what was Wittgenstein’s reading, note taking, and process? Was it note taking, arranging/outlining, and then dictation followed by editing? Dictating certainly would have been easier/faster if he’d already written down his cards and could simply read from them to a secretary.
For those hoping for lots of answers about his particular practice, not much is to be gleaned here except for looking directly at the collection as a whole. Most fascinating to me is seeing a softer conversational and decontextualized nature in the notes which I’ve also seen in Luhmann’s. Of course without the context and references, many are unlikely to mean much to some without some heavy reading or studying.
Puzzling out Wittgenstein’s active practice is likely going to require some more direct access to the source materials or subsequent works from other scholars who have been through them and his other materials more thoroughly.
References
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Zettel. Edited by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright,. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Second California Paperback Printing. 1967. Reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2007.