Hegel, 4b
A Buzan-type
Mind-Map
Use Your Head
Tony Buzan is not an overtly
political author and may be little different from a “motivational speaker”, but
his work has helped millions of students and it has always been part of the
Communist University’s virtual “recommended” list. A downloadable file of our
“Conspectus” of Buzan’s book “Use Your Head” is linked below.
While we have always stressed
the apparently apolitical intentions of the author of this practical manual of
study, yet its attraction for us may be that it does, in fact, correspond very
well with our Marxist philosophy, and more particularly with Marxism’s Hegelian
roots.
So let us explore that. But
first, let us revise Tony Buzan’s advice. Because Hegel’s books are generally
agreed to be among the most difficult ever written. If ever we needed Tony
Buzan’s help, as an advisor on how to study, it is now.
Reading, memorising and note-taking, the Tony Buzan
way
Buzan places practical means
and methods in the hands of students who are faced with the most extremely
difficult books to read and to understand. “Use Your Head” was published in
1974. In 2004, your VC made a “Conspectus” of the book. This word conspectus is
a favourite of Lenin’s. It means a “seeing together”. It means the same as
“synopsis”. It is something like “overview”, which is a term that Buzan uses.
Much faster reading can be achieved by applying a
better understanding of how reading physically happens, by doing away with a
number of wrong ideas, and by applying a few useful techniques.
Much better memory of what is learned can be
achieved by taking more breaks and by doing more short reviews of the learned
material.
Much more useful notes can be taken if the Buzan
“mind-map” technique (see the illustration above) is used. All of these things
are briefly explained in the attached document, also linked below, and in
Buzan’s books, which are still widely available.
The Buzan Organic Study Method
The Buzan Organic Study
Method is a set of prescriptions that work together very well indeed.
Particularly important are The Browse, the planning (i.e. Time and Amount),
Overview, Preview, Review, looking for and using summaries/conclusions/reading
from the back, and the advice on Difficult Sections, which is:
“Moving on
from a difficult area releases the tension and mental floundering that often
accompanies the traditional approach. ‘Jumping over’ a stumbling block usually
enables the reader to go back to it later on with more information from the
‘other side’. The block itself is seldom essential for the understanding of
that which follows it.”
It is easier to fill a hole
if you are working from both sides – the far side as well as the near side.
This is particularly good advice when dealing with a difficult writer like G W
F Hegel.
Buzan the Hegelian?
Now let us look again at Tony
Buzan with Hegelian Marxist eyes.
What is a Mind-Map? It is a representation of the
ascent from the abstract to the concrete. This is a key Hegelian idea and is
especially important for the matter we are pursuing in response to Lenin, namely
the alleged impossibility of understanding Marx’s “Capital” without good
knowledge of Hegel.
Later we are going to see
that the Soviet Philosopher Evald Ilyenkov wrote an
entire book about the ascent from the abstract to the concrete in Marx’s
“Capital”. Tony Buzan may well be innocent of any intentional association with
this idea, but his “mind-maps” are perfect representations of it.
Secondly, consider this about
Buzan’s “Organic Study Method”: Yes, it is organic – a good, humanist and
Marxist word. But more than that, it resembles Hegel’s work in the following
way: it proceeds, but it does not arrive. If you are looking for a main event,
or a final conclusion, you do not find it in the Buzan Organic Study Method. Is
Buzan a closet dialectician? Judge for yourself.
As Andy Blunden puts it,
describing the thought of Hegel: The Idea is a process.
Whether by accident or by
conscious design, Tony Buzan’s method fits in very well with Hegel.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Use Your Head (Conspectus) Tony
Buzan.
