Check Out This Handwritten "MAP OF GUNKEL"

I love studying materials Patrick Gunkel generated in the years before he invented ideonomy (i.e., circa 1981). These documents illuminate the convergence of ideas that eventually gave rise to Gunkel’s science, making it easier to understand the context.

Today, I’d like to share this undated, handwritten list where Gunkel tried to brainstorm everything he could think of about himself and his identity.

Though it’s undated, the lack of any references to ideonomy strongly suggests to me that it fits the profile of one such pre-ideonomy document.

As shown by the redactions up top, Gunkel rejected the potential titles GUNKELLAND and ^MapGunkel before settling on the rather generic, but still descriptive, title: “Map of Gunkel.”

Although some entries are hard or impossible to make out due to damage—someone with good image-processing software may actually succeed at interpreting some of the lines—there are still plenty of fascinating nuggets about Gunkel and his personality scattered throughout this very long list, which could easily provide inspiration for a biography or series of biographical sketches.

Some of Gunkel’s personal interests are listed, including:

We also see his own self-knowledge on display:

The list provides a hint of the emotional and mental pain that he struggled with throughout his life:

As well as his grandiosity…

…self-aware self-mythologizing…

…and unique intellectual interests:

In terms of the likely date, at first I assumed the list was from the late 1970s, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it could be several years older.

The reason?

Unless future analysis shows differently, the other big thing missing on the list (besides ideonomy) is “Efflorescent World View,” which Gunkel developed in 1976.

That would date the list to perhaps the 1974 - 1975 period, which was a dark period for Gunkel following his ejection from MIT’s Project MAC and could directly explain the list as a desire to take stock of himself and his identity.

What I find particularly interesting and “relatable” about this list is that many people, perhaps as an exercise in school, have come up with such trait or identity lists.

What I don’t think happens, however, is that a personal list like this ends up being as long and as far-ranging as Gunkel’s list.

The more I look at this list, in fact, the more I begin to wonder about what seems to me the most interesting question—since Gunkel wrote this out long hand at one go, what are the associative leaps that led him from one idea to the next, and do those leaps themselves say something about Gunkel?

I can understand why “Cross-pollination” may have led to “Inspiration,” but why was his next item—“Self-criticism”—followed by “Outthinking all”?

I wish Gunkel were still alive today so that I could go, point by point, down this list with him together.

Based on what I know about Gunkel, however, such an exercise would have likely taken many weeks—and perhaps months!—of intense conversation, digression, and analysis.

1) Unless this was a misspelling of “diachronic,” which seems unlikely, this term was Gunkel’s own invention. Although I can’t be sure, the references do pop up in his writings and may refer to a sort of Hegelian dialectical method of inquiry. More research would be needed.

2) Reflecting Gunkel’s long-time interest in Fritz Zwicky’s morphological analysis and his quest to find the fundamental types of order underlying the universe, as I described here.

3) This was one of Gunkel’s original coinages and pet ideas for a long time which eventually merged into ideonomy. The best I can figure, Gunkel imagined an analytical technique similar to morphological analysis that would predict future sciences; something we are actually coming close to today, with a profusion of papers on using large language models to identify gaps in scientific research.