Knowledge Trees: the early days of visualising information

Our quest first takes on substance, form and impetus with the father of science, Aristotle, whose taxonomy was used to catalog everything that was known. In the fertile grounds laid by his work, many trees of knowledge have since taken root, beginning with the tree diagrams of Porphyry, a 3rd century CE Greek. Porphyrian trees were used to illustrate various topics, from knowledge of the natural world, to legal and ethical systems, from genealogies “proving” the divine rights of kings, to arborescences of religious precepts.

Over the ages, these trees would lose their arboreal quality, taking on more abstract forms in order to better “explain and educate… and ultimately, to make the invisible visible”.¹ In the 13th century, Ramon Llull created his own knowledge trees, and was inspired by them to devise a tool for resolving all possible arguments with logic.

Example of a Porphyrean tree: the Tree of Science — Ramon Lull, Arbor scientiae, 1505 ed.

The Universal Tool

The idea of a universal tool capable of reducing complex phenomena to recombinable and computable constituent elements inspired one of the 17th century’s greatest polymaths, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, to devise a system of his own: his Characteristica Universalis, a universal language of pure concepts, or according to Couturat, “a system of signs that directly represent things (or, rather, ideas) and not words”.²

I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Leibniz’ dream of the “great instrument of reason, which will carry the forces of the mind further than the microscope has carried those of sight”, remained largely unrealised by the time of his death, but it succeeded in lighting conflagrations in the minds of another group of luminaries, the Enlightenment movement known as Les Lumières.

‘Stand out of my sunlight’ — Diogenes to Alexander the Great

Enkyklios-paedeia: Interrelation of all knowledge

This intellectual movement, headed by Diderot and d’Alembert, and whose members comprised such notable men of letters as Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu and Jaucourt, sought to change the way people think. Though they did not themselves fulfil Leibniz’ dream, in a brilliantly ambitious tour de force they drastically exceeded their own expectations by successfully organising all of knowledge within one definitive, 28 volume encyclopedia, the first of its kind to be mass printed and widely distributed. In Diderot’s words (emphasis mine),

the aim of an encyclopedia is to collect all the knowledge scattered over the face of the earth… and to transmit this to those who will come after us… that we may not die without having deserved well of the human race…. I have said that it could only belong to a philosophical age to attempt an encyclopedia… because such a work constantly demands more intellectual daring than is commonly found. All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings…³

This work was prefaced with one of the most famous knowledge trees, inspired by the premonitory words of Francis Bacon — the figurative system of human knowledge.