Setting off

Diversions on the way — What way is this, where am I headed? If anywhere? I have in mind here, as well as the “way” of Daoism, some of those familiar Buddhist formulations of a “pathless path” that might even take us through a “gateless gate”: a gate where we discover that we never needed to take a single step in any direction because we were already precisely where we needed to be. I think these much quoted lines of T. S. Eliot are worth putting out there again:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Nevertheless I have a sense that I am on the way somewhere, and for the most part I enjoy the journey, and find that the journey is itself worthwhile. Perhaps the journey even is the destination in some sense. And the diversions, in the sense both of what feels like getting “sidetracked,” but also of a kind of enjoyable distraction, what are called “divertissements” in French, are perhaps also the destination.

I once worked in the academic world, in philosophy. It’s thanks to my immersion in the Western philosophical tradition that I feel that all of the great questions of life are forever up for grabs and that nothing has been decided in advance. One of the things I took from those years was that in the most fundamental questions no definite ‘progress’ has been made since the days of the ancient Greeks; rather what happens is an unfolding of these questions, opening up new dimensions of them in new terms but never moving beyond the infinite profundity of that initial questioning. It is for this reason that we always have to go back to, for example, Kant, but also to Descartes, to St. Augustine, and of course to Plato, and read them anew. So it is the most arrant naivety to believe that, for example, anything modern science has to tell us can in any way bypass the need to re-engage with these questions. And now I realize that it is, of course, also a question of going back to the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, and no doubt to African and other indigenous wisdom traditions.

As a tribute to what I owe to Western philosophy, and because I would love to re-engage in this tradition, I would like one day soon to again put together something sufficiently scholarly to pass muster in the academic world: that would be a return to a kind of home for me. But for now, just this ragbag assortment of diversionary thoughts.