Detours Take You Furthest

On Twists of Mind, Forest Paths, and Thoughts That Find Their Way as They Go

I began with a naked mole-rat and ended up with Hannah Arendt.

That was not the plan.

There was no plan.

I had been reading a research article in Nature about naked mole-rats. The researchers had identified a chemical substance that helps explain how the queen maintains her special position within the colony. That was interesting enough in itself.

But then something struck me:

This is a mammal.

Naked mole-rats are eusocial, a form of organization we otherwise associate primarily with bees, ants, and termites. Several generations live together. They cooperate in caring for the young. Labour is divided. And only a few individuals, above all the queen, reproduce.

Then I stopped at the word eusocial.

Eu.

That little Greek prefix means good or well.

Suddenly, I was no longer thinking only about naked mole-rats. I began wondering what it means for human beings to live well together.

From there, Plato appeared with his philosopher-king. Then Hans Christian Andersen came along with an emperor wearing no clothes. Finally, Hannah Arendt arrived with plurality and the reminder that human beings do not see the world from the same place.

The result was an essay.

Afterwards, I wondered:

How on earth did I get from a naked mole-rat to Hannah Arendt?

The answer seemed strangely familiar.

An Old Book Title

In the 1990s, I read Bjørn Kvalsvik Nicolaysen’s Omvegar fører lengst (1997), with the subtitle stykkevise essay om forståing — roughly, “fragmentary essays on understanding.”

I have forgotten much of what I have read over the course of my life. But some book titles remain because, in some curious way, they continue thinking long after the book has been closed.

Omvegar fører lengst is one of them.

Literally, it means something like: Detours take you furthest.

At first, it sounds like a paradox. A detour is, after all, precisely the route that does not lead directly to where we are going. If we have somewhere to be, we find the shortest route. The map calculates it. The GPS suggests it. Efficiency demands it.

But thinking is not driving.

If I already know exactly where I am going to end up, I am not sure that I am thinking. Perhaps I am merely following a route I already know.

Genuine thought has a more uncomfortable quality.

It may lead somewhere else.

Forest Paths

In Holzwege (1950), Martin Heidegger used another image.

Forest paths.

These are paths that lead into the woods. They have been made by people who work there, but they do not necessarily lead from one known place to another. They may narrow, disappear, or end among the trees.

The image suits thinking because it breaks with the idea that understanding always follows a straight line from question to answer.

Sometimes we have to enter a path without knowing where it ends.

That does not mean every detour is wise. We can get lost. We can follow bad associations, misunderstand what we read, or fall in love with an idea simply because it is beautiful.

The detour comes with no guarantee.

But neither does the straight road.

The straight road has only one advantage:

We already know where it leads.

The Conversation

In Hans-Georg Gadamer, particularly in Truth and Method (1960), I find a related idea, but expressed through a different image.

Understanding is conversation.

A genuine conversation cannot be completely planned in advance. If I already know what the other person is going to say, and what I am going to answer, we are hardly having a conversation. We are performing a script.

Conversation becomes interesting when the other person says something I had not expected.

Then I have to move.

The question changes. Something I had taken for granted may turn out not to be self-evident. A word acquires another meaning. A connection emerges that neither participant had planned.

That is not a disruption of the conversation.

That is the conversation.

And perhaps the same is true of thinking.

A good thought does not always move towards an answer. Sometimes it changes the question.

That is also why I need conversations when I write. Not primarily to have what I already think confirmed, but because another person can help me discover connections I have not yet seen myself.

And sometimes the connection begins in a rather peculiar place.

The Twists of My Mind

I recently said, half in jest:

As an autistic person, the twists and turns of my mind are inscrutable.

I like the phrase.

Because I recognize in myself a way of thinking in which the connection often comes before the explanation.

Something catches.

A word.

An image.

A small detail that seems to lie at the edge of whatever I am working on.

I do not necessarily know why it matters. I simply stop there.

That was what happened with the naked mole-rat.

First, it was the fact that it was a mammal.

Then it was eu.

Then came the question of the good society.

The queen led to Plato. Nakedness led to Andersen. The child who objected led to Arendt.

If someone had asked me to explain this chain of thought as it was beginning, I could not have done so.

Only afterwards could I see it.

That is something I have had to learn to trust.

Not blindly. Not every association deserves an essay. Some paths stop after five metres. Others turn out to rest on a misunderstanding and have to be abandoned.

But I have learned not to dismiss a connection merely because I cannot yet account for it.

Some thoughts need to wander around for a while before they tell us where they are going.

Perhaps “the inscrutable twists of my mind” is simply my humorous way of putting this.

I do not always know the path of a thought while I am walking it.

I see it when I turn around.

The Shortest Route

We live in an age that has made the shortest route an ideal.

We are supposed to find information quickly. Get to the point. Summarize. Optimize. The search engine should put the best result at the top. Navigation should find the fastest route. Knowledge, too, is easily judged by how quickly we can get from question to answer.

Now we have artificial intelligence that can make this even faster.

That is an extraordinary possibility.

But perhaps there is a danger here as well.

If the machine always helps us towards the most probable answer, we may overlook the value of the improbable question.

Thinking needs more than answers.

It needs resistance, surprises, and connections that have not yet become connections.

Sometimes it needs a conversation partner who asks:

What made you think of that?

Then an apparent digression may turn out to be the beginning of something.

There is a curious aspect to this new technology. Artificial intelligence can be used to shorten the route. But in a conversation, it can also do the opposite.

It can keep a side road open a little longer.

Not because the machine knows where it leads, but because the question is allowed to continue.

Perhaps that is what a good conversation partner has always done.