A Disposition

A certain disposition to the world — possessed by some humans, though not many — leads to reflection. That reflection in turn leads to puzzlement, and the puzzlement may be formed into questions. Those questions may lead to answers, either tentative or assured.

When the questions and answers are articulated, we call that articulation philosophy and the person who articulates a philosopher.

When reflection and puzzlement do not find straightforward verbal form, the person who has this disposition may be called an artist or a mystic or something else entirely: a dreamer, perhaps. There are less complimentary terms. Not that the ones I’ve listed are invariably complimentary. 

It is noteworthy that when Terrence Malick was still a philosopher he worked on a thinker who believed that philosophy, as professionally practiced, had lost its proper connection to the reflection which had prompted it. Philosophy had become homeless, and this thinker tried to bring it home. 

But what if your doubts go deeper than that? What if you suspect that philosophy as such has always-already gone astray? What if verbal articulation is inevitably, necessarily misleading, unable to stand on its own, requiring the complementary or corrective presence of other forms or modes of response to the world — other forms or modes of encountering the world? 

And what if one’s deepest conviction is that the world we encounter always transcends the perceptions and the categories available to us? That it always eludes and exceeds, that what we say is always partial? Then one might fall into silence and inaction. 

Or one might strive for some total work of art that gives us the widest possible range of responses to both the presence and the elusiveness of the world. One might apprentice oneself to the discipline of making such art — and in so doing one might learn the inadequacies of its existing techniques. One might embark on a quest for ever-greater technical capability — and at the same time realize that even perfect technique is insufficient unless one’s vision corresponds to it. 

Such a person needs at one and the same time to acquire facility in all the parts of making such a work of art and to expand on’s perception: to shape in one’s mind a Cosmos as one shapes it in art, so that the thinking and the making reinforce each other. It is the discipline of a lifetime.