The philosopher as a dancer

Often I am asked which philosophical problems one must take up, and which ones one must set aside as confused or paralyzed or unproductive. One does not need a critique of faculties to answer this question. The answer is quite simple and is given in its very givenness as a philosophical question. One does not "take up" a philosophical problem, but to a philosopher philosophy is given in a singular, nuanced way, which is particular to the shape and contours of that philosopher's life paths and idiosyncracies. The philosopher meets philosophy half way, and then he defines and determines the exact way in which his philosophy is unfolded by deepening or altering the forms of these contours.
But existentially speaking, that decisive moment when a person "becomes" a philosopher, when a philosophy "comes" to him, can be described as the pleasure of a bitter-sweet pain at the ever-so-slight loss he feels in his world, with which he had hitherto been completely at one. It is the sweet pain one experiences when one lifts only one toe off the ground, even though one is in every other way grounded in reality: the bitter pleasure of "metaphysics." The subsequent challenge for the philosopher is to maintain a sort of balance so that on the one hand he does not abstractly try to remove himself off the ground (lest he wants to get caught in the entrapments of false philosophies), and on the other hand not to induce himself with a narcotic which makes him again "one" with the world (unless he wants to end up being a self-satisfied mystic). Balance is the key for a philosopher.