"It is not the position, but the disposition"
About this Quote
What matters is not the rank you hold, the platform you stand on, or the slogan you endorse, but the cast of mind and heart you bring to the world. A position can be a badge, a label easily adopted or abandoned. Disposition is harder won: a habit of attention, a temperament of curiosity, courage, and sympathy. It governs how you look and listen, whether you can sit with complexity, how you treat others when no one is watching.
Susan Sontag returned to this distinction throughout her work. She cared less about declarative stances than about sensibility, the quality of response. In essays like Notes on Camp and Against Interpretation, she argued that style is not decoration but a way of thinking, an ethical pressure. To really see an artwork, a culture, a political event, you need a disposition that resists reduction, that can be both exacting and generous. The right conclusion reached with glibness or zealotry is not right enough; she wanted an erotics of art and an ethics of attention.
Her public life bore this out. She was suspicious of righteous posturing, whether on the left or the right, and she learned in public, revising earlier enthusiasms as experience deepened. She went to besieged Sarajevo and helped stage Waiting for Godot, turning solidarity into a practice of presence. That was not a change of position so much as a fidelity to a disposition: seriousness, cosmopolitanism, and an obligation to witness.
Carried into everyday life, the line becomes advice. Titles, identities, and hot takes come cheap; the way you look, doubt, care, and persist does not. Disposition shapes the use of any power you acquire and the credibility of any critique you offer. Positions may be timely; disposition makes them trustworthy. Cultivating it means training the attention, disciplining the ego, and remaining open to what is difficult to absorb. It is a standard not for what to think, but for how to be.
Susan Sontag returned to this distinction throughout her work. She cared less about declarative stances than about sensibility, the quality of response. In essays like Notes on Camp and Against Interpretation, she argued that style is not decoration but a way of thinking, an ethical pressure. To really see an artwork, a culture, a political event, you need a disposition that resists reduction, that can be both exacting and generous. The right conclusion reached with glibness or zealotry is not right enough; she wanted an erotics of art and an ethics of attention.
Her public life bore this out. She was suspicious of righteous posturing, whether on the left or the right, and she learned in public, revising earlier enthusiasms as experience deepened. She went to besieged Sarajevo and helped stage Waiting for Godot, turning solidarity into a practice of presence. That was not a change of position so much as a fidelity to a disposition: seriousness, cosmopolitanism, and an obligation to witness.
Carried into everyday life, the line becomes advice. Titles, identities, and hot takes come cheap; the way you look, doubt, care, and persist does not. Disposition shapes the use of any power you acquire and the credibility of any critique you offer. Positions may be timely; disposition makes them trustworthy. Cultivating it means training the attention, disciplining the ego, and remaining open to what is difficult to absorb. It is a standard not for what to think, but for how to be.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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