He adheres to no single philosophical school, though he feels free enough to wander through the hallways, so to speak, of each and every school of West and East down through the ages. He defends no propositions; rather, he samples them, explores them to their heights and the depths, then moves on. He proposes ultimate answers -- a goodly number of them, in fact -- and then confesses that he himself cannot choose among them. Especially in the Exegesis, Dick is sometimes moved to exclamations of unphilosophical joy; at other times the despair expressed on the page is a fearful thing. Dick clearly does not fit the modern mold of the "philosopher"; his true affinity is with the pre-Socratic thinkers, whose gnomic and evocative writings -- adamant, fragmented personal visions of the universe, its nature and purpose -- have resisted definitive textual analysis for more than two millennia.

If one attempts to label Dick as a "mystic," similar difficulties arise. First, the term "mystic" seems to imply, by its standard usage in theological literature, that Dick definitely made contact with a divine reality or "saw God," as modern parlance goes. This conclusion is, of course, unwarranted. Dick himself never made up his mind as to whether it was God or "psychosis" or "something other" that he contacted in 2-3-74. Indeterminacy is the central characteristic of the Exegesis. The sheer strangeness of Dick's visions, coupled with his self-confessed "nervous breakdowns," have led some readers and critics to conclude that 2-3-74 can be seen only as the product of mental illness; the diagnoses offered are legion. To be sure, attempts at posthumous diagnosis of Dick are doomed to be highly speculative, particularly when psychiatrists and psychologists who treated him at various times of his life themselves disagreed widely over his mental state (most placed him as neurotic in some form, and at least one found him quite normal).