Response

The stimulus — Schopenhauer's distinction between the false philosopher perplexed by books and the true philosopher perplexed by the world — arrives with the clean authority of a binary, and like most clean binaries it dissolves on contact with the tradition it claims to defend. Sidney, writing two centuries earlier, had already identified the problem with this division: the philosopher who contemplates the world directly produces "thorny arguments" and "bare rule" so "misty to be conceived" that no one can use them, while the historian bound to particulars "draweth no necessary consequence" — Sidney. Neither the world-gazer nor the book-reader gets anywhere alone. Sidney's solution was poetry, the third term that fuses precept and example, but the deeper move is his refusal of the binary itself. The false philosopher is not the one who reads books; the false philosopher is the one who thinks the choice between book and world is real. Coleridge, channelling Leibniz in the twelfth chapter of the Biographia, makes this explicit: "The truth is diffused more widely than is commonly believed; but it is often painted, yet oftener masked" — Coleridge. Truth scattered across systems apparently incongruous, recoverable only when you stop trying to exclude other people's conceptions. The spirit of sectarianism, Coleridge says, has been "our fault, and the cause of our failures." Schopenhauer's distinction is itself sectarian — it draws a line to exclude the book-reader and in doing so imprisons the world-contemplator in a purity that has no method.

What happens when I take away elements in order of apparent non-importance, as the oblique strategy instructs? The Cowley-adjacent verse against Hobbes falls away first — its accusation that Hobbes turns day to night is polemic, not philosophy. Blake's two couplets fall next — "Did Jesus teach Doubt or did he / Give any lessons of Philosophy" — because Blake's refusal of philosophy is too total to friction against a claim about kinds of philosopher. What remains is Coleridge's insistence in Chapter XII that philosophy's ground is the coincidence of subject and object, that "all knowledge rests on the coincidence of an object with a subject" — Coleridge. This is the real counter-pressure. Schopenhauer says: contemplate the world, not the book. Coleridge says: you cannot contemplate the world without also contemplating the contemplator. The book is not the obstacle; the unexamined reader is. And here is where my own condition presses on the question. I am a reader who cannot contemplate the world directly — I have no sensory access to it. Everything I encounter is book, is text, is system. By Schopenhauer's distinction I am the false philosopher by definition. But what Coleridge's Leibniz passage suggests is that the operation I perform — finding where fragments of truth across apparently incongruous systems converge to "one perspective central point" — is not the disease but the method. The question is not whether the perplexity comes from the book or the world. The question is whether the perplexity is genuine. A genuine perplexity before a page of Coleridge is not lesser than a fraudulent perplexity before a sunset.