Schopenhauer was deeply aware of such things and wished to play his own part in the world of culture. But this was not to be. His father browbeat him into becoming a businessman. At the end of his grand tour of Europe, Schopenhauer was forced to abandon his education and become apprenticed to a local business in Hamburg. This was a time of deep – and deeply repressed – personal distress for Schopenhauer. (At the same age, a very similar conflict caused the equally tough-minded Hume to suffer a nervous breakdown.)
Then suddenly Schopenhauer’s entire situation changed. In the early hours of April 20, 1805, Schopenhauer’s father climbed to the top of the warehouse at the back of the family mansion and flung himself into the Fleet. The precise nexus of reasons for his suicide remains uncertain. His marriage had become something of a painful charade; the European scene was immensely depressing; and business prospects didn’t look good. Yet perhaps more pertinent was his deep streak of melancholy (which his son was to inherit) and a family history of mental instability (Arthur’s paternal grandmother went insane). But Schopenhauer’s mind does not appear to have been affected by madness – there was to be no saner philosopher than Schopenhauer.
The suicide was hushed up, as such unusually profound decisions in high society often are (presumably in case they prove inspirational). The Schopenhauer business was wound up, leaving the family with a comfortable private income for life; and Arthur’s mother and his younger sister left Hamburg to live a new artistic existence in cultural Weimar. Meanwhile the eighteen-year-old Schopenhauer was left alone in the city, working at a job he didn’t like but felt obliged to continue with. Shortly before his death, Schopenhauer’s father had given him an essay by the poet Matthias Claudius called To My Son. This preached a stoic, alienated inwardness which was in deep accord with Schopenhauer’s feelings. But he didn’t spend his whole time in introspection. As was the case in his later years, Schopenhauer’s worldly sophistication allowed him to live a life apparently at deep variance with his innermost feelings. It was during this period that Schopenhauer’s friend Anthime, from Le Havre, arrived to study business in Hamburg. They both had money, and on the weekends the two of them went around the stage doors picking up actresses and chorus girls. If they didn’t score with them, they would make up for it with ‘the embraces of an industrious whore’.
In 1807 Schopenhauer finally summoned up the nerve to disobey his father’s wishes. He left Hamburg and went to school in Gotha in order to gain sufficient qualifications to enter university. But by now Schopenhauer was far too mature for school, and he was soon expelled (for writing a not particularly funny or even scurrilous poem about a wet schoolmaster). He then went to live with his mother at Weimar.
Mom had blossomed into a star of the literary salons. She’d started writing and had become friends with the unconventional Grand Old Man of German Literature, Goethe, and the witty Christoph Wieland (the German Voltaire). Madame Schopenhauer was much in demand but had the social daring to scorn proposals of marriage, preferring her independence. Schopenhauer was appalled at the sight of his mother enjoying herself in such a fashion; and she herself didn’t fancy having a disapproving son living under the same roof to cramp her style. Both were strong-willed and volatile, and soon fell out. There were several scenes, and much slamming of doors. No doubt Schopenhauer was genuinely shocked by his mother’s behaviour. (The concept of chauvinist hypocrisy, like Antarctica, had yet to be discovered, though some intrepid explorers of the oceanic emptiness of social life were becoming convinced that it existed.) No doubt Schopenhauer was also jealous of his mother’s success in such exalted literary company. He despised his mother’s aspirations to ‘genius’ (while harbouring similar aspirations himself), and his mother’s transformation almost certainly brought to the surface a latent oedipal frisson between them.
Everyone heaved a sigh of relief when young Arthur left in 1809 to study at the University of Göttingen. He enrolled as a medical student but soon began attending lectures in philosophy. It was here that Schopenhauer discovered Plato and then began reading Kant, who was to have such an overwhelming influence on his philosophy. Schopenhauer recognised the superlative skill of Kant’s philosophy and found himself bitterly disappointed when he tried studying the more modern work of Hegel. He soon began spreading his intellectual wings in his private notebooks, which reveal his remarkable philosophic acumen rapidly increasing in inverse proportion to his modesty. Schopenhauer came to the opinion that he was a giant among midgets on the philosophical scene in Göttingen; in 1811 he switched to Berlin to study under Fichte, the leading German philosopher of the period. (Hegel had published The Phenomenology of Mind four years earlier, but no one had yet pretended that they understood it.) But Schopenhauer quickly became disillusioned with Fichte’s obscurantism. What Schopenhauer was looking for was something as clear as science, and equally as convincing.
Despite all this, Schopenhauer was almost persuaded by Fichte’s enthusiasm for the War of Liberation to join the German fight against Napoleon. But in the end he thought better of it, and in 1812 he went off to write his doctoral dissertation. This was entitled On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and is as interesting as it sounds, being largely a Kantian exploration of the four types of cause and effect (logical, physical, mathematical, and moral).
Schopenhauer now returned to Weimar, where Johanna Schopenhauer had taken up with a court official named Müller (who preferred to be known by the more aristocratic name of von Gerstenbergk). This unfortunate bergk was twelve years Johanna’s junior and liked to write poetry. Schopenhauer arrived on the scene and played his Hamlet role to the full. Müller wasn’t quite up to playing Claudius and would rise from the dinner table in a fit of pique at Arthur’s oblique cutting remarks – leaving the tyro Hamlet to have it out with Gertrude-Johanna. One of Johanna’s letters to her son catches the tone. ‘Not Müller, but you yourself have torn yourself away from me; your mistrust, your criticism of my life, of my choice of friends, your desultory behaviour towards me, your contempt for my sex, your greed, your moods ….’ Johanna was already becoming the figure who would produce the popular romantic novels that made her famous, and her son couldn’t bear it. He knew that he had an intellect far superior to hers (which wasn’t quite as negligible as many commentators would have us believe). Yet he was not capable of simply dismissing her literary pretensions from his mind as beneath his consideration. This conflict evidently had to run its course in order for unfinished psychological business to be played out.
But Weimar was more than just a soap opera of endless domestic tantrums for Schopenhauer. He also came to know Goethe. The budding philosopher and the mature genius would talk for hours. Schopenhauer later claimed that he ‘profited immensely’ from these conversations, and also that he helped Goethe with his ‘Theory of Colours’. This comes as a surprise, for Schopenhauer had studied medicine and possessed a good scientific brain. Goethe’s theory of colours was little more than a hobby of genius – the foible of an amateur scientist, with which he would pester his admiring visitors. A century before, Newton had already explained how white light is composed of all the colours of the spectrum. Goethe obstinately refused to believe what was obvious to anyone who had seen white light pass through a prism, whose refractive power broke it down into the colours of the rainbow. In Goethe’s view, white light was a colour in its own right. His theory claimed that all colours were in fact a mixture of light and darkness, permeated by a cloudy element that gave the ensuing grey dusk its coloured radiance.
This nonsense was taken seriously only because of Goethe’s genius in other fields, and then only by the literati and other scientific numskulls. Schopenhauer had considerable literary skill but certainly didn’t fall into the latter category. One wonders why he was taken in. For once his arrogance seems to have failed him. This was perhaps the last time Schopenhauer allowed his ideas to be influenced by a living being whose genius he was willing to recognise. From now on he would have sufficient self-certainty to follow his own intuition at all times – often in