In short, Jenisch's office becomes Schopenhauer's blacking factory – with this difference, that Dickens's experience was that of a little boy unable to analyse his situation and was one now fortunately rare, while Schopenhauer's is so ordinary as to be called perhaps the common lot of middle-class youth. The capitalist world, and in particular the heart of it, the world of buying and selling, offers almost nothing a young man wants: the instincts of youth are at variance with the demands of business, and especially with those of clerking. What young man is by nature diligent, sober and regular in his habits? Respectful to ‘superiors’ and humble before wealth? Sincerely able to devote himself to what he finds boring? One in ten thousand, perhaps. But for the great majority a ‘job’ is, depending on temperament, a torment or a tedious irrelevance which has to be endured day after day in order that, during one's so-called ‘free time’, one will be allowed to get on with living. The situation is the most commonplace in the world. I believe it is the cause of that settled cynicism with which nine out of ten regard the ‘social order’: they know that, short of a total revolution in the conduct of human affairs, any conceivable social order will for the great majority mean the boredom of routine, the damming up of their natural energies and the frustration of their natural desires. This familiar feeling was what now overcame Schopenhauer: the feeling which appears when life, hitherto apparently capable of granting anything, is suddenly revealed as a deception, when the colour is drained from it and the whole future seems a single grey. The essence is in the question: Is this all? Is this life? The intensity with which the question is asked must of course vary: but when we consider that Schopenhauer was in fact a man of genius, we shall not be surprised to discover that in him its intensity was very great. He himself tells us that, when in the spring of 1807 his mother wrote to him from Weimar that now two years had elapsed he could if he wished regard his promise to his late father as fulfilled and change his mode of life, he ‘burst into tears of joy’ and left Jenisch's office at once. And my contention is that the attitude towards life produced by these two years and more of office misery became, as did everything he felt, a permanent and irremovable part of his make-up: became, in fact, his permanent attitude towards life. What he as yet lacks is a mode of expressing it, but as soon as he is introduced to a suitable mode he seizes it instantly and employs it to the limit of its capacity.

Self-discovery

 

He is now 19, and only now does he embark on any kind of higher education. In June 1807 he goes to the grammar school at Gotha and subsequently to Weimar. He soon manages to find the amount of money his mother spends extravagant because, as he sees it, it has all been earned by his father; he also resents the evident fact that the ‘widow’ has certainly not resigned herself to lovelessness. He quarrels with her and from then on they are never on a friendly footing.

In February 1809, at 21, he receives his share of the patrimony and is now well off and his own master. His first act is to enter himself at Göttingen University, to which he goes in October to study medicine and science. After a year he turns to philosophy, and at once knows he has found himself. He is already 22, but by the time he is 28 he has formulated in every detail the philosophy of ‘will and idea’ which is the complete expression of his personality and whose vehicle, The World as Will and Idea, is half a century later to become the Koran of a large and very variously composed cult.

His teacher, G. E. Schulze, advised him to confine his reading to Plato and Kant: this he did, almost literally. Plato and Kant (with one other ingredient to be mentioned later) provided him with all the conceptual machinery he needed to formulate his own ideas in philosophical language. In 1811 he transferred to the University of Berlin, then in only the second year of its existence, and heard Fichte lecture, though without either pleasure or profit: his ideas were already fixed, and in any case Fichte was at this time coming forward as the great champion of German nationhood, a cause to which Schopenhauer was totally indifferent. In 1813 the German states rose against Napoleon and after the battle of Lützen (2 May), when Berlin appeared to be in danger, he left that city for Dresden and subsequently Rudolstadt, where he wrote his doctoral thesis, originally meant for Berlin, now offered to Jena. He received his diploma on 2 October, and in November returned to Weimar. He tried to resume relations with his mother but they quarrelled afresh and when he left the town in May 1814 he never saw her again. From 1814 to 1818 he lived in Dresden, and there he wrote The World as Will and Idea. To Plato and Kant he had now added the reading of a curiosity of early nineteenth-century literature: the Upanishads in Anquetil Duperron's Latin translation of a Persian version of the Sanskrit original, published in 1801 and 1802. This introduced him to Indian metaphysics, and again he required nothing more (or very little: while in Dresden he met the orientalist Friedrich Majer, whose Brahma, or The Religion of the Hindus appeared in 1819, and no doubt learned something from him). The Upanishads supplied the ultimate confirmation of his pessimistic ethic and made it possible for him to employ the metaphysic of Kant in a sense remote from that in which Kant himself had employed it. Of The World as Will and Idea its author himself had the highest opinion. ‘Subject to the limitation of human knowledge,’ he wrote, ‘my philosophy is the real solution of the enigma of the world.