He had resolved that his son should follow the family career of a merchant, and his education was planned accordingly on those lines. He was taken to France in 1797, and left at Havre for two years. For the next three years he attended a private school at Hamburg. During this time, discontent with his father's plans for his future was gradually ripening within him. To reconcile him, he was promised a trip to France and England, on the condition that he promised to give up his own desires and ambitions, and to be loyal to his father's wishes. The prospect of the journey was too alluring, and he gave the required promise. After six weeks had been spent in London, his parents left him at a boarding-school at Wimbledon. In letters to his mother, he complains of the mechanical instruction, the dreary Sunday services, and the tedious routine of the school. She, in reply, warns him not to give way to bombast and empty pathos.
He became proficient in English, and always held English character and intelligence in admiration, although he was impressed by the prevalent hypocrisy and the oppressive pietism of the time. He was busy already recording his impressions, describing characteristically the feelings and ideas awakened in him rather than the actual facts and events. The travellers returned through France, from Geneva to Vienna, and thence to Berlin.
For about four months Schopenhauer now worked in a Dantzig office, trying to acquire the rudiments of a business training. When almost seventeen, he entered the employment of a firm in Hamburg. He himself has recorded that there never was a worse clerk in a merchant's office. In his leisure, and during office hours whenever possible, he was reading voraciously.
In 1805 his father died, whether by accident or by his own hand remains uncertain. For two years longer Schopenhauer stuck to his hated task, out of loyalty to his father, and the promise made him some years earlier. But at last he could stifle his ambitions and yearnings towards a purely intellectual life no longer, and he obtained his mother's consent to leave his office, and to begin preparation for a learned career.
His mother meanwhile, with her daughter Adèle, had left Hamburg and settled at Weimar, at that time the intellectual centre of Germany. Goethe was here the sun round which the lesser lights of the artistic and intellectual world revolved. At the age of forty, Johanna Schopenhauer had entered on a new life, and was finding scope and free development for untried capabilities. She played a prominent part in the social life of the place, and her receptions were remarkable for the circle she gathered round her. Goethe himself was a frequent visitor there. She also took part in the theatrical performances, which were so conspicuous a feature of the life at Weimar. With help and encouragement from Fernow, a distinguished scholar and art critic, she began to write, and published with considerable popular success travel sketches, art biographies, and novels. Her daughter, in describing their life at Weimar, tells how her mother experienced ever fresh delight in intercourse with the famous men living there. "She was liked, her society was agreeable. Her pleasing manners made her house a centre of intellectual activity, where everyone felt at home, and freely contributed the best he had to bring." Besides Goethe, Schlegel, Grimm, Wieland and others were frequent guests under her roof. Freed from his hated bondage, Schopenhauer now left Hamburg and entered the gymnasium, or grammar school, at Gotha, but a lampoon on one of the masters was so resented that he was obliged to leave. He then came to Weimar, at his mother's suggestion, and worked at classics in the house of a well-known scholar, who had a real enthusiasm for all things Greek. Something of his spirit he communicated to his pupil, and the passion for Greek art and thought grew into a moulding principle in Schopenhauer's views of life and religion. At the same time that he was entering into the spirit of classical literature, he was cultivating his musical ability, and thus feeling his way towards a full and intense understanding of the art, which entered later with such significance into the development of his philosophy. He was striving to realise an ideal of the fullest and most complete culture, in which not only the life of thought, but also the life of art should find consummate satisfaction.
The estrangement between his mother and himself began to widen now that they were thrown constantly together. By arrangement, he dined daily with her, and came to her receptions. But Schopenhauer was too uncontrolled in his temper, and too uncompromising in his egoism to make an agreeable companion. His mother, driven to write to him, asserts that his constant grumbling, gloomy looks, and intolerant dogmatism depress her. It is necessary to her happiness to know that he is happy, but not necessary that she should be a witness to it. Therefore, if they are to agree they must consent to live apart. Both mother and son were bent on self-development, and in character were too dissimilar to understand each other. Schopenhauer was jealous, uncontrolled in his moods, and boorish in his manners. That all-consuming egoism, which all his life spoiled his relations with everyone with whom he came in contact, made a congenial family life impossible. He resented his mother's freedom and independence, and insulted her friends. In a way that is very characteristic of him, he generalises from his own personal experience, and in his views on women we find reflected all the bitterness which had grown round the relations between himself and his mother.
In 1809 he attained his majority, and received his share of his father's fortune, amounting to about £150 a year. He was now independent, and could pursue the career he had marked out for himself. He valued all his life the liberty which this competency secured him. A draft dedication, intended for the second edition of The World as Will and Idea, was addressed "to the manes of my father. Noble, beneficent spirit! to whom I owe everything that I am.... As thou didst bring into the world a son such as I am, thou didst also make provision that in a world like this, such a son should be able to subsist and to develop himself.... In my mind the tendency to its only proper vocation was too decidedly implanted to let me do violence to my nature, and so to subjugate it that, recking nought of existence in general, and active only for my personal existence, it should find its sole task in procuring daily bread.... Thou seemest to have foreseen that thy son, thou proud republican, could not possess the talent to compete in cringing before ministers and councillors, Mæcenases, and their advisers, basely to beg for the hard-earned piece of bread, or to flatter self-conceited commonplaceness, and humbly join himself to the eulogistic retinue of bungling charlatans.... That I could expand the forces nature gave me and apply them to their destined purpose, that I could follow my natural instinct and think and work for beings without number, while no one does anything for me, for that I thank thee, my father, thank thy activity, prudence, thrift, and provision for the future."
In 1809 he entered the University of Göttingen as a student of medicine. In his second year he changed his course to philosophy. Wieland, the poet, on the occasion of a visit from Schopenhauer, tried to dissuade him from philosophy as a career. The reply was, "Life is a ticklish business. I have decided to spend it in reflecting on it."
In 1811 Schopenhauer left Göttingen, and entered the University of Berlin. Here, too, he gave special attention to natural science. Throughout his notebooks are scattered critical remarks on his teachers and their lectures. Fichte especially was a butt for his sarcasms. Against a statement of Schleiermacher's, that "No man can be a philosopher without being religious," he writes, "No man who is religious takes to philosophy: he does not need it."
The Napoleonic wars were at this time disorganising the whole of Europe. Berlin was in the hands of a French garrison. But after the disastrous campaign of Napoleon in Russia, the entire nation rose against the invader. University classes were broken up. Fichte stayed behind to nurse the wounded, and died next year at his post. Schopenhauer, a prey to fears, which tormented him all his life, fled for safety to Dresden. He settled finally at Rudolstadt, and wrote there an essay, to qualify for the degree of doctor of philosophy at Jena. This he obtained, and his essay was published as A Philosophical Treatise on the Four-fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. This work he describes in his later books as a preliminary part of his system, which must be studied if the remainder is to be understood. It is written entirely under the influence of Kant. The title refers to the four branches of knowledge: physical science, mathematics, logic, and ethics.