Lessons from the teenage Schopenhauer’s European tour.

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on in 22 February 1788 at 114 Heiliggeistgasse in the free city of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland). His father, Heinrich Floris, was one of the city’s most prominent merchants. Heinrich Floris was determined that his only son should become a merchant, and regularly upbraided him for his poor posture and even worse handwriting.

In 1793, when Arthur was five years old, Prussia annexed Danzig. The Schopenhauer family moved to the free Hanseatic city of Hamburg. At nine years old, Arthur was sent to Le Havre in France to live with the family of his father’s business associated, Grégoire de Blésimaire, who had a son, Jean Anthime, of Arthur’s age. The two years that Arthur spent in le Havre were, he claimed, among the happiest of his life. He became fluent in French, learn to play the flute, and forged a lifelong friendship with Jean-Anthime. Later in life, Schopenhauer would play the flute every day—leading Nietzsche to wonder whether he was indeed such a pessimist.

When Arthur was in his mid-teens, the principal of his private school, Dr Runge, who recognised his exceptional potential, attempted to persuade Heinrich Floris to redirect him onto an academic path. Arthur too exerted considerable pressure on his father. To settle the matter in his favour, the wily Heinrich Floris offered Arthur a Hobson’s choice between remaining in Hamburg to learn Latin and prepare for university, or accompany his parents on a luxurious two-year pleasure tour through Europe—on condition that he commit to a merchant apprenticeship upon their return.

Arthur’s European tour: The Wimbledon academy

Thus, in 1803, the fifteen-year-old Arthur set off on a tour of Holland, Britain, France, Switzerland, Austra, and Prussia. In England, he spent twelve weeks at Reverend Thomas Lancaster’s academy in Wimbledon, while his parents toured the North. Teachers thought of him as a “seething, belligerent pupil.” He developed a lifelong antipathy towards Anglicanism and later described the experience as a form of “incarceration.” But he became fluent in English, and, later, would write German in a more limpid English style.

Schopenhauer is still regarded as one of the greatest stylists in the German language. In On Language and Words, he would argue that language, though essential for human reasoning, shapes and limits our thoughts. It often serves as a substitute for true thinking, and distances us from intuitive perception and action. 

However, learning another language can increase our range and flexibility of thought by obliging us to separate the concept from the word and to break down and reconstruct thoughts according to a different organisational scheme. This is all the more true of the classical languages (Latin and Greek), which call for a non-literal translation that forces a melting down and recasting of thought.

Arthur’s European tour: Three hangings and a hard-labour penitentiary

Tourism in those days could take in the ugly as well as the beautiful. On June 8, 1803, Arthur witnessed three hangings from the window of a pub opposite Newgate prison in London. He noted in his travel diary that the men, right before the drop, took to praying: “One of them, who moved his hands up and down as he prayed, made the same movement a couple more times after he had fallen.”

On April 8, 1804, he visited the Bagne de Toulon, to be made famous by Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. “Can one think of a more terrible feeling than that of one of these unfortunates as he is chained to the bench in the dark galley and from which nothing but death can separate him?”

Later, he would compare the whole world to a penitentiary, and this period of his life to the Buddha’s awakening, when Prince Siddharta (later, the Buddha) ventured out of the palace only to be confronted everywhere by the “Four Sights” of age, sickness, death, and an ascetic monk.

Why Arthur warned against book knowledge

There can be no doubt that Arthur gained a lot more from his travels than he would have done from sitting in a Hamburg classroom. His worldliness, he would argue, gave him an advantage over “mere scholars” or “book philosophers”, for true thought must be rooted in direct observation and firsthand experience of the world.

Reliance on books is like “thinking with somebody else’s head” and produces only superficial knowledge, which, “like an artificial limb, false, tooth, or waxen nose,” is not organically woven into our being. Children, he thought (like Jean-Jacques Rousseau), should not be exposed to “theories and doctrines” until the age of sixteen.

In On Reading and Books, Schopenhauer wrote: “For the person who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, since they are carrying what ought to have carried them.

Nietzsche, in the autobiographical Ecce Homo:

[Sickness] bestowed on me the compulsion to lie still, to be idle, to wait and be patient … But to do that means to think! … My eyes alone put an end to all bookwormishness, in plain terms … I was redeemed from the “book,” for years at a time I read nothing—the greatest favour I ever did myself! 

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.