Who Has the Right to Create Values?
Beyond Good and Evil — Introductory Reading Path · Reading 7 of 10
Read: Part VI, §§204, 207, 210–213. Read every listed section in full; unlisted sections are outside this lesson’s assignment.
Allow: About 75–105 minutes for the assigned text, commentary, rereading, questions, and writing. You can divide this lesson across two sittings.
Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann. Free alternative: Part VI (prose translated by Helen Zimmern).
Section numbers run continuously from 1 to 296. The free links open the relevant part; use Find to locate each assigned section number followed by a period. Read to the next numbered section, stopping before it. Part titles vary by translation. See the edition guide for details. This is a selected-reading course; the explanations below are original commentary.
Before you read
Begin with §§204 and 207, pause to state their criticism of scholarship, then read §§210–213 as Nietzsche’s description of a different philosophical task.
The title We Scholars places Nietzsche within the learned world he examines. He was himself trained as a philologist. Do not assume that his attack on scholarly supremacy is an argument for intellectual carelessness. Watch for the abilities he preserves and the authority he claims they cannot supply by themselves.
The main question: What would justify moving from understanding existing values to deciding which values should govern the future?
Three things to notice
- A dispute about rank In §204, locate the relation Nietzsche wants between philosophy and the sciences. Notice his concessions about philosophy’s own failings.
- Necessary but insufficient abilities In §§207, 210, and 211, separate the capacities Nietzsche admires from the final task he reserves for philosophers.
- A contested qualification In §§212–213, distinguish breadth and responsibility from the claims about descent and inherited rank. Which qualifications receive reasons, and which are asserted?
A way to read the passages
Why knowledge does not choose its own ends: §204
Nietzsche describes a struggle over intellectual authority. The sciences have successfully freed themselves from theology; he thinks they now overreach by claiming the authority to determine philosophy’s task. Scholarship can dismiss philosophy as useless, refuted, or insufficiently specialized. Yet such judgments already depend on an estimate of what thinking ought to accomplish.
He also concedes that contemporary philosophers have given scholars reasons for distrust. A defender of philosophy cannot simply claim grandeur while failing to do demanding intellectual work. The question concerns philosophy’s proper task, not the automatic superiority of anyone with the title.
Our example is a school with excellent data about learning. Those findings can constrain its decisions, but a choice among intellectual independence, obedience, creativity, and economic preparation still involves judgments of value. This example illustrates a gap between information and ends. It does not establish Nietzsche’s further claim that a rare philosopher should have the power to decide those ends for others.
The objective person as an instrument: §207
Section 207 values the objective scholar’s patient receptivity. Such a person can attend to unfamiliar things without forcing them immediately into a personal drama. Nietzsche calls this a precious intellectual capacity. His objection arises when the capacity to reflect becomes a complete ideal of human existence.
His portrait exaggerates a danger: the perfectly receptive observer may lack a direction of their own. They can explain circumstances yet struggle to affirm, refuse, create, or take responsibility. Objectivity can then become a way of avoiding a commitment that more information alone will never make.
But Nietzsche’s proposed hierarchy is sharper than the modest claim that description and decision are different activities. He places the scholar at the disposal of a more powerful creator, and his language diminishes the scholar’s independent standing. Readers can accept the value of informed commitment while challenging the inference that one kind of person should become another’s instrument.
Creation still needs critical discipline: §210
The philosophers of the future will conduct experiments and possess the critic’s rigor. Nietzsche names method, careful courage, independence, and responsibility. He rejects the leap from finding a thought uplifting to calling it true. Creation does not mean inventing whatever gives the creator a pleasing feeling.
The opening refers back to the preceding discussion of different forms of skepticism. For this selection, the relevant distinction is between questioning as an active capacity to test and questioning as an inability to decide. Nietzsche wants the former included in philosophy, without allowing even rigorous criticism to become philosophy’s final destination.
His talk of experiments is deliberately unsettling. The projected severity may reach other people as well as the experimenter. The section does not provide a sufficient account of consent, limits, or acceptable harms. Its demand for responsibility cannot substitute for those missing specifications. Keep both features in view: serious intellectual discipline and unresolved authority over others.
Workers and legislators: §211
Section 211 distinguishes work upon an existing body of valuations from the creation of new values. Philosophical workers clarify, order, and make the past manageable. Nietzsche describes that as an immense achievement. He nevertheless assigns the philosopher a further task: determining directions and purposes for the future.
This is why the philosopher’s preparation must be unusually broad. The prospective creator may need experience as critic, historian, artist, interpreter, and free spirit. Those roles develop the capacity to see through several perspectives. Passing through them is a qualification, while remaining entirely within one of them falls short of the larger task Nietzsche imagines.
Creating a value involves establishing what should matter and arranging other aims in relation to it. It is more consequential than expressing a private preference. Our example: declaring intellectual independence an overriding educational aim changes how success, obedience, curricula, and disagreement are ranked. Such a commitment still has to face evidence about its consequences.
Nietzsche connects this activity to will to power: knowing can participate in shaping a world of purposes. That connection explains his conception of philosophy; it does not by itself legitimate the purposes chosen. A capacity to impose an interpretation and a justified claim to authority remain distinguishable.
The philosopher against the present: §212
The philosopher challenges the admired qualities of their age when those qualities obstruct a different human possibility. Section 212 therefore resists treating greatness as the same visible behavior in every historical setting. A challenge appropriate to complacent inherited status can differ from one directed at a culture Nietzsche regards as leveling.
For his own situation, he emphasizes comprehensiveness, sustained will, solitude, and extensive responsibility. Specialization can leave a person extraordinarily capable within a narrow field but unable to judge how that field belongs within a life or culture. The philosopher must be able to bear multiple perspectives without merely becoming an assortment of disconnected roles.
This is a demanding ideal, but opposing the present does not prove greatness. An opinion can be unpopular because it is mistaken. To test an alleged philosophical challenge, specify the accepted virtue it questions, the possibility it protects, and the reasons for valuing that possibility. Nietzsche’s hostility to equality should be examined at that level, not translated into generic encouragement to be yourself.
Inheritance and a right to philosophy: §213
Section 213 joins intellectual daring with exactness. Nietzsche compares accomplished thought to artistic activity in which constraint and freedom work together. This recalls §188: trained ability can make demanding work feel fluent without making it arbitrary. Apparent ease need not indicate shallowness.
The section also goes much further. It claims that the highest philosophical capacities require preparation through generations and speaks explicitly of descent, blood, and breeding. This is an inherited hierarchy, not merely the observation that expertise takes practice. It belongs to Nietzsche’s elitism and must remain visible in our account.
He asserts more here than he demonstrates. Even if capacities differ, it does not follow that ancestry settles who may confront a problem or direct other people. His warning against intellectual presumption might apply to the prospective legislator as well: how could someone reliably establish that they possess the very rank whose authority they claim?
A difficulty to keep in view
Is Nietzsche contradicting his earlier suspicion of philosophers’ prejudices?
There is a real tension. Earlier, Nietzsche exposed the values and drives behind claims to impersonal truth. Here he asks future philosophers to take responsibility for creating and directing values. One possible distinction is between hiding a commitment as a discovery and acknowledging it as legislation.
Acknowledgment would answer a charge of concealment, but not every objection. An openly avowed commitment can still be ill-informed or destructive. The difficult question is how Nietzsche’s creator earns authority after giving up the claim that an impersonal order has already authorized their values.
Check your understanding
Try answering before revealing each suggested response.
Does §204 simply reject the sciences?
No. It disputes their supremacy over philosophy while recognizing their achievements and conceding that philosophers have contributed to their own loss of standing.
What is valuable and what is insufficient about the objective scholar in §207?
Receptivity and careful attention are valuable. Nietzsche thinks they do not by themselves provide a purpose or the capacity to affirm and create.
Why does §210 matter for understanding value creation?
It requires rigorous criticism, method, and testing. Value creation is not presented as freedom from intellectual standards.
What distinguishes philosophical workers from philosophers in §211?
Workers clarify and organize established valuations; philosophers set future directions through new determinations of value. Nietzsche regards the first activity as important preparation for the second.
Why can §213 not be summarized as ‘work hard and anyone can become a philosopher’?
It expressly claims that inherited preparation and descent qualify people for philosophy in its highest sense. Its elitism exceeds an account of training and raises questions it does not adequately settle.
What should I write in my notes?
Write 300–400 words answering: Does Nietzsche establish a right to create values for others?
- Reconstruct the strongest case using §211 and either §210 or §212. Explain why scholarship alone would be insufficient for the task.
- Distinguish the ability to propose a value from the authority to require other people to live under it.
- Test one proposed qualification from §213. Explain whether it provides a reason that others could assess.
- Give your judgment, including one requirement that a creator would have to meet. Identify whether that requirement comes from Nietzsche’s text or from your own criticism.
You may defend, reject, or limit Nietzsche’s proposal. The essential work is locating the step from intellectual capability to justified authority.
Continue the reading
Part VI describes the formidable virtues of future philosophers. Part VII brings scrutiny closer to home: what happens when those who question morality examine their own honesty, sympathy, and desire for knowledge?
Reading 8: Can Honesty Expose Its Own Prejudices? →
Next assignment: Part VII, §§214, 221, 225, 227, 229–232, 238–239.