Who Is Culture For?
Essential Reading Path · Reading 7 of 10
Read: Selections from Schopenhauer as Educator, §6
Allow: About 50–65 minutes, including the passages, this guide, and a short written response.
Open §6: the purpose of culture
Continue to the final two paragraphs of §6
Read two selections from §6 of Schopenhauer as Educator. In Adrian Collins’s free translation, look for the heading VI.
- The opening six paragraphs: begin at “It is sometimes harder to agree to a thing than to understand it” and read through the paragraph beginning “There is, secondly, the self-interest of the state”, ending “the clash and conflagration of states.” This runs from page 155 through page 161. Stop before “In the third place”.
- The final two paragraphs: resume at “I remember saying in the third chapter”, near the bottom of page 173. Read to the end of §6, ending “to what end Schopenhauer can really educate.” Stop at the heading VII, on page 176.
Between these selections, Nietzsche criticizes the pursuit of fashionable appearance and the motives of scholars, completing his examination of four interests that claim to advance culture. We concentrate on business, the state, and his proposed alternative. Earlier in the essay he connected culture with helping nature produce the philosopher, artist, and saint; §6 asks what people and institutions would have to do if they accepted that purpose.
Before you read
A school has one room it can keep open after classes. A local employer offers funding if it becomes a training centre. Another proposal would give students time and materials for difficult projects whose results might take years to appear. Both proposals invoke education. Their disagreement concerns what the school should make possible and how its success should be judged.
Nietzsche presses that disagreement much further. He asks whether culture exists to make people employable, strengthen the state, or bring exceptional human beings into existence. He gives the last purpose an authority that can require other people to serve it.
In the previous reading, an educator’s independence depended partly on conditions and relationships. Here that question becomes institutional: who supports such a life, who directs the support, and what happens to the people whose contribution remains less visible?
The main question: Can a culture organize itself around exceptional achievement without treating most people merely as its means?
Read the selections once. Mark Nietzsche’s stated aim before considering whether his criticism of existing institutions is persuasive.
What to notice
- The strength of the opening claim. What does Nietzsche identify as humanity’s task, and which alternative aims does he reject? Keep his hierarchy visible.
- Support that controls its beneficiary. How can business or the state encourage education while directing what it is allowed to become? Follow the currency and mill images.
- The workers around the exceptional person. At the end, who must organize, protect, and help? What does Nietzsche promise these people, and what does he ask them to surrender?
Close reading
A purpose that ranks human lives
Nietzsche opens with the claim that humanity’s task is to bring forth individual great people. He immediately distinguishes understanding that claim from agreeing with it. That distinction gives us a useful rule for this reading: state the proposed purpose accurately before deciding what deserves acceptance. §6, the opening claim
The argument is hierarchical. Nietzsche rejects the happiness of the greatest number as the final aim, and describes the majority in severely devaluing terms. His proposal is stronger than the familiar thought that talented people deserve encouragement. Other lives acquire their highest significance through service to the rarest human possibilities. §6, hierarchy and the purpose of a life
He appeals to the natural world, where he locates development in rare, higher individual types. But moving from a claim about nature to a duty for human society requires justification. Naming some people higher does not yet tell us who can identify them or why others owe them service.
Admiration becomes an institutional demand
The first initiation into culture begins with dissatisfaction and love: a person sees possibilities above their present condition and wants to help them appear. Nietzsche imagines people as fragments of sculptures asking to be brought into completeness. The image connects this section with the upward movement of education in Reading 1. §6, the first initiation; discussion continues on page 158
The second initiation turns outward. The learner must examine social arrangements and act against institutions that frustrate the production of genius. Private admiration is insufficient when the admired possibility has no conditions in which to develop. §6, the second initiation
Nietzsche also refuses to trust that competing interests will automatically produce the right outcome. An obscure impulse toward culture can be redirected. Conscious purpose is needed because abundant cultural activity may serve ends quite different from the one he has proposed.
Education made into currency
Business, Nietzsche argues, supports education while prescribing its aims and limits. More knowledge should generate more demand, production, wealth, and happiness. The apparent generosity has a measure built into it: education is valuable insofar as it improves commercial success. §6, business and education; discussion continues on page 160
The image of making people current, like currency, is especially sharp. Their knowledge should make them readily usable within the existing economy. An education that takes too long or leads toward solitude and purposes beyond earning becomes suspect. §6, making people current; discussion continues on page 161
Return to the schoolroom. A funded programme can create real opportunities and still narrow the purposes the institution recognizes. Nietzsche directs attention to who establishes the standard of success. His criticism does not by itself tell us how a school should pay its costs, or how learners should meet material needs. Those questions remain part of judging any alternative.
The state and the mountain stream
The state similarly releases intellectual powers only as far as existing institutions can use them. Nietzsche imagines a strong stream diverted into channels to turn mills. The organized water does useful work, while the force that might threaten the mills is contained. §6, the state and the mill-wheels
This image explains how support can become restriction. An institution can cultivate ability while limiting the purposes that ability may challenge. The relation matters more than whether the institution describes its work as liberation.
The paragraph applies the argument to Christianity’s use by political powers. Nietzsche presents that history as a case of an original cultural purpose redirected toward institutional interests. His compressed account is part of the polemic; the mill image makes the mechanism imaginable without proving every historical judgment attached to it.
The people who make another life possible
The final two paragraphs call for different educational institutions and describe two roads. One offers recognition through accepted aims. The other gathers fewer companions around the production and protection of exceptional people. Its travellers need organization so they are not overwhelmed, exhausted, or diverted from their work. §6, future institutions; discussion continues on pages 174–175
This is a collective undertaking. Nietzsche assigns supporting roles even to people he calls second-rate talents. Their labour has significance through helping the larger task succeed. The passage therefore joins the singular figure with the organized effort required to make that figure possible. §6, the supporting community
Nietzsche lets the rival outlook voice a powerful objection: these helpers become tools overshadowed by higher natures. He presents the alternative promises of personal prominence as temptations, and answers through a heroic disposition and a felt kinship with genius. He does not offer a procedure by which supporters could contest the exceptional person’s authority. §6, the appeal to supporters
The practical question is therefore demanding. How could we recognize freely chosen participation in valuable work, and distinguish it from a hierarchy that has taught people to discount their own claims? The organization Nietzsche proposes needs examination by the same attention to directing purposes that he applies to business and the state.
A difficulty
Who gets to decide whose development justifies another person’s sacrifice?
The criticism of commercial and political control may be persuasive without establishing Nietzsche’s alternative. An institution devoted to genius can also protect its authority, reward conformity, and treat inconvenient people as expendable. Calling its end higher does not remove that possibility.
The final paragraph supplies motives for participation: sympathy with a struggling creator, shared purpose, and the wish to help something valuable become possible. These can describe meaningful work. Yet Nietzsche also asks supporters to accept an unequal place, and gives little attention here to their ability to revise the arrangement or withdraw.
Ask what would happen if a helper’s judgment conflicted with the supposed genius’s wishes. Would the conflict count as a contribution to the work, or be dismissed as vanity? This is a way to test the proposed institution using the passage’s own concern about who controls education’s aims.
Check your understanding
Try answering before opening each suggested response.
Why would “culture should help everyone reach their potential” misstate this section?
Nietzsche gives the production of exceptional individuals priority over the happiness of the majority. He assigns many people a supporting role and ranks the human possibilities being served. A general commitment to everyone’s development would soften the hierarchy that makes his position difficult. Explain that hierarchy before accepting or challenging it.
How can business and the state both help culture and obstruct its aim?
They can supply resources and cultivate capacities while directing them toward their own ends. Business measures education through commercial usefulness; the state channels intellectual energy into existing institutions. The currency and mill images show how assistance can make the recipient usable while limiting its purposes.
What changes between the first and second initiations into culture?
The first concerns love, dissatisfaction, and aspiration toward higher possibilities. The second turns that aspiration into criticism of institutions and action to change the conditions of cultural work. The final call for organization develops this outward task. Whether its chosen end justifies the hierarchy remains a separate question.
Writing prompt
Write 150–200 words answering: What would a school owe to unusual talent, and what would it owe to the people who support that talent?
Begin by stating Nietzsche’s proposed purpose of culture, including its hierarchy. Use either the currency image or the mountain stream to explain one danger facing the school. Then describe a concrete form of support: time, teaching, space, money, or shared labour.
End by identifying one claim a supporter should be able to make if the arrangement becomes unfair, and say whether Nietzsche’s final paragraph adequately recognizes it. A successful response grants unusual achievement a possible value while keeping the people around it visible. If your proposal revises Nietzsche’s priorities, say where and why.
Continue
We now turn to Wagner and the audience. What could art contribute to the formation of a culture, and how could a performance change someone’s relationship to suffering?
Reading 8: What Can Tragic Art Do for Us? →
A reading guide from Reading Nietzsche · Revised .
Preferred edition: R. J. Hollingdale, edited by Daniel Breazeale. About the editions and free texts.