Part 6 — We Scholars

Part 6 opens with a protest (§204) against the confusion of the scholar and the philosopher — a confusion that has become, in the modern German university, a systematic error. The man of learning is industrious, diligent, precise, and content within the limits of his discipline. He is an instrument of knowledge. The philosopher is something else: someone who commands from a height, who takes responsibility for the whole, who legislates rather than discovers. The confusion of the two has produced institutions filled with learned men and almost no philosophers.

Section 206 is the sharpest: the man of learning has, in relation to the genius, "something of the old maid about him," because he is not conversant with the principal functions — engendering and producing. This is deliberately provocative; it is also precise. The scholar's relation to knowledge is essentially passive: he receives, confirms, extends, arranges. The genius creates — makes something that was not there before. Nietzsche is not contemptuous of scholarship; he has spent his career in it. He is insisting that it is not philosophy.

Section 211 closes the part with the clearest definition of the philosopher of the future in the book: "Genuine philosophers are commanders and legislators: they say 'it shall be thus!' — they determine the Whither and the For-what of man." This is not a description of any philosopher Nietzsche knows. It is a job description for someone who does not yet exist, written by someone who believes they are needed. The philosopher of the future is not a specialist, not a scholar, not a critic: he is a creator of values, a person who is willing to answer the question that the whole of modern Europe is managing to avoid asking.