Two Properties of "Culture"

"The notion of a free cultivation of the mind and heart began, as we have seen, as the private reaction of a few independent spirits like Wieland, Herder, Goethe and Schiller, inspired by Shaftesbury, Rousseau and the Greeks as Winckelmann saw them, a reaction against clericalism and utilitarianism alike. It was a splendid ideal for those who had the ability and the means to follow it, but in the days when railroads were being built and the Customs Union was being created, there were few who wished to use the world simply to develop their own personality, to turn it in this sense into their 'property', as Humboldt put it, and many who were eager to learn how to develop the forces of nature and to make their mark among their fellowmen. Schoolmasters filled with the old ideals of 'inwardness' were inevitably in conflict with most of their pupils. Yet culture, or the reputation for culture, still retained its attraction, as a symbol of status at least, with the new elite, of businessmen and administrators of middle-class origin, and the more widely it was sought, the more diluted and externalized the content of individual culture became, until the cultivated man was only too often replaced by what Nietzsche called the 'philistine of culture'. Much of Nietzsche's satire is of course directed against countrymen of his who are very well informed about all sorts of dead cultures, but do not seem to him to know what culture really means, so that he finds Germany after the Franco-Prussian War utterly undistinguished."

-- Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, 1775-1806, W. H. Bruford, 1962, p. 421.