I begin this thesis by introducing some of the key words which are relevant to the development of the concept of Bildung, or self-cultivation, in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Germany. In the second chapter Schiller is grouped with his contemporaries - Humboldt, Herder, and Goethe - as a 'Weimar Humanist'. I attempt to show how the 'Weimar Humanists' developed a contradictory but definite intellectual concept of self-cultivation, which sought to forge some relation between the moral and the aesthetic in the development of the individual. I proceed, in the third chapter, to examine Friedrich Schlegel's radical or romantic conception of self-cultivation: what I typify as the extension of one of the tendencies inherent in, but eventually antagonistic to Schiller's aesthetic education. In the same chapter I introduce the terms which are essential to understanding Hegel's approach to self-cultivation, and account for their relevance to both his historical dialectics and his exposition of the development of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology. The fourth chapter focusses upon an exposition of self-development in the Phenomenology itself, and attempts to characterise Hegel's mature theory of the relation between the self and culture in the context of his earlier theory of selfcultivation. This leads to a conclusion which sets the stage for Nietzsche's response to the right-Hegelian theorists of culture, which I concentrate upon in an analysis of the Untimely Meditations in the first section of the fifth chapter. I then examine the three books in which Nietzsche both developed a picture of the "free spirit" and the "paths" a long which he saw the free spirit coming: Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and Gay Science. In the final sections I examine each of these books in turn and how they portray Nietzsche's systematic rejection of many of the concepts which are essential to the theories of self-cultivation which I have previously examined, but how, at the same time, they set out his own theory of the relation between the aesthetic and the moral in his own very particular concept of self-cultivation.