ABSTRACT
No philosopher has been more intensely concerned with questions of value than Nietzsche was. Moreover, notwithstanding his radical critique and emphatic repudiation of much of what both traditionally and more recently has been taken to constitute morality, he devoted as much attention to it as almost any of the many philosophers before and after him who have viewed it more sympathetically. Indeed, it was his concerns along these lines, above all others, which supplied the main motivation for his explorations of the matters dealt with in previous chapters. His attention in his early works was drawn continually to evaluative questions posed but not resolved by the ancient and modern cultural phenomena with which he found himself confronted in his philological studies and in his own time. The investigations he went on to undertake, in the years prior to Zarathustra, were in effect efforts to place himself in a better position than either classical scholars or previous philosophers were to deal with these questions properly and adequately. The whole of Zarathustra revolves around evaluative and moral concerns; and the same is true of his subsequent Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals.
