Nietzsche's path to the question of values

As a thinker his starting-point is Schopenhauer; in his first books he is actually his disciple. But, after several years of silence, during which he passes through his first intellectual crisis, he reappears emancipated from all ties of discipleship. He then undergoes so powerful and rapid a development--less in his thought itself than in the courage to express his thoughts--that each succeeding book marks a fresh stage, until by degrees he concentrates himself upon a single fundamental question, the question of moral values. On his earliest appearance as a thinker he had already entered a protest, in opposition to David Strauss, against any moral interpretation of the nature of the Cosmos and assigned to our morality its place in the world of phenomena, now as semblance or error, now as artificial arrangement. And his literary activity reached its highest point in an investigation of the origin of the moral concepts, while it was his hope and intention to give to the world an exhaustive criticism of moral values, an examination of the value of these values (regarded as fixed once for all). The first book of his work, The Transvaluation of all Values, was completed when his malady declared itself.