The route by which Nietzsche comes to conceive of a project of reevaluation can be reconstructed in terms of his increasing rejection of specific features of the influence exercised by Schopenhauer and, to a lesser extent, Paul Rée over his thinking. The influence of the former is hard to exaggerate, as Nietzsche himself acknowledges (see UM III; Janaway 1998c), but it is equally hard to overlook Nietzsche's subjection of his inheritance from Schopenhauer to a process of critical reflection characterized by the increasingly deep disavowal of the terms of that inheritance. It is, at any rate, within the terms of this critical relationship to Schopenhauer that Nietzsche comes to conceive of the possibility of the project of a re-evaluation of values, and I shall begin by tracing Nietzsche's overcoming of these features, before laying out the initial form of his project of re-evaluation.

Nietzsche's 1868 essay “On Schopenhauer” indicates that he is already well aware of the problems with, and objections to, Schopenhauer's metaphysics of the will and is thus by no means an uncritical disciple of this philosopher. Even in The Birth of Tragedy, which is typically taken to be Nietzsche's most explicitly Schopenhauerian text, Nietzsche's appropriation of Schopenhauer's philosophy is already characterized by a certain critical distance. Thus, while the central distinction between the Dionysian and Apollonian of that work expresses, in eccentric fashion, Schopenhauer's distinction between the world as will and as representation, Nietzsche's use of Schopenhauer is mediated through Friedrich Lange's neo-Kantian concept of the “standpoint of the ideal”, which allowed him to treat Schopenhauer's ideas as fictitious but unifying metaphysical concepts (Salaquarda 1998: 101).