The question which Nietzsche asks in 1874 is the one of the value of history; it can be asked only because it refers history to something external, life, qualified as unhistorical. In 1878, Nietzsche reverses his interrogation and he asserts the identification of the life to the history, opening in this way the possibility of an history of values. The problem becomes how to take shape this one. Nietzsche uses then the utilitarist outline, with which he starts a long debate, as The Gay Science shows it right in 1882. In 1887, the concept of "genealogy" is promoted to signify a new historicity, the possibility of which is in the liquidation of this outline, so that the critic of Paul Rée must be understood as a self-critic.
history; value; genealogy; utilitarism