Introduction: Nietzsche, Professor of Philology at the University of Basel, 1869–1879

In the section of the 1886 Beyond Good and Evil called “We Scholars,” Nietzsche returns again to the very first personal problems he confronted when he found himself with a new life as a university professor of philology and, contrary to what should be self-evident for us, estranged from himself and his new circumstances. The deepest, most personal struggles, as to his self-conception and what he aspired to become, had not been at all settled despite the considerable passage of time since 1869 or the number of writings intended to represent what he called, in this late work on morality and culture, “Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.”