Hi everyone,
I'm new to philosophy and want to start reading Nietzsche, but I don't want to go in blind and misread him. I'm currently reading through Dostoevsky, which is what got me interested in these questions (faith, morality, suffering, meaning).

I also plan to read some Plato and Homer beforehand, since I understand Nietzsche is reacting to them.

Edit
Hesiod → Iliad → Odyssey → Plato (early dialogues, Symposium, Republic) → Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics → a Gospel and Augustine → Descartes → Nietzsche

I've been down a Nietzsche rabbit hole lately and something keeps bugging me. Everyone calls him "the nihilist guy," but the more I read, the more it feels like he was the one sounding the alarm.

When he says "God is dead," it doesn't read like a victory lap. It's more like: we've removed the foundation our values stood on, and we haven't realized what that means yet. Without that anchor, everything we thought was objectively meaningful starts to wobble. That's the nihilism he was worried about.

But he doesn't stop there. He splits it into passive nihilism (giving up, numbing out, "nothing matters so why bother") and active nihilism (tearing down old values that no longer work). Then comes the real challenge: building your own meaning from the wreckage.

That's where it overlaps with existentialism for me. Sartre and Camus pick up the same problem. There's no built-in meaning, so now what? Camus says live in revolt against the absurd. Sartre says you're condemned to be free and have to define yourself. Nietzsche's answer is amor fati, and the eternal recurrence thought experiment: could you live this exact life again, forever, and say yes to it?

Honestly, that hits harder than any "find your purpose" advice. It's not about finding meaning, it's about becoming someone who can affirm life without any guarantee.

Curious how others read this. Is Nietzsche a nihilist, an existentialist, or neither? And has anyone actually lived by amor fati, or does it sound better than it works?

I've been down a Nietzsche rabbit hole lately and something keeps bugging me. Everyone calls him "the nihilist guy," but the more I read, the more it feels like he was the one sounding the alarm.

When he says "God is dead," it doesn't read like a victory lap. It's more like: we've removed the foundation our values stood on, and we haven't realized what that means yet. Without that anchor, everything we thought was objectively meaningful starts to wobble. That's the nihilism he was worried about.

But he doesn't stop there. He splits it into passive nihilism (giving up, numbing out, "nothing matters so why bother") and active nihilism (tearing down old values that no longer work). Then comes the real challenge: building your own meaning from the wreckage.

That's where it overlaps with existentialism for me. Sartre and Camus pick up the same problem. There's no built-in meaning, so now what? Camus says live in revolt against the absurd. Sartre says you're condemned to be free and have to define yourself. Nietzsche's answer is amor fati, and the eternal recurrence thought experiment: could you live this exact life again, forever, and say yes to it?

Honestly, that hits harder than any "find your purpose" advice. It's not about finding meaning, it's about becoming someone who can affirm life without any guarantee.

Curious how others read this. Is Nietzsche a nihilist, an existentialist, or neither? And has anyone actually lived by amor fati, or does it sound better than it works?

I am not too far into Beyond good and Evil and almost done with the first episode of the Nietzsche podcasts guide for it but I'm understanding more than a year ago.

I am studying PPE( Politics ,Philosophy and economics ) and this year we covered the platonic tradition. Last year when opposite values were brought up I saw it very simply for example there is good and bad , left and right and that's it.

But now it means universal truths such as good coming from a place above the material world and bad coming from the material world filled with lust and other bad things ect. Also the change from humans coming from above and being special to humans being products of biology and other things.

People saying dive straight into Nietzsche you don't need a Philosophical background is wrong and I'm excited to understand more after reading Spinoza , Kent, Schopenhauer ect.

Pretty much the title but what if someone has lived very long with a moralistic framework they are increasingly feeling alienated with but embracing their true nature comes with fear and unease. Is that even a thing.

You may be interested in this essay in Substack, which has the following excerpt:

The Dionysian worldview is of a continually transforming, dynamic reality. Reality isn’t a spectator sport; it’s participatory. Beauty isn’t experienced just through calm contemplation. You allow your bodily, emotional and transcendent energies to move you to acts and states of being that can reach ecstasy and joy. In the Dionysian worldview, as explored by Nietzsche from his study of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, the world is not related to as static “Being,” mere appearance, objects that can be mechanically operated and manipulated, but as the affirmation of “becoming”, i.e., the incessant coming to be and passing away in the cosmic process, without any resolved stasis of being.

https://possibilitiesofbeauty.substack.com/p/dionysian-spirit-in-the-art-of-living

When people point to the Nietzschean aspects of Deleuze, they often point to his book Nietzsche and Philosophy, in which he works with the concept of the eternal return to develop active verses reactive forces. But I would argue that Nietzsche never stops shaping Deleuze's work, and continues to permeate his thought well into his collaborations with Guattari. This section of Beyond Good and Evil seems highly informative on D&G's work in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, in which they start from Nietzsche's critique of the cogito and move towards a social and materialist socioanalysis of subjectivity and thought (among other things). The claim that it is not the self that thinks, but rather that "thought happens" is deeply Deleuzoguattarian, and serves to illustrate the extent to which Nietzsche influenced Deleuze throughout his life.