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One of the most misunderstood and misappropriated philosophers, Friedrich Nietszche is often cast as a gloomy nihilist. But that gets it wrong. Nietzsche was staring into the headlights of a crisis and wanted to help humanity before it was too late.In his 1882 book The Gay Science, Nietzsche famously wrote that “God is dead.” But the philosopher wasn’t advocating for atheism, he was making an observation: Christianity had lost much of its power in Europe.For centuries, Christian thought was — for better and for worse — the foundation of the continent’s value system. But by the late 19th century, science and scholarship had chipped away at people’s faith. Nietzsche saw two possible outcomes: Either people would despair into nihilism and drift away from any moral principles, convinced life had no meaning, or they would try to find new “religions” elsewhere, namely in mass political movements like fascism or communism.Nietszche shuddered at the thought of the second option, which would later become frighteningly real in his home country of Germany. He argued that people had no choice but to forge ahead through nihilism instead. But rather than embrace a meaningless life — and fall into corrosive despair — he offered a way to overcome this nihilism: the “Übermensch.”To Nietszche, the Übermensch is a person who rises above the conventional notions of morality and creates new values that embrace the beauty and suffering of existence. Hardly just the stuff of gloomy teenagers, Nietszche’s philosophy aimed to be life-affirming. (In fact, alternate translations of The Gay Science call it “The Joyful Wisdom.”)