There’s no doubt he was an optimist just as there’s no doubt he was at war with institutionalized Christianity. Combatting Christianity and being a nihilist are

There’s no doubt he was an optimist just as there’s no doubt he was at war with institutionalized Christianity. Combatting Christianity and being a nihilist are not the same thing. You’re right that Nietzsche’s work comes from a place of hope. Nietzsches cheif argument was for a “revaluation of all values”—he believed that, given the major technological and scientific breakthroughs in the 17c - 19c, man had to reorient his relation to life. The old social forms, such as traditional Christian morals, were holding humanity back by valuing or prioritizing the wrong things (e.g. humility instead of the pursuit of knowledge). That’s the major thrust of his whole output. He was largely right about this. The point of my op is to say that we’ve more or less achieved what he sought minus the ordination of some new shceme of shared values to guide us (ubermensch). People let Nietzsche’s admittedly amazing stylistics cloud their comprehension of his arguments which are actually rather straightforward—he saw that the world was changing and that societal change was lagging far behind technical change, as it in fact still does to this day.