No Nietzsche specialist either (for that you need to read German, for starters), but I would caution against the assumption that he had anything like a coherent theory of "nihilism". Most of the appearances of the word in his corpus are in the posthumously published The Will to Power, which was compiled by his Nazi sister and is in general not very reliable. It does appear in The Gay Science and The Genealogy of Morals but it's far from clear that it means the same thing in all those instances. I would say that it can mean both the "culmination of the long process of exhaustion of our vital forces through embrace of Socraticism and Christianity" and also "the liberation from aforementioned decadent exhaustion through the realization that God is dead".
If you understand French, this is the best short exposition of the topic I know of:
|