Reading List · Lisanne Swart
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Nietzsche didn’t build a philosophical system so much as he tried to dismantle everyone else’s — Christian morality, rationalist certainty, the comfortable idea that meaning comes pre-installed. He wrote in aphorisms and parables as often as arguments, which makes him one of the most quotable and most misread philosophers ever published. This list is for readers who want more of that same instinct: thinkers who treated inherited moral and metaphysical certainty as something to interrogate rather than inherit, whether they arrived at despair, absurdism, or something more affirmative on the other side.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 authors · Philosophy · Existentialism · Updated August 2026
Søren Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard, writing decades before Nietzsche, was already arguing that objective, systematic philosophy misses what actually matters — the anguish and responsibility of individual choice, especially around faith. His concept of the ‘leap of faith’ and his relentless critique of institutional Christianity anticipate much of what Nietzsche would later attack from the opposite direction.
Where Nietzsche concluded God was dead, Kierkegaard got to a similarly radical individualism by staying inside faith rather than rejecting it. Read him to see the other branch of the same root — existentialism before Nietzsche gave it its most famous atheist voice.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy of the ‘will’ — a blind, striving force underlying all existence and suffering — was Nietzsche’s single greatest early influence, discovered as a young student and absorbed so thoroughly that Nietzsche spent much of his career arguing with him.
You can’t fully understand what Nietzsche was reacting against without reading the philosopher he idolized and then spent his career trying to overturn. Read Schopenhauer first to see Nietzsche’s own thought in relief.
Albert Camus
Camus took Nietzsche’s diagnosis of a universe without inherent meaning and built a specific philosophy of the absurd out of it — not despair, and not Nietzsche’s Übermensch, but a clear-eyed commitment to living fully anyway, most famously worked out in The Myth of Sisyphus.
Camus is arguably the 20th century’s most direct inheritor of Nietzsche’s core problem — what do you do once you’ve admitted there’s no built-in meaning — even though he rejected some of Nietzsche’s specific conclusions.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky’s novels, especially Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, dramatize the same crisis Nietzsche wrote about philosophically — what happens to morality and meaning once traditional religious and rational certainty collapses — through characters pushed to genuine psychological extremity.
Nietzsche himself called Dostoevsky ‘the only psychologist’ he had anything to learn from. Read him for the novelistic version of Nietzsche’s core questions, worked through actual human beings rather than aphorisms.
Michel Foucault
Foucault explicitly adopted Nietzsche’s ‘genealogical’ method — tracing how concepts like madness, punishment, and sexuality were historically constructed by power rather than discovered as objective truths — and applied it to modern institutions Nietzsche never lived to see.
If Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals interested you, Foucault is the most direct 20th-century continuation of that exact method, aimed at prisons, asylums, and clinics instead of morality itself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson’s philosophy of radical self-reliance and his suspicion of inherited convention were a genuine influence on the young Nietzsche, who read Emerson’s essays closely and annotated them heavily.
A gentler, more optimistic ancestor to Nietzsche’s individualism — useful for readers who want the self-overcoming instinct without Nietzsche’s harsher edges.
Where to start if you loved Friedrich Nietzsche
If you want the philosophical precursor, then read Schopenhauer.
The philosopher Nietzsche idolized and then spent his career arguing against.
If you want the novelistic version, then read Dostoevsky.
Nietzsche’s core questions, dramatized through genuinely extreme characters instead of aphorisms.
If you want the clearest 20th-century inheritor, then read Camus.
The Myth of Sisyphus takes Nietzsche’s diagnosis and builds an entire philosophy of the absurd from it.
If you want the method applied to modern institutions, then read Foucault.
He adopted Nietzsche’s genealogical method directly and pointed it at prisons and asylums.
If you want his own work first, then start with his books.
My complete guide to Nietzsche’s own books is the place to start before branching out.
If you want more of this tradition generally, then keep exploring it.
My best philosophy books list has the natural successors to Nietzsche’s project.
