I can't say for sure but I don't think Nolan or Goyer took the Joker's philosophy as seriously as he took it. The thing about the Joker is he can be compelling, especially to the mindset of adolescent going through that phase both necessary and necessarily temporary, where they question everything. But at the end of the day he is still wrong. That's why he's not the hero of this story.
Game Theory really crystallized the Joker for me when they diagnosed the character with Antisocial Personality Disorder. Its characterized by lack of empathy and extreme rejection of authority. He's a psychotic Holden Caulfield calling everything phony, rejecting our sentiments as pretenses. But its because he doesn't feel what the rest of us do. While we all pretend on some level we do so in part because we care. He might have done so at one point just to fit in but it wasn't enough for him. So he has to tear it all down.
This is really the story of how Batman deals with that. A part of Batman's journey has been trying to understand the nature of criminals. What makes people break the law? Why did that man shoot my parents? He found some useful answers in the first movie. People are hungry, they're given bad examples, they don't feel like they have another choice, etc. But those answers don't apply to the Joker. Joker would have walked away with his stolen mob money at the beginning of the movie if he was any kind of normal criminal. It threw everything about what Batman was doing into question. The idea that he'd throne himself headlong into this world of misery and risked everything only for things to be even worse.
But ultimately he does rise to the challenge, the bad guys fold and he wins.
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The Joker Begins (and Ends): Featuring Batman
Oh yeah, this was a Batman movie, wasn't it? Ain't nobody's stolen the show in a movie like the late Heath Ledger since that cockatoo from Citizen Kane. Few will dispute that. But the essence of what I like about Batman gets lost in a veritable shitstorm of pseudo-intellectual nihilism of the "My knowledge of Nietzsche extends to the conflated broad strokes version of his philosophy perpetuated by mass media for decades, and maybe how to spell his name right on a good day" variety, that could have been in any 2000s action movie. In the end, this film could have worked probably just as well as its own standalone IP.
The visuals are awesome, the casting is beyond reproach, and it sure knows how to keep the tension going... but it tends to suffer from a level of impersonal sleekness to the way it flows that detaches me from the experience. My father tends to liken it to an "extended music video" and I have a hard time debating that. It doesn't help that Mr. Nolan seems to have taken a few cues from the Ken Russell school of symbolism. The "intellectuality" it seems to be aiming for just feels a bit forced and flat. I don't know, it's hard to put into words.
It's not that I dislike TDK... though I must admit, I have no choice but to shake my head when seeing it placed on lofty pedestals next to the aforementioned Kane, 12 Angry Men, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, etc. This is not because of some sort of condescending bias towards comic book films or anything as I'm quite averse to that level of high-brow snootery. It's just, it's pretty hard to imagine it being the result of anything but a confluence of young people who've yet to gain the level of perspective needed for a more balanced look at something like this. When these people get there, a reassessment may very well change things around. Oooooooooooor maybe not. Who knows.
In the end, TDK is a well-constructed, enjoyable action film with an almost completely redundant Batman theme. A modern classic it may well be, but I doubt it's going to be viewed as "timeless" a few decades on... especially since I'm holding out hope that the Batman film is yet to come.