[Serious] Absolutes and Atheism

[Belacqua]

Why didn't Nietzsche make himself clearer? 

That's a good and important question, which is in fact crucial to understanding Nietzsche's goals.

Is it my job to assume he meant a particular thing when he worded something a certain way?

If you want to understand Nietzsche, then it's a job you have to do.

And there's no way I'm believing someone else's interpretation just because they say so.

Nor should you, nor would Nietzsche want you to. 

But here's the thing. Is philosophy meant to be poetic, is it meant to be filled with metaphors and similies that cause your brain to bleed trying to figure out what's literal and what's aliteral?

It depends on the philosophy. Very roughly, we can say that there are two kinds. 

If a philosopher believes he has a clear and complete answer to a given problem, then it makes sense for him to lay out that answer in a logical, non-poetic way. 

Other philosophers are more about posing questions, or even suggesting that a particular problem has no answer. 

As with so many things in philosophy, the paradigm begins with Plato and Aristotle. Plato is poetic, full of metaphor, and leaves us with more questions than we started with. Aristotle, on the other hand, reads like a long logical set of lecture notes, meant to build up to a conclusion we can clearly define. 

As a writer, you know that form and content are not separate. Plato thinks that we come to truth through beauty, so it's important for him to make his language and dialogues beautiful. People who read Ancient Greek tell me that they are among the most beautiful texts ever written. Aristotle and most later philosophers want to come to truth through logic, so they build up clear (they hope) logical arguments step by step. 

Nietzsche, as always, is an extreme provocation. His prose is meant to provoke. It is intended to be difficult, because the world is difficult. He wants us to wrestle with it to pull out a meaning, because that is how we always get meaning -- by forcing ourselves to pull it from chaos. If you believe that the world is, at root, chaotic and meaningless, texts that are orderly and meaningful are automatically untrue. Producing a logical argument in an attempt to show that logic doesn't really work would be a contradiction at best, and possibly hypocritical.