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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>The article goes on and on but says nothing insightful.

It's not supposed to.

A better title would be "A general introduction to Nietzsche's life to people who have only heard his name" -- rather than the more promising "Nietzsche’s Eternal Return" which only concerns half a hastily written paragraph in TFA.

That said, it's quite poorly informed in the philosophical aspects (didn't bother to check the biographical ones):

"Scholars still debate what Nietzsche had in mind. A physically stronger being? A spiritual aristocrat? A kind of cyborg?"

Scholars might still debate "what Nietzsche had in mind" with Ubermench, but they don't consider any of the above options (except perhaps "a spiritual aristocrat", and that's still extremely vague).

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Why do current scholars consider meaningful a philosopher who left poorly specified one of the core idea about which he wrote?

Because one of his main points is that it's impossible to be specific about some things and it's important to be suspicious about those who claim to have the truth.

Nietzsche also put an end to a century of increasingly technical and analytical philosophy by dropping a lot of truth bombs that exposed the futility of a century of German philosophy. He’s kind of an edgelord by 19th century standards, but he wasn’t wrong that German philosophy had been intellectual masturbation with no meaning for quite a while.

His wordplay is an intentional reaction to blowhards like Kant and Schopenhauer — who attempted to be so precise they were almost certain to be proven wrong given enough time. He is intentionally vague, because he’s allowing for the fact that definitions and sentiments change arbitrarily over time. But he is intentionally evasive in his prose to distance him from a specific German philosophical tradition.

There's nothing poorly specified about Nietzsche's ideas, he just wrote deliberately in a way to be incomprehensible to people casually browsing his books, or looking for quotes to bandy about someplace like this. He deliberately says in a few places (effectively) "if you can't be bothered to read my entire works then you have no right to claim to understand my thought." It's a bit pretentious and a bit arrogant, but please don't confuse a New Yorker article wondering whether the overman is a "cyborg" with the consensus of serious Nietzsche scholars. He is not so unambiguous as English-speakers who've read 1 or 2 critical essays and skimmed half of one of his books would lead you to believe. (I've read all of his books multiple times, the big ones over a dozen times, and studied him for 5+ years in college).

There are lots of legitimate criticisms of Nietzsche. But saying "overman could be a very strong man, or cyborg??? lol we don't know" is a bad faith child's argument, imo. Overman (the man who continually self-overcomes) is a notable example of a very clearly articulated idea in Nietzsche's thought, and it has nothing to do with being stronger or more powerful than other people.

Well, assuming that was the case, it could be for several reasons.

For one, because in certain areas of philosophy (as in certain areas of life in general) what's important is how deep you went, and what insights you brought, not how clearly you expressed them.

Second, because, unlike the case accounting or physics, but not unlike paining, a particular sketch open to interpretations can more important than a perfect, but bland and meaningless, photograph. One of the roles of philosophy is to make you think, not necessarily to tell you what to think and give you exact proofs and specs.

Third, because literary techniques, including poetry, metaphor, parable, satori, and mystery, have been part of philosophy for millennia. It's not just some crude axiomatic endeavor (as it sometimes, for some philosophers, is) going from first principles to the proof some theorem.

Fourth, for the same way we don't drop physicists just because they have holes as big as what's this "dark matter", or how QM and relativity work as a cohesive whole in their theories.

That said, the case here is simpler (although part of the above hold). Nietzsche made quite a clear case. Scholars argue about the extensions and repercussions of it -- the same way computer science is still developing Turing's ideas.

was far more clear

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