I'll walk you through an aphorism or two but you should start with Plato or even someone like Shakespeare and take your time. Let's look at the very beginning of BGE because it's one of few good starting points for Nietzsche (and know, that if I had to give someone a one sentence boilerplate guide to reading Nietzsche, I would tell them to remember that SUBJECTIVE TRUTH should always be taken into account, and that Nietzsche can both praise Socrates at one point in one of his works, and then, tapering towards the end, be Socrates's absolute counterpoise. At the same time, WOMAN is a major topic, and only non-readers can boil down N to being a woman-hater):
>SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman—what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women—that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman? Certainly she has never allowed herself to be won; and at present every kind of dogma stands with sad and discouraged mien—IF, indeed, it stands at all!
Okay, so he's going right to the gut of it. Here he calls to mind the idea that all philosophers, hitherto, have failed to capture women. Schopenhauer, A HIGHLY RECOMMENDED PERSON TO READ, mentions in his main work that LOVE (and honestly consequently women) have not been discussed in philosophy. Schopenhauer doesn't fully do woman and love justice, but he does a damned-good job, and Nietzsche takes it to the next step. See the women aphorisms in HATH and BGE (in that order!) for YOUR own start. SO, anyway, IN THE BEGINNING, Nietzsche is calling out all philosophers for never having correctly pinned women down. If they can't even do this, then how can they even claim TRUTH? On top of this, and in one sentence mind you, Nietzsche is making the claim that (perhaps all) philosophies to this point have been the philosopher's way to deal with life, or, in this case, to get laid. THIS IS ONE OF HIS MAIN THEMES: any philosophy is just the philosopher's way of how THEY see the world. Please please please do not read that and jump to the conclusion that the society-is-a-constructor's have it all figured out--on the contrary--they themselves (like N) have a reason for coming to that conclusion. In the second sentence Nietzsche uses the word certainly, and YOU HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO THE WORDS. This is why a reading of Shakespeare (the great barbarian as N and Voltaire saw him) or any good poetry would be beneficial. Elsewhere, Nietzsche praises words like PERHAPS, and hopes that the future might in fact be filled with PERHAPS. But ELSEWHERE, and at the same time, he also praises the Emersonian school of thought where you should say something, be proud of it, and then say something else if that's how YOU FEEL, even if it's contradictory. N is contradictory.
