Lao tzu. My opinion is that with most western philosophers, you can use brute mental force to understand their concepts. With lao tzu, if you understand, you understand immediately - if not, then you can’t until you just do a couple of months, maybe years down the road.
Or they have been screaming out the truth and we have heard but not understood.
Hah. That’s been my experience with Nietzsche.
i think that anyone or anything that is so easily understand perhaps is not worth the effort…but i could be wrong.
do you really think lao tzu is that easily understood, ity? some thoughts, some paragraphs may be and beautiful too, but others they need time to brew within our minds, to get to know them and to love these philosophical thoughts, to sense their fragrance, to chew them up and digest and then perhaps to spit them out and then chew them up again and again, digest them and perhaps even then we may just get a small beautiful inkling into them. perhaps like a fire on a cold night first the kindling wood and then paying attention to it, watching it burn and burn until its a great giant flame and then it smolders for a bit, and then more kindling wood and watching it turn into something very powerful and concrete (though not concrete) perhaps very “fluid” like ( 
) and then suddenly, we know and understand in a blaze. 
I’d say both approaches have their particular virtues. A sufficiently elaborate allegory can allow only the ready-minded to grok the underlying concepts, in a way, a safety valve for esoteric knowledge. But I disagree that western philosophy relies mostly on “brute mental force”, for example Plato. Even today, if you describe the myth of the cave to most people, they won’t see the meaning behind the whole setting. It takes a very perceptive mind to understand it without explanation. Most religious texts resort to this kind of masquerading, which results in the necessity of having “translators”, such as priests, gurus, or whatever a certain religion calls their teachers. Though it is true that eastern philosophers rely almost exclusively on this form of expressing their ideas, surely if one looks close enough not all of them do: Confucius and Sun Tzu come to mind. The first in respect of his ideas on government and society, and the latter when the metaphoric general he speaks of has to ‘translate’ the precepts exposed to reality, in a real battle or war. Western philosophy has a more heterogeneous mix of both approaches that seems to fluctuate by epoch in my opinion, but never sticks to one exclusively. Nietzsche combines both depending on the book we’re reading, nobody can deny Thus Spoke Zarathustra cannot be understood by pure mental force only. Wittgenstein on the other hand, is the antithesis of this. I’m still wrapping my head around his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus after numerous readings. What I find most curious is the influence of this latter text in postmodernist philosophy, notably on the limits of science. I’d further argue that postmodernism is possibly the first manifestation of a true syncretism between both styles, requiring both raw power and ‘spiritual’ or ethereal readiness to understand. In the end, both roads lead to a certain degree of protection to both the uninitiated and the neophyte, but also the possibility that through sufficient effort one is finally rewarded proportionately.
John Holmes?
Whoever blows your hair back.
Nietzsche did understand nature better than anybody. out of this understanding he wrote about humans. But out of this natural science grew a political philosophy even before him. The cyclical understanding of history and nature was already developing several decades before him. The most superficial example of this was Oswald Spengler.
Let’s say that Spengler finds religion as the source of culture, while Nietzsche finds religion as the source of the death of culture.
But Spengler is desired by the West, because Germanic nations are good in being believers.