Autobiographies are somewhat of a rarity in general. Thankfully for us all, Nietzsche was merciful enough and left us a very significant one,
Ecce Homo.
Ecce Homo is a gateway into Nietzsche's own insights on his books, and the
Dionysian dithyrambs. The dithyrambs are Nietzsche's greatest invention and by far the least understood; a simple search of these forums indicates no one has ever brought this up:
The whole of my Zarathustra is a dithyramb in honour of solitude. — Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, p. 26
Directly following this Nietzsche indicates, in my opinion, what is the greatest significance of his work:
The loathing of mankind, of the rabble, was always my greatest danger.... Would you hearken to the words spoken by Zarathustra concerning deliverance from loathing?
The book
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a
dithyramb concerning deliverance from one's own loathing. Hopefully, by the end of this post I will have detailed why this is the ultimate significance of his work...
The following two quotes are additional context Nietzsche provides from
Ecce Homo:
The whole of Zarathustra might perhaps be classified under the rubric music. At all events, the essential condition of its production was a second birth within me of the art of hearing. — p. 97
What language will such a spirit speak, when he speaks unto his soul? The language of the dithyramb. I am the inventor of the dithyramb. — p. 109
So what exactly is a dithyramb? Well, first, we can ruminate upon what Nietzsche said about TSZ to begin with.... It is a book, and it is music, thus it follows that a dithyramb is music in literary form. To understand, more fully, what a dithyramb is we can consult Nietzsche's first book
The Birth of Tragedy. In the second aphorism of
The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche suggests an intense visceral reaction occurs: "in the Dionysian dithyramb man is incited to the highest exaltation of all his symbolic faculties; something never before experienced struggles for utterance—the annihilation of the veil of Mâyâ, Oneness as genius of the race, ay, of nature." To put it plainly, the dithyramb is literary music that incites one into a certain state of heightened intelligence and creativity.
So now that we know what a dithyramb is, I will point out how dithyrambs work. In aphorism 16 of
The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche details how the art of music distinguishes itself from all other art, based off the influence of Schopenhauer, such that music is the direct copy of the will of the artist. Such that
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a copy of the will of Zarathustra, or as Jung might suggest, a copy of the will of the archetype of the "wise old man."
TLDR: Go learn something you're super passionate about, and then go back and read the right dithyrambs, and be incited into the state of heightened intelligence and creativity, what kind of thoughts will flood you then? This, in my opinion, is Nietzsche's ultimate secret of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra.