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Notes -
So you mean to say, he was an artist!
The greater works are always autobiographical to some degree. In minor works, the author's own individuated personality is not strong enough to shine through ("every great philosophy hitherto has been a confession on the part of its author" [emphasis mine]).
Sometimes you won't always like the autobiographical content that is thus exposed. It won't always be admirable, it won't always speak to your own experience, etc. But you can still choose to adopt a more detached viewpoint and find what can be appreciated in it as a phenomenon for its own sake.
Of course this is not a natural and spontaneous attitude, but one that must be cultivated through diligent practice. I try to make a habit of doing mental exercises like, I imagine someone I admire, either because of their work or on a personal level or whatever, and I imagine: what if I discovered something absolutely horrifying about them? What if their own values actually turned out to be antithetical to everything I value? What if they hated free expression, what if they supported wireheading, etc. Or maybe there's something far worse than any of that, something that my conscious mind won't even let me access. And in this hypothetical I try to remind myself that, in spite of all that, there still has to be some kernel there that made me admire them in the first place, so my goal at that point would be to achieve an understanding of the phenomenon that is the person as a whole, rather than get bent out of shape about the individual things that we disagreed on.
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