1 Nietzsche's final year of sanity, 1888, was a time of extraordinary productivity. In it he wrote four major works, The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Anti-Christ, and Ecce Homo, as well as compiling Nietzsche Contra Wagner out of earlier writings and producing a large amount of the Nachlass material published posthumously as The Will to Power. He must have written, even more than in previous years, in an extraordinary frenzy of productivity. The portrait of the artist as creating out of a state of frenzy (Rausch) painted, as we will see, in Twilight of the Idols, must be amongst other things a self-portrait.

The works of 1888 hang together in a closely coherent way so that collectively they can be taken to constitute Nietzsche's final thoughts about art and about its relation to life. The unity which they form is, it seems to me, one that is separate from that constituted by The Gay Science and the works discussed with it in the last chapter. Though it would be aesthetically pleasing for Nietzsche's output to fall, like Gaul, into three parts (early, middle, and late), actually, it seems to me, it falls into four. In a way, though, the tripartite structure is preserved since, so I shall argue, Nietzsche's final account of the relation between art and life constitutes a return to his first.

2 Two contrasts in particular separated the works of 1888 from The Gay Science.