268 Nietzsche
pressure to be precise. He speaks into an echoless space. No one can pin
Zarathustra down to any particular meaning; he is far too elusive. He
says in reference to the "far too many: If only preachers of quick death
would come" (4,94; Ζ First Part, "On Free Death''). This declaration
could be seen as an incitement to kill the weak and infirm before they
could reproduce. Nevertheless, Zarathustra does not actually say this.
Nietzsche did sometimes harbor thoughts of this kind in fits of fury and
rage about what he considered a stifling air of banality. In early 1884, he
wrote in his notebook that in the future it would be crucial "to gain that
immense energy of greatness in order to shape the man of the future by
means of breeding and also by destroying millions of failures, and not
perish from the suffering that one creates; nothing of this sort has ever
existed!" (11,98; WP% 964).
In his final writings, Nietzsche would shed his inhibitions, break out
of the parable form, and draw conclusions on an open stage that did
not bode well for the concept of the Übermensch. "Mankind sacrificed
en masse so that one single stronger species of man might thrive—that
would be progress" (5,315; GM Second Essay § 12), he wrote in On the
Genealogy of Morals, and in Ecce Homo we find some notorious pro-
nouncements on the tasks of the future "party of life." He wrote that
mankind is entering into a "tragic era." Why "tragic"? The affirmation
of life will have to arm itself with an awful naysaying of everything that
diminishes and domesticates life. "Let us glance ahead to one century in
the future and suppose that my assassination of two millennia of per-
version and human disgrace were to succeed. The new party of life,
which takes charge of the greatest of all tasks, raising up humanity,
including the relendess destruction of all that is degenerate and parasit-
ical, will again make possible the excess of life on earth from which the
Dionysian state must reawaken" (6,313; EH"Birth of Tragedy" § 4).
Creating this "excess of life" can succeed only if the "far too many"
can be prevented from reproducing or even be eliminated. For
Nietzsche, these truly murderous thoughts were an outgrowth of the
"Dionysian state." Why did he bring the Dionysian into the context of