Why Nietzsche Did Not Want Followers

According to one of Nietzsche’s most repeated aphorisms: ‘one repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil’. Nietzsche has his Zarathustra says this after he exhorts his disciples to leave him: ‘Now I go alone, my disciples. You too go now, alone. Thus I want it. Verily, I counsel you: go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he deceived you’.

Rather than reverence, Nietzsche desired disciples that would one day surpass him. He knew that people had a tendency to ‘petrify’ the ‘fiery liquid’ of thought — especially that of those they revere: ‘You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you’.

The new thinkers he envisioned ‘would not be dogmatists’; nor would they be his contemporaries — and this is where his issue lies. Nietzsche looked to posterity to fulfil his vision and therefore he was forced to write. But as Hans Blumenberg puts it, dogma ‘operates through the agency of writing’. Unlike orality, which is optimized by improvisation, with writing ‘only corruption remains possible’.

Derrida writes something similar in Of Grammatology. He says, ‘Nietzsche has written what he has written’, therefore all of his revolutionary thoughts are incorporated (and institutionalized) within the philosophical tradition: ‘the Nietzschean…