Nietzsche's Anti-Education: Paul Reitter, Chad Wellmon, and Damion Searls

Friday 25 September, 2015
6:30pm, $0/Rsvp

New York University, Deutsches Haus
42 Washington Mews

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Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a panel discussion with Professor Paul ReitterProfessor Chad Wellmon, and the translator Damion Searls on Friedrich Nietzsche's Anti-Education. The discussion will be moderated by Professor Mark Greif

Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon edited the first annotated English edition of Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, a series of lectures, held in Basel in 1872 to much acclaim, on Germany’s system of education. They also wrote an introductory essay for the edition which is translated from the German by Damion Searls and will be published by the New York Review Books in November 2015.

In 1869, at the age of twenty-five, the precociously brilliant Friedrich Nietzsche was appointed to a professorship of classical philology at the University of Basel. He seemed marked for a successful and conventional academic career. Then the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the music of Wagner transformed his sense of purpose. The genius of such thinkers and makers—like the genius of the ancient Greeks—was the only touchstone for true understanding. How then was education to answer to such genius? Something more than sturdy scholarship was called for. A new way of teaching and questioning, a new philosophy...

What that new way might be was the question Nietzsche broached in five vivid, popular public lectures in Basel in 1872. Composed in emulation (and to some degree as a satire) of a Platonic dialogue, Anti-Education presents a provocative and timely reckoning with what remains one of the great problems of modern societies.

Paul Reitter is professor of Germanic languages and literatures and director of the Humanities Institute at Ohio State. His work has appeared in both scholarly journals and venues such as Harper's MagazineBookforumThe Paris ReviewThe Nation, and The Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of three books, and he recently collaborated with Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Kehlmann on The Kraus Project.

Chad Wellmon is the author of Becoming Human: Romantic Anthropology and the Embodiment of Freedom and Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University. He is Associate Professor of German Studies at the Institute for Advance Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He is also editor of the Infernal Machine.

Damion Searls has translated many classic twentieth-century writers, including Proust, Rilke, Elfriede Jelinek, Christa Wolf, Hans Keilson, and Herman Hesse. For NYRB Classics, he edited Henry David Thoreau's The Journal: 1837-1861, translated Nescio's Amsterdam Stories, and Robert Walser's A Schoolboy's Diary. He has received Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Cullman Center fellowships and is currently writing a book about Hermann Rorschach and the cultural history of the Rorschach test.

Mark Greif was born in 1975 in Boston. He received a BA summa cum laude from Harvard in History and Literature and an M.Phil. from Oxford in English as a British Marshall Scholar. He earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale in 2007. In 2000, he entered journalism as a Writing Fellow at the political magazine The American Prospect, where he was subsequently a Senior Correspondent. In 2004, in New York, he co-founded the literary and intellectual journal n+1, and has been a principal at the magazine since then. 

Greif has taught at Brown University, and since 2008 has been Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at the New School in New York. Greif’s criticism and journalism have appeared in publications including London Review of BooksNew York TimesBoston GlobeTLSNew York Times Book Review, Harper’sGuardian (UK), New Statesman, Süddeutsche ZeitungDie WeltCourrier InternationaleEtiqueta NegraVillage VoiceDissent, and, principally, n+1. In 2010, he was elected a member of the New York Institute of the Humanities at NYU. In 2013-2014, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in its School of Social Science.

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