An NYRB Classics Original from one of the most important and revered philosophers of the 19th century, Anti-Education collects five brilliant and provocative lectures that Nietzsche delivered to the public in Basel in 1872. These lectures, in a clear and precise translation by Damion Searls, question accepted ideas about education and redefine what it means to truly learn.
Friederich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher, essayist, and critic whose writings about morality, truth, language, aesthetics, and nihilism are considered cornerstones of Western philosophy. 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. 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 Magazine, Bookforum, The Paris Review, The 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.
“Nietzsche does not belong entirely to philosophers. He was a
philosopher-poet concerned not simply with describing and
explaining the world as he found it, but with identifying and
employing the electrifying arts that make the world appear uncanny
and ineffably deep.” —Tamsin Shaw
“Nietzsche wants to hear idols break. Dismay, exasperation, anger,
outrage, disgust, humiliation disappointment: they fuel his
philosophy, and it is little without them. Exhilaration, joy,
exuberance, excess: they feed it too.” —William H. Gass
“Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon’s introduction and notes helpfully
contextualize Nietzsche’s barbs, though much of what Nietzsche has
to say transcends the milieu in which it was written, and many of
his criticisms will resound with readers today…this translation,
with its useful notes and introduction, certainly provokes and
surprises.” —Jon Morris, Popmatters
"Whether we acknowledge it or not, we continue to live within the
intellectual shadow cast by Nietzsche. Postmodernism,
deconstructionism, cultural relativism, the "free spirit" scorning
bourgeois morality, even New Age festivals like Burning Man can all
ultimately be traced to him." --Francis Fukuyama, The New York
Times Book Review
"Prof. Nietzsche was one of the most prominent of modern German
philosophers, and he is considered the apostle of extreme modern
rationalism and one of the founders of the socialistic school,
whose ideas have had such a profound influence on the growth of
political and social life throughout the civilized world...his
doctrines however, were inspired by lofty aspirations, while the
brilliancy of his thought and diction and the epigrammatic force of
his writings commanded even the admiration of his most pronounced
enemies, of which he had many." --The New York Times
"Having challenged the foundations of all external authority,
Nietzsche demonstrated that the intellect, once it frees itself of
all binding illusions philosophical, religious, and cultural, knows
no piety, no party, and no platform." --Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen,
The Making of the American Nietzsche
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