Prof. Dr. Ulrike Wagner gives talk on "Unlearning the Self" at Harvard University

Prof. Dr. Ulrike Wagner presented a guest lecture at Havard University's Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures on October 22 titled "Unlearning the Self: Nietzsche, Emerson, and the Transatlantic Future of the Humanities."

What if the vocation of the humanities were not to affirm identity but to unlearn it? Part of a broader project in transatlantic intellectual history, the talk explored Nietzsche’s and Emerson’s shared vision of education as an art of self-abandonment — a practice of freedom grounded in disengagement, negation, and estrangement from the familiar self. Against today’s tendency to treat identity as the foundation of moral and intellectual life, both thinkers suggest that genuine learning begins where self-certainty gives way.

Reading Nietzsche’s philological writings — from “Schopenhauer as Educator” to The Gay Science — alongside his annotations of Emerson’s essays, Wagner's presentation traced a lineage that locates creativity and the pedagogical force of the humanities in acts of self-forgetting and even self-hatred: gestures that transform not through the affirmation of who we are, but through the courage to become otherwise.

Post Date: 10-23-2025