Dr. Ross Posnock is Anna Garbedian Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He delivers a lecture titled “On the Pleasures of Self-Misunderstanding: ‘How One Becomes What One Is’ in Nietzsche and Emerson.” This lecture was given on October 3, 2013, as part of the Fall 2013 Franke Lectures in the Humanities at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, a series organized in conjunction with the Yale College seminar taught by Paul North, Associate Professor of German, and Paul Grimstad, Assistant Professor of English. This undergraduate seminar presented perspectives on the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The lecture argues for the shared commitment of Emerson and Nietzsche to renouncing the false distinction between books and life, and between life and work. Putting into practice these thinkers’ injunction to bridge these realms, Posnock uses a personal narrative of his own process of book collecting to think through Emerson’s, Nietzsche’s, and Karl Polanyi’s emphasis on tacit, subconscious knowledge. He ends his lecture by applying these ideas to a critique of postmodern theory’s division of the body from the mind.