Educating the Soul

I often cite classicist Daniel Mendelsohn’s insight that when your father dies, your accounting degree won’t help you process the experience to underscore the humanities’ true value: their unique ability to engage with life’s most profound questions—loss, mortality, love, purpose and identity.

The humanities offer more than technical skills like close reading, critical thinking or historical analysis; they invite us to explore the existential questions that shape our inner lives. They provide tools to process emotions and confront life’s most poignant experiences. Practical disciplines like accounting equip students for professional demands and external markers of success but do not address the complex inner landscape of human experience—the hopes, fears and sorrows that define us.

When facing the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship or personal failure, it is literature, philosophy, history and art that offer insight and solace. The humanities help us meet these experiences with resilience and understanding, enriching our emotional lives and nurturing personal growth. Through the humanities, we gain wisdom, not just knowledge, to grapple with life’s inevitable challenges. They provide tools for living—a compass for both the heart and mind.

The humanities enable us to confront life’s existential challenges with greater clarity and resilience. Far from being an indulgence, the humanities are essential, equipping us to approach life’s complexities with compassion and courage. In embracing the humanities, we gain not only knowledge but also the strength to face life’s profoundest challenges and the perspective to find meaning in them.

Beyond intellectual growth, the humanities prepare us for life’s trials, offering solace and insight in times of grief, disappointment and transformation. In critical moments—loss, failure or the search for purpose—the humanities provide strength and guidance. Works of literature, art and philosophy help us explore love, mortality and the quest for meaning in ways technical skills cannot.

In a world increasingly focused on productivity and technical skills, the humanities stand as a vital counterbalance. They help us confront the complexities of love, identity and mortality—foundational aspects of the human experience that often escape measurable utility. By connecting us to universal human experiences, the humanities offer a guiding force for living meaningful lives, shaping who we are and how we endure.

There are many writers, thinkers and artists who have spoken to the humanities’ role in helping us confront life’s most difficult experiences. Here are a few quotations and anecdotes that capture the essence of how literature, art and philosophy provide insights and solace in the face of life’s profound challenges:

• Seneca: “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.” The Stoic philosopher reminds us that facing life’s trials takes immense bravery. Stoic philosophy, like much of the humanities, offers tools to navigate adversity with resilience and poise, helping us endure the storms of life.
• Marcel Proust: “We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.” Proust suggests that growth and healing come from confronting our suffering directly. The humanities allow us to explore life’s depths, guiding us through turmoil to greater understanding and insight.

• C.S. Lewis: “We read to know we are not alone.” Lewis’s simple yet resonant statement captures how literature offers companionship and understanding in moments of solitude or crisis. Through stories, we find echoes of our own experiences and solace in shared humanity.
• Viktor Frankl: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” A Holocaust survivor, Frankl’s search for meaning in the face of suffering teaches us that purpose can transform hardship. His work underscores the humanities’ ability to provide insights that help us grow even amid profound challenges.
• Ernest Hemingway: “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” Hemingway’s words speak to the resilience that comes through struggle. Literature doesn’t erase pain but helps us make sense of it, reminding us that adversity can leave us stronger and more empathetic.

• Albert Camus: “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” Camus, an existentialist, captures the human capacity to find strength and hope amid despair. His philosophy affirms that resilience is often born from confronting life’s apparent meaninglessness and choosing to endure.
• James Baldwin: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” Baldwin’s words remind us that literature is a bridge, connecting us to the shared human experience. Through stories, we see that others have grappled with similar struggles, and in this recognition, we find empathy and connection.
• George Saunders: “A person who’s only had experiences we call positive is, in effect, a character in a story that hasn’t really started yet.” As a short story writer, Saunders reminds us that meaningful growth often emerges from challenges and adversity. Literature teaches us empathy by immersing us in diverse human experiences, suggesting that life’s true richness is revealed through our capacity to navigate pain and learn from it.
• Toni Morrison: “All art is knowing when to stop and how to stop.” Morrison spoke of art’s ability to bring closure and reflection, even in the face of sorrow. Through literature and storytelling, we explore loss and resilience, finding spaces to reflect and heal.
• Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” Cohen’s lyric captures the essence of resilience and beauty in imperfection. The humanities illuminate our flaws and struggles, showing us that hope and strength often emerge through our most painful experiences.

Each of these reflections speaks to the humanities’ enduring power to help us face, understand and grow from life’s greatest challenges, offering insights that reach beyond technical knowledge and professional skills to touch the core of our humanity.

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The humanities are a source of existential insight. These fields explore what it means to be human. Literature immerses readers in diverse lives, eras and inner worlds, inviting reflection on complex emotions and universal experiences. In reading novels like To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, one can encounter the intricacies of family relationships and the pain of loss, themes that resonate with anyone who has experienced love or grief.

Poetry, too, has an almost unmatched ability to capture fleeting emotions and make sense of pain and beauty, giving readers the language to articulate their own experiences.

Philosophy dives even deeper, addressing foundational questions about existence, purpose and morality. Works like Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations or Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling help readers confront mortality, the search for meaning and the struggle with ethical dilemmas.

These texts not only ask hard questions but also provide readers with intellectual and emotional tools to address uncertainty, make difficult choices and find meaning in suffering.

The humanities also build skills for self-reflection and resilience. Humanities education fosters critical self-reflection, an essential skill for navigating life’s challenges. By studying diverse perspectives, students learn to question assumptions and develop a deeper understanding of their own beliefs, values and emotions. Encountering a character’s internal conflicts in a novel or grappling with a philosophical debate about free will and determinism encourages students to reflect on their own responses to similar issues.

History, as another example, offers lessons in perspective and resilience. Studying events like the Great Depression, the civil rights movement or personal narratives from wars allows students to see that others have endured and overcome hardship. This awareness of shared struggles across time and place can instill a sense of perspective, reminding students that their challenges are part of a broader human experience.

The humanities cultivate emotional literacy. They help people articulate their feelings and understand others. Through literature and art, students encounter expressions of anger, joy, love, loss and despair in ways that are complex and multidimensional. This nuanced view of human emotion makes it possible to relate better to others, to empathize with different perspectives and to navigate relationships with more understanding and patience.

In a therapeutic sense, the humanities can act as a form of emotional preparation for life’s inevitable trials. Reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Toni Morrison’s Beloved offers not only profound emotional experiences but also models of how to engage with trauma, memory and moral ambiguity. These texts serve as a rehearsal for real-life challenges, encouraging readers to process and make peace with their own vulnerabilities.

The humanities cultivate a lifelong ability to engage with life’s big questions. A humanities education doesn’t end with graduation. It provides a framework for lifelong learning and self-inquiry. When faced with major life changes, those who have been exposed to the humanities have a set of resources to draw upon—an internal library of ideas, metaphors and examples that can help them interpret, confront and sometimes even transcend personal challenges. This is perhaps one of the humanities’ most profound gifts: It offers ways of coping with experiences for which there are no easy answers or formulas, equipping individuals to endure and grow.

The value of the humanities extends far beyond academic achievement or cultural literacy; it lies in their ability to help individuals face and make sense of life’s most difficult moments. Through their exploration of human experience in all its depth and diversity, the humanities foster empathy, self-reflection and resilience. When life brings moments that no career training can address—grief, existential uncertainty, the search for purpose—it is the wisdom of the humanities that provides the language and perspective to process and understand these experiences.

While fields like accounting are essential in building careers, the humanities are crucial for building lives. They help shape individuals who are not only knowledgeable but also capable of confronting life’s challenges with insight, compassion and grace.

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All too rarely do we teach the humanities as a source of wisdom, as a vehicle for helping students contemplate life’s biggest issues or the ethical conflicts that inevitably arise or for insights into human nature and history’s dynamics. We need to do those things, and that should fundamentally alter the way we teach humanities courses.

The humanities are often taught with a focus on developing analytical skills—close reading, critical thinking and historical context—important abilities, certainly, but they capture only part of the humanities’ power.

When we present the humanities primarily as a means of technical skill building, we miss a profound opportunity to engage students with sources of wisdom, perspectives on meaning and insights into human nature that have stood the test of time.

The humanities can and should be a transformative force in students’ lives, helping them grapple with life’s complexities in ways that technical or professional fields cannot.

Consider literature’s power to explore mortality, loss and identity. When students read Hamlet, they are not just analyzing iambic pentameter or identifying themes—they’re encountering a raw exploration of grief, revenge and the struggle for purpose in the face of death. Shakespeare gives readers a powerful way to engage with universal human experiences that they, too, will face. By guiding students to reflect on these themes, instructors can help them consider their own responses to loss or how we all seek meaning in a world that can feel chaotic or unjust.

Philosophy and ethics offer similar possibilities. When students study thinkers like Aristotle or Kant, they’re not just learning about abstract theories—they’re wrestling with questions of what it means to lead a good life, how to balance personal freedom with social responsibility and what justice and fairness truly entail.

Ethics courses can become spaces where students explore their own values, confront real ethical conflicts and develop a moral compass they’ll carry throughout their lives. Instructors can emphasize that these are not simply academic exercises, but tools for understanding how they should act in their own lives.

History, too, becomes more relevant and engaging when taught as a dynamic exploration of human nature and societal evolution. Rather than memorizing dates and events, students could be asked to consider how power dynamics, ideological conflicts and ethical dilemmas shaped world events and led to pivotal moments of change.

When students study the French Revolution, for instance, they could examine not only the social and economic causes, but also what it reveals about human aspirations for justice and the often-tragic consequences of radical change. This approach encourages them to reflect on the ethical dilemmas we face today and to see history as a living force that influences current societal dynamics.

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To teach the humanities as a source of wisdom and solace, as guides to ethics, human relationships and historical dynamics, we would need to redesign humanities courses and curricula to prioritize relevance to students’ lives and focus on the real-world application of insights drawn from literature, philosophy, history and the arts.

Here’s how this redesign might look:

• Redefine courses around big questions. Courses could be structured around enduring questions such as “What does it mean to live a good life?” “How should we respond to suffering?” or “What is justice?” This approach allows students to explore major themes across time periods and disciplines, encouraging them to draw connections between texts and their own experiences.
• Create interdisciplinary humanities seminars that integrate literature, philosophy, history and art. Cross-disciplinary courses might focus on shared themes, such as Love and Loss, Conflict and Reconciliation, or Power and Corruption. This would allow students to approach complex issues from multiple perspectives, offering a fuller understanding of how different cultures and thinkers have grappled with these questions.
• Focus on reflective assignments and real-world connections. Instead of emphasizing analytical essays, assignments could include reflective writing that encourages students to connect course material to their own lives. Journals, response papers and personal reflection sections within formal essays could guide students to consider how the humanities’ themes resonate personally and ethically.
• Include real-world application assignments. Assignments could ask students to apply lessons from humanities texts to current events, ethical dilemmas or personal experiences. For example, students reading Antigone might analyze the conflict between family loyalty and civic duty in contemporary issues like whistleblowing or protest.
• Emphasize structured discussions on ethical and existential questions. Rather than only analyzing narrative structure or historical context, students could debate the choices of characters and historical figures, exploring what they would do in similar situations and why.
• Rethink course readings and text selection. Select texts with emotional and ethical depth. Prioritize works that grapple explicitly with human emotions, ethical questions and the complexity of human relationships. Texts like The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Odyssey or essays by Montaigne and Baldwin offer rich material for discussions on mortality, courage and self-examination.
• Include diverse and global perspectives. By selecting texts from a wide range of cultures, periods and voices, humanities courses can show students how different societies have wrestled with universal questions. Works by authors from diverse backgrounds can broaden students’ understanding of ethical challenges and shared humanity across cultures.
• Infuse courses with life skills, emotional intelligence and resilience training. Incorporate teachings from positive psychology into the curriculum. For instance, after reading about characters or historical figures facing hardship, students might discuss or journal about resilience strategies that can apply in their own lives.
• Offer guided reflections on failures and setbacks. Courses can include reflective assignments that ask students to think about failures or setbacks in their own lives, using humanities texts as guides to reframe and grow from these experiences.
• Develop capstone humanities courses for reflection and synthesis. A capstone course on The Meaningful Life or The Art of Living could encourage students to synthesize what they have learned in the humanities. In this course, students might select texts, themes and personal experiences that resonate with them and write a culminating project on how these insights apply to their lives. Inspired by ancient philosophy courses that examined how to live well, these courses could integrate literature, philosophy and art to explore different philosophies of life, ethics and the development of personal meaning. These classes would encourage students to engage deeply with their own values, identities and life goals.

By redesigning humanities courses in these ways, colleges would cultivate not only intellectually capable graduates but also emotionally resilient, ethically engaged individuals who are prepared to confront the complexities of adult life. Such an approach would not only broaden students’ minds but also deepen their capacity to find meaning and purpose in a rapidly changing world, equipping them with an inner compass that will serve them well beyond the classroom.

Rather than treating humanities courses as repositories of information or rigid skill-building sessions, instructors can cultivate them as places for open-ended inquiry and self-reflection. This involves encouraging students to connect what they learn to their own lives, promoting discussions that welcome ambiguity and diverse perspectives and guiding students to see the humanities as a lifelong resource for understanding the human experience.

In the end, a humanities education that prioritizes wisdom, self-reflection and ethical inquiry has the power to shape students, preparing them not just for careers but for lives of meaning and purpose. This shift in teaching helps students see the humanities as an invaluable guide for navigating life’s complexities, fostering a greater appreciation for the arts, literature, history and philosophy as sources of insight, solace and inspiration that they can draw on throughout their lives.